Part II of the Verbal Abuse Scale 4 – “What you accused me of is dumb.” This is much worse than #1 because it is an overt statement, not implicit, but explicit that the person you’re speaking to is dumb. Don’t use pejorative language on your loved ones! Although you...
There was a humorous article in the newspaper about how a person manages to secure table reservations at restaurants when the hostess has been telling other people that there will be nothing available for three weeks. The gentleman in question says, “I want a...
You thought you had an identity. Actually, you have many of them. This is not my original idea. The idea was first proposed by Kenneth Gergen 20 years ago in a book he wrote called The Saturated Self. I just came across some thoughts I had on it which I want to share...
Is it normal for one person’s happiness to be dependent on another person? Isn’t that co-dependent? In my last two blog posts I addressed codependency. I explained that a key to understanding co-dependency is that while one person does something destructive, the other...
In my last post, I defined co-dependency. The key ingredient in it is that the supposed “victim” gets something out of the spouse’s bad behavior. Today I want to look at it from a different angle. Above all, a marriage is meant to be a friendship. It cannot be a...
It’s always bad to put labels on people—especially yourself—just by looking at the outer behavior. For example, a person with a tremor could have a brain dysfunction, a motor problem, delirium from a life of drinking, or plain old fear. How can you know which it is by...
I was delighted: more feedback! I love opening emails from people or seeing blog comments; I like that sense of conversation. When people post, I know I’m not talking to myself. Imagine my surprise in reading a comment that I shouldn’t have said in a recent...
Elizabeth stood back and looked at the job she had just completed. She had created a display for her work team and it was clear and well organized. But Elizabeth walked off in disgust, thinking it was awful. And no one could convince her otherwise. She came home...
