How Emotional Attitudes Effect Your Parenting

Each parent should understand the importance of the attitudes youngsters hold. A psychological attitude is much like a general assumption we hold about life and our place in the broad scheme of life.

The attitudes we hold play a crucial part in the way children think of themselves and others, as well as what they plan on achieving in life.


THE SUPERIORITY ATTITUDE (I'm all right but you are not.) The first assumption that parents are superior and that children are inferior beings, is destructive to a youngster's maturing toward a successful adult life.

Some persons call this a superiority complex but it really is a sham that is used to relieve the adult's wounded ego from the pain it suffered in childhood. Such a parent is unable to admit to mistakes in judgment or to attribute sound motives to the child -- while each youngster knows he or she makes many blunders that displease a perfectionist parent.

In comparison to the perfect parent, the child who is finding his way through life, is forced to think of himself or herself as incompetent. And that often leads to the development of the second attitude.

THE INFERIORITY ATTITUDE (You're all right but I am not.) This second assumption, that one is inferior and that everyone else is a much better person, is a fetid breeding ground for mental illness with depression, schizophrenia sexual disorders and many obsessions and compulsions.

All parents are frustrated by their kids at times and occasionally resentful of the fifteen or twenty year commitment that rearing a child requires. As H.L. Mencken quipped, Our kids ruin the second half of our lives. But most of us manage to make our way through those often difficult years and eventually experience great joy from the process.

We discover that we must make allowances for young learners, must accept many trial and error attempts to succeed, when we want to have our children accept the benefits of our vast wisdom! Children almost always respond better to encouragement rather than to criticism.

In fact, no criticism is valuable, because children learn far more from correction and sound instructions from their elders. Too much criticism leads to the third attitude.

THE HOPELESS ATTITUDE --(Neither of us is all right.) This is the whimper heard within families that have been crippled or even crushed by secular values, low expectations or simply by the a culture that has little need for families that do not earn a lot of money or make sophisticated choices.

Such sufferers feel, there is no point in trying to succeed, to achieve anything good, because there is little or no hope for a person such as myself.

THE ACCEPTING ATTITUDE --(Both of us are all right.) Although the parent and child will have different interests and play different roles in the family and community, this is the only positive attitude of the four.

Believing that children are all right, even when they cannot run as fast as an adult, lift as much weight or spell as correctly, is an important act of faith, providing that one doesn't cripple them with unrealistic expectations and draconian punishments when they stumble and need more instruction and patience.

The accepting attitude doesn't guarantee perfect, obedient children but it does give them a better opportunity to mature without excessive pressure that often leads to disaster. Judge children by others of their own age and competence rather than in comparison to adults and that includes yourself.

Parents and children who mature together, in different ways and at different rates of course, are generally well adjusted people who adapt when they should and persevere when they must.

A successful parent must understand that his or her children are growing up in a family, school, city and nation that is vastly different from the institutions that shaped the previous generation's values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices.

When parents cannot accept these changes, which are irreversible within every family, community and society, they establish many stumbling blocks for their children and cause a great number of unnecessarily conflicts.

Jard DeVille; Psychology Dept. Chair at Westminster College; Director of the Learning And Learning Disabilities Clinic with the University of Wisconsin, also taught in the Executive Development Program at the University of Arizona. He's published many psychology books, seminars and test instruments. He's considered by many to be one of America's foremost leadership scholars. Permission to use if attributed to author with his website address.

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A PRINCIPLE OF SOUND RELATIONSHIPS

The sound Basic Principle of Life we want others to learn from us is this --

GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO COOPERATE WITH ME.
BAD THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO COOPERATE WITH ME.
GOOD THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO DON’T COOPERATE.

The Basic Principle is effective in normal relationships because people prefer:

PLEASURE TO PAIN IN THE PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PRESTIGE TO DEVALUATION IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PURPOSE TO MEANINGLESSNESS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE.

Obviously, the world has fallen on difficult times because change has become incessant and we have accepted secular philosophies that go against the grain of human spirituality. And of course, any attempt to keep the cultural traditions of our uneducated, pre-industrial ancestors as Truth Incarnate is self-destructive. Nevertheless, that is precisely what many persons try to do. The passage of time and the flood of new persons being born and growing up changes everything until we are like the befuddled King of Siam in the musical play THE KING AND I. He sings:

When I was a boy, what was what.
Now I am a man, things have changed a lot.
Some things nearly so, some things nearly not.

We humans are inclined to pack our beliefs in bundles - to cast them in concrete with handles on them, so we can pass then on unchanged and unchallenged to our children and their children. Just as our parents and our grandparents tried to do. We will, as the king continued to sing:

Fight to prove what we do not know is so! Tis a puzzlement!

This means, of course, that you must assume the responsibility for yourself and the people for whom you are responsible because huge societies never collapse overnight And yet, they seldom adapt in time to save themselves. Half a century ago Billy Graham was saying that America was in trouble, that without a spiritual renewal such as John Akers and Lee Atwater discussed years later, we were doomed to defeat as a society. He preached that only through a spiritual restoration with strong philosophical values could we mature enough to succeed. We did respond to Graham's call, from 4 or 5 percent who said they followed a spiritual life-style in 1940, to 35 or 40 percent who say they do now, and yet we are still in trouble because of the even swifter growth of Nihilism in our institutions and our human reluctance to adapt.

Fortunately, through years of study and counseling, we have identified a Basic Logotherapy Principle of satisfaction that will help keep you on the right track as you cope with widespread nihilism and narcissism. This principle isn't what a greedy society offers people, this is what you as an AUTHENTIC or a CONGRUENT promise to the people with whom you share life. It is this:

GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO COOPERATE IN ORDER TO REDUCE ALIENATION AND TO ADVANCE OUR COLLECTIVE FULFILLMENT

The title of Jard's first major book - NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST - was fascinating to reporters, talk show hosts and newspaper editors. Some of them wanted to believe he was right but a significant number of people with closed-minded life-themes wanted to prove he was an idiot to think such obvious nonsense. Every intelligent person knows, some reporters implied, that nice guys finish last Leo Derocher, the baseball guru, even wrote a book to that effect John Kelly was the host of a killer talk show in a large Ohio city who did everything but put a dunce cap on Jard's head when he arrived before a studio audience of three hundred persons, while many thousands viewed out in the community. He even seated him on a stool before beginning his attack. Kelly then asked the studio audience to vote on the proposition that decent men and women can succeed. About half said Jard was correct, that nice people can do well, while the other half decided he was all wet, good persons don't have a chance in this lousy, rotten world. That was interesting since none of the audience had read the book; had no idea what he'd written, although they were willing enough to judge in advance. Kelly then turned to Jard and gloated over the negative vote, Now, Doc, How are you gonna handle the skeptics? He then sat down in the audience while the three cameras whirled up close, presumably to watch Jard sweat as the people grilled him.

Jard started out by agreeing with the host, admitting if you define a decent guy or gal as a wimp, a doormat, a marshmallow - such a person couldn't expect ranch in a nihilistic, pragmatic society. On the other hand, he said, I define nice guys and gals as persons like Joe Butterworth who apply life's Basic Principle through:

MANAGING INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS CONSISTENTLY WISELY AND WELL,
SHARING LIFE'S GREATEST REWARDS WITH COOPERATIVE WOMEN AND MEN,
CREATING A COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVING PERSONS WHO BELONG TOGETHER.

Jard leaned back on the stool, folded his arms and waited quietly while the cameras frantically panned around for some kind of action. Kelly was so startled by the statement that he sat silently considering the answer for thirty seconds or more and that's an eternity of dead time on television, before coming slowly to his feet. He muttered right on camera - Well, I'll be damned - I never thought of it that way. He was hooked and rather than the six minutes Jard was supposed to have, he discussed NICE GUYS for thirty minutes and sold a lot of books in the community! When the audience voted again, only two persons out of three hundred still said that Jard was all wet. He went home and the next Sunday took our minister aside to repeat the story. He concluded, If you had my conversion rate, we'd be the largest congregation in the city!

This basic element of consistent satisfaction, dealing fairly in your relationships, sharing the benefits of cooperation and offering others a community where they can belong with people who support each other - will surely go a long ways toward making your life the best it can become. It is a practical expression of the faith, hope and love that is vital to consistent growth. There is another aspect to the basic principle. It is:

BAD THINGS DON'T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO COOPERATE IN OUR ACTIVITIES AND RELATIONSHIPS

You must recognize the obvious - that accidents occur, recessions come, companies fail and much more in an imperfect world. The Tragic Quartet of suffering, rage, guilt and death is all too real. However, to the limit of your abilities, you promise to be consistently open-minded and accepting of other people in your relationships. You shall neither blame women and men for your own failures nor punish them for circumstances beyond their control. You will not hide when people require your help and will end all cruel psychological games designed to hurt someone who gets sucked into some hateful scheme. Because you serve society in an organization or as a free-lance as a committed person should, according to the by-product approach to satisfaction, you will apply faith, hope and love to guarantee meaning and belonging that wells up out of your accepting life-style. You become a mature person in your relationships and that gives you better opportunities to influence other persons toward a satisfying life.

There is one more factor to the Basic Principle.

GOOD THINGS DON'T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO REFUSE TO COOPERATE IN GETTING GOOD THINGS DONE


Accepting and maturing men and women don't want to be cruel even though we all are frustrated at times and tempted to become aggressive or apathetic. However, we are finite persons with limited time and resources to invest in a satisfying life. Therefore, we have not only the right but the responsibility to use our powers where they will accomplish the greatest good for ourselves, the people we support and for humankind. Be patient; don't write people off too soon. Offer distressed or difficult men and women time to understand, despite possibly negative life-themes and low expectations that you mean well. Work with them and discover ways to convince others that you do indeed work, love and play according to sound Logotherapy principles. Be very patient as you try to lead people to consistent satisfaction.

Nevertheless, as finite persons, times do come when we cannot invest still more effort in the activities of some people without depriving someone else of something vital. Some of the people we try to help, have hidden agendas or vested interests that are destructive to those you support. When that happens you should move on however regretfully, to use your time and energy for someone who will respond to your support and generosity. Even the deeply accepting Jesus said something about not casting one's pearls before swine, but then, he may have been having a bad day. We were forced to abandon Andy the musician who hates himself and everyone else. We had taken him in after he was released from prison, put him in our upstairs apartment without charging him rent and fed him for several months. Despite doing our best, he grew consistently angry and aggressive in drunken fits, swearing at and threatening to harm Roberta, our daughter and an elderly aunt, until Jard drove him away at pistol point in order to protect the family. We'd done all we could for Andy and was not going to have him abuse us in order to meet his selfish, distorted needs. Our good efforts simply could not continue for a man who was threatening violence against us and someone we love. We all have to be tough at times.
The Basic Principle is effective in normal relationships because the vast majority of people prefer:

PLEASURE TO PAIN IN THE PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PRESTIGE TO DEVALUATION IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PURPOSE TO MEANINGLESSNESS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE.

Apply this principle in your relationships - Good things happen to people who cooperate with me and discover why it is so successful a method for relating to others, for enhancing your growth and influencing others to a fulfilling life-style.

Parenting Winning Children - The Guidance Psychology of High Expectations

“I worried about my oldest daughter keeping her virginity while she was in high school. Now, just ten years later, I lay awake nights, anxious that my youngest girl will be crippled by AIDS or become addicted to life-devouring drugs.”

Mary Ellen Fitzsimmons, Single Mother

NEW Vital Information about your teenager. Scientists are now gaining new insights into remarkable changes in teenagers’ brains that may help explain why the teen years are so hard on young people -- and on their parents.

AN AWESOME RESPONSIBILITY

All normal parents love their children and want them to live meaningful lives among loving people with whom the youngsters find places to belong. We teach them to be as successful as we can. Because of their love, parents normally have no intention of crippling their child's physical, psychological or spiritual growth with inadequate guidance or with harsh discipline. It is our intention to maintain loving and purposeful relationships with our youngsters during their formative years. Nevertheless, because we bring our own emotional baggage with us, because many of us had less than ideal childhoods, the road to disaster for many children is paved with the good intentions of inept parents. For -- the fact of the matter is -- we make but one journey through life with each child -- and although most adults strive diligently to succeed, we can never control all society’s variables and we do have difficulty compensating for our own weaknesses. Even when we do the best we can, we spend years before learning how well we have done with our most precious assets.

Despite the best of intentions, virtually all parents I know (I spent yesterday afternoon with a group of friends, honoring a recent high school graduate who is leaving home to matriculate in Carleton College), readily admit that guiding their offspring to emotional and spiritual maturity is an awesome responsibility. Because of a combination of social, cultural and financial changes occurring across our civilization, the responsibilities each parent carries have indeed become more difficult than they were when society was less complex. One deeply concerned mother of several daughters shook her head and lamented;

I worried about my oldest daughter keeping her virginity while she was in high school. Now, just ten years later, I lay awake nights, anxious that my youngest girl will be crippled by AIDS or become addicted to life threatening narcotics. What on earth is happening to our children when eighty percent of high school girls have already engaged in high risk sexual relations and dangerous drugs are as available as soft drinks?

At one Parent/Teacher Organization meeting, when my oldest son’s now adult daughters were rowdy teenagers, a middle eastern father chided the group that Americans were having discipline problems with their children because they are too permissive. He continued to say that he, as an Islamic father, had no problems maintaining control of his daughters. The group pondered this for a moment or two and someone suggested he share his methods with the PTO members, many of whom were indeed being challenged. When he offered some obviously simplistic, rather primitive religious advice from the desert sands of Arabia, one woman grew suspicious and asked how old his always obedient daughters were. He answered, five and seven years. He then became angry when the group burst out in laughter at his advice. My son, for whom the Moslem man worked, took him aside after the meeting and kindly told him that his daughters were going to turn him inside out when they reached puberty -- unless he switched from a controlling to a counseling relationship. His said the daughters were surely going to grow up yearning to be part of their high school society and the only way he could block their desire for acceptance would be to stamp out every iota of their creativity -- or possibly keep them locked in the attic for ten years! And sure enough, I live across the street from South West High School and the oldest Moslem daughter, now fifteen or sixteen, ran past recently with a group of girls training for cross-country competition. She was wearing a traditional head scarf -- but was also clad in a T shirt over an athletic bra and a pair of short shorts. The Moslem Religious police in Saudi Arabia, who behead girls who so much as touch the hands of any man except for their fathers, brothers or husbands, would have stoned her for playing the harlot had she dressed for a sporting event in her father’s homeland. Life goes on and every generation must find its own way rather than simply adopting the past as eternal wisdom.

In his delightful short story The Reivers, William Faulkner wrote about a disobedient son’s father who is preparing to thrash him for his boyish transgressions. Before he can get his leather razor strap, the boy’s grandfather steps in to block the whipping and the angry father becomes disgusted with the older man. He grumbles, Father, when I was a boy, you had no compunction about whipping me! The elderly grandfather sighs and admits that his son is right, that he did whip him too often when he was growing up. But -- he adds, As a grandfather, I’m much smarter now than I was when your age. Most of us do learn something important while traveling life’s journey. To paraphrase an old Pennsylvania Dutch quip:

Too soon we get old and too late we stop hurting our kids. Or as H. L. Mencken griped, Our parents ruin the first half of our lives and our kids ruin the second half.

My own children are grown now and even my grandkids have kids -- several of whom are almost grown, which shall likely make me a great, great grandfather before many more years past. I have participated in my own development, that of my children and my grandchildren and now my great grand kids. Two weeks ago my wife Roberta and my youngest son took two of our great grandsons to a fabulous Minnesota Twin’s baseball bash for kids, where they could eat all the hot dogs and drink all the pop they could manage without throwing up and come home with prizes of all kinds. It was a hoot for everyone -- unto the second and third generation of our clan! I have also served as a pastor for seven years, was Director of a learning and learning disabilities center in association with the University of Wisconsin, professor of psychology and department chair at Westminster College, leadership professor in the Executive Development Conference at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a leadership consultant from London to Singapore. I have also researched and written more than a score of books, seminars and psychology assessment instruments, of which this is my most recent study course.

This study course is based in part on some of the concepts that were discussed in my books such as Nice Guys Finish First, Lovers For Life, The Psychology of Leadership, The Pastor’s Handbook On Interpersonal Relations, Frontiers of Fulfillment, The Liberated Soul and others. It isn’t a rehash of any of them but draws from my ever-increasing maturity as I continue my life-long quest for knowledge and wisdom. Parenting is written specifically for mothers and fathers who are committed to guiding their children and adolescents toward emotional, spiritual and career maturity and to life-long satisfaction. It is based on several psychospiritual principles that include these.

We must:

DEVELOP CONSISTENTLY LOVING RELATIONSHIPS WITH OUR CHILDREN THROUGH KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM AND FAITH.

SHARE THE REWARDS OF GREAT SATISFACTION AND DEEP MEANING WITH THE KIDS WE LEAD TO SUCCESS.

CREATE A FAMILY OF DEEPLY COMMITTED PERSONS IN WHICH EVERY MEMBER IS A COMMITTED STAKE HOLDER.

Those three approaches are best implemented through two principles of psychology that are easy to remember and to apply.

They are:

THE BASIC PRINCIPLE OF HUMAN COOPERATION THE PRINCIPLE OF INTERPERSONAL RECIPROCITY

The basic principle our children need to absorb from our attitudes and activities is that all men and women, boys and girls continue holding the attitudes and doing the things reward them or appear to reward them and stop doing the things that deprive them in some manner. The basic principle has these three elements to it.

Good things happen to people who do good things. Bad things don’t happen to people who do good things. Good things don’t happen to people who don’t do good things.

This is not necessarily the way the world functions, whether at school, on the playground, on the job, in the criminal justice system or in politics, but it can be our promise to those precious children whom we want to mature as courageous, successful and loving adults. Of course you are not all powerful or totally wise and we all grow weary, frustrated and crabby at times. But, we are not discussing the cosmic principles of good and evil here, but learning practical ways of improving our interactions with our children so we can guide them toward maturity and competence. Children grow ill and suffer and friends move away and discretionary income may be lost -- life has its downturns -- but to the best of your abilities, you promise to live with a sound quid-pro-quo that is put in simple words children can understand. You must communicate clearly and consistently follow up with this commitment --

When you do what I need from you, I shall grant what you need from me.

In addition, I shall not treat you badly when you are doing your best to cooperate with the people among whom we belong. And finally, I shall not make any extraordinary effort to waste my time, money and energy rewarding people who fail to cooperate for the good of this family unless I see some hope for the future.

The reciprocity principle is less cerebral -- is more instinctive in nature.

The positive, neutral or negative way you treat individuals and groups, comes from your values, attitudes and expectations that are based on your basic trust in humanity or in your basic distrust of society. The way you relate to others determines the way the vast majority of persons relate to you.

In other words:

I have just given you a very powerful interpersonal mechanism for creating a positive psychological and spiritual climate within your home, on the job and in virtually all of your relationships

I cannot take a great deal of credit for this fact of existence -- since both Aristotle and Jesus were teaching it long before I arrived on the scene -- but it still works wonders in complex situations today. Management psychologists now call this principle behavior modeling, through which we demonstrate as well as discuss the attitudes and activities that shall be rewarded. I realize this principle of reciprocity will have little value if your boss’ cousin is gunning for your job or when you are being stalked late at night by a rejected lover, but it does work in the vast majority of cases with people who are merely annoyed or frustrated without nursing hidden agendas. Actually, we often teach our children in this manner -- whether we recognize it or not. Children learn much that is both good and bad from their parents, from their attitudes and activities, although there is often a great gap between the concepts we express and the activities we pursue.

When we relate to other persons, each of us goes through a series of spoken and unspoken transactions that play a crucial role in how we manage relationships. If we demonstrate love and trust -- normal men and women as well as boys and girls are draw into our attitudes and activities. On the other hand: If we are paranoid or psychopathic and are consistently distrustful, people feel uncomfortable around us and likely deal with us cautiously even if they cannot avoid us entirely. If we are closed-minded and defensive in our relationships, our children usually learn to behave in the same manner. One very good psychologist, whom I shall call Fred to protect the guilty, muttered one night after we’d quaffed a few beers too many:

I’ve studied Freud, Adler and Frankl and rejected most of Skinner’s simplistic stuff and accepted Dugal Arbuckle’s existential approach, but one concept keeps coming to me. I believe in nurture and nature or nature and nurture -- or perhaps both! But after forty years of assessment and psychotherapy, I have found a consistent factor to explain sound mental health. Healthy and happy parents rear healthy and happy kids. And nutty and frustrated parents rear nutty and frustrated kids.

Well -- there are exceptions of course, but I modify that to include the sad fact that emotionally distressed parents usually rear psychologically inept kids, which causes them to make serious mistakes that bring suffering to themselves and to the next generation of children. Of course, remedying that -- breaking the chains of ignorance -- is what this course is all about. What you give to your kids is what you consistently receive in return, although you may go wrong by not be giving them what you thought you were offering them. I find great wisdom in something valuable Otto Rank wrote and I paraphrase:

I was resting on my bed, pondering why so many parents put so much pressure on their children, wondering why they cripple them with neuroses and psychoses and I finally reached a conclusion. They do it out of stupidity. They have no concept of sound mental health and so they rear children in haphazard ways that fail.

I find Otto Rank one of the greatest of all the mental health scholars, but I prefer the phrase, They do it out of ignorance, for while stupidity is a life-long genetic disability, ignorance may be only temporary and can be corrected. I suppose almost every teacher, professor and counselor agrees or why work with students who are doomed to repeat their parents’ blunders ad infinitum.

What parents, teachers and ministers really need to do with kids is to reverse the most common child guidance system. Rather than watching like hawks to catch the kids doing something wrong and then punishing them for it -- we must watch them like mother hens, to catch them doing something right and grant them appropriate rewards for their maturing choices. Punishment -- whether physical, emotional or spiritual, inevitably fails to accomplish what we expect as soon as a child becomes old enough to resist -- first during the terrible twos when kids learn to use the magic word -- NO! that throws many young parents into confusion. And then later, during adolescence. The only way abuse will deter a determined child is by escalating the severity of the punishment, which leads to a point of diminishing returns. In the first place, a slap alongside the head teaches the child nothing except how displeased the adult is -- he or she learns nothing about improving one’s behavior the next time around. And even if the adult follows the blow with correction, the child is usually too frightened or resentful to listen and accept the appropriate behavior. In the second place, escalating punishment either crushes the child’s spirit, making boys vulnerable to bullies or girls unable to resist abusive men, or it leads to a simmering guerilla war that poisons the home climate.

Rather than being traumatic and conflict laden, childhood and adolescence can be a grand experience for parents and offspring alike. Life remains satisfying in many families and have been great within many cultures across the world, although Socrates once wrote a bitter diatribe about the impolite and narcissistic youngsters of ancient Greece. Perhaps some rowdy boys had tipped his outhouse over! The American Plains Indians, such as the Cheyenne, Sioux and Absaroka, offered a striking example of family and community congeniality. Juvenile delinquency was unheard of -- as was theft, divorce, child or spouse abuse or even mental illness. The Great Plains children were pampered beyond reason, were reared in an atmosphere of permissiveness that would have shocked Dr. Spock. There was virtually no physical, psychological or spiritual punishment within the families or the clans and yet, infants were taught not to cry within a few days after birth, because crying could reveal the band’s presence to enemies. There was no spanking, slapping or pinching and no emotional abuse of any kind. Nevertheless, the Plains peoples reared children who were obedient, loving and loyal to parents and elders and generous to their clans for their entire lives. These stone age, pre-literate people used the Basic Principle and the Law of Reciprocity much more successfully than we industrial world persons ever have.

If you consistently use the concepts and techniques I teach in this course, you can make the most of the years you spend with your children and teen-agers. The processes learned here can mean the difference between consistent success and disastrous failure in an age when life is changing so swiftly that old traditions and worn down ideologies can no longer serve our children well. For those who haven’t seen through my approach yet -- this program is a synthesis of phenomenological or existential and behavioral elements in a child-centered guidance system.

Adolescents

Warning -- Ignoring the Following Paragraphs May Lead To Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Disaster for Your Peace of Mind and Your Child’s lifelong Welfare.

Professor Ian Campbell, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Davis, is a researcher who studies the near miraculous aspects of the most remarkable organ of human existence. This magic box is, of course, the incredible flesh and blood information processor we carry above our shoulders. Our brains can be thought of as our hardware, as the personal computer that runs ceaselessly every moment of our lives from a few months after conception until death. In fact, few physicians will declare any person dead until his or her brain wave activity has ceased completely. On the other hand, the activities of the brain -- the mind -- is analogous to software that enables most people to live their entire lives with seldom a thought about their breathing, temperature management, disease defense, wound healing, the digestion of food and blood flow. But while the autonomic system functions in a predictable manner through its chemical solutions and electronic flows, the information processing software of the brain has an entirely subjective element to it. Professor Campbell has written a great deal that is valuable for parents, teachers, psychologists, pastors or police and prosecutors who try to persuade, cajole and even browbeat young people to grow up and behave as adults. Some youngsters get along reasonably well but others do indeed find it quite difficult to bring these adult qualities into interaction with each another and their parents, teachers and pastors.

When I was a young pastor, science teacher, psychology professor, and clinic director, a red hot debate raged whether we should speak of the brain or about the mind, when we were trying to understand, teach and counsel children and adolescents. In my youth, some behaviorally oriented psychologists who were disciples of B F Skinner spoke of the brain as if it were a machine. Some of them reduced all of human activity to a response to stimuli -- with clearly predictable S-R behaviors. Some radical behavioral scientists went so far as to call the mind as much of a myth as the church‘s primitive teaching about the human soul. This led someone with a devastating wit to quip -- Psychology first lost its soul and then lost its mind. Many existential psychologists and scholars thought of the mind as a subjective but virtually independent entity that transcends the flesh and blood brain with its chemical fluids and electrical currents that ran the autonomic processes such as heart beat, breathing and so on. For decades the argument raged for years. When I was director of a dyslexic or learning and learning disabilities clinic in Wisconsin, I decided that we needed a middle way in order to help our learning disabled but obviously intelligent students to manage their lives and studies well enough to grow up and function as adults. I taught my teachers, social workers and psychologists:

The brain is the tangible instrument (the hardware of the system) and the mind is what the brain does, (the software). And there is nothing on the face of the earth that is more subjective and self-serving than the human mind.

Since I taught this body/mind interaction to the professionals that I led, at a time when no more than half a dozen medical schools in America had body/mind department, a great awakening has occurred. Now, three out of every five colleges of medicine, have departments that deal extensively with the subjective aspects of healing that can only be understood through mind/body research such as Campbell and others now conduct. I am pleased that the medical world has finally started catching up with this hard working, back country clinic director and author!

Robert Boyd of the McClatchy News Service wrote:

“Scientists are now gaining new insights into remarkable changes in teenagers’ brains that may help explain why the teen years are so hard on young people -- and on their parents.”

Campbell reports that between eleven and fourteen years of age, adolescents lose a significant percentage of the brain’s neural connections that enable them to think wisely and well. And Boyd writes that this loss in necessary because it trims unneeded connections in order to prepare the youthful brain for more complex adult thought processes. Boyd also quotes Alison Gopnic of the University of California at Berkley.

Ineffective or weak connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener trims a tree or bush, giving a plant the desired shape.

Jay Giedd from the National Institute of Mental Health was also quoted by Boyd.

Neural connections or synapses that get exercised are retained while those that don’t are lost. Teens appear to process emotions differently from adults.

Campbell went on to say:

Normal adolescents who are experiencing these brain changes can react emotionally. And girls start pruning their cells about a year earlier that boys but the losses end up to be about the same. This pruning is a case in which less becomes more. It causes an improvement in speed in information processing and a greater ability to build the long neuron chains required for complex problem solving.

I am convinced that many of the parent and teacher conflicts with older children and adolescents occur during this period in which the youngsters are trying to understand and to readjust their emotions without understanding anything about turmoil going on within. Many seldom have a clue and neither do their parents -- the teen age youngsters live as one researcher said, in a very small world of their own hormonal and brain driven urges for esteem, acceptance and admiration. They are so unaware of these confusing urges that kids, who run amok -- like the teen shooters at Columbine School in Colorado or at Red Lake School in Minnesota, are often unable to explain their murderous rage and ruthless aggression. They simply cannot offer a rational reason for their unspeakable violence. Some have no way of understanding their angst and rage. This is why Abigail Baird, a psychologist in Vassar College, insists that teenage criminals should never be tried as adults and never, ever executed for their crimes. It is much too easy for emotionally burned out police and ambitious prosecutors to convince themselves that they should meet the demands for ruthless revenge by an outraged public regardless of the facts. It is a sad fact that our ram-shackled criminal justice system puts one innocent defendant out every twenty in long term confinement or on death row. And even when a prisoner’s innocent is competently proven through evidence such as DNA, virtually every prosecutor in the land will fight to the death before releasing a prisoner mistakenly convicted of a felony.

As Professor Giedd concluded:

The teen-age brain is a very complicated and dynamic area, one that is not easily understood.

Obviously, every parent must learn sound ways of interacting with the vicissitudes of adolescent, must master patience and stop expecting youngsters to behave as adults do. It is good and usually productive to expect and plan well from the high expectations you hold for your child, but your suggestions during the years from about twelve to eighteen should be tempered by the fact that human children are never simply little adults to be set on course and then left to manage for themselves. They need your understanding and your assistance until their brain/minds become more adult. Of course, that is what this course and the book that contains is all about!

MAKING YOUR LIFE COUNT

Our lifestyle psychology course NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST shows you How To Get People To Do What You Want And Thank You For It.

The only way to make reluctant persons let you win every pot at cards, take home every attractive lover or get the lion’s share of the money, is by cheating, bullying or stealing everything you want. You shall have to outwit, outrun or out-bluff the people you want to take advantage of. The major trouble with that deceptive approach is society develops its own ways of dealing with people like that. Unless you get out of town ahead of the mob coming with tar and feathers, moving every few months to new hunting grounds, life can get very painful. Of course you could take up free lance bank robbing or selling dope down by the elementary school -- after your company fires you, your kids run away from home and your spouse files for divorce.


IN THIS COURSE YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO:

• Identify the personality patterns that motivate yourself and other women and men.

• Consistently get inside the thought processes of the people you want to influence.

• Persuade other persons to tell you everything you want to know about anything.

• Identify the step by step progression of a successful interpersonal relationship.

• Master several powerful conflict avoidance and conflict control techniques.

• Use a refusal to cooperate as a request for additional information.

• Climb the cooperation ladder to consistent interpersonal success.

• Finalize agreements so there are fewer brush fires for you to fight.

MAKING YOUR LIFE COUNT

This course is about people and about succeeding or failing in life, since some degree of success and failure are the only real options that are open to us. It is written with the knowledge that neither power nor pleasure exists in a vacuum. Virtually everything good we do in life requires the cooperation of people in different ways. And every one of them has his or her own agenda that is personally important.

Therefore, you will have to overpower, out-skill, deceive, or persuade others before society will consistently allow you to share in the marbles, money, passionate lovers, prestige or promotions you want. Only in this way can you make your life count for something worthwhile.

Of course, few of the people who are succeeding are willing to share their hard-earned knowledge with you. Mentors are hard to find and they always want much in return for any help they offer.

The purpose of this course is to teach you how to predict the attitudes and activities of the men and women you must influence every day in order to keep your life successful. It also shows you how to influence their choices in ways they approve by using sound methods of personal effectiveness. You can do these things by learning and using powerful techniques developed by some very good psychiatrists and psychologists. These methods are unknown to most people, although professional therapists, consultants and social workers have been using them for decades with much success.

Most people struggle through life the best way they can, succeeding once in a while, but more often failing because they never learned how to consistently make good things happen when and where they are needed. They simply blunder along -- accepting whatever the luck of the draw offers them daily, never really taking charge of their relationships in a mutually rewarding manner that keeps people cooperating with them.

Many persons try to succeed by using the values, attitudes, expectations, and skills they chanced on in childhood. Unfortunately, in this age of relentless change, when power and authority are shared by more and more people, to depend on what you picked up as a youngster is a poor way to shape your life into a successful affair. In our conventional behavioral patterns many mistakes have been handed down from generation to generation. At home you were probably socialized not to ask embarrassing questions of your elders. At school you were expected to memorize the correct answers. And if you are like most people, you are still waiting for someone to ask the right questions so you can show what a good student you were. Unfortunately for your welfare, no one is ever going to ask them, since most of the answers you learned in school are no longer appropriate. Yet -- millions of men and women who would never imagine crossing the country by covered wagon instead of jet aircraft, who would never take some medicine man's snake-oil cure, try to succeed in life by using methods that were outdated a century ago. And then can’t understand why they aren't among the successful achievers.

Click To Read More

Grace Under Pressure - World Class Leadership Course

“There are no bad regiments in the French Army -- although some regiments fail because they are commanded by bad colonels.”

Napoleon Bonaparte -- Maxims Of War

Wild Ducks

Some years ago I heard what was soon to become the death rattle of a great industrial civilization. I heard it in the angry voices of two factory owners who were at their wits end. In Sydney, Australia, one furious executive shouted that the only way to restore employee commitment would be to line his striking workers against a wall and shoot every third one.

His American counterpart in Minneapolis wasn’t so bloody minded but he was no less frustrated by his failure to win the commitment of his workers. He yearned for a major economic depression to return them to their senses so they would never again challenge his decisions. His business would suffer and his earnings decline, he admitted, but he felt it would be worth it emotionally to get the labor issue settled once and for all. He may have had his wish granted, since his company is now working at half capacity and is struggling to survive as his sons now compete with products coming from China, Japan, India, Brazil and even from an awakened and ambitious Vietnam. For we are no longer competing with ourselves -- with firms who are making the same fundamental mistakes inherent in a lockstep approach, but with hungry achievers who are coming on line abundant resources and deeply committed people.

I took neither man seriously, since they were both half out of their minds with frustration and were obviously venting their fears and frustrations -- but as they blustered, it became painfully obvious that neither executive understood the challenge nor had the wisdom and the grace to cope with the events occurring across Western Civilization. Neither owner had a sound vision for ending the crippling adversary relationships that make many American, Australasian and British businesses more and more vulnerable. Too few men and women in leadership positions have captured a vision of what a committed community of achievers can accomplish. A great many companies remain trapped in an antiquated philosophy of leadership that depends on interpersonal power and rigid control and when that fails, they become vulnerable because of increasing world competition.

We, in the Western World, still suffer greatly from the massive leadership failure documented in Harvard Business Review some years past. Of course it is ironic that more recent Harvard researchers criticized the tightly scripted industrial engineering approach to management that their predecessors in the Harvard Business School invented a generation or so ago. The fill in the blanks -- connect the dots, Harvard engineering and re-engineering approach used managers and workers as if they were emotionless robots. Workers were paid the absolute survival minimum and worked relentlessly until they malfunctioned. The so called rational approach that ignored emotions and ethics and excluded morality from a nihilistic philosophy of business, consumed people who were then replaced as if tools of production that failed.

It seemed cost effective to use up workers and to replace those who faltered with machines that never argue or want more money. Actually, dealing successfully with ego-centric humans is a challenging business that bad managers and executives strive desperately to avoid at all costs.

The Harvard approach trained plug-in executives who could shift effortlessly from one product or service to another as the best possible approach to fast stock market profits -- whether manufacturing hair driers, paint or canning peaches. The Harvard approach was always about winning on Wall Street with swift stock market killings and never about producing great products or valuable services and letting a company’s excellence persuade investors to stay committed over the long term. Many executives lose their jobs because the company suffered a bad year on Wall Street but few if any have ruined their careers by producing second or third rate products. This nihilistic philosophy of service to society worked reasonably well for dysfunctional organizations that produced shoddy goods and services. The managers could follow the lock step procedures laid down by ideological professors who never met a payroll or walked a production floor and the cash cow would give milk and cream forever. Unfortunately, the old girl grew weary and gave up the ghost when a host of international players appeared on stage and elbowed their day into the chow line. Until now, General Motors automobiles and vans suffer as many failures after three years on the road as Toyotas and Hondas have during their seventh year of service. More and more companies have become wholesalers who produce nothing of their own but pass foreign goods off to the public with their own brand names pasted on. Chrysler has managed to survive by teaming up with Mercedes while General Motors is considering a consortium with European and Asian firms in order to remain viable in the world market. Or possibly Ford and G M may combine forces in order to survive by cutting design and production costs significantly. Everything is still about the all crucial quarterly report in order to placate institutional shareholders. Very little is about manufacturing excellence although no one wants to make shoddy goods. It is just that when push comes to shove financially, the accountants on the top floor go for the stock market fast buck every time.

The computerized re-engineering approach became an item of faith, was the standard ideology revered by many who lacked the vision that sophisticated leaders apply to create effective communities of achievers. It seemed good enough to break every task down to its mind-numbing elementals, to pay the peons just enough to keep them from starving and to follow the industrial engineering lock steps to mediocrity on the world’s stage when our competitors are offering increasing excellence through their products and services.

There certainly has been no great desire to follow the wild ducks who ride the cold north wind of commerce to great heights with their organizations. These swift birds of passage upset domesticated barnyard fowl terribly with their fierce passions. Lee Iacocca carried his youthful fascination with speed to fruition when he saved an even then struggling Ford Motor Company with the original Mustang sports car. He mass produced a twenty-nine hundred dollar low tech donkey that could blow off forty thousand dollar Porsche thoroughbreds on any race track in America. He build them in several variants -- from six cylinder butterflies for elderly ladies who wanted a town coupe -- to fire-breathing dragons for white knuckle racing. I know, I bought one of the four speed, over-carburated, disc braked beasts that was sprung like a British ox cart for my wife Roberta on her thirtieth birthday. We made swift passages along the back roads through the Rocky Mountains and around the Great Lakes for years in bellowing glory. Thank you Lee Iacocca for many glorious memories imprinted on our psyches while in four wheel drifts near the limit of adhesion!

Then, there was Mary Kay with her cosmetics empire who developed an entirely new way of transforming fifty cents worth of simple ingredients into glamorous lipsticks and rouges and she did it with flair and great fun -- with girls-only house parties and gifts of flamingo pink Cadillac's for her committed achievers. Mary Kay was a sophisticated leader who really understood the social and sensual interests of women who party together, recapture a bit of romance at home and buy more of her cosmetics line than they had planned!

Dutch Kindleberger transcended the law of gravity by first designing and building the world class B - 25 bombers that James Doolittle’s boys flew to Tokyo and the evergreen P - 51 fighter from scratch on clean sheets of engineering paper. You could see the fighter parked on a tarmac at dawn and know that it was the best of the breed. That was for practice -- Dutch then went on to jets such as the F - 86 and the F - 100 and to create earth shaking rocket engines that could power towering space ships to escape velocity at his Rocket dyne Division of North American Aviation. He literally made the mountains quake! Dutch loved aircraft and he loved men and women who were thrilled by his Mad Max vision of powering Americans to the moon. Dutch would salivate at nights over his drawing board. I know -- I did quality assurance on his X - 15 and the air breathing Navajo scram jet for two summers when I was teaching science at Cincinnati’s Sayler Park School. For years I treasured a small medallion which included aluminum taken from the Eagle that Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon. Walking upright through the massive ram jet engines of the Navajo was never just a summer job for this former science instructor who sent ten times as many kids into science and technical careers as his predecessor.

And don’t forget Willy Davidson who quipped that a fellow who has only one motorcycle couldn’t consider himself much of a biker. Willy knew what his customers wanted and served them so well with his rumbling 1915 technology Hogs, that Harley Davidson is now worth more on the stock market than General Motors. I doubt that the Harvard gurus ever pondered why the Dupont executives who destroyed the Indian Motorcycle Company, failed so miserably with their plug-in management approach. The executives made bad financial decisions and a series of bad motorcycles that few riders would buy. Willy and his posse didn’t survive with clever Wall Street scams after Indian collapsed -- they did it the old fashioned way -- they earned it after Willy and other motorcycle enthusiasts snatched Harley Davidson back from the Brunswick executives who were following the Dupont crew to disaster by building bad machines. You might say that both companies were saddled with bad colonels, but Willy and his guys rescued his namesake.

Those were committed people, who multiplied their passions through their people and not one of the wild ducks, who rode the cold north wind ahead of their flocks, would have been worth a hill of beans at making clothespins or peddling sugar water to teenagers. All of them were passionate achievers who had the dual leadership ability to manage resources and relationship well.

Unfortunately, our deepening American leadership failure has included a greedy loss of vision of what creative men and women of passion and a commitment to greatness can achieve when they become committed leaders.

It is well past time to put that failure behind us, to harness the human element understood by successful leaders, by embracing and capitalizing on the universal desire of men and women to find meaning for themselves and to make their lives count in purposeful activities with their resources and through their relationships. Fortunately, I am finding signs that more perceptive Western managers are beginning to understand how commitment and excellence can be jump-started in our organizations. I surely do see it emerging from the women entrepreneurs now taking significant roles in our society. Most men have traditionally followed the Harvard paint-by-the-numbers approach, using a universal system for earning money but not especially caring whether they are working with garbage, grain, coal or with the American banking system’s money -- so long as the monthly report is good. On the other hand, most women going into business for themselves, choose areas of service where they feel a sense of meaning and purpose that lifts them beyond a satisfactory bank account in return for their accomplishments. When they reach home and family at the end of the work week, many more women than men want to feel they have contributed to society in some significant manner in addition to creating their own wealth.

For years I taught courses about the need to harness commitment and creativity, to manage resources and relationships -- to the budding executives in the Executive Development Conference at the University of Arizona at Tucson. I acknowledged the need for greater government cooperation, for improved technology, for lower interest rates, and for freedom from the tyranny of the monthly report. I then insisted that a new philosophy of leadership is needed to better utilize the reservoir of often untapped human ability that exists in every organization. In my courses, I told each group of two dozen or so fast-track executives from Saudi Arabia, France, Latin America, Australia, England, Brazil and the United States, that we must turn our organizations into surrogate communities in which people invest the very stuff of their lives at tasks or in relationships that are meaningful to them personally. I concluded by saying that in no other way could an executive or manager further a career effectively.

There is a point to this, and I cannot help but recall it every time I hear managers and executives talking about the lack of commitment offered them by their employees:

Because men and women almost always continue holding the attitudes and completing the activities that reward them personally, while avoiding the attitudes and ending the activities that devalue or deprive them of benefits, every management team receives the level of performance from the employees that the leadership group consistently reinforces in some tangible or intangible manner.

Unfortunately, in our American and European nations, frequently the level of commitment is neither what the leadership wanted nor expected.

There are no bad regiments: There are only bad colonels!

This course is about becoming a more successful leader by harnessing what we now know about effectiveness and efficiency. The research is in -- any group that becomes what I call a community of achievers can maintain its level of productivity with a significant reduction in labor costs, in floor space, and with in inventory. Any manager who cannot build a career on that improvement probably has no business cluttering the territory!

SELF-FOCUS SAMPLE
Tell what you think the author means when he writes that every management team receives the level of commitment that the leaders consistently reward.

In the physical or resource aspects of leadership.

In the psychological or relational aspects of leadership

Does your group receive the degree of commitment expected from the use of a sound quid pro quo?

If you answer yes, why does your reward system succeed?

If your answer is no, why does your reward system fail?

Facing Up to 2008 and Limits of American power

In the dark Indochina night of the American soul, we wasted almost sixty thousand soldiers and a quarter million wounded, while morally weakening virtually every American institution. Multitudes of citizens have never again accepted our administrative, legislative and judicial aspects of governance with the same degree of trust that we had in them before Vietnam. This is still reflected in the twenty-two percent approval rate of the late do nothing Republican Congress. And why should we -- when our leaders not only sacrificed our own men but murdered more than a million simple peasant farmers and fishermen. They killed them in a brutal scheme to return the people of Vietnam as serfs in chains forged by brutal French colonial thieves. Worse, we supported the rapacious return of the Europeans to Indochina while Ho Chi Min and his staff were begging first Truman and then Eisenhower to help them create a humane approach to life for their people. They modeled their revolution after our own and in desperation after their pleas fell on deaf Washington ears, turned to the Communists to help them savage the French Army at Dien Bien Fu. Hard ball power players such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were incensed and eager to retaliate, because the ragged little peasants dared challenge their personal power to move the people of Asia around like pawns on the international board. As J R R Tolkien said so brilliantly -- Unfettered power players compromise so much in their determination to rule or ruin, that they lose the ability to distinguish between good and evil -- between right and wrong. A wicked shroud of expediency envelopes their souls as the needs and rights of others are twisted to their meet own neurotic or even psychopathic yearnings.

It has now become painfully obvious that our present cabal of hubristic proto-fascist ideologues have learned nothing about the limits of American power. We have been led for more than a decade by power brokers who are far more willing to rip and tear everything good for our middle class rather than to create anything positive. Now, anyone with even a modicum of spirituality mourns the three thousand slain and twenty-five thousand maimed men and women of the Cheney/Bush War that has the potential to explode out of control and double or triple the current costs and casualties. Three thousand dead and still counting as Cheney/Bush call for even more men and women to draw their chestnuts from the Iraqi fire. All of which should receive some concentrated attention from Republican clones of Bush who survived the 2006 massacre when the 2008 campaign brings another day of reckoning.

During the Vietnam War, Tricky Dick Nixon won the presidency after the voters drove Johnson from office, by pretending to have a secret plan to extricate America from Vietnam. He even patted his breast pocket as he campaigned -- as if he carried his plan close to his heart. Of course, Nixon’s exit strategy was to win a grand military victory over the non-white raggedy-assed little peasants, despite rebellion on the college campuses and streets of America and eventually in corporate board rooms and within the Congress itself. After Johnson left just before the ax fell, Nixon’s futile pursuit of a military victory gave America another twenty-five thousand mostly poor ghetto and farm boys slain, and another hundred thousand crippled. Only then was Nixon dragged, kicking and screaming to negotiate with the peasants armed with little more than great big A K - 47s, a handful of rice each day, plenty of ammunition and infinite courage -- as they shivered with malaria in the monsoon. They gave first French Foreign Legionaries and then U. S. Marines all the war they could tolerate, closing so near to the perimeter wire that neither American artillery nor air craft could strike them without slaying their own ground troops. His wicked choices led to Nixon’s downfall -- the entire Watergate affair was simply the cause celebre through which angry citizens drove the dark hearted, paranoid president out of office. And despite the continuing disaster Nixon stayed the course to the bitter end. It fell on Gerald Ford, to bite the bullet and withdraw all American forces from Vietnam. And, when Ford sacrificed his own reelection chances to pardon Nixon, possibly keeping him from prison, he refused to thank his benefactor.

As a line of ancient French wisdom reports -- The more things change the more they remain the same. George Bush has taken a page from Nixon’s failed play book with his very own secret plan for winning his war despite growing outrage at home. Bush’s exit strategy is to win his victory by doubling down the number of our boys and girls at risk, dooming as many American kids as it takes to secure military bases from which to dominate the oil rich region, which is why Cheney/Bush took us to war in the first place. He also wants to leave a decent legacy to his presidency and especially, to sooth his severely wounded ego. Virtually every man and woman in the civilized world now sees that this wannabe emperor wears no clothes, that he is a fraud as a leader. Many understand that his failures as a dyslexic student, a womanizing husband, a troubled father with drastic mood swings and a three strike business failure until his father gave him a share in a Texas baseball team -- have left great throbbing wounds in his psyche. He consistently reveals the symptoms of psychological overcompensation with his bombastic West Texas aggression, his devaluing everyone he meets with demeaning nicknames, his inability to read and concentrate, his violent rejection of any form of criticism and reliance on ideological fantasies rather than on facts, are some of the symptoms that plague a dried out alcoholic. To paraphrase the brilliant Otto Rank -- The road to vast power and wealth indeed passes close by the madhouse.

Bush irrationally expects successful results from compulsively repeating his self-defeating mistakes. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Baath Party and the El Quaida leaders despised and distrusted one another, there was not a single Iraqi among the 9/11 attackers and the myth of creating a democratic Middle East was a fall back position hurriedly invented by White House spin doctors to deceive a restive American citizenry who had begun to question the logic behind the Cheney/Bush War. Bush now finds himself deep in a hole of his own making but he cannot stop obsessively digging it ever deeper.

Such a rigid inability to learn from one’s mistakes is as probably as good a short description of neuroticism and psychopathy as can be found.

Cheney/Bush ignore the bruising defeat the American voters handed the Republican Party during the 2006 election, reject virtually everything the Baker Commission identified as important and dispute the advice from the compliant generals they themselves appointed. Bush is compulsively determined to win a self-redeeming military victory where none is possible without a decade or two of bloody guerrilla warfare. An Iraqi civil war is simmering as American occupiers cause deep resentment and distrust. Obviously, a defeat of this magnitude shall shred even more his wounded ego although he no longer has any good options. Bush faces a choice of evils, clinging to the slender hope that somehow, Iraqi politicians who hate one another with a tribal virulence few Americans have ever seen can persuade their police and military forces to forget centuries of brutal warfare to cooperate according to democratic rules they do not understand.

To win a military victory and keep the lid on tight, Cheney/Bush would need to double or triple the war budget and the number of Americans sacrificed in Iraq and install a regime as cruel as any imposed by the Germans and Japanese during World War II. The war mongers would need to invent and rearm another Saddam! Johnson and Nixon installed surrogate rulers in Vietnam and the expedient decisions made in Washington hastened the Vietnamese victory and crippled the American Army for a generation. Unjust wars and the moral compromises made by politicians and generals to win them at any cost, make a mockery of the motto of our professional officer corps -- Duty, Honor and Country. Even honest and patriotic soldiers can be so worn down and frustrated that they acquiesce to the lesser of several evils. After having served America as one of them, I do not blame the troops in any way as they serve our nation wisely and well in a situation made by the proto-fascists of the Republican right wing. It is a tragedy that so many American soldiers naively danced to the tune of narcissistic politicians, plutocrats and preachers for so long -- who are spending their lives like pocket change in a mad quest to meet their own wicked ideological and financial goals.

The reactionary politicians and their fundamental preacher allies of the Republican Party may remain so stubborn that they must stay the course with an apparently neurotic and barely coherent president and his brain trust. They can filibuster every attempt to negotiate an end to the Cheney/Bush War, burn the Army and the National Guard to professional and emotional cinders with endless tours of duty and keep Cheney’s Halliburton gang busy building military bases in Iraq from which to launch an even more disastrous war against Iran. They can continue to play fast and lose with the Kurds’ against Turkey and the Shiite slaughter of Sunni Muslims in Iraq until Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt explode in resentment. Then the oil fields may well go up in flames and gasoline shall sell for five dollars a gallon across America -- crippling our airline and trucking industries and sending inflation skyrocketing.

Every wicked endeavor is filled with unforeseen consequences that are subjectively overlooked by compulsive narcissistic leaders who claw their way to power in political, commercial and religious organizations. The Cheney/Bush spin doctors may continue to egoistically assume they can manipulate middle class voters into loving or at least financing and fighting their war with their sons and daughters, while their own kids are safe at Yale, Harvard and Stanford. But we out here on the tundra are primed to complete the job well begun during the 2006 election. If the reactionaries and fundamentalists continue playing the cards Cheney/Bush deal from the bottom of the deck, they will enter the 2008 presidential election season with still more of our kids coming home in coffins, the national debt soaring out of sight and inflation stalking every retirement plan. That should galvanize their already surly constituents immensely as they vote to elect a president and even more members of Congress who will finally stop sleepwalking behind the pied pipers of Washington led by Cheney/Bush and address our legitimate concerns.

Secrets of Lovers Relationships

The Loving Psychology of Life-Long Sexual Intimacy





* Do You want exciting intimacy?

* Do You want to save or improve your marriage or relationship?

* Do you want less conflict in your relationship?

* Do You want to have greater influence with your lover?

Click Here Now Secrets of Lovers Relationships or read more..


Our Printable eBook Course shows you how to create a meaningful relationship that assures permanent love and consistent joyful sexuality with printable self-focus exercises and projects in every chapter.

The Course Includes:

* Your Keys to a Loving and Lasting Relationship.

* Benefit: learn the personal tools to revitalize and fulfill your
relationship.

* Consistent joyful sexuality in your relationship.


* Benefit: achieve sexual intimacy without guilt or game playing to increase your joy.

* Predict your Personality Pattern to influence and your partners.

* Benefit: learn specific communication techniques to better influence your partner.

* Learn to manage your conflicts through the Three Stage Conflict Avoidance and Control ASRAC PROCESS.

* Benefit: learning this alone could save your marriage or relationship.

* Create Couple's Contracts that really work for you and your partner.

* Benefit: negotiate about money, sex, discipline and everything else without conflict.

* Self-Focus Exercises in every Chapter.

* Benefit: achieve personal empowerment and understanding.

* Learn many interesting things about yourself and your partner with our Personality Pattern Predictor.

Men and women are mirror image souls who need one another for fulfillment - for intimacy caresses through the long nights of winter, for the yin and yang of masculine and feminine strengths, for perpetuating ourselves immortally through our children.

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100% satisfaction is our goal: ordering, customer service and selection. If you are unhappy with your purchase for any reason, please contact us immediately. We promise to do everything we can to make things right and offer a 90 day money back guarantee or trade if you prefer.

Warmly,
Jard and Roberta DeVille

Michael Moore's new film is online for free

The Slacker Uprising

Come watch the trailer for the new Michael Moore movie entitled "Slacker Uprising". You will be able to download the entire movie for free on September 23rd if you sign up!

http://slackeruprising.com

God's Passion

As anthropologist and priest Tielhard de Chardin expressed so brilliantly, life in the universe is no accident -- no one time collision of random factors that led eventually to humankind's appearance on this lovely planet circling an insignificant yellow star, out on the edge of a very common galaxy, with nothing to set it off from several hundred million island universes. We can hardly imagine how life established a foothold here, amidst the billions of crashing meteor strikes, millions of rumbling volcanoes and eons of acid rain in a poisonous atmosphere. We do know that free radicals and electricity are colliding continually throughout the Cosmos, creating basic building blocks of protein, under enormous pressure to burst through every seam on every viable world, into existence in every possible environment. Of course, as children of the stars we simply cannot boast that God created the cosmos for us alone, when one planet around an insignificant yellow sun would have been quite enough for our needs.

Everything exists because God's deepest passion has always been life, life in every nook and cranny of our world. From the mountain peaks to the depths of the seas, life of every shape and style emerges constantly. Life seems to ooze out of the very pores of Mother Earth. The six or eight billion year old record of fossils in the rocks is staggering in volume and complexity. When Jard was in graduate school and teaching science in the Cincinnati school system, he’d occasionally take the kids fossil hunting with picks and hammers along the creeks that carved passages through the chalk bed of the vast, primordial Mississippian Sea. The white deposits are hundreds of feet thick with the skeletal remains of creatures that look like everything from twigs to trilobites and a great many one to two inch long beaks of prehistoric squids. One year, a nearby farmer plowed up a giant squid’s beak over four feet long. Even the biology professors at the University of Cincinnati, where we were studying at the time, had trouble estimating how long its arms must have been. Perhaps, one of them finally ventured a guess, tentacles of sixty or more feet! God indeed is the Seminal Spirit and Cosmic Creator of all matter and all that has followed according to the basic principle of Continuous Creation.

Here now is our crucial point about cosmic origins, about stars and humans for men and women who want to make their lives count for something meaningful rather than merely secular and temporal.

When God’s processes of Continuous Creation produced our species through cosmic alchemy, we retained the metaphysical -- the spiritual nature of God and the Cosmos from which we came. No other species became so self-aware, with spiritual yearnings that go far beyond our physical and psychological needs. We are the only philosophical species. Like no other creatures -- we are sentient, we know that we know. We think constantly about thinking and consistent find spiritual sources of meaning and belonging or we go spiritually bankrupt.

We ponder being alive, wondering who we are, why we exist and where we are going. After making a bad choice and receiving punishment, no dog lays awake all night agonizing over what an evil thing he has done. To think about good and evil is a human concept. So is success and failure. It is our conscience, a vital part of the spiritual unconscious of which Frankl wrote, that actively seeks more than bread and circuses, more than power, possessions, prestige and pleasure. We live within the physical and through the psychological. but we dare not neglect our philosophical/spiritual needs or we wither and blow away as rootless tumbleweeds vanish in a barren desert.

Until we connect consciously to God by developing a purposeful and permanent spiritual relationship, we remain fragile individuals trying to navigate our little boats on a desperately complex voyage that stretches from eternity to eternity with very little security while traversing the void. And it is from this challenge in an age of incessant change that the many life-style frustrations of our era come to bedevil us!

Fortunately, God, the Continuous Creator and Lord of the Cosmos in whom we live and move and have our being, is the all-powerful, all wise and all-pervasive spirit who knows, understands and loves all persons. In other words;

God cares about you and all of your loved ones, although multitudes freeze God out of their lives until they are unhappy, frustrated and in desperate spiritual straits. Then, with their souls wounded, they turn to any number of self-defeating ways in a futile search to make psychology successful. Karen Horney in her brilliant book, the Neurotic Personality Of Our Time wrote --

“A great many neurotic men and women will do anything to be loved except to become loveable.”

God’s obvious passion is life; life beyond comprehension developing continually in every nook and cranny of Earth. Off the coast of southeastern New Guinea, two great tropical ocean currents collide and swirl and intermingle water so warm it is almost like a broth. This vast soup bowl is filled with incredible living creatures, thousands of which have yet to be discovered and classified by scientists. Some of them change from plants to animals and back again during their life cycles. Spiders have been found hunting prey atop Mt. Everest and incredible yard long eel-like creatures make their living feeding on bacteria spewed from the throats of volcanic vents in the eternal night and crushing pressure under two or three miles of Pacific Ocean water. And of course, the faster we create antibiotic medications to slay dangerous bacteria, they faster their strongest survivors adapt to the poison and render it useless as a medication. Nothing in life remains static, although we humans do indeed despise change in almost any form, unless it is to our immediate and obvious advantage. And even then we still have difficulties when adapting to anything new.

There is little doubt, to us anyway, that life forms continuously develop beyond our limited vision to populate the entire Cosmos, according to scientific principles of which God is the divine author. Astronomers have now identified more planets beyond our solar system than within it. And we do understand that God the universe throbs with God's passion for life; life under intense pressure to burst through at every seam in every viable environment, on every borning world. This is no little fly-by-night operation we are invited to join but the very purpose of existence! God’s passion is why there is something here, within our grasp and sight rather than nothing existing at all. If we foolishly reject psychospiritual wisdom and practices or just ignore God through ignorance, we are missing the main element of a successful and spiritual lifestyle. For the health of our souls, we must meet the cosmic needs that we all have inherited through the Lord of Life.

Despite the quarrels of some fearful persons within formal religion and academic research, there never has been any real conflict between spiritual wisdom and scientific knowledge. There is nothing that should cause spiritually minded persons to cower in the stagnant backwaters of research, education, the arts, commerce and government. Of course, science considers the how of cosmic creation while religion deals with the why of our extraordinary cosmos.

Mini-Quiz
Have you ever felt yourself connected with God in a personal manner?

How do you see God’s passion for life being manifested today?


Author's Bio

Jard & Roberta DeVille; published psychology books, seminars & psychological assessment instruments. NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a best seller. He & Roberta wrote 'LOVERS FOR LIFE' and other courses/books together. She's been a wonderful teacher in Minneapolis for many years. He’s considered by many to be America’s foremost leadership scholar. Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for Free E-Book Courses and Internet Business Tools.