I feel like the thing we're always skirting around and trying to pin down in discussions about The Beatles breakup is that the primary thing that wedged the destructive crack in the Lennon-McCartney partnership, is this: Paul flourished under the pressure of fame, while John was completely destroyed by it.

I think every aspect of their conflict becomes crystal clear with this in mind: both John's black-and-white-style provocations and specific resentments (phonies and fakes and Business Shit), and Paul's inability to emotionally understand why his priorities exhausted the other three members of the band by the end. Things were fine when they were primarily "performing" for each other, but once Paul started to derive so much energy from performing for other people, the whole thing was gonna inevitably catch fire b/c John simply wasn't capable of doing that, and also doing so made him feel fucking insane. What John saw as abandonment, Paul saw as The Beatles reaching new artistic heights. Eventually - as their personal bond deteriorated - what Paul saw as himself as stoically shouldering John's nonfunctional deadweight, John saw as Paul taking his chance to do whatever the fuck he wanted with the band. A lot of professional and fandom ink is spilt trying to 100% justify one of these POVs, but I think it's a much more even handed tragedy than what's represented at either of these poles: which is that John was burnt-out, and Paul wasn't, but the immature possessiveness and insecurity in their relationship made the idea of taking a bit of a "break" not just intolerable, but completely unthinkable. It was the gulf opened by these opposite reactions to fame that made the emotional results of this an unbridgeable communication gap, because they just could not understand (and thus ended up deeply resenting) the way the other was acting.

Once the switch flipped in their relationship there really was no coming back because Paul reacts to pain by running from and rationalizing it, and John reacted to pain by deciding that if he felt something bad, then everything must have always been bad and thinking it was ever good was a lie. The effects of this reverberate through time as well; to this day Paul is trying to enshrine, protect and clean up The Beatles legacy, whereas John - despite dipping frequently into bouts of genuine affection and nostalgia for the band - seemed often to be gripped with an almost hysterical sense that he and Paul had built something fake and socially harmful (a terrible irony, b/c he let Yoko use him to build something that actually IS fake and, imo, deeply socially harmful).

Anyway, *puts on my (tin) wizard hat*, this is what I think 'Dig A Pony' is about, the end.

The dark truths of being an athlete – it is time to face the facts

Think of an athlete. Now describe that athlete in 3 words. Let me guess ‘strong’, ‘fit’ or ‘fast’ was one of the words you came up with, right?

I took to Instagram and asked my followers to do the same, this was the response:

We are all guilty of perceiving athletes to be especially resilient and therefore less vulnerable to what the average person may go through in life.

Athletes can be viewed as superhuman and the impact of their emotional wellbeing is frequently overlooked. I myself admit to being guilty of this.

Determining the burden of mental health issues in sport can be difficult. Especially considering the stigma associated with speaking out and the positive association between physical activity on the prevention and treatment of mental health issues [1]. 

Athletes have a huge amount of pressure to deal with. It is common for elite athletes to develop a perfectionist personality at training and competition, which often can lead to anxiety, stress, depression and fatigue.

What could cause an athlete’s mental state to deteriorate? 

        I.            Abuse from fans

Fan abuse can easily contribute to a decrease in an athlete’s psychological state. Dealing with this level of hate from such a large audience during competition and then having it carry on in the media cannot be easy to deal with.

Football players especially receive a lot of hate from fans as tensions rise in the stadium. The level of abuse athletes experience is no secret.

A recent incident involving Mario Balotelli the former Manchester City and Liverpool striker displays the level of hate footballer players face day to day. Balotelli makes new headlines after storming off the pitch due to falling victim of racist chants.

This video gives you an insight into the event and how Balotelli responded. Evidently the torment is causing a reaction that could quite possibly lead to a bigger issue regarding his mental health.

Racism doesn’t stop after a game or competition. Abuse from fans is moving online. Less than two months into the new football season Paul Pogba, Tammy Abraham and Marcus Rashford had all encountered racist abuse on Twitter after missing penalties.

Kick It Out reported 22,000 discriminatory online posts directed at players and teams during the European Championships in 2016. During the 2014/15 English premier League season, there was around 134,000 discriminatory posts aimed at players and clubs. Overall, an average of 16,800 discriminatory posts every month. Both pieces of research show racism being the most common form of hate speech [2]. 

        II.            Injury

One of the most recognised risk factors for psychological distress amongst athletes has been sport injury. Brewer and Petrie (1995) were among the first researchers to compare depression symptoms in athletes who had and had not experienced injuries, using a retrospective study. They found that athletes who experienced an injury during the previous year reported significantly higher depression symptom scores than those reported by non-injured athletes [3].The fear of not being able to make a comeback can affect athletes mental state after suffering from an injury.

QPR technical director Chris Ramsey has spoken about the depression he faced during his injury-hit playing days. In an interview, Ramsey said: “People don’t realise with long-term injuries you go into depression no matter how mild it is. You think about where you are in your career, if a new manager might come in who doesn’t know you – will he buy someone to replace you?” [4].

When athletes experience physical injury, there is often a team of medical employed to ensure a speedy recovery. However, when an athlete experiences a mental health issue, the treatment process is often not quite as similar. Leaving athletes feeling abandoned and unsure of where to turn.

        III.            Stress

Within elite sport, athletes face an extreme load of physical training and psychological stress, including competition-induced stress either prior, during or immediately after competition, as well as training, rehabilitation, team meetings and contract negotiations.

The stress players experience does not end when their playing career does, it follows them into retirement. For example, retired professional footballers are as likely as anyone to be exposed to stressors especially major life events.

The pressure and stigma behind being an athlete 

Athletes may even be more predisposed than the general population to depression, because of the physical and psychological demands placed on them by the sporting environment.

Mental health has the stigma of being weak, the absolute antithesis of what athletes want to portray. Elite athletes are idealised within the media, gaining them a large fan base, giving them false perceptions and the immunity to such problems.

Stigma causes athletes to disconnect from seeking help for their mental health, mainly, to avoid the label of being mentally unwell and the harm it brings on their pride.

Anyone can suffer with depression 

Mental health stigma is still an ongoing issue in society; however, with the help of athletes opening about their mental health walls are being broken.

John Kirwan (Rugby Union coach and player, New Zealand) quote: “Getting help [for depression], for someone like me who saw getting help as a weakness, was a big step. I did an awareness campaign and that first step was difficult for me. I thought people were going to think I was mad.”

Kirwan is now using his experience of suffering with depression to spread awareness and help others going through it.

Emma Mitchell, similarly, in an interview with BBC sport revealed how even after winning the league she felt “terrible” and has now learned to make room for her feelings.

Mitchell describes her struggles with mental illness: “It was like I had a constant pressure on my chest, like somebody was standing on top of me.”

In her interview with the BBC she also highlights how mental health should be valued with the same importance and support that is in place as standard for physical injury.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49934256

Mental health in elite sport is receiving more publicity due to an increase in athletes sharing their personal experiences.

Michael Phelps and Ricky Hatton have publicly spoke about their struggles with mental health to raise awareness. This is helping break down existing barriers within sport, such as mental health making you weak.

Ricky Hatton (professional UK boxer) openly speaks about his struggle with depression in an interview.

Hatton states: “It's adrenaline, the euphoria of having your hand raised in the middle of Madison Square Garden, and then having it taken away.”

Food for thought 

Remember those 3 words you had at the start? Is it as easy to label athletes with those 3 words now? Or has your opinion changed?

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Footnotes:

[1]  Rosenbaum S, Tiedemann A, Sherrington C. (2014) Physical Activity Interventions for People with Mental Illness: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 75(9): 964-974.

[2] http://theconversation.com/racist-abuse-at-football-games-is-increasing-home-office-says-but-the-sports-race-problem-goes-much-deeper-124467

[3]  Brewer, B.W & Petrie, T.A. (1995). A comparison between injured and uninjured football players on selected psychosocial variables. Acad. Athl. J. 10:11Y8.

[4] https://www.mylondon.news/sport/football/football-news/qpr-technical-director-chris-ramsey-13202247

Official Internal Business Mentoring Programs

"I have the privilege, as a doctor, of conference with women in my workplace every day to discuss symptoms and issues connected to the natural aging procedure. The consultations that I offer can enter numerous instructions whether it hormones, feelings, physical needs, or psychological requirements. I need to also preface this short article by stating that these ladies I meet services in every walk of life and are in every phase of life from young to old. I provide care to executives, regional stars, doctor, school instructors, stay-at-home mommies, ministry other halves, building employees, and almost any function you can imagine. After years of doing this, I can say without a doubt that nobody, regardless of expert status or responsibility, is exempt from the impact of anxiety. Each time I do an assessment, I constantly touch on the issue of anxiety and anxiety to totally examine the factors for numerous issues. The ""cause"" of depression is sometimes identifiable, but usually is not. For some, anxiety can be explained as a fundamental tendency to anxiety due to a strong family history of the condition; for others it's brought on by stress and psychological trauma; for others it's a sluggish downward decrease due to unhealthy relationships and poor social networks; for others it's the consistent feelings of failure or not meeting expectations; and for others it's due to endocrine and biological shifts of the child escorting body due to some other illness state. The reality is that whatever the cause, the impacts can be substantial and lasting for some women who deal with clinical depression.

These are the hardcore stats about anxiety so you have an understanding of how considerable this is:

- The World Health Organization identified depression as the third most important reason for illness problem worldwide in 2004, and it is approximated that, globally, anxiety will be the 2nd leading cause of impairment by the end of 2020.

- In the U.S., anxiety is the most common type of mental illness (impacting 26% of adults).

- Women experience depression 2 times more than guys.

- Bringing the stats ""closer to house"" (so to speak), I did an audit of charts that I hold in the office and recognized that 88% of my clients reacted ""Yes! I have actually experienced depression"". Twenty-five percent mentioned they had actually experienced it once or twice in their life. Twenty-three percent said they experienced anxiety one or two times a year.

- Then to bring it ""actually near to home"", I found that depression amongst those that I happen to know remain in ministry (or merely ministry partners) experienced a typical age beginning of anxiety in their early thirties. That's our YOUNG WOMEN in MINISTRY. WOW!!! The majority experienced depression at or near five to six years in their ministry profession. Mentoring girls in ministry are clearly needed and crucial. The very first five years have a SUBSTANTIAL impact psychologically for those beginning their journey in ministry.

What should a woman do if she has constant sensations of depression?

Speak with your spouse, speak to your most trusted coach or buddy, and go see your doctor. Among the greatest mistakes made by well-meaning people is to provide somebody who is crying out for help the old ""it'll improve"" pat of termination on the shoulder. That, unfortunately, is frequently what takes place when someone tries to express the feelings of being in a deep blue sea fair state. Lots of ladies and especially girls end up being puzzled that depression is a state of weak point and find themselves extremely vulnerable in reaching out because of the opinions and advised antidotes of others. Or, they simply soon recognize that it's the ""thing I dare not speak of"" because of the reactions of the past. If there is one thing I have actually learned throughout the years, it is to take these discussions about anxiety very seriously and ask the best concerns to direct each female, as a private, toward the appropriate aid. Frequently having an outlet to share sensations and disappointments is all that is required (together with terrific studies of the Word obviously), but always bear in mind that from time to time, there needs to be medical intervention.

In wrapping this up, I wish to end on the power that faith holds in the battle with anxiety. Maybe it's more easy to understand to describe the effect of a skewed point of view in this way. I once had a bathroom scale that was undoubtedly broken and unreliable. I might step on the scale and it would display 108 pounds. That seemed great until my seven-year-old daughter and my partner each stepped on it and it revealed the precise same number. The scale was clearly broken, but I think we as ladies wish to utilize a defective scale to determine our status in life. Plain and simple, you can't utilize society's unreliable ""self-respect"" scale to determine YOUR own self-regard. I always inform ladies not to get their hands caught in the contrast trap. It will fracture you and your spirit in a heartbeat. The bible is clear on the truth that we are each highly favored by God. No doubt, our earthly life will bring with its trials, temptations, loss, and sometimes beat, but God's view of us does not alter and is not faulty in any way. The scripture states that He is the magnificence and the lifter of our heads. (Ps. 3:3) There will be times when we have to utilize the scripture to re-evaluate and re-calibrate our view of ourselves.

I wish to tell you what God has to say about you (By the way, His scale is never ever broken).

Mark: we are to be followers and not doubters.

John: Christ's good friend, designated, and a recipient.

Romans: Justified, redeemed, free of guilt, and holy

Corinthians: A new creation, reconciled.

Ephesians: blessed picked, redeemed, forgiven, God's craftsmanship

Timothy: conserved and called

Peter: a living stone, developed, chosen, royal, God's own, and a partaker.

Each of us could state that ""He likes me the most!"" and we would be right. I strongly think that God is our ultimate Source and we always require to be seeking to Him. I likewise believe that he has actually called and equipped pastors, leaders, coaches, and health care professionals to minister to others who need a helping hand and a gracious heart as they cope the depression. I think it's the time we end up being sensitive to others and specifically to those that are younger in ministry. Our responses and suggestions might indicate all the distinction ""IN THE WORLD"". Actually."

Grey's Anatomy: Go Big or Go Home (14x03)

I love how Grey's Anatomy will sometimes indulge in some dark comedy. I also love how even in its most sappy and dramatic moments, it still sometimes gets me unexpectedly emotional. This was a fairly standard episode of television, but I had fun with it!

Cons:

Every time I see one of Meredith's kids, or evidence of her being a mother, I kind of snicker, because that has really not been a thing at all in this show. At least with April and Jackson, we see the baby once in a while. This rare Zola sighting was not unwelcome in and of itself, but it just highlights a consistent balance flaw in this show.

One of the patients this week is a boy who ends up getting in a hot air balloon accident while trying to ask a girl out to homecoming in an elaborate way. This makes for some good laughs, but there was one moment that I found troubling. The girl didn't get a chance to answer because of the accident, and she confesses to April that she's not sure she's going to say yes. She's suddenly really popular because of what happened, and might get the chance to go to homecoming with one of the more popular kids in school. April makes this speech about how you have to go for the people who make grand gestures, not for the people that are popular. Now, I agree with April that you shouldn't base who you go out with on social status. But I definitely disagree with her that just because this boy went to great lengths, the girl should say yes. What if she doesn't like public displays? What if she genuinely only thinks of this kid as a friend? April made it seem like she owed him a yes, which I am super not okay with.

Oh, and one other small thing - the weekly Maggie-is-annoying segment. Amelia tells her that she has a brain tumor, and Maggie starts crying. When Amelia tells her to stop, she says "my mother died, I'm allowed to cry." Like. I'm not surprised, but are you seriously making this about you, Maggie? Again?

Pros:

I roll my eyes a lot at love triangles, and in many ways the whole Meredith/Nathan/Megan situation is eye-roll-inducing to the extreme. But I like how we used this bizarre soap opera scenario to acknowledge some of Meredith's psychological issues and her journey towards self improvement. We do this by reintroducing her therapist from earlier seasons. He is in the hospital with an issue of his own, but they spend some time working through Meredith's problems. She's angry at Nathan, and she realizes with her therapist's help that it's because Nathan is giving up on his dream to be with Megan. She tells him he needs to fight for her, because Meredith will never get that chance with Derek. I like this angle because it means there's no pining going on. Meredith has closed off whatever feelings she may have for Nathan because there are much more important things going on right now.

Amelia calls in a brain surgeon from Johns Hopkins to consult on her brain tumor. DeLuca is in on the secret, but nobody else knows. Amelia eventually tells Richard, who convinces her to share the truth with the people who matter to her. She tells Maggie, who is there for her when she breaks the news to Owen. Maggie also tells Meredith so that Amelia won't have to. I'm glad we're not protracting the secrecy angle on this one, and I like the fact that Amelia was worried about Meredith's reaction. Meredith and Amelia have always had a complicated relationship, and Meredith has always told Amelia that she's crazy. Amelia is upset because this tumor means she was kind of right. That's an interesting angle to explore.

There was one really funny element here, which is that DeLuca knows about Amelia but is being pressured not to say anything. He pulls Maggie into the room with all of the brain scans, and he starts talking about their past relationship, saying he hopes that they can ameliorate some of the tension and shepherd themselves to a better relationship. Maggie does not pick up on the puns, of course, but is just confused and then actually a little thankful that DeLuca has apologized for his behavior towards her. Later, after Maggie finds out, she runs in to DeLuca, and just looks back at the room and says "oh," and DeLuca just answers "yeah." So that was pretty great.

Another fun plot thread was that Arizona has a patient who is going through a hard labor, and Carina DeLuca has an unorthodox suggestion for how to help speed it along. Arizona is at first uncomfortable with it, but eventually the woman's husband helps her to orgasm in order to help bring along the labor - and it works. Carina is just a fun character. I like her comments about Americans being prudish. We probably should be more open about sex.

Jo and Alex! Not a ton going on here... we get a patented Grey's Anatomy elevator make-out scene, and then Jo asks Alex to move back home at the end of the episode. I'm sure Meredith will be relieved, what with all the extra people she has hanging around. Jo and Alex are cute when they're not being dramatic.

Finally, we have the sexist white dude plot thread. Harper Avery comes to the hospital, belittles his family (Jackson and Catherine) and Bailey as well. He says the hospital is losing too much money, and that this is what happens when you put women in charge. Bailey stands up for the hospital when Mr. Avery threatens to pull funding, which actually works... only, he decides he has to fire her. Bailey is upset, but when Catherine and Bailey go back inside the boardroom to argue their case, they find that Mr. Avery, a very old man, has died of a sudden heart attack. Jackson, Catherine, and Bailey make an awkward commemorative speech to the hospital staff, and Bailey is quietly reinstated as chief.

This is that dark comedy I'm talking about. They made Harper Avery as unpleasant a person as they possibly could. He's rude and dismissive to Jackson, and utterly sexist towards Catherine and Bailey. His death doesn't make me smile, exactly, but it's not like I'm at all broken up by it. The speech was really funny, as they tried to re-purpose what Mr. Avery had said about the hospital and make it sound positive: "he was astonished at the work we were doing." Very funny.

I think that's all I've got to say! This season is certainly less dour than the last one. I'm curious to see where things go with the Megan situation, since I imagine that actress isn't available to be a series regular. When all is said and done, I'm still interested in what's going on!

8.5/10

(1/2) My MC leads an armed revolt against the tyrannical rulers (which are his own family) but the revolt fails, my MC is captured and put in prison. He is not tortured per se, but he is in a solitary confinement for a month and is put in hand shackles. After that, one of his relatives visits him, assures him that his life will be not in danger and orders to remove the shackles. After this "small kindness" and the solitary my MC breaks and gives all the names of rebels to the interrogators.

(2/2) I wanted to write it respectfully and truthfully and still show the "lowest point" of my MC - I thought to write it as some kind of coping strategy, like, my MC convinces himself that the rebellion was a mistake, did more worse than good and destroyed lives, the rulers are not so bad and he was mistaken in opposing them - and thats why he breaks. Do you think it is realistic? And which are the short-term (and long-term, is any) effects of being shackled? Thank you!

Alright well- if youwant to be realistic and respectful you need to start by treating solitary confinement for a month and being shackled for amonth as torture.

 Because it is.

 There are massive long term effects of thetortures your describing which would affect your character. And part of what Iwant to do is help authors realise that and show that.

 Because at the momentwe tend to write about certain tortures as if they have no effect on people.Which- well it does a disservice to the victims but it also teaches generationsof writers not to think twice about putting their characters through thesethings. We’re taught to assume they have no effect.

 I think it’ll probablybe helpful for you if I go over the physical and psychological effects ofsolitary and shackling for this time period but the main thing you’re worriedabout seems to be the character’s reaction. So I’ll go over that first.

 I’ve stressedrepeatedly that torture does not and can not change hearts and minds. But theimpression I have here is that that isn’t what you’re going for.

 The ‘enemy’ are thecharacter’s family that makes everything much more emotionally complicated. Itwould be natural for your character to have doubts about how ‘bad’ their familyare, especially if they had a good childhood.

 And if the rebellionhas so far landed the MC in prison and done the same for other rebels who wererelying on the MC. Well then I think it’s alsonatural for the character to doubt whether rebelling was ‘right’.

 So to me this scenariosounds reasonable because it’s not showing the character changing their beliefs because of torture.

 Instead it sounds likethe character had a lot of doubts to begin with and the failure and capture have made them reconsider their beliefs. Itseems likely to me that if the character wasn’ttortured and was well treated in prison they’d arrive at a similar conclusion:that the rebellion was wrong, their family isn’t ‘so bad’ and they made amistake.

 My main suggestion isthat you make that as clear as possible in your writing. Show the MC havingdoubts before they’re captured. Itcan be small things like thinking ‘oh but x family member isn’t really that bad’ or ‘I don’t think myfamily could have really ordered orknown about x atrocity’.

 It could also includelooking over areas the MC has occupied/’saved’ and thinking that the people areworse off. This would be a reasonableand natural consequence of the kind of war you’re describing, transport routesare disrupted, farming is disrupted, normal people are trying to supportarmies. The upshot is less food in local rural areas. The MC could justify thisby telling themselves that this is temporaryand when he gets rid of his family these people will be better off. But thatsort of scenario can be used to show his doubts exist before torture.

 Which means that hiswillingness to ‘talk’ would be there without torture.

 I think you shouldconsider drastically reducing the time your MC is tortured. A week is longenough for symptoms of solitary confinement to start. If the MC isn’t shackled and is left for ‘only’ aweek then I think that plays in more strongly to the MC’s idea that his familyare merciful/not so bad.

 If you’re wedded tokeeping a month’s solitary and the shackles then you’re going to have to dealwith the fact that this will make the character both less willing and less ableto give their family information about the rebels.

 One of the symptoms ofsolitary is severe mood swings and increased aggression. He could haveconvinced himself the rebellion was a mistake but still be in no mood tocooperate with his relatives.

 But the real kicker is that all forms oftorture have a pronounced negativeeffect on memory. Your character is basically not going to remember all therebels’ names after being tortured for a month. The ones he’s known longest he’llprobably remember but the ones he didn’t have a lot of contact with or didn’tlike as much or didn’t know for as many years- He’ll probably have forgotten even if he really wants to tell hisrelatives.

 Even when he remembersnames he may have forgotten physical descriptions and he’s extremely unlikelyto accurately remember addresses.

 He is likely to misremembernames and descriptions. For instance if one of the key rebels is called ‘JohnSmith’ the MC might give his name as ‘Jack Smith’. He might describe ‘JackSmith’ as a tall man with a huge beard when in fact that description matchesanother rebel.

 Your MC would not be aware he’s doing this.

 As a side note I reallydislike the term ‘break’ it’s a specific reference to a form of execution bytorture that was used in Europe (the wheel). I suggest you don’t use it in yourwriting.

 Right so now let’s talka little about the effects of solitaryconfinement and restraint tortures.

 Solitary confinementhas pronounced negative effects on people.The effects are physical as well as psychological, something I try to stressbecause physical symptoms are usually overlooked in fiction.

 The physical symptomsinclude head aches, eye problems, joint pain, lack of energy, feelings ofweakness and insomnia. Head aches seem to be particularly common.

 Psychological symptoms arewide ranging and serious. They include depression, anxiety, self harm,aggression, mood swings, memory problems, difficulty concentrating and learning,hallucinations and sometimes psychotic episodes. Hallucinations and psychotic episodesappear to be a little less common. Depression and suicidal urges are verycommon.

 You can find out moreinformation from this great, free, online source.

 If your character is insolitary confinement for a week he can be expected to make a full recovery, however if he’s confined for longer thenthe psychological symptoms will persist. Probably for years. How long exactlythey last and how well he copes depends on his support network, his access totreatment and his individual symptom profile.

 I advise pickingsymptoms that fit the character and the story since there’s no way to predictwhich victims develop which symptoms.

 Shackling someone inthe long term is a form of restraint torture. I suppose the easiest way todescribe it is a less dangerous form of stress position. It restraint in such away that the victim is kept uncomfortable and a constant state of pain but they have enough mobility to relievesome of the pressure on their muscles. As a result the break down of muscles isless severe and they aren’t at risk of kidney failure.

 The upshot is thatsomeone can be realistically keptthis way for months without dying. They’re incredibly popular in China rightnow and seem to be one of the tortures of choice (which indicates a change inNational Style since Rejali published research).

 The character should beable to move his limbs to the extent that the same muscles aren’t constantly stretched.

 Generally speakingthese tortures can cause circulation problems and nerve problems that canaffect long term mobility.

 With a metal shackleparticularly circulation problems are lesslikely because the cuff itself doesn’t tighten. But the weight of the cuffs andchain and the way they dig into flesh means cuts, scarring and nerve damage areslightly more likely.

 All forms of restrainttorture that keep the hands tied for prolonged periods would cause musclewastage in the arms, which affect the character’s ability to use their arms onrelease.

 In this case from yourdescription I think the character would (after a month) have permanently lost alot of fine mobility in his hands. Anything that requires manual dexterity islikely to be much more difficult. But given time he should recover the strengthin his arms.

 He could still throw amean punch but he might not be able to throw a pot on a wheel.

 I think in terms of theway your character acts you have a reasonable and well thought through scenariobut you need to add in the kind of symptoms and long term effects a charactertortured in this way would experience in order for it to be realistic.

 I hope that helps. :)

Disclaimer

Since I first issued my dire predictions of civil violence in the not-so-distant future, I’ve been looking, exhaustively, for evidence I’m wrong. III Have you considered this angle: The traditional media's hyping that up? I mean, we know in the early/mid 60's the newspapers and cameras focused on the small number of violent protestors during anti-war protests and made them out to be the majority. If the media has no shred of integrity left, why are you looking at them for evidence of integrity?

That’s just the thing - I’m not. I’m looking at people. at the “man on the street” and in both my personal life (as in actual meatspace, not online) and in actual journalism (some people still do it, outside and inside the mainstream establishment,) I’m seeing a decidedly worrisome tone. 

We all remember “literally shaking” on Twitter the night of the election, but there were other words going around quite a bit - sick, disgusted, afraid, scared, etc. Twitter - as it’s used by the majority - gives a quick insight into the personal emotions of the people using it. (This is why PR uses that bank on the presumed intimacy - like Trump’s twitter - tend to be more successful, and more careful, sterile treatments, like the Clinton campaign that took 12 staffers and 10 drafts to compose a single tweet, typically lack traction.) Sure, us seal-clubbin neocons and tree-hugging liberals had a good giggle at the triggered snowflakes breathlessly predicting the Right Wing Gestapo emerging from the woodwork to bash the gays - but then a friend of mine told me it’d actually happened, post-election, to a friend of his, and that’s when my laughter stopped. 

As was explained to me, the LGBTQ folks feared that Trump’s election would be seen as “permission” by all the knuckledraggers, and it seems it was. So it’s time to ask yourself the question - how did the knuckledraggers get that impression to begin with? Maybe - just maybe - it had something to do with the media screaming, 24/7, for months, that Trump was literally Hitler and that he was going to oppress all the gays and Jews and Muslims and fluffy bunnies. “Of course he’s Our Guy,” the Illinois Nazis said with glee, “the entire news media keeps screaming about it!” 

Also consider that the media’s reinforcing the left wing’s narrative, which makes people on the left wing much more likely to believe it since it’s validating their own beliefs. Vox.com has an excellent article on the Russian conspiracy blitz and why it’s playing so well with Democrats, and the author is neither a Trump fan or apologist (as is abundantly clear from the article itself.) It’s worth reading entire, but this quote stands out: 

“Misinformation is much more likely to stick when it conforms with people’s preexisting beliefs, especially those connected to social groups that they’re a part of,” says Arceneaux. “In politics, that plays out (usually) through partisanship: Republicans are much more likely to believe false information that confirms their worldview, and Democrats are likely to do the opposite.”

The article accurately compares the current phenomena to the entire “birther” movement on the right - it’s the exact same psychological phenomena, so unsurprisingly you see it manifesting with human beings on both sides of the spectrum. A lot of politics falls into that category, and it’s where most of that “political common ground” I keep talking about can be found. The difference is that the Left controls the lion’s share of the communication media and in turn, our culture. Hollywood - a cultural engine if there ever was one - is extremely left wing and has been since before McCarthy’s day. The modern telecommunications and internet media, which lives and breathes in Sillicon Valley, is likewise invested in the left wing; Erich Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet (Google’s parent company,) founded a PAC to give Hillary’s campaign IT support during the election, and we all remember how the CEO of Mozilla was hurled out of office because he dared to cast a private, anti-revolutionary vote. The next time you hear leftists talking about how “de-platforming” is legitimate, remember that the leftists literally own the fucking platforms. Nobody’s gonna find your conservative site if Google de-lists it. This is the problem - both sides have their lunatics willing to swallow any shit they’re being shoveled, but only one side has a massive megaphone that’s actively colluding - complete with sticky-handed twitter high-fives - to push the same narrative across the board, and cross-validate it. 

Hilariously, the Vox author (Kevin Drum) doesn’t see it, making the article a self-demonstrating one: 

Luckily for the Democratic Party, there isn’t really a pre-built media ecosystem for amplifying this like there was for Republicans. In the absence of left-wing Limbaughs and Breitbarts, media outlets totally unconcerned with factual rigor, it’s much harder for this stuff to become mainstream.

… except he does see it, because he goes on to name some examples (and some tweets) of people chugging the kool-aid… but all of them Democratic politicians or DNC staffers who should know better, not the media itself. He’s clearly intelligent and well-balanced, he’s standing in the middle of a bullshit cyclone he knows is bullshit, but he’s only just now starting to smell the rot and he hasn’t even noticed objective journalism’s decaying corpse yet, despite standing in its ribcage. If someone like him can be so stymied, how do you think That Guy - you know, [the bitter old man |the aging hippie creep] who always [ sits on his porch yelling at birds | shuffles around Trader Joe’s in grungy sandals comparing kale prices] and blames everything on [ dat gal-dern Mooslim Obongo | the military-industrial-jew-lizardman-complex] is going to react?

Some people do actually believe this shit and they are mostly Democrats - hell, here’s a Gallup poll with the numbers if you doubt my analysis. And to re-iterate, they’re inflaming extremists on both sides of the spectrum, because the more violence antifa commits, the more the Illinois Nazis will croon “see, we were right all along!” 

The traditional mass media engaging in this shit is much, much worse than the right-wing “alternative news ecosystem,” the blogs, the talk radio hosts, infogiggles, etc. They’re all personality-based and those personalities differ and disagree (if they didn’t, how would they offer content distinct from what the others offer?) This is natural, because conservatives argue. They argue a lot. It might surprise some of you given how often the media portrays the NRA as triple Satan, but there’s gun rights groups that exist specifically because some conservatives think the NRA is too wussy. You’ve got social conservatives, business/free market conservatives, REEE TAXES conservatives, etc., and they rarely see eye to eye. Ann Coulter - the Screeching Enchantress herself - once wrote that “Republicans can’t put together a two-car funeral without writing six books denouncing each other.” 

You don’t see this on the left - not in the media, at any rate. There’s more to this than just the obvious mainstream media collusion; the back-slapping and twitterwank, although their deliberate and conscious effort plays a huge part. There’s also how the left wing thinks. 

If you’re old enough to remember the Bush years, you’ll remember how often the left would attack Rush Limbaugh - even though an entire ecosystem of conservative, national talk-radio had sprung up by then, so he was no longer The One And Only Conservative Voice In Mass Media. Liberals treated - and attacked - him as the de facto leader of the right wing, and this puzzled conservatives no end, because a pundit, however clever, is not a goddamn politician or leader. 

The left wing, however, thinks differently. Unlike classical liberalism, which is mostly concerned with balancing the inherent rights of individuals with the rights of every other individual in a social contract, the leftists (communism/socialism/etc.) focus on the  collective as the central, essential point, and move from there. This is why “virtue signalling” exists; leftists care very much about what others think of them. Emmet Rensin’s essay on smugness in liberalism, which I’ve mentioned many times, showcases it well; while describing his subject, he also illustrated the mechanisms by which it manifests - left-wing culture. Everything he described - the virtue-signalling to others that you know the correct facts, the knowing, even the “Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns,“ exemplifies it. This Mother Jones writer’s reaction to his piece has a telling line: 

“I’ve long since gotten tired of the endless reposting of John Oliver’s "amazing,” “perfect,” “mic drop” destruction of whatever topic he takes on this week.”

They key here is John Oliver. When leftists look at Rush Limbaugh, they see a conservative John Oliver - in short, a demagogue. Demagogues and cults of personality have always been of prime importance with the left wing - remember how Obama was lionized by the left during his first campaign? To say nothing of the Kennedy’s being immortalized as “Camelot.” Yes, conservatives liked Reagan a whole lot, but we don’t vote in entire fucking royal dynasties, which is why Low-Energy Jeb is cooling his heels right now. And these demagogues, you’ll note, are all on the same page when it comes to ripping into conservatives… and their epic, wicked put-downs then become The Big Joke that the left wing retweets and reblogs and parrots to each other ad nauseum. Remember Tina Fey’s mockery of the only working mother leftists have ever despised? I’ve seen people on facebook quote “I can see Russia from my house” fully believing that Sarah Palin herself said it - the Tina Fey skit is the reality, for them. Truth is lost around the twentieth re-tweet, or so. 

And these “comedians” - in truth, pundits and opinion columnists - base their jokes on whatever quote-unquote “revelations” aired in the mainstream media’s news broadcasts that morning. 

If you’ve ever noticed how quickly a new catchphrase or word gets onto every leftist’s lips - like “fake news” - this is how it’s done. It’s not just the mass media moving in lockstep co-ordination to get the message out; it’s how the phrases become the newest “in-thing” with the entire leftist culture, that then get bandied about in the social sphere, on and off-line. After the cruise missile strike on Syria, I watched, on /pol/ alone, about thirty different varying interpretations, everything from “Assad and Putin are unironically heroes shove omfg I love facism Trump why u blow them up” to “I HOPE HE DROPS A MOAB ON RUSSIA NEXT FUCK THE REDS NUCLEAR WAR NOW” to a bunch of “he’s really playing 64 dimensional chess check this shit just you wait” that covered everything in-between. And that’s just on /pol/, which is so full of bullshit and jokes they literally made a fucking containment board for the containment board - called /bantz/. You don’t see this in the leftist blogosphere - the opinions all align the same way and vary only in magnitude of gibbering lunacy. And the John Oliver quotes don’t just define the conversation, they define the fucking language - for instance, “Drumpf.” 

Do not, for one second, think that the media doesn’t know how all this shit works. They may be delusional, but they don’t control and run vast media empires because they’re stupid. And a lot of them have been at this for a long, long time. 

@iwantthatbelstaffanditsoccupant, I’m going to continue this discussion from your response on my addition to addigni’s post here, so I’m not putting all this on her post.  See under the cut.

You said:

Reconciling them is perhaps what is most painful. To actually have John be truly sorry. My abuser still blames me for pushing his buttons. (I didn’t, but that is beside the point). It is painful. I don’t want reconciliation in my situation. But…I do. And that is the issue at hand.

^^Yeah.  I feel that on a deep personal level.  You are constantly battling so many things when it comes to being a victim of abuse.  The question of whether an abuser can ever actually show true remorse, and change.  How can you accept an apology, and still demand respect, and still have enough self-respect to stand up for yourself when need be.  Should you even accept the apology...  If they are remorseful, how are they going to rebuilt trust.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.  I find it sooooo difficult to write, that a lot of times I just don’t.  Or I write it and keep it private.  Honestly, it’s unsurprising to me that the Sherlock fandom, who are mostly women, would respond so strongly to that beating, as women are most frequently the victims of domestic abuse.  I often find myself wondering if Moffat would be shocked at how horrified much of the audience was by that.  But, I digress...

Back to S4 John...  The problem with labelling S4 John as a chronic abuser, and approaching the TLD situation like an instance of abuse, is that though I would never argue the fact that he is a man who battles with anger, co-dependency, PTSD-related issues in dealing with too much stimuli and processing high emotion, and clearly, CLEARLY has issues with communication, I’m not sure that I would label him as an abuser based on what happened in TLD.  Not because I’ve ever viewed him as a saint (far from it), but because there were a lot of circumstances surrounding that moment of abuse, that were so far outside the norm, and which could be considered extenuating.

So was it a moment of assault/abuse.  Absolutely.  Does that make John a chronic abuser?  Not sure.  I don’t think we have enough data.  

True, John has hit Sherlock before.  In ASiB, Sherlock actually asked him to, so I don’t count that.  But TEH was more complicated.  It bothered me, but it was a moment of extremely high emotion, that I think very few people could ever really identify with, because I mean, who’s best friend goes off and fakes their death for two years, and then pops up disguised as a waiter at the moment you are about to move on and propose to someone else.  I don’t think anyone really knows how they would react in a situation like that.  it’s sort of a ludicrous situation that would only occur in fiction.  So, did that make John’s repeated assaults a sort of understandable knee-jerk reaction for a PTSD victim given the bizarre circumstances, without attaching the sorts of psychological manipulations that go hand-in-hand with chronic abuse?  I don’t know.  

I would probably consider TEH a warning sign.  John’s PTSD and severe depression were obviously retriggered by Sherlock’s fake suicide.  He definitely needed to get help.  He had been.  But in that moment, Sherlock’s surprise reappearance was probably a HUGE trigger.  Even Mycroft had enough presence of mind to suggest that Sherlock should have given John a heads up.  I’m not blaming Sherlock either, because he misjudges social situations like that, a lot, and I do believe it’s something he sincerely struggles with consistently getting right.  But it’s an explanation of sorts.

So TLD...  John is psychotic.  He’s been hallucinating and talking to his dead wife for weeks, possibly months (a state I’ve also been in after an unexpected, shocking death of a loved one, so I have empathy here).  He is blaming Sherlock, at least in part for that death, which I can partially understand (but that’s a whole other meta, and I kind of don’t have the energy for that).  He is trying.  He’s getting therapy again.  He’s actively taking steps to try and get better.  But, he’s also faced with a Sherlock who is killing himself (again!), and then they are in a morgue with a serial killer who is playing around with dead bodies like it’s no big deal, and suddenly Sherlock’s out of control, requires subduing, and then everything goes tits up.  

Again, was that an act of abuse.  It was a vicious, potentially fatal beating.  No one could argue that it was an assault, and given the intimate relationship between the two parties involved, and the emotions at the root of it, I would be okay calling it abuse.  But again, would I consider it as part of a cycle of abuse, a cycle that was going to continue, and become more and more of a problem?  I don’t know.  Potentially...

But really, I just don’t know, and I think that’s what tears me up.  Things were so glossed over in S4, and the writing so consistently ignores all consequences, that it makes it almost impossible to really say definitively one way or another.  There is definitely room to explore either direction in fan fic, imo.  But the fact that the story-telling is making me waffle back and forth between wanting to not believe that a character I’ve loved is an abuser, and finding logical reasons in the sketchy narrative to explain what happened, while simultaneously realising, that this could just be me making excuses for abusers all over again is sort of re-traumatising for me.  

I definitely saw the victim mentality in Sherlock’s response.  I think that was more heartbreaking that what John did, for me.  That Sherlock was just like, “Let him.  I deserve it.”  Umm...  No Sweetheart, you don’t.  And in saying it was more heartbreaking for me, I don’t mean I’m victim blaming.  I mean that I identified with that on such a profound personal level, that it was almost harder for me to deal with than what John did, because I have a lot of anger at myself for passively accepting abuse for so long, for not even recognising it was abuse.  And at the same time, I realise that it’s unfair to be angry at myself for that, and I want to be gentle with myself, and thus also gentle with Sherlock.  You just sort of want to bundle him away safely, and keep John the heck away from him until he’s had time to figure himself out.  And then that is a painful place to be, when johnlock has been your happy place, your escape for a long time.

I’m rambling.  But all this to say that the reasons that people shy away from addressing what happened in TLD are, as you say, not all because people just don’t see anything wrong with what John did, or even want to really excuse him.  I think for a lot of people it did hit too close to home, and it brings up a whole mess of crap that you just don’t want to have to unpack and look at, things you don’t even have rl answers for, let alone feel you would be able to do proper justice by in a fic.  Abuse cycles are such complicated, nuanced things, and they take decades to heal from in some cases.  I can totally understand why people don’t want to address that whole mess in fic.  It should never have been written into the episode in the first place, imo.  I think it took things too far, and then never even attempted to address the consequences, and that just left us all in a very difficult spot.

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/ouch-supernatural-gets-emotional-twigs-twine-tasha-barnes/

Ouch! Supernatural Gets Emotional with Twigs & Twine & Tasha Barnes

Sometimes it’s downright painful being a Supernatural fan! But I don’t mean that as a complaint—this is part of what the Show has always been. Two weeks in a row that were painful is tough to take, there’s no doubt about that, but there was a lot to appreciate in this week’s episode. Even the painful was just done so well! Grudging admiration, Steve Yockey, for the writing, Richard Speight Jr., for the directing, and all the actors for conveying the pain so brilliantly. Before I do an actual recap, here are some of the reasons for my grudging admiration. First, I love when an episode is a mirror for the Winchesters. This is a tradition going back all the way to the beginning, something Kripke liked to do and made work extremely well. Sometimes the mirror is a little too large and obvious, but in this case, I didn’t think we were too pounded over the head with it – or maybe I just enjoyed the pounding. Which sounds really wrong. Max and Alicia, the witch twins, were immediately seen by fans as a mirror of Sam and Dean in their first episode. Their closeness, the way they talked at the same time and finished each other’s sentences, the way they squabbled but clearly always had each other’s backs – all of that reminded us of the Winchester brothers. Sibling pairs often are used in the show as a mirror for the brothers, so that wasn’t a surprise. It was a surprise to see them back in another episode! A very pleasant one. Even in the limited time they had onscreen in their first appearance, they made a big (and positive) impression on fans. So yay for Show listening! There were several scenes where the parallels were made explicit, including Sam quoting Dean as he tries to convince his brother to come to the aid of Max and Alicia. The call back to the pilot made me smile, and had the intended effect on Dean too. Sam: Their mom’s on a hunting trip and hasn’t been home in a week… Dean: (in the pilot): Dad’s on a hunting trip and he hasn’t been home in a few days… I know not everyone enjoys the call backs, but I really do. I do a lot of research on fandom and the psychological impact of being a fan, and one of the things that makes us feel good is the familiarity of our favorite shows. We respond emotionally to our favorite television shows differently than we respond to any old show – they have more impact, actually creating some of the same physiological  and psychological reactions that we have when we sit down with an old friend to chat over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. So all the small nods that reinforce our familiarity with a show increase that emotional impact. The phone call that Dean makes to his mother is also a call back, to the early episode aptly titled “Home”. In that episode, one of the first times I noticed how unique this show is and how unafraid the actors were to really “go there”, Dean calls his Dad and pleads for a call back, his eyes watering and his lip wobbling as he admits he doesn’t know what to do. I can’t watch it without my eyes watering too. In this episode, Dean doesn’t get as overtly emotional—his relationship with Mary isn’t as long standing and intense as his bond with John was—but he once again pleads for her to call him back and admits that he feels “spun out” and over his head.  I’ve had many conversations with Jensen about how the emotion in those scenes is not something he has to create, it’s something that happens organically. That’s clear by the small, unconscious tells – like a hint of Ackles’ Texas twang coming out as he tries to hold back the emotion from his voice. Those little things, and the way these actors are fearless in letting their emotionality come through, are what make this show so special and so impactful. Second and relatedly; the acting. Ackles and Padalecki knocked it out of the park with their empathy for Max and his repeated, brutal losses of his family—something the Winchesters can relate to with every ounce of their being. All three of the Banes family members were also incredible--Alvina August as Tasha, Kara Royster as Alicia, and Kendrick Sampson as Max. Alvina made us love her even in a short amount of time, which meant her children’s anguish over her death was incredibly painful. Kara showed us once again Alicia’s badass bravery but also her great love for her mother and her brother. And Kendrick Sampson nearly killed me by portraying Max’s devastation so powerfully that I could feel it in my gut. And it hurt! Sometimes I love this show so damn much even as I’m sobbing on the floor scrambling for more tissues. Not sure what that says about me. The BMoL story line ran parallel to Sam and Dean’s throughout the episode, which can sometimes give me whiplash from going back and forth. In this case, director Richard Speight Jr. and writer Steve Yockey made it seamless, and actors Samantha Smith and David Haydn-Jones made it snap with tension and intrigue. There was never a second of this episode where I felt like I had a chance to catch my breath, let alone think about making a sandwich! Smith’s slowly dawning realization of the colossal mistakes she’s made, and Jones’ portrayal of Ketch’s complicated feelings for Mary losing out to his indoctrination and psychopathology were fascinating to watch. And yes, also painful! And third, some big kudos to Richard Speight for the brilliant directing and gorgeously shot scenes, Serge Ladouceur and his team for the beautiful lighting throughout, Jerry Wanek and his team for infusing the twigs and twine theme throughout the episode (even in the wallpaper!) just so we could be even more creeped out than we already were, and the special effects wizards for making those violet eyes and all the other effects look anything but cheesy. And to Lou Bollo and his team for pulling off another epic fight scene worthy of the epic fight scenes in this show that have come before. [caption id="attachment_45848" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Photo: @sleepypanda[/caption] So yeah, I really liked this episode even if “enjoyed” wouldn’t be quite the right word. Let me walk through what happened, so I can point out more of what worked and possibly a few minor quibbles (because when does a review not have quibbles??) Unless it’s a Robbie Thompson episode. Then I plead for your indulgence. The episode begins right where we left off last episode, with the boys waking up the next day and trying to figure out what the hell happened with Cas (pretty much the way I felt after the last episode too). Dean draws a line between Castiel’s profession of faith in Lucifer’s child (and presumably his decision to knock Sam and Dean out and leave them in a playground) and the things Cas has done before with good intentions—for the right reasons, as he says. If you read my last week’s review, Dean and I were clearly on the same page. Dean: Last night, I didn’t recognize him. The boys are clearly worried about Cas. Meanwhile, Sam unwraps the broken Colt – and I actually leapt up to my feet and screamed! I was so devastated by its seeming loss last week, and so ecstatic to see that the boys haven’t given up hope on her yet. Dean: Can you fix it? Sam: I hope so. Me: PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE!!!!! At first I was surprised that it wasn’t Dean trying to do the fixing, since he’s the mechanical wizard who’s always taking apart the guns and putting them back together. But I assume this isn’t exactly a mechanical problem. Go, Sammy!! We’re re-introduced to Max and Alicia, and immediately the parallel is set up with Sam and Dean. They’re bickering, lovingly, as siblings do. Max: You’re being dramatic. Hah! I just talked about that same accusation being thrown at Dean by his sibling in last week’s review. Maybe it really is a sibling thing. (Actually that accusation might have been thrown at me by my brother a time or two, come to think of it…) Sam convinces Dean to help them by quoting Dean’s way of convincing Sam in the pilot, and off they go. Before he leaves, Dean makes that poignant phone call to Mary, leaving a voice mail just as Dean did for his dad in ‘Home’. The next scene of all four siblings together is awesome. Max is already one of my favorite characters, in part because Sampson pulls off both being a powerful witch and being a charismatic person. Max is also another queer character for the show, happily announcing that he got the hot bartender’s phone number. Remember the early seasons when Dean might have been uncomfortable (and we were uncomfortable with Dean’s discomfort)? Dean and Sam join Alicia in their affectionate ribbing, and then Dean wants to do some male bonding with Max over the grenade launcher. Seems like such a small thing, but I don’t think it is. I loved that scene so much, and love Sampson’s portrayal of Max. Alicia and Sam have their own bonding moments, which I got distracted by for a few moments by Jared’s glorious hair tossed by the wind. Anyway, we find out that the twins are hunting a borrower witch, which yay for Yockey keeping canon! Alicia and Sam connect over feeling like their siblings shared a special bond with their single parent. Alicia: Magic, it’s their thing. Sam: Dean and my dad had that bond with hunting. It was also interesting to have an outsider pov on Mary from Alicia, who wryly notes that Mary “doesn’t seem like much of a hugger.” I’ll say. The foursome arrive at the place they track Tasha to, which is a beautiful Vancouver house or something standing in for a bed and breakfast. This show has ruined me for idyllic bed and breakfasts in the countryside – I’d just be waiting for someone to kill me! I need to give Yockey and Speight some love for the wine scene too. And probably Ackles, for holding his wine glass in his fist so awkwardly, making it crystal clear that Dean isn’t used to drinking wine without ever saying a word. And Sam giving his brother his own glass of wine when he goes out to grab the food from the vegan restaurant. Sam: Dean, drink. (pats his brother on the knee affectionately—again one of those small nonverbal moments that say so much, and that every single person in the fandom picks up on. And appreciates) Dean: Yes. (pours Sam’s wine into his own glass happily) That was just such a Sam ‘n Dean scene—the kind I’ve been missing so badly all season. Thank you Steve Yockey! We already know at this point that Tasha isn’t really Tasha, but I have to say, that twig doll was pretty damn real! She had all of Tasha’s memories, and she certainly seemed warm and loving and wise. I liked watching her and Dean observing Max and Alicia squabbling, both of them with such fond looks on their faces. Dean is so wistful, it hurts my heart. He loves knowing that Max and Alicia had what he and Sam never did—a loving mother with them to raise them. And you just KNOW that he’s wishing that for Sam, most of all. Oh, Dean. Where are my tissues? Tasha and Dean talk about mothers too—a theme of Season 12. Tasha on moms: You think they’re perfect, then you grow up and realize they’re just people. This was one of the few times in this episode that I scratched my head. Show is really wanting us to go down that road, I guess—of saying that Mary is imperfect because of course all of us, moms or not, are imperfect. I’ve been worried about this all season, that they took us so far in the opposite direction that it’s going to be very difficult to spin us around and make us say oh well, Mary was pretty awful to her boys but hey, no one’s perfect. Why did you make it so difficult, if that’s where you wanted us to end up, Show?? I honestly don’t know if I can go where you want me to. And it’s not because I think moms have to be perfect—god knows, I’m not, just ask my kids. But this went so far away from perfect! Moms don’t have to be perfect, but they don’t have to be callous and hurtful either. We get another nice little slice of “yes these are the Winchester brothers I know and love” when Sam returns with the takeout and motions Dean to come with him. Dean: I know that look. What’s up? Nothing more Winchester than nonverbal conversation and reminding us that’s how well they know each other. Sam and Dean check out the basement where that creepy guy emerged from as they arrived (and I forgot to say how much I adored Jared’s awkward little wave—he has so much talent for doing comedy that doesn’t get used very often! I laughed out loud and had to replay that moment a few times). Nothing funny about this scene though—they find Tasha’s dead body. That’s horrible enough, but what happens next absolutely broke me. Max sees the light on and comes down the stairs. Sam and Dean (breaking my heart in pieces) try to shield Max from seeing his mother, instinctively wanting to keep him from that unbearable pain even though of course he’ll have to know. And oh my god, Max’s face when he does see her. Kendrick Sampson acted the HELL out of that scene! Max (brokenly): I… I just… He breaks down in sobs, and so do I. Sam and Dean, watching, are clearly devastated too, remembering their own traumatic losses, including their dad. Jared and Jensen were amazing in this scene too, again with all those little seemingly inconsequential nonverbal reactions that are anything but. At separate times, each of them scrubs a hand over their face, like they can’t quite decide how much emotion to let show there. Again and again, they look at Max and then turn away, like it’s physically too painful for them to watch his pain and empathize with it so thoroughly. God, that was a hard scene to watch. And absolutely masterful –from all involved. Dean and Max confront the witch, while Alicia tries to help her “mother” and Sam gets beat up by the twig doll hotel guy. The witch needs time to do some serious exposition, so she puts Dean and Max under a spell that freezes them. Dean looks distractingly pretty during this time, so I don’t mind so much that there’s a lot of exposition going on. Max, on the other hand, looks devastated—he’s forced to actually see his mother murdered. That trauma contributes, I think, to him considering taking the witch’s deal, but Dean tries to talk him out of it. Dean: No, your mom is gone. It’s awful and it sucks but… The witch silences him, though Max does hesitate. Meanwhile, for some unknown reason nobody has told Alicia that the twig doll is not actually her mother, so she’s not much help to Sam as he gets tossed around like a ragdoll and then strangled (shades of early SPN!)  She finally comes to his aid, only to be stabbed to death by the twig doll that’s not really her mother. How heartbreaking was it that when she saw her “mom” stand up, Alicia happily said “Mom!” right before she killed her. I gasped out loud when Alicia went down, truly horrified. Dean managed to break the witch’s spell long enough to shoot her with witch killing bullets, and when she dies, the other twig dolls disintegrate. Too late to save Alicia though. Sam yells for his brother, his anguished “DEAN!” ringing down the hall. And then Kendrick Sampson destroys me all over again, as Max sees that his beloved sister is dead. It was such a call back to All Hell Breaks Loose Part 2, the scene that kept me crying for literally an entire week when Sam dies in Dean’s arms. Max has such a similar reaction, rushing to his sister’s side and leaning over her sobbing. Max: Please, no, hey hey, no no no… It’s what the Winchesters say when one of them dies too –they always say “hey, hey” when trying to talk the other one out of leaving them, so when Max said the same I totally lost it. Nobody told me I’d need THAT many tissues! Sam and Dean are thinking the same thing; they look at each other pointedly as Max cries. He sends them away, and they respect his wishes and go. In the car, Sam tries to reassure his brother that he did the right thing, that he saved Max (his soul anyway). Dean: Yeah, he seemed super saved. Dean is so sad about how things went down, saying that they had a loving family, “the kind we should have had.” Dean: Sam, we do terrible things all the time to save each other, that’s what you do for family. Who am I to stop him? That’s pretty much Supernatural in a nut shell, and it’s why I love this Show. Hearing Dean say that just made me even MORE emotional. There’s a great music cue as Max does the same, putting his sister’s heart in the twig doll and bringing it to life. Alicia’s body burns as the twins leave, twig doll Alicia as mystified about what’s happened as Sam was when Dean sold his soul to bring his brother back to life at the end of Season 2. Oh, the call backs, my heart can’t take much more of this! Meanwhile, in the second story line, Ketch is torturing what at first looks like Mary but is in fact a shape shifter. Mary is watching, and her phone rings. Mary: It’s Dean. Ketch: And?? That sets up the beginning of the end for Mary and Mr. Ketch’s unlikely romance, if you can call it that. He takes every bit as much pleasure in torture as we would have expected him to, and Mary sees that side of him for the first time-the brutal side that his charming exterior has covered up. It’s telling that Mary refers to the shifter as “he” and Ketch corrects her to “it.” That’s what the BMoL – and every torturing regime ever—does in order to be as brutal as they are. They dehumanize, see anything other as “it” so they can torture with impunity and without regret. Mary is as put off by seeing this as Dean was when he was hunting vampires with Ketch. The Winchesters can be ruthless, but most of the time (if they’re not demons at the time or whatever) they don’t take pleasure in it. Afterwards, Mary is angry. Ketch, on the other hand, wants to jump into bed and work off all that adrenaline. (Ewww). Mary shuts that down pretty quickly, and Jones does a good job showing us, again with those subtle nonverbals that all these actors excel at, that Ketch is hurt by the rejection. And for someone as ruthless as him? That is not going to be a good thing. He taunts Mary that she’d better call Dean, or “he’ll think Mommy doesn’t love him”. Ouch. On the nose there. Mary finally gets Dean’s message, and leaves Dean the voicemail she should have left him way back in Episode 2 or 3, telling him that she’s sorry she hasn’t been there for him and Sam. Mary: But I want to be. I will be. I miss you boys. I love you. Me and everyone else watching: uh oh, that sounds like the sort of voicemail people leave when the show is about to kill them off. Ketch has been careful, even sending emails as though they were from Mick so Mary won’t get suspicious. But Mary is a hunter, and she’s smart, and soon enough she finds Mick’s body in a storage container and a room full of hunters’ photos and stats that make them look like the next intended targets. Ketch tries one last lie about Mick. Ketch: An accident, with a werewolf. Mary: (incredulous) A werewolf shot him in the head? Ketch: It’s not impossible… Me: actually laughing out loud. Nice dialogue, Steve Yockey! We then get one of those epic fight scenes that Supernatural is known for, thanks to Lou Bollo’s amazing stunt choreography and the willingness of the actors to always give it their all. They throw each across the room, get in punches and kicks. Ketch is still not entirely ready to give up on her, which really says something about the effect she had on him. He says he can keep her safe, if only she plays nice. Mary: I don’t play nice. I’ll say. Mary breaks his arm and brass knuckles him in the nuts, leaving him on the floor as she walks out. Nope, not that easy! Ketch tasers her and she falls flat to the floor. Meanwhile, Dean and Sam are driving away. Sam falls asleep, leaning against the window in the passenger side while Dean drives and keeps an eye on his brother, just like in all the best fanfic. Then Dean checks his voicemails. He gets to hear the one from Mary, which I’m glad about; so often in this show, the most important voicemails never get heard. Then he hears the one that tells him to call her, that they’ve got a problem. Dean to sleeping Sam: Sam, wake up, it’s mom, something’s wrong. SAM! Me: Why is Sam not waking up??? Is something wrong with Sam? (Probably not, this was just a fitting transition to the next scene, but it worried me) We end with a splash of water on a bound Mary’s face as she comes to. Ketch: (ominously) Remember Mary, I gave you a chance. And then we see the person NONE of us ever wanted to see again (but expected nevertheless). Lady Toni (with her goddamned notebook again): Now Mary, let’s begin. [caption id="attachment_45875" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Caps by @kayb625[/caption] Talk about callbacks! This episode may not have been enjoyable—in fact it was downright painful to watch at times—but it was incredibly well done. Kudos to all—writer, director, cast, crew. I’m full of trepidation as we start careening toward the finale, but that’s just Supernatural, isn’t it? For more Supernatural, check out our new book, Family Don’t End With Blood: Cast and Fans on How Supernatural Has Changed Lives, available now here! Check out next week's Supernatural 1221 There's Something About Mary.

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Charlie Munger: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (Transcript)

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, a speech given in 1995 by legendary investor Charlie Munger, opened my eyes to how behavioral psychology can be applied to business and problem-solving.

Munger, for those of you who haven’t heard of him, is the irreverent partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. He’s offered us such gems as: a two-step process for making effective decisions and the work required to have an opinion.

And this talk on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment is one of the best you’ll ever hear.

My nature makes me incline toward diagnosing and talking about errors in conventional wisdom. And despite years of being smoothed out by the hard knocks that were inevitable for one with my attitude, I don’t believe life ever knocked all the brashness out of the man.

… I have fallen in love with my way of laying out psychology because it has been so useful to me. And so, before I die, I want to imitate to some extent the bequest practices of three characters: the protagonist in John Bunyan’s Pilgram’s Progress, Benjamin Franklin, and my first employer, Ernest Buffett.

Munger made extensive revisions to The Psychology of Human Misjudgment in Poor Charlie’s Almanack because he “thought he could do better at eighty-one than he did more than ten years earlier when he (1) knew less and was more harried by a crowded life and (2) was speaking from rough notes instead of revising transcripts.”

Transcript

I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment, and Lord knows I’ve created a good bit of it. I don’t think I’ve created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with. When I saw this patterned irrationality, which was so extreme, and I had no theory or anything to deal with it, but I could see that it was extreme, and I could see that it was patterned, I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading, but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life.

Fairly late in life I stumbled into this book, Influence, by a psychologist named Bob Cialdini, who became a super tenured hotshot on a 2,000 person faculty at a very young age. And he wrote this book, which has now sold 300 odd thousand copies, which is remarkable for somebody. Well, it’s an academic book aimed at a popular audience that filled in a lot of holes in my crude system. When those holes had filled in, I thought I had a system that was a good working tool, and I’d like to share that one with you.

And I came here because behavioral economics. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it? And I think it’s fairly clear that all reality has to respect all other reality. If you come to inconsistencies, they have to be resolved, and so if there’s anything valid in psychology, economics has to recognize it, and vice versa. So I think the people that are working on this fringe between economics and psychology are absolutely right to be there, and I think there’s been plenty wrong over the years.

Well let me romp through as much of this list as I have time to get through. 24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment.

First. Under recognition of the power of what psychologists call reinforcement and economists call incentives. Well you can say, “Everybody knows that.” Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes, but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.

One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The heart and soul of the integrity of the system is that all the packages have to be shifted rapidly in one central location each night. And the system has no integrity if the whole shift can’t be done fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the thing to work. And they tried moral suasion, they tried everything in the world, and finally somebody got the happy thought that they were paying the night shift by the hour, and that maybe if they paid them by the shift, the system would work better. And lo and behold, that solution worked.

Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson, who was then in the government, had to go back to Xerox because he couldn’t understand how their better, new machine was selling so poorly in relation to their older and inferior machine. Of course when he got there he found out that the commission arrangement with the salesmen gave a tremendous incentive to the inferior machine.

And here at Harvard, in the shadow of B.F. Skinner, there was a man who really was into reinforcement as a powerful thought, and you know, Skinner’s lost his reputation in a lot of places, but if you were to analyze the entire history of experimental science at Harvard, he’d be in the top handful. His experiments were very ingenious, the results were counterintuitive, and they were important. It is not given to experimental science to do better.

What gummed up Skinner’s reputation is that he developed a case of what I always call man-with-a-hammer syndrome, to the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. And Skinner had one of the more extreme cases in the history of Academia, and this syndrome doesn’t exempt bright people. It’s just a man with a hammer and Skinner is an extreme example of that. And later, as I go down my list, let’s go back and try and figure out why people, like Skinner, get man-with-a-hammer syndrome.

Incidentally, when I was at the Harvard Law School there was a professor, naturally at Yale, who was derisively discussed at Harvard, and they used to say, “Poor old Blanchard. He thinks declaratory judgments will cure cancer.” And that’s the way Skinner got. And not only that, he was literary, and he scorned opponents who had any different way of thinking or thought anything else was important. This is not a way to make a lasting reputation if the other people turn out to also be doing something important.

My second factor is simple psychological denial. This first really hit me between the eyes when a friend of our family had a super-athlete, super-student son who flew off a carrier in the north Atlantic and never came back, and his mother, who was a very sane woman, just never believed that he was dead. And, of course, if you turn on the television, you find the mothers of the most obvious criminals that man could ever diagnose, and they all think their sons are innocent. That’s simple psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it until it’s bearable. We all do that to some extent, and it’s a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems.

Third. Incentive-cause bias, both in ones own mind and that of ones trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call agency costs. Here, my early experience was a doctor who sent bushel baskets full of normal gallbladders down to the pathology lab in the leading hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. And with that quality control for which community hospitals are famous, about five years after he should’ve been removed from the staff, he was.

And one of the old doctors who participated in the removal was also a family friend, and I asked him, I said, “Tell me, did he think, here’s a way for me to exercise my talents,” this guy was very skilled technically, “And make a high living by doing a few maimings and murders every year, along with some frauds?” And he said, “Hell no, Charlie. He thought that the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil, and if you really love your patients, you couldn’t get that organ out rapidly enough.”

Now that’s an extreme case, but in lesser strength, it’s present in every profession and in every human being. And it causes perfectly terrible behavior. If you take sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate and businesses, I’m 70 years old, I’ve never seen one I thought was even within hailing distance of objective truth. If you want to talk about the power of incentives and the power of rationalized, terrible behavior, after the Defense Department had had enough experience with cost-plus percentage of cost contracts, the reaction of our republic was to make it a crime for the federal government to write one, and not only a crime, but a felony.

And by the way, the government’s right, but a lot of the way the world is run, including most law firms and a lot of other places, they’ve still got a cost-plus percentage of cost system. And human nature, with its version of what I call incentive-caused bias, causes this terrible abuse. And many of the people who are doing it you would be glad to have married into your family compared to what you’re otherwise going to get.

Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way, and that is that people who create things like cash registers, which make most behavior hard, are some of the effective saints of our civilization. And the cash register was a great moral instrument when it was created. And Patterson knew that, by the way. He had a little store, and the people were stealing him blind and never made any money, and people sold him a couple of cash registers and it went to profit immediately.

And, of course, he closed the store and went into the cash register business. With results which are … And so this is a huge, important thing. If you read the psychology texts, you will find that if they’re 1,000 pages long, there’s one sentence. Somehow incentive-caused bias has escaped the standard survey course in psychology.

Fourth, and this is a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency, bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.

Well what I’m saying here is that the human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can’t get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort. And here again, it doesn’t just catch ordinary mortals, it catches the deans of physics. According to Max Planck, the really innovative, important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard.

Instead, a new guard came along that was less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. And if Max Planck’s crowd had this consistency and commitment tendency that kept their old inclusions intact in spite of disconfirming evidence, you can imagine what the crowd that you and I are part of behaves like.

And of course, if you make a public disclosure of your conclusion, you’re pounding it into your own head. Many of these students that are screaming at us, you know, they aren’t convincing us, but they’re forming mental change for themselves, because what they’re shouting out they’re pounding in. And I think educational institutions that create a climate where too much of that goes on are in a fundamental sense, they’re irresponsible institutions. It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out.

And all these things like painful qualifying and initiation rituals, all those things, pound in your commitments and your ideas. The Chinese brainwashing system, which was for war prisoners, was way better than anybody else’s. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations, and then they’d slowly build. That worked way better than torture.

Sixth. Bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making. I never took a course in psychology, or economics either for that matter, but I did learn about Pavlov in high school biology. And the way they taught it, you know, so the dog salivated when the bell rang. So what? Nobody made the least effort to tie that to the wide world. Well the truth of the matter is that Pavlovian association is an enormously powerful psychological force in the daily life of all of us. And, indeed, in economics we wouldn’t have money without the role of so-called secondary reinforcement, which is a pure psychological phenomenon demonstrated in the laboratory.

Practically, I’d say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company we’re the biggest share-holder. They want to be associated with every wonderful image, heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don’t want to be associated with Presidents’ funerals and so forth. When have you seen a Coca-Cola ad, and the association really works.

And all these psychological tendencies work largely or entirely on a subconscious level, which makes them very insidious. Now you’ve got Persian messenger syndrome. The Persians really did kill the messenger who brought the bad news. You think that is dead? I mean you should’ve seen Bill Paley in his last 20 years. He didn’t hear one damn thing he didn’t want to hear. People knew that it was bad for the messenger to bring Bill Paley things he didn’t want to hear. Well that means that the leader gets in a cocoon of unreality, and this is a great big enterprise, and boy, did he make some dumb decisions in the last 20 years.

And now the Persian messenger syndrome is alive and well. When I saw, some years ago, Arco and Exxon arguing over a few hundred millions of ambiguity in their North Slope treaties before a superior court judge in Texas, with armies of lawyers and experts on each side. Now this is a Mad Hatter’s tea party, two engineering-style companies can’t resolve some ambiguity without spending tens of millions of dollars in some Texas superior court? In my opinion what happens is that nobody wants to bring the bad news to the executives up the line. But here’s a few hundred million dollars you thought you had that you don’t. And it’s much safer to act like the Persian messenger who goes away to hide rather than bring home the news of the battle lost.

Talking about economics, you get a very interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen over and over again in a long life. You’ve got two products, suppose they’re complex, technical products. Now you’d think, under the laws of economics, that if product A costs X, if product Y costs X minus something, it will sell better than if it sells at X plus something, but that’s not so. In many cases when you raise the price of the alternative products, it’ll get a larger market share than it would when you make it lower than your competitor’s product.

That’s because the bell, a Pavlovian bell, I mean ordinarily there’s a correlation between price and value, then you have an information inefficiency. And so when you raise the price, the sales go up relative to your competitor. That happens again and again and again. It’s a pure Pavlovian phenomenon. You can say, “Well, the economists have figured this sort of thing out when they started talking about information inefficiencies,” but that was fairly late in economics that they found such an obvious thing. And, of course, most of them don’t ask what causes the information inefficiencies.

Well one of the things that causes it is pure old Pavlov and his dog. Now you’ve got bios from Skinnerian association, operant conditioning, you know, where you give the dog a reward and pound in the behavior that preceded the dog’s getting the award. And, of course, Skinner was able to create superstitious pigeons by having the rewards come by accident with certain occurrences, and, of course, we all know people who are the human equivalents of superstitious pigeons. That’s a very powerful phenomenon. And, of course, operant conditioning really works. I mean the people in the center who think that operant conditioning is important are very much right, it’s just that Skinner overdid it a little.

Where you see in business just perfectly horrible results from psychologically rooted tendencies is in accounting. If you take Westinghouse, which blew, what, two or three billion dollars pre-tax at least loaning developers to build hotels, and virtually 100% loans? Now you say any idiot knows that if there’s one thing you don’t like it’s a developer, and another you don’t like it’s a hotel.

And to make a 100% loan to a developer who’s going to build a hotel. But this guy, he probably was an engineer or something, and he didn’t take psychology any more than I did, and he got out there in the hands of these slick salesmen operating under their version of incentive-caused bias, where any damned way of getting Westinghouse to do it was considered normal business, and they just blew it.

That would never have been possible if the accounting system hadn’t been such but for the initial phase of every transaction it showed wonderful financial results. So people who have loose accounting standards are just inviting perfectly horrible behavior in other people. And it’s a sin, it’s an absolute sin. If you carry bushel baskets full of money through the ghetto, and made it easy to steal, that would be a considerable human sin, because you’d be causing a lot of bad behavior, and the bad behavior would spread. Similarly an institution that gets sloppy accounting commits a real human sin, and it’s also a dumb way to do business, as Westinghouse has so wonderfully proved.

Oddly enough nobody mentions, at least nobody I’ve seen, what happened with Joe Jett and Kidder Peabody. The truth of the matter is the accounting system was such that by punching a few buttons, the Joe Jetts of the world could show profits, and profits that showed up in things that resulted in rewards and esteem and every other thing that human being. Well the Joe Jetts are always with us, and they’re not really to blame, in my judgment at least. But that bastard who created that foolish accounting system who, so far as I know, has not been flayed alive, ought to be.

Seventh. Bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect. Well here, again, Cialdini does a magnificent job at this, and you’re all going to be given a copy of Cialdini’s book. And if you have half as much sense as I think you do, you will immediately order copies for all of your children and several of your friends. You will never make a better investment.

It is so easy to be a patsy for what he calls the compliance practitioners of this life. But, at any rate, reciprocation tendency is a very, very powerful phenomenon, and Cialdini demonstrated this by running around a campus, and he asked people to take juvenile delinquents to the zoo. And it was a campus, and so one in six actually agreed to do it. And after he’d accumulated a statistical output he went around on the same campus and he asked other people, he said, “Gee, would you devote two afternoons a week to taking juvenile delinquents somewhere and suffering greatly yourself to help them,” and there he got 100% of the people to say no.

But after he’d made the first request, he backed off a little, and he said, “Would you at least take them to the zoo one afternoon?” He raised the compliance rate from a third to a half. He got three times the success by just going through the little ask-for-a-lot-and-back-off.

Now if the human mind, on a subconscious level, can be manipulated that way and you don’t know it, I always use the phrase, “You’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” I mean you are really giving a lot of quarter to the external world that you can’t afford to give. And on this so-called role theory, where you tend to act in the way that other people expect, and that’s reciprocation if you think about the way society is organized.

A guy named Zimbardo had people at Stanford divide into two pieces, one were the guards and the other were the prisoners, and they started acting out roles as people expected. He had to stop the experiment after about five days. He was getting into human misery and breakdown and pathological behavior. I mean it was awesome. However, Zimbardo is greatly misinterpreted. It’s not just reciprocation tendency and role theory that caused that, it’s consistency and commitment tendency. Each person, as he acted as a guard or a prisoner, the action itself was pounding in the idea.

Wherever you turn, this consistency and commitment tendency is affecting you. In other words, what you think may change what you do, but perhaps even more important, what you do will change what you think. And you can say, “Everybody knows that.” I want to tell you I didn’t know it well enough early enough.

Eight. Now this is a lollapalooza, and Henry Kaufman wisely talked about this, bias from over-influence by social proof, that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress. And here, one of the cases the psychologists use is Kitty Genovese, where all these people, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 of them just sort of sat and did nothing while she was slowly murdered. Now one of the explanations is that everybody looked at everybody else and nobody else was doing anything, and so there’s automatic social proof that the right thing to do is nothing.

That’s not a good enough explanation for Kitty Genovese, in my judgment. That’s only part of it. There are microeconomic ideas and gain/loss ratios and so forth that also come into play. I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn’t understand both is a damned fool.

Big-shot businessmen get into these waves of social proof. Do you remember some years ago when one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company? And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn’t know exactly what to do, and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil, and vice versa. I think they’re all gone now, but it was a total disaster.

Now let’s talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact one of the economists who won, he shared a Nobel Prize, and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn’t quite as efficient as you think, he said, “Well, it’s a two-sigma event.” And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas, better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently. And, of course, when this share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone.

If you think about the doctrines I’ve talked about, namely, one, the power of reinforcement after all you do something and the market goes up and you get paid and rewarded and applauded and what have you, meaning a lot of reinforcement, if you make a bet on a market and the market goes with you. Also, there’s social proof. I mean the prices on the market are the ultimate form of social proof, reflecting what other people think, and so the combination is very powerful.

Why would you expect general market levels to always be totally efficient, say even in 1973, 4 at the pit, or in 1972 or whatever it was when the Nifty 50 were in their heyday? If these psychological notions are-

Fifty were in their heyday. If these psychological notions are correct, you would expect some waves of irrationality, which carry general levels to … ’til they’re inconsistent with the reason.

Nine. What made these economists love the efficient-market theory is the math was so elegant, and after all, math was what they’d learned to do. To the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. The alternative truth was a little messy, and they’d forgotten the great economist Keynes, whom I think said, “Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

Nine. Bias from contrast caused distortions of sensation, perception, and cognition. Here the great experiment that Cialdini does in his class is he takes three buckets of water. One’s hot, one’s cold, and one’s room temperature. And he has the student stick his left hand in the hot water and his right hand in the cold water. Then he has them remove the hands and put them both in the room temperature bucket, and of course with both hands in the same bucket of water, one seems hot, and the other seems cold because the sensation apparatus of man is over-influenced by contrast. It has no absolute scale. It’s got a contrast scale in it, and it’s scale with quantum effects in it, too. It takes a certain percentage change before it’s noticed.

Maybe you’ve had a magician remove your watch, I certainly have, without your noticing it. It’s the same thing. He’s taking advantage of your contrast type troubles and your sensory apparatus. But here the great truth is that cognition mimics sensation, and the cognition manipulators mimic the watch-removing magician. In other words, people are manipulating you all day long on this contrast phenomenon.

Cialdini cites the case of the real estate broker. You’ve got the rube that’s been transferred into your town, and the first thing you do is you take the rube out to two of the most awful over-priced houses you’ve ever seen, and then you take the rube to some moderately over-priced house and then you stick ’em. And it works pretty well, which is why the real estate salesmen do it. It’s always gonna work.

And the accidents of life can do this to you, and it can ruin your life. In my generation when women lived at home until they got married, I saw some perfectly terrible marriages made by highly desirable women because they lived in terrible homes. And I’ve seen some terrible second marriages, which were made because they were slight improvements over an even worse first marriage.

You think you’re immune from these things, and you laugh, and I wanna tell you you aren’t. My favorite analogy, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of. I have this worthless friend I like to Bridge with, and he’s a total intellectual amateur that lives on inherited money. But he told me once something I really enjoyed hearing. He said, “Charlie,” he says, “If you throw a fog into very hot water, the frog will jump out. But if you put the frog in room temperature water and just slowly heat the water up, the frog will die there.”

Now I don’t know whether that’s true about a frog, but it’s sure as hell true about many of the businessmen I know, and there again, it is the contrast phenomenon.

These are hot-shot high-powered people. These are not fools. If it comes to you in small pieces, you’re likely to miss, so you have to … if you’re gonna be a person of good judgment, you have to do something about this warp in your head where it’s so mislead by mere contrast.

Bias from over-influence by authority. Well here the Milgram experiment is it’s caused … I think there have been 1600 psychological papers written about Milgram. He had a person posing as an authority figure trick ordinary people into giving what they had every reason to expect was heavy torture by electric shock to perfectly innocent fellow citizens. And the experiment has been … he was trying to show why Hitler succeeded and a few other things. So it has really caught the fancy of the world. Partly it’s so politically correct and …

Over-influence by authority has another very … this’ll … you’ll like this one. You got a pilot and a co-pilot. The pilot is the authority figure. They don’t do this in airplanes, but they’ve done it in simulators. They have the pilot do something where the co-pilot who’s been trained in simulators a long time. He knows he’s not to allow the plane to crash. They have the pilot to do something where an idiot co-pilot would know the plane was gonna crash, but the pilot’s doing it, and the co-pilot is sitting there, and the pilot is the authority figure. 25% of the time, the plane crashes. This is a very powerful psychological tendency.

It’s not quite as powerful as some people think, and I’ll get to that later.

11. Bias from Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed but never possessed. Here I took the Munger dog, lovely harmless dog. The one way, the only way to get that dog to bite you was to try and take something out of its mouth after it was already there.

Any of you who’ve tried to do take-aways in labor negotiations will know the human version of that dog is there in all of us. I had a neighbor, a predecessor, on a little island where I have a house, and his nextdoor neighbor put a little pine tree in that was about three feet high, and it turned his 180 degree view of the harbor into 179 and three-quarters. Well they had a blood feud like the Hatfields and McCoys, and it went on and on and on. People are really crazy about minor decrements down.

Then if you act on them, you get into reciprocation tendency because you don’t just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity. And the whole thing can escalate, and so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously over-weighing the importance of what you’re losing or almost getting and not getting.

The extreme business cake here was New Coke. Now Coca-Cola has the most valuable trademark in the world. We’re the major shareholder. I think we understand that trademark. Coke has armies of brilliant engineers, lawyers, psychologists, advertising executives, and so forth. And they had a trademark on a flavor, and they’d spent better part of 100 years getting people to believe that trademark had all these intangible values, too. And people associate it with a flavor, so they were gonna tell people not that it was improved ’cause you can’t improve a flavor. If a flavor’s a matter of taste, you may improve a detergent or something, but telling you’re gonna make a major change in a flavor, I mean … So they got this huge Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome.

Pepsi was within weeks of coming out with Old Coke in a Pepsi bottle, which would have been the biggest fiasco in modern times. Perfect, pluperfect insanity. And by the way, both Goizueta and Keough are just wonderful about it. They just joke. They don’t … Keough always says I must’ve been away on vacation. He participated in every single … he’s a wonderful guy. And by the way, Goizueta’s a wonderful, smart guy, an engineer.

Smart people make these terrible blunders. How can you not understand Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome? But people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Now maybe a great Bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that’s a trained response. Ordinary people subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies.

Bias from envy/jealousy. Well, envy/jealousy made what, two out of the 10 commandments. Those of you who’ve raised siblings or tried to run a law firm or investment bank or even a faculty. I’ve heard Warren say a half a dozen times, “It’s not greed that drives the world but envy.”

Here again, you go through the psychology survey courses. You go to the index: envy, jealousy. Thousand page book, it’s blank! There’s some blind spots in academia. But it’s an enormously powerful thing, and it operates to a considerable extent at a subconscious level, and anybody who doesn’t understand it is taking on defects he shouldn’t have.

Bias from chemical dependency. Well we don’t have to talk about that. We’ve all seen so much of it, but it’s interesting how it always causes moral breakdown if there’s any need, and it always involves massive denial. It aggravates what we talked about earlier in the aviator case, the tendency to distort reality so that it’s endurable.

Bias from gambling compulsion. Well here, Skinner made the only explanation you’ll find in the standard psychology survey course. He, of course, created a variable reinforcement rate for his pigeons, his mice, and he found that that would pound in the behavior better than any other enforcement pattern. He says, “Ah ha! I’ve explained why gambling is such a powerful, addictive force in the civilization.” I think that is, to a very considerable extent, true, but being Skinner, he seemed to think that was the only explanation.

The truth of the matter is the devisers of these modern machines and techniques know a lot of things that Skinner didn’t know. For instance, a lottery … you have a lottery where you get your number by lot and then somebody draws a number by lot? It gets lousy play. You get a lottery where people get to pick their number, get big play. Again, it’s this consistency and commitment thing. People think that if they’ve committed to it, it has to be good. The minute they’ve picked it themselves, it gets an extra validity. After all, they thought it and they acted on it.

Then if you take slot machines, you get bar, bar, lemon. It happens again and again and again. You get all these near misses. Well that’s Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome, and boy do the people who create the machines understand human psychology.

And for the high IQ crowd, they’ve got poker machines where you make choices, so you can play blackjack, so to speak, with the machine. It’s wonderful what we’ve done with our computers to ruin the civilization.

But anyway, this gambling compulsion is a very, very powerful important thing. Look at what’s happening to our country. Every Indian reservation, every river town, and look at the people who are ruined with the aid of their stockbrokers and others.

Again, if you look in the standard textbook of psychology, you’ll find practically nothing on it except maybe one sentence talking about Skinner’s rats. That is not an adequate coverage of the subject.

Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one’s own kind, and one’s own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being mislead by someone liked.

Disliking distortion. Bias from that. The reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked. Well here again, we’ve got hugely powerful tendencies, and if you look at the wars in part of the Harvard Law School as we sit here, you can see that very brilliant people get into this almost pathological behavior, and these are very, very powerful, basic, subconscious, psychological tendencies or at least partly subconscious.

Now let’s get back to B.F. Skinner, man with a hammer syndrome revisited. Why is man with a hammer syndrome always present? Well if you stop to think about it, incentive caused bias. His professional reputation is all tied up with what he knows. He likes himself, and he likes his own ideas, and he’s expressed them to other people, consistency and commitment tendency. I mean you’ve got four or five of these elementary psychological tendencies combining to create this man with a hammer syndrome.

Once you realize that you can’t really buy your thinking down. Partly you can, but largely you can’t in this world. You’ve learned a lesson that’s very useful in life. George Bernard Shaw said, and a character say in The Doctor’s Dilemma, “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” But he didn’t have it quite right because it’s not so much conspiracy as it is a subconscious, psychological tendency.

The guy tells you what is good for him, and he doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than that doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal gallbladders. He believed that his own idea structures will cure cancer, and he believed that the demons that he’s the guardian against are the biggest demons and the most important ones. And in fact, they may be very small demons compared to the demons that you face. So you’re getting your advice in this world from your paid advisor with this huge load of ghastly bias. And woe to you!

And only two ways to handle it. You can hire your advisor and then just apply a windage factor like I used to do when I was a rifle shooter. I’d just adjust for so many miles an hour wind. Or you can learn the basic elements of your advisor’s trade. You don’t have to learn very much, by the way, because if you learn just a little and you can make him explain why he’s right. And those two tendencies will take part of the warp out of the thinking you’ve tried to hire down.

By and large, it works terribly. I have never seen a management consultant’s report in my long life that didn’t end with the following paragraph: “What this situation really needs is more management consulting.” Never once! I always turn to the last page. Of course Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t hire them, so … I only do this in sort of a lawyer-istic basis. Sometimes I’m in a nonprofit where some idiot hires one.

17. Bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deals with probabilities employing crude heuristics and is often mislead by mere contrast. The tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychological rooted mis-thinking tendencies on this list when the brain should be using the simple probability mathematics of Fermat and Pascal, applied to all reasonably attainable and correctly weighted items of information that are of value in predicting outcomes. The right way to think is the way Zeckhauser plays Bridge. It’s just that simple.

And your brain doesn’t naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows to play Bridge. Now you notice I put in that availability thing, and there I’m mimicking some very eminent psychologists … Tversky, who raised the idea of availability to a whole heuristic of misjudgment.

You know, they are very substantially right. Ask the Coca-Cola company, which has raised availability to a secular religion, if availability changes behavior. You’ll drink a hell of a lot more Coke if it’s always available. Availability does change behavior and cognition.

Nonetheless, even though I recognize that and applaud Tversky, Kahneman, I don’t like it for my personal system except as part of a greater subsystem, which is you gotta think the way Zeckhauser plays Bridge. It isn’t just the lack of availability that distorts your judgment. All the things on this list distort judgment. And I wanna train myself to mentally run down the list instead of just jumping on availability. So that’s why I state it the way I do.

In a sense, these psychological tendencies make things unavailable ’cause if you quickly jump to one thing and then because you’ve jumped to it, the consistency and commitment tendency makes you lock in, boom, it’s there. Number one.

Or if something is very vivid, which I’m going to come to next, that will really pound in. And the reason that the thing that really matters is now unavailable and what’s extra vivid wins is … the extra vividness creates the unavailability. So I think it’s much better to have a whole list of things that cause you to be less like Zeckhauser than it is just to jump on one factor.

Here, I think we should discuss John Gutfreund. This is a very interesting human example which will be taught in every decent professional school for at least a full generation. Gutfreund has a trusted employee, and it comes to light not through confession but by accident that the trusted employee has lied like hell to the government and manipulated the accounting system and was really the equivalent to forgery. The man immediately says, “I’ve never done it before. I’ll never do it again. It was an isolated example.” Of course, it was obvious that he was trying to help the government as well as himself ’cause he thought the government had been dumb enough to pass a rule that he’d spoken against. And after all, if a government’s not gonna pay attention to a bond trader at Salomon, what kind of a government can it be?

At any rate, and this guy has been part of a little clique that has made way over a billion dollars for Salomon in the very recent past, and it’s a little handful of people. So there are a lot of psychological forces at work. You know the guy’s wife, he’s right in front of you, and there’s human sympathy, and he’s sort of asking for your help, which is the form which encourages reciprocation, and there are all these psychological tendencies are working. Plus the fact he’s part of group that have made a lot of money for you.

At any rate, Gutfreund does not cashier the man, and of course, he had done it before, and he did do it again. Well now you look as though you almost wanted him to do it again or God knows what you look like, but it isn’t good. And that simple decision destroyed John Gutfreund.

It’s so easy to do. Now let’s think it through like the Bridge player, like Zeckhauser. You find an isolated example of a little old lady in the See’s candy company, one of our subsidiaries, getting into the till, and what does she say? “I never did it before. I’ll never do it again. This is gonna ruin my life. Please help me.” And you know her children and her friends, and she’s been around 30 years and standing behind the candy counter with swollen ankles. In your old age, isn’t that glorious a life? And you’re rich and powerful and there she is. “I never did it before, and I will never do it again.”

Well how likely is it that she never did it before? If you’re gonna catch ten embezzlements a year, what are the chances that any one of them, applying what Tversky and Kahneman called baseline information, will be somebody who only did it this once? And the people who have done it before and are gonna do it again, what are they all gonna say?

Well in the history of the See’s candy company, they always say, “I never did it before, and I’m never gonna do it again.” And we cashier them. It would be evil not to because terribly behavior spreads. … You let that stuff … you’ve got social proof, you’ve got incentive caused bias, you got a whole lotta psychological factors that will cause the evil behavior to spread, and pretty soon the whole damn … your place is rotten, the civilization is rotten. It’s not the right way to behave, and …

I will admit that I have … when I knew the wife and children, I have paid severance pay when I fire somebody, for taking a mistress on a extended foreign trip. It’s not the adultery I mind. It’s the embezzlement. But there, I wouldn’t do it where Gutfreund did it, where they’d been cheating somebody else on my behalf. There I think you have to cashier, but if they’re just stealing from you and you get rid of them, I don’t think you need the last ounce of vengeance. In fact, I don’t think you need any vengeance. I don’t think vengeance is much good.

Now we come bias from over-influence by extra vivid evidence. Here’s one … I’m at least $30 million poorer as I sit here giving this little talk because I once bought 300 shares of a stock, and the guy called me back and said, “I got 1500 more.” I said, “Will you hold it for 15 minutes while I think about it?” In CEO of this company, I’ve seen a lot of vivid peculiarities in a long life, but this guy set a world record. I’m talking about the CEO, and I just mis-weighed it. The truth of the matter is his situation was foolproof. He was soon gonna be dead. I turned down the extra 1500 share, and it’s now cost me $30 million, and that’s life in the big city.

It wasn’t something where stock was generally available, and so it’s very easy to mis-weigh the vivid evidence. Gutfreund did that when he looked into the man’s eyes and forgave the colleague.

22. Stress-induced mental changes, small and large, temporary and permanent. Oh no, no no, I’ve skipped one.

Mental confusion caused by information not arrayed in the mind and theory structures creating sound generalizations, developed in response to the question why. Also mis-influence from information that apparently but not really answers the question why. Also failure to obtain deserved influence caused by not properly explaining why.

Well we all know people who’ve flunked, and they try and memorize, and they try and spout back, and they just … doesn’t work. The brain doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to array facts on theory structures answering the question why. If you don’t do that, you cannot handle the world.

Now we get to Feuerstein, who was the general counsel of Salomon when Gutfreund made his big error. And Feuerstein knew better. He told Gutfreund, “You have to report this as a matter of morality and prudent business judgment.” He said, “It’s probably not illegal. There’s probably no legal duty to do it, but you have to do it as a matter of prudent conduct and proper dealing with your main customer.” He said that to Gu-

… and proper dealing with your main customer. He said that to Gutfreund on at least two or three occasions, and he stopped. And, of course, the persuasion failed, and when Gutfreund went down, Feuerstein went with him. It ruined a considerable part of Feuerstein’s life. Well Feuerstein, was a member of the Harvard Law Review, made an elementary psychological mistake. You want to persuade somebody, you really tell them why. And what did we learn in lesson one? Incentives really matter. Vivid evidence really works. He should have told Gutfreund, “You’re likely to ruin your life and disgrace your family and lose your money.” And is Mozer worth this? I know both men. That would’ve worked. So Feuerstein flunked elementary psychology, this very sophisticated, brilliant lawyer. But don’t you do that. It’s not very hard to do, you know, just to remember that “Why?” is terribly important.

Other normal limitations of sensation, memory, cognition and knowledge. Well, I don’t have time for that. Stress-induced mental changes. Here, my favorite example is the great Pavlov. He had all these dogs in cages, which had all been conditioned into changed behaviors, and the great Leningrad flood came, and it just went right up. The dog’s in a cage, and the dog had as much stress as you can imagine a dog ever having. The water receded in time to save some of the dogs, and Pavlov noted that they’d had a total reversal of their conditioned personality. Well, being the great scientist he was, he spent the rest of his life giving nervous breakdowns to dogs, and he learned a hell of a lot that I regard as very interesting. I have never known any Freudian analyst who knew anything about the last work of Pavlov, and I never met a lawyer who understood that what Pavlov found out with those dogs had anything to do with programming, and de-programming, and cults and so forth. …

Then, we’ve got other common mental illnesses and declines, temporary and permanent, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse. Then I’ve got mental and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome. Here, my favorite thing is the bee, a honeybee. A honeybee goes out and finds the nectar, and he comes back, and he does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar is, and they go out and get it. Well, some scientist who was clever, like B.F. Skinner, decided to do an experiment. He put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar way the hell straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what he now has to communicate.

You’d think the honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but he doesn’t. He comes into the hive and does this incoherent dance, and all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee. And it’s a very important part of human organization to set things up so the noise, and the reciprocation and so forth of all these people who have what I call say-something syndrome don’t really affect the decisions.

Now, the time has come to ask two or three questions. This is the most important question in this whole talk. What happens when these standard psychological tendencies combine? What happens when the situation, or the artful manipulation of man, causes several of these tendencies to operate on a person toward the same end at the same time? The clear answer is the combination greatly increases power to change behavior, compared to the power of merely one tendency acting alone. Examples are: Tupperware parties. Tupperware has now made billions of dollars out of a few manipulative psychological tricks. It was so schlock that directors of Justin Dart’s company resigned when he crammed it down his board’s throat. And he was totally right, by the way, judged by economic outcomes.

Moonie conversion methods. Boy, do they work. He just combines four or five of these things together. The system of Alcoholics Anonymous. A 50% no-drinking rate outcome when everything else fails? It’s a very clever system that uses four or five psychological systems at once toward, I might say, a very good end. The Milgrim experiment. See, Milgrim … It’s been widely interpreted as mere obedience, but the truth of the matter is that the experimenter who got the students to give the heavy shocks in Milgrim, he explained why. It was a false explanation. “We need this to look for scientific truth,” and so on. That greatly changed the behavior of the people. And number two, he worked them up, tiny shock, a little larger, a little larger. So commitment and consistency tendency and the contrast principle were both working in favor of this behavior. So again, it’s four different psychological tendencies.

When you get these lollapalooza effects you will almost always find four or five of these things working together. When I was young, there was a whodunit hero who always said cherchez la femme. What you should search for in life is the combination, because the combination is likely to do you in. Or, if you’re the inventor of Tupperware parties, it’s likely to make you enormously rich if you can stand shaving when you do it. One of my favorite cases is the McDonald-Douglas airliner evacuation disaster. The government requires that airliners pass a bunch of tests. One of them is evacuation. Get everybody out, I think it’s 90 seconds or something like that. It’s some short period of time. The government has rules, make it very realistic, so on, and so on. You can’t select nothing but 20-year-old athletes to evacuate your airline.

So McDonald-Douglas schedules one of these things in a hangar, and they make the hangar dark. The concrete floor is 25 feet down, and they got these little rubber chutes, and they got all these old people. They ring the bell, and they all rush out. In the morning when the first test is done, they create, I don’t know, 20 terrible injuries. People go off to hospitals. Of course, they scheduled another one for the afternoon. By the way, they didn’t meet the time schedule either, in addition to causing all the injuries. So what do they do? They do it again in the afternoon. Now, they create 20 more injuries and one case of a severed spinal column with permanent, unfixable paralysis. They’re engineers. These are brilliant people. This is thought over through in a big bureaucracy. … Authorities told you to do it. He told you to make it realistic. You’ve decided to do it. You’d decided to do it twice. Incentive-caused bias. If you pass, you save a lot of money. You’ve got to jump this hurdle before you can sell your new airliner.

Again, three, four, five of these things work together, and it turns human brains into mush. And maybe you think this doesn’t happen in picking investments. If so, you’re living in a different world than I am. Finally, the open-outcry auction. Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush. You get social proof. The other guy is bidding. You get reciprocation tendency. You get deprival super-reaction syndrome. The thing is going away. I mean, it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior.

Finally, the institution of the board of directors of a major human, American company. Well, the top guy is sitting there. He’s an authority figure. He’s doing asinine things. You look around the board, nobody else is objecting. Social proof, it’s okay. Reciprocation tendency, he’s raising the director’s fees every year. He’s flying you around in the corporate airplane to look at interesting plants, or whatever in hell they do, and you go and you really get extreme dysfunction as a corrective decision-making body in the typical American board of directors. They only act, again the power of incentives, they only act when it gets so bad that it starts making them look foolish, or threatening legal liability to them. That’s Munger’s rule. I mean, there are occasional things that don’t follow Munger’s rule, but by and large the board of directors is a very ineffective corrector if the top guy is a little nuts, which, of course, frequently happens.

The second question. Isn’t this list of standard psychological tendencies improperly tautological compared with the system of Euclid? That is, aren’t there overlaps, and can’t some items on the list be derived from combinations of other items? The answer to that is, plainly, yes. Three. What good, in the practical world, is the thought system indicated by the list? Isn’t practical benefit prevented because these psychological tendencies are programmed into the human mind by broad evolution so we can’t get rid of them? Broad evolution, I mean the combination of genetic and cultural evolution, but mostly genetic. Well, the answer is the tendencies are partly good and, indeed, probably much more good than bad, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. By and large these rules of thumb, they work pretty well for man given his limited mental capacity, and that’s why they were programmed in by broad evolution.

At any rate, they can’t be simply washed out automatically and they shouldn’t be. Nonetheless, the psychological thought system described is very useful in spreading wisdom and good conduct when one understands it and uses it constructively. Here are some examples. Karl Braun’s communication practices. He designed oil refineries with spectacular skill and integrity. He had a very simple rule. Remember I said, “Why is important?” You got fired in the Braun company. You had to have five Ws. You had to tell who, what you wanted to do, where and when, and you had to tell him why. If you wrote a communication and left out the why, you got fired, because Braun knew it’s complicated building an oil refinery. It can blow up. All kinds of things happen, and he knew that his communication system worked better if you always told him why. That’s a simple discipline, and boy does it work.

Two, the use of simulators in pilot training. Here, again, abilities attenuate with disuse. Well, the simulator is God’s gift because you can keep them fresh. Three, the system of Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s certainly a constructive use of somebody understanding psychological tendencies. I think they just blundered into it, as a matter of fact, so you can regard it as kind of an evolutionary outcome. But, just because they blundered into it doesn’t mean you can’t invent its equivalent when you need it for a good purpose. Clinical training in medical schools. Here’s a profoundly correct way of understanding psychology. The standard practice is watch one, do one, teach one. Boy, does that pound in what you want pounded in. Again, the consistency and commitment tendency. That is a profoundly correct way to teach clinical medicine.

The rules of the U.S. Constitutional Convention, totally secret, no vote until the final vote, then just one vote on the whole Constitution. Very clever psychological rules, and if they had a different procedure, everybody would have been pushed into a corner by his own pronouncements and his own oratory and his own … and no recorded votes until the last one. And they got it through by a whisker with those wise rules. We wouldn’t have had the Constitution if our forefathers hadn’t been so psychologically acute, and look at the crowd we got now.

Six, the use of granny’s rule. I love this. One of the psychologists who works with the center gets paid a fortune running around America, and he teaches executives to manipulate themselves. Now granny’s rule is you don’t get the ice cream unless you eat your carrots. Well, granny was a very wise woman. That is a very good system. So this guy, a very eminent psychologist, he runs around the country telling executives to organize their day so they force themselves to do what’s unpleasant and important by doing that first, and then rewarding themselves with something they really like doing. He is profoundly correct.

Seven, the Harvard Business School’s emphasis on decision trees. When I was young and foolish, I used to laugh at the Harvard Business School. I said, “They’re teaching 28-year-old people that high school algebra works in real life?” We’re talking about elementary probability. But later, I wised up and I realized that it was very important that they do that, and better late than never. Eight, the use of post-mortems at Johnson & Johnson. At most corporations, if you make an acquisition and it works out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You’ve got denial, you’ve got everything in the world. You’ve got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing, or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. By the way, I do the same thing routinely.

Nine, the great example of Charles Darwin is he avoided confirmation bias. Darwin probably changed my life because I’m a biography nut, and when I found out the way he always paid extra attention to the disconfirming evidence, and all these little psychological tricks, I also found out that he wasn’t very smart by the ordinary standards of human acuity, yet there he is buried in Westminster Abbey. That’s not where I’m going, I’ll tell you. And I said, “My God, here’s a guy that, by all objective evidence, is not nearly as smart as I am and he’s in Westminster Abbey? He must have tricks I should learn.” And I started wearing little hair shirts like Darwin to try and train myself out of these subconscious psychological tendencies that cause so many errors. It didn’t work perfectly, as you can tell from listening to this talk, but it would’ve been even worse if I hadn’t done what I did. And you can know these psychological tendencies and avoid being the patsy of all the people that are trying to manipulate you to your disadvantage, like Sam Walton. Sam Walton won’t let a purchasing agent take a handkerchief from a salesman. He knows how powerful the subconscious reciprocation tendency is. That is a profoundly correct way for Sam Walton to behave.

Then, there’s the Warren Buffett rule for open-outcry auctions: don’t go. We don’t go to the closed-bid auctions too because they … that’s a counter-productive way to do things ordinarily for a different reason, which Zeckhauser would understand. Four, what special knowledge problems lie buried in the thought system indicated by the list? Well, one is paradox. Now, we’re talking about a type of human wisdom that the more people learn about it, the more attenuated the wisdom gets. That’s an intrinsically paradoxical kind of wisdom. But, we have paradox in mathematics and we don’t give up mathematics. I say damn the paradox. This stuff is wonderfully useful.

By the way, the granny’s rule, when you apply it to yourself, is sort of a paradox in a paradox. The manipulation still works even though you know you’re doing it. I’ve seen that done by one person to another. I drew this beautiful woman as my dinner partner a few years ago, and I’d never seen her before. Well, she’s married to prominent Angelino. She sat down next to me, and she turned her beautiful face up and she said, “Charlie,” she said, “What one word accounts for your remarkable success in life?” Now, I knew I was being manipulated and that she’d done this before, and I just loved it. I never see this woman without a little lift in my spirits. By the way, I told her I was rational. You’ll have to judge yourself whether that’s true. I may be demonstrating some psychological tendency I hadn’t planned on demonstrating.

How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist’s mind? Two views. That’s the thermodynamics model. You know, you can’t derive thermodynamics from plutonium, gravity, and laws of mechanics, even though it’s a lot of little particles interacting. And here is this wonderful truth that you can sort of develop on your own, which is thermodynamics. Some economists, and I think Milton Friedman is in this group, but I may be wrong on that, sort of like the thermodynamics model. I think Milton Friedman, who has a Nobel prize, is probably a little wrong on that. I think the thermodynamics analogy is over-strained. I think knowledge from these different soft sciences have to be reconciled to eliminate conflict. After all, there’s nothing in thermodynamics that’s inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics and gravity, and I think that some of these economic theories are not totally consistent with other knowledge, and they have to be bent. And I think that these behavioral economics, or economists, are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction.

Now, my prediction is when the economists take a little psychology into account that the reconciliation will be quite endurable. Here, my model is the procession of the equinoxes. The world would be simpler for a long-term climatologist if the angle of the axis of the Earth’s rotation, compared to the plane of the Euclyptic, were absolutely fixed. But it isn’t fixed. Over every 40,000 years or so there’s this little wobble, and that has pronounced long-term effects. Well, in many cases, what psychology is going to add is just a little wobble, and it will be endurable. Here, I quote another hero of mine, who of course is Einstein, where he said, “The Lord is subtle, but not malicious.” And I don’t think it’s going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what’s right in psychology. The final question is if the thought system indicated by this list of psychological tendencies has great value not widely recognized and employed, what should the educational system do about it? I am not going to answer that one now. I like leaving a little mystery.

Why Limiting Your Consuming Time Period To 8 Hours Will Change Your Health & Fitness

Periodic fasting can provide many important health benefits, including improving your insulin/leptin level of sensitivity, assisting your body better burn fat for fuel, increasing psychological clarity and total energy levels, and more.

For several years I struggled over discovering the diet, consuming schedule, and exercise routine that finest fit my goals and lifestyle. It used up a lots of psychological energy and time. Nevertheless, it didn't matter what I tried or how passionate I was about a new strategy of attack for my diet plan and fitness-- eventually I would fall off track for numerous reasons, with much dissatisfaction.

I tried the 'six little meals a day' strategy and I tried a 100% whole-food diet. I mixed, I chopped, and I juiced. I attempted various exercise strategies too, however nothing appeared to really resonate with my body. I found myself sluggish the majority of the day, tired of always planning my meals, and annoyed that, thinking about just how much effort I was putting into preparing my diet and workouts, I still wasn't seeing or feeling the outcomes I had actually hoped for.

But this all changed when I found intermittent fasting (IF). I had heard a couple of things about it occasionally, but I 'd never ever completely entertained the subject.

After checking out the unbelievable health benefits of IF, something finally clicked within my brain. Call it my instinct or my 'aha!' moment, but something was informing me that this new method to consuming and fitness was the one I had actually been awaiting.

Why A Lot Of Struggle With Their Weight

As

=" _ blank" > Dr. Mercola describes, The factor so lots of battle with their weight (aside from consuming processed foods that have been grossly changed from their natural state) is since they're in continuous banquet mode and seldom ever go without a meal.

As an outcome, their bodies have adjusted to burning sugar as its main fuel, which down-regulates the enzymes that use and burn kept fat. Fasting is an excellent method to "reboot" your metabolism so your body can start burning fat as its primary fuel, which will assist you shed your unwanted fat shops.

When your insulin resistance improves and you are normal weight you can begin consuming more regularly, as already you will have reestablished your body's capability to burn fat for fuel-- that's the key to sustained weight management.

The amount of research study around fasting, particularly intermittent fasting, is growing tremendously. Let's explore what the research is stating.

How and Why Intermittent Fasting Functions

One 2013 evaluation discovered a broad variety of healing capacity in periodic fasting, even when total calorie consumption daily did not change, or was just somewhat decreased. Research studies included in the review produced proof that periodic fasting may:

Limit inflammation

Enhance distributing glucose and lipid levels

Lower blood pressure

Enhance metabolic effectiveness and body structure, consisting of considerable decreases in body weight in obese people

Reduce LDL and total cholesterol levels

Help prevent type 2 diabetes, in addition to slow its development

Reverse type 2 diabetes

Enhance pancreatic function

Improve insulin levels and insulin sensitivity

Reproduce some of the cardiovascular benefits connected with workout

Protect against heart disease

Modulate levels of harmful visceral fat

The reasons for these health advantages connect to the reality that the human body appears to be developed to grow in a cycle of "banquet and starvation." By imitating the ancestral conditions of cyclical nourishment, your body participates in a state of optimum performance. Three significant systems by which fasting benefits your health include:

Increased insulin sensitivity and mitochondrial energy efficiency: Fasting increases insulin level of sensitivity in addition to mitochondrial energy efficiency, therefore retarding aging and disease, which are typically connected with loss of insulin sensitivity and declined mitochondrial energy.

Minimized oxidative stress: Fasting reduces the build-up of oxidative radicals in the cells, and consequently prevents oxidative damage to cellular proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids related to aging and disease.

Increased capability to resist stress, disease, and aging: Fasting induces a cellular tension reaction (similar to that induced by workout) in which cells up-regulate the expression of genes that increase the capacity to manage stress and resist disease and aging.

The Benefits of Working out in a Fasted State

We have actually frequently been told to make sure we are well fed prior to a workout, however this notion has actually been a hot subject of dispute in the last few years.

When we think of the cyclical consuming patterns of our ancestors, we know that there were lots of cases in which they would carry out rigorous physical activity on an empty stomach, such as throughout their hunt for food. Today, research confirms the biological advantages of this type of consuming schedule.

As the target=" _ blank" > Huffington Post summarizes," Exercisers with weight loss goals may find a benefit in getting up and working out first thing in the early morning before eating breakfast or fasting for a couple of hours prior to a mid-day or night workout."" The less glucose you have in your system the more fat you will burn," continues John Rowley, Health Director for the International Sports Science Association (ISSA). "Nevertheless,"Huffington Post continues, "if your goals are efficiency related (e.g. to improve strength or speed), exercising without fueling up probably isn't your best choice since a lack of available energy might prevent you from presenting your best effort."

What About Acquiring Muscle While Intermittent Fasting?

" src =" http://cdn2.collective-evolution.com/assets/uploads/2015/02/Bojan-Before-After-Leangains.jpg" width=" 640" height= "480" > Arise from one of Martin Berkhan's clients using the intermittent fasting' lean gains' technique. For males or women who are aiming to remain lean while acquiring muscle mass, Martin Berkhan from Leangains.com has the ideal option for this goal.

His systematic approach to periodic fasting has assisted a lot of accomplish their fitness goals that he can easily be thought about the professional in the world of intermittent fasting and muscle gain.

Berkhan offers different kinds of " _ blank "> fasting schedules That individuals can choose which one works best with their way of life. Personally, I picked his recommended 12pm-8pm consuming window followed by a 16-hour fasting period. Far I've found this schedule fantastic for a couple of reasons.

For one, I don't have to stress over making breakfast as quickly as I wake up which, for me, was ending up being a huge hassle. Similarly, I know that my eating window stops after 8pm, which is hassle-free in that I know precisely when to consume and when not to.

" src =" http://cdn1.collective-evolution.com/assets/uploads/2015/02/Carrie-Before-After-Leangains-back.jpg" width= "400" height= "352" > Another one of Berkhan's client results. One essential note that Berkhan tensions is that if you are going to be lifting heavy weights or training hard, make sure to consume either a scoop of protein powder or a scoop of branched chain amino acids (BCAAs) 5-10 minutes before your workout. Doing this sidesteps the increased protein breakdown of fasted training while still profiting of the increased anabolic action as seen in

_ blank" > this research study. Another essential aspect to keep in mind is to ensure you are consuming enough during your eight hour eating window. Starving yourself while also fasting and working out is a guaranteed method to attain exhaustion and nutrient deficiency.

Here is how my schedule looks on a heavy workout day (taking into account that my goal is muscle growth):

7:30 -8:00 am: Get up and ingest 10 grams of BCAAs.

8:30 am: Exercise.

10:00 am: Another scoop of BCAAs or protein powder. Cup of coffee and after that work or errands before I break the fast.

12:00 pm: Post-workout meal/Fast-breaking meal. (Should be the greatest meal of the day. Keep protein and carbohydrates high.)

3:00 pm: second post-workout meal.

7:30 pm: 3rd meal of the day. Again, keeping protein and carbohydrates high.

9:00 pm: Tea and water galore!

Repeat daily.

* Remember, you can produce the type of fasting schedule you desire based upon your lifestyle. Some individuals fast for 14 hours, while others fast as much as 24+ hours. That is why IF can work for anybody.

Is IF For You?

Tea, coffee, and water are allowed as much as you like throughout the fasting state so long as you don't go beyond 50 calories in sugar or milk.

There is a lot more info available regarding periodic fasting that it is difficult to check out within this single short article, so stay tuned for more articles relating to IF in the extremely near future.

In the meantime, I suggest finding out more about the incredible benefits of IF to see if it is best for you.

.

Studies:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22425331( IF and lower cases of diabetes/heart illness) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18805103 (IF and minimizing coronary heart problem, one of the greatest killers of our time )

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21410865?dopt=Abstract (Why IF is the very best for fat loss)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15699226( Why avoiding breakfast benefits your health) Have you had any success with intermittent fasting? Show

us in the remark section below!

Source

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/02/05/why-restricting-your-eating-time-period-to-8-hours-will-transform-your-health-fitness/

Kill Your Baby at Home. Doctors are Finding Abortions too Traumatic

The abortion industry is in trouble. Big trouble. If you run a hospital you need doctors. If you run a slaughterhouse you need butchers. If you run an abortion abattoir you need doctors who will double up as butchers.

It’s a bit like the execution industry in countries that still have the death penalty. They just can’t find good staff. The profession of executioner is a highly coveted specialism and since the jolly ol’ days of Albert Pierrepoint, England’s longest serving hangman in recent times, kids in India and Zimbabwe are specializing in programming computer strings rather than in knotting ropes for the noose.

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I was reading about Pawan Kumar, who learned his trade from his father and grandfather—I’m not sure if there is a hangmen’s caste. The Indian government pays him a retainer of £30 a month to be a registered executioner. When he’s not stringing up vicious murderers and rapists, Kumar sells shirts from the back of a bicycle in the north Indian town of Meerut.

So far this is one profession feminists haven’t infested. So, Kumar doesn’t get harangued on Channel 4 by the likes of Cathy Newman asking him why there are no hangwomen or female executioners. Naturally, Kumar’s job is also safe from the bile of bellicose gender gap activists. But Kumar’s son wants to study banking and in a country of 1.2 billion people, prisons are struggling to find hangmen.

Zimbabwe is having similar problems. Chikurubi prison has been trying to fill the post of hangman for five years and 50 men are on the waiting list but there’s no one willing to hang them. Again, there’s horrible sexism in the applications process—not even equality of opportunity, let alone equality of outcomes—and the advertisement in the Zimbabwean Daily News categorically states: “The hangman’s job is reserved only for men”. Zimbabwe needs its own battalion of feminists in pink pussy hats.

So we return to the killing industry in our green and pleasant land of Britain. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is urging Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to allow women to kill their babies at home. Wales and Scotland already allow DIY baby-executions so why not import the Carry on Killing series into Ye Olde England as well?

One in three women are already having abortions and surely the queue must be very long if you can’t find doctors who are willing, a la Pierrepoint and Sons to do the excavating, hacking and dismembering of a woman who has the right to choose because it’s her own body, er… um … except it’s not, or she’d be dead, not the baby.

So if doctors are not applying in droves to be butchers, the mother can finish off her baby by popping two pills, mifepristone, and misoprostol, between 24 and 48 hours apart. The abortion starts within 30 minutes of taking the pill. And when the pills have done their magic, simply flush the baby down the toilet. It’s simple. It’s cheaper. It’s a great victory for womankind.

The government has acquiesced to this barbarity. By Christmas 2018 when the country is celebrating the birth of Jesus, lots of non-virgin Marys and Elizabeths will be popping their pro-choice pills and flushing their babies down the bog as the Salvation Army band outside their window plays “Unto us a child is born”.

But why are many doctors deciding to call it quits? Why are the men and women in white coats not willing to do your dirty work any longer?

In America, medical colleges are opting out of abortion training. In a 2005 survey of U.S. medical schools in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, only 32 percent of respondents said they offer a formal lecture specifically about abortion, and 23 percent reported “no formal education” about abortion at all. In the same survey, 55 percent of medical schools reported that they offered students no clinical exposure to abortion.

Then there are doctors who are “conscientious objectors” for religious or moral reasons. There are also pro-life humanists and atheists who condemn abortion as murder using scientific and philosophical arguments. According to the report Unconscionable: When Providers Deny Abortion Care (2017), there is evidence of “a worrisome and growing global trend of health care providers who are refusing to deliver abortion and other sexual and reproductive health care”. Over 70 jurisdictions around the world, including 21 EU countries allow “conscientious objection” in providing abortions.

In Italy, 70 percent of obstetrician-gynecologists are registered with the Italian Ministry of Health as objectors to abortion. In the UK, one-third of those training and 10 percent of obstetrician-gynecologists object to abortion, and in Hong Kong, 14 percent of physicians are objectors.

But even those doctors who do not have religious or moral objections to abortion are now backing out because of the traumatic effects of abortion. Dr. Rachel M. MacNair in her book Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing has a chapter on doctors suffering PITS as a consequence of performing abortions. These doctors suffer from symptoms associated with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

MacNair poses the same questions to “medical personnel involved in euthanasia or abortions, Nazi officials in the discharge of their duties, researchers whose experiments may harm subjects, and those who kill animals”. Her research is nuanced and non-judgmental and does not push a moral line on abortion. She is careful to cite only pro-choice doctors and nurses in determining the effects of trauma on medical personnel involved in abortion.

“I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses,” MacNair quotes abortion nurse Sallie Tisdale. “There are weary, grim moments when I think I cannot bear another basin of bloody remains, utter another kind phrase of reassurance,” says Ms. Tisdale. “I watch a woman’s swollen abdomen sink to softness in a few stuttering moments and my own belly flip-flops with sorrow,” she adds.

Earlier studies done by pro-abortion researchers note the high prevalence of PTSD symptoms with “obsessional thinking about abortion, depression, fatigue, anger, lowered self-esteem, and identity conflicts”. Another study reports “nightmares, images that could not be shaken”, and “deep and lonely privacy within which practitioners had grappled with their ambivalence”.

Such-Baer’s study, done in 1974, a year after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the U.S., describes how “almost all professionals involved in abortion work reacted with more or less negative feelings”. Those who have contact with the fetal remains have more negative feelings than those who do not. Nevertheless, “All emotional reactions were unanimously extremely negative”.

An article published in American Medical News, published by the American Medical Association talks about “the conflicting feelings that plague many providers. … The notion that the nurses, doctors, counsellors, and others who work in the abortion field have qualms about the work they do is a well-kept secret”.

Even a paper presented at the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians does not shrink from narrating the case of two abortion practitioners who dreamed “of vomiting fetuses along with a sense of horror”. The writers conclude: “In general, it appears that the more direct the physical and visual involvement (i.e., nurses, doctor), the more stress experienced”.

A nurse working in an abortion clinic said her most troubling moments came not in the procedure room but afterward. Many times women who had just had abortions would lie in the recovery room and cry, “I’ve just killed my baby. I’ve just killed my baby.” “I don’t know what to say to these women,” the nurse told the group. “Part of me thinks, ‘Maybe they’re right.’”

In 2105, the obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Antony Levatino testified at a House Judiciary Committee hearing about Planned Parenthood’s medical procedures after videos were released showing how the mega-abortion provider sold fetal tissue to researchers. Levatino testifies performing the brutal dismembering of a baby who has just been kicking in its mother’s womb by taking apart its legs, hands, intestines, heart, and lungs.

Levatino was asked why he ended his abortion practice after performing 1,200 abortions over a four-year period. Levatino tells his story of how he and his wife adopted a girl because they suspected they were infertile. However, his wife got pregnant the very next month and the couple had two children ten months apart. Their adopted daughter was killed in a car accident when she was six. Sometime after burying her, Levatino went to perform an abortion and got sick after pulling out an arm and leg. “For the first time in my life I really looked at that pile of body parts on the side of the table … all I could see was somebody’s son or daughter,” he says. Dr. Levatino could no longer kill babies.

If abortions are so traumatic for the doctor, isn’t it even more traumatic for the mother? Dr. John Bruchalski is a former abortionist who is part of a network that provides abortion pills. He says that because the mother has to see the aborted baby abortions by pills are more traumatic than surgical abortions. He says:

“There’s lots of contractions without anesthesia, lots of clots, that’s not even the issues that come with seeing the tissue with the baby.”

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The mother has to make sure that all the body parts have been ejected otherwise any part remaining inside her can cause serious infection. Women have to flush their baby down the toilet. But many women panic once they see their baby and don’t know what to do.

Vicki Thorn, of the National Office for Post Abortion Reconciliation and Healing, says some women in late-term medical abortions who did not want to bury their baby were at such a loss that they kept their baby in the freezer.

The abortion industry is in big trouble. They are running short of executioners. Women conned by the abortion industry into believing that abortion is safe are in even bigger trouble. The abortion industry is turning them into hangwomen.

Killing her own baby and flushing it down the toilet could leave a woman traumatized for the rest of her life.

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Practical, Science-Based Steps to Heal from an Affair

Many years ago, in the Clinton era, I was asked to do an interview on whether Hillary and Bill would make it through Bill’s affair. Responding psychologically rather than politically, my answer was to say, “If couples didn’t make it through affairs, the divorce rate would be even higher than it is now.”

Working through an affair is tough. It takes tremendous energy and vulnerability on both sides. Drs. John and Julie Gottman have developed the Trust Revival Method, with three defined stages of treatment: Atonement, Attunement, and Attachment. The effectiveness of this model is being studied in a randomized clinical trial.

I’ve watched hundreds of couples try this method, and I’ve learned a few practical things about effective treatment along the way. To provide clarity, let’s use names: Jennifer and Sam are married, and Jennifer had an affair with Anthony.

Seek couples therapy, not just individual counseling

Trust is an obvious issue, and is vital to regain. But if both partners are committed to reconciling the marriage, or at least to try, then seeing a couples therapist together is most helpful. Individual therapy doesn’t help regain this trust and may only make healing more complicated. Enough secrets have been kept. Even if Jennifer is talking about the love she had for Anthony, it’s important that Sam regain his role as confidante, and it’s even more important that Jennifer be completely transparent about what happened.

Often, people who engage in an affair will balk at the idea of sharing with their spouse their struggles with letting go of their lover. The most important point? To move ahead, Sam needs to actively hear and believe that Jennifer is choosing him and their marriage.

Realize that the “truth” rarely comes out all at once

This is a tough one. Those who have had an affair, whether they’ve been caught or whether they’ve actually come forward, rarely tell the whole story initially. In this case, Jennifer will either feel guilty and extremely protective of Sam, not wanting to hurt him anymore, or she’ll be protective of Anthony. Or both.

The latter reason may likely infuriate Sam. But it’s part of the process. The “story” usually emerges slowly, even though Sam might want the truth and all of the truth right away. Jennifer may not be able to do that. Remember, she’s now committed to the marriage, and more than likely fears Sam’s reaction — that “too much too soon” may blow up in her face.

When this occurs, it’s very easy for the hurt partner to view this as more intentional deceit, which many betrayed people say is just as difficult to work through than any sexual or emotional indiscretion. The therapist needs to guide the couple carefully through the betrayer’s tangle of self-protection or protection of a lover and the defensiveness and shame that comes with it, as well as the betrayed’s desperately wanting and deserving “the absolute truth” and the sadness, rage, and fear that accompanies it.

All of this lies in the Atonement phase — a working through of anger, fear, guilt, and shame. It’s a tightrope that has to be walked very carefully, and with as much openness as possible.

The problems in the relationship did not cause the affair but are important to change

Jennifer is totally responsible for going outside the marriage to get her needs met. That is clear. But affairs happen in contexts. And that context is Jennifer and Sam’s marriage.

Sam and Jennifer will want to create a fresh, enlivened relationship where both can recommit and leave behind the relationship that was not working. The task is to learn new skills and new ways of communicating so both can feel better about their marriage. They’re not going back — they’re going forward. They’re starting marriage #2.

If Jennifer is adamant about blaming the marriage and only the marriage, that’s not a good sign. In Gottman terms, she’d be stuck in the barn with the Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse and not moving forward. The same would be evident if Sam insisted that the marriage had been great with absolutely nothing amiss or broken. Both would be locked in defensiveness and contempt.

Drs. John and Julie Gottman teach that talking about the context of the marriage doesn’t belong in the “Atonement” process, but belongs in the second “Attunement” phase of treatment. This may be easier said than done. I’ve found that as long as distinctions are being made, and very clear boundaries are formed — that nothing happened in the marriage to cause the betrayer to betray — that both can be discussed. However, it’s far better to keep them clear from one another, if possible.

Give structure to communication about the affair

Dr. Shirley Glass points out in her book Not Just Friends that the betrayed partner often fits criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, with their emotional well-being heavily threatened and a sense of safety having disappeared from the marriage. It’s important to structure the sessions to help the betrayed work through that trauma, as slowly as is needed, and not amplify symptoms like hypervigilance, nightmares, or flashbacks.

And, in all seriousness, this process can’t happen quickly enough for the betrayer nor slow enough for the betrayed.

Jennifer’s job is evident. She must cut ties with Anthony. She needs to provide whatever information Sam needs to help him heal. Most people seem to want a lot of information, often coming in with pages of questions.

If Jennifer is reticent to proactively offer openness to what used to be more private choices (cell phone or social media account passwords, for example), that may be a signal that the hurtful impact of the affair is still not understood, or the betrayer has not fully taken responsibility. At that point, work directed at the betrayer, to try to understand their balking — whether it’s an issue still with the affair, or is it some other individual trait, such as a struggle with control — is vital for the therapeutic process to go forward.

It is best if the couple can wait and only talk about the affair in the therapist’s office. But some people just can’t wait, so we would suggest that they limit, perhaps even by strictly scheduling, the time that they talk about it. Each would need to agree that they will refrain from using the four horsemen during those conversations. This structure helps prevent emotional explosions or from the affair gaining any more power than it already has, while also honoring the need for healing.

The affair will be on everyone’s mind. But it’s got to be fenced in to some degree. You are looking for new information to use for recommitment.

People in Sam’s role can sometimes get lost in the details, wanting to know everything about the affair. For example, asking if Jennifer loved Anthony, or why she was attracted to him, may be important details for Sam to know. But Drs. John and Julie Gottman would suggest that he, and others like him, need to be careful, again recalling Dr. Glass’ admonitions concerning PTSD. He runs the risk of becoming re-traumatized by the revelation of intimate details, such as where the affair happened and what the sex was like. He can become obsessive, requesting too much information. Yet if not enough is asked and absorbed, it can lead to later regret.

What’s the goal here? Sam finally says to himself, “You know, I just don’t need to ask that question. I’ve asked all I need to ask. I’m okay with not knowing.”

Realize the need for trust travels in both directions

The last thing that Jennifer wants to realize is that 10 or 15 years down the road, Sam says, “You know, I never really forgave you for that affair. I want a divorce.” Or he might never say those words, and simply act it out passive-aggressively.

That is very sad. Couples have come to me years after doing therapy for an affair. There has been no true stage of reconciliation that Drs. John and Julie Gottman would call “Attachment.” The unforgiving spouse remains bitter, but may try to hide it. The unforgiven feels a loneliness that he or she doesn’t understand; it may be that everything “looks” fine, but underneath there is still distrust, blame, or anger.

Sam should take on the responsibility of giving reassurance to Jennifer that trust is building. He can say things sincerely, such as, “I wanted to text and ask you to take a picture of where you were at 10:00 last night when you were out of town, but I realized I didn’t need to. I’m past that.”

Jennifer can begin to feel hopeless if not given this information, or that her efforts are not being recognized. Both need to deeply understand and believe that the other is on board for a new commitment, that they both have chosen to remain, and are working on a new relationship dynamic that outshines their previous connection.

The process of healing from an affair takes time. Like all grief, it comes in waves. One day, it will seem like it happened a long time ago. The next? Either Jennifer or Sam can get triggered, and emotions will feel once again very raw.

Learning new skills of communicating about conflict, rebuilding trust, rekindling physical and sexual connection, giving time and attention to how the problems have affected the children or other family members — all of that can happen with time and energy.

There are many variations to the above. Such are the complications of being human.

The good news? It can be accomplished, and the commitment can be richer than ever. Not because of the affair, but because of the work done to make marriage #2 better than marriage #1 ever was.

Has your relationship experienced a sexual or an emotional affair? The Gottman Institute is currently seeking couples for an international study on affair recovery. For more information, click here.

The post Practical, Science-Based Steps to Heal from an Affair appeared first on The Gottman Institute.

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Practical, Science-Based Steps to Heal from an Affair

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Practical, Science-Based Steps to Heal from an Affair

Many years ago, in the Clinton era, I was asked to do an interview on whether Hillary and Bill would make it through Bill’s affair. Responding psychologically rather than politically, my answer was to say, “If couples didn’t make it through affairs, the divorce rate would be even higher than it is now.”

Working through an affair is tough. It takes tremendous energy and vulnerability on both sides. Drs. John and Julie Gottman have developed the Trust Revival Method, with three defined stages of treatment: Atonement, Attunement, and Attachment. The effectiveness of this model is being studied in a randomized clinical trial.

I’ve watched hundreds of couples try this method, and I’ve learned a few practical things about effective treatment along the way. To provide clarity, let’s use names: Jennifer and Sam are married, and Jennifer had an affair with Anthony.

Seek couples therapy, not just individual counseling

Trust is an obvious issue, and is vital to regain. But if both partners are committed to reconciling the marriage, or at least to try, then seeing a couples therapist together is most helpful. Individual therapy doesn’t help regain this trust and may only make healing more complicated. Enough secrets have been kept. Even if Jennifer is talking about the love she had for Anthony, it’s important that Sam regain his role as confidante, and it’s even more important that Jennifer be completely transparent about what happened.

Often, people who engage in an affair will balk at the idea of sharing with their spouse their struggles with letting go of their lover. The most important point? To move ahead, Sam needs to actively hear and believe that Jennifer is choosing him and their marriage.

Realize that the “truth” rarely comes out all at once

This is a tough one. Those who have had an affair, whether they’ve been caught or whether they’ve actually come forward, rarely tell the whole story initially. In this case, Jennifer will either feel guilty and extremely protective of Sam, not wanting to hurt him anymore, or she’ll be protective of Anthony. Or both.

The latter reason may likely infuriate Sam. But it’s part of the process. The “story” usually emerges slowly, even though Sam might want the truth and all of the truth right away. Jennifer may not be able to do that. Remember, she’s now committed to the marriage, and more than likely fears Sam’s reaction — that “too much too soon” may blow up in her face.

When this occurs, it’s very easy for the hurt partner to view this as more intentional deceit, which many betrayed people say is just as difficult to work through than any sexual or emotional indiscretion. The therapist needs to guide the couple carefully through the betrayer’s tangle of self-protection or protection of a lover and the defensiveness and shame that comes with it, as well as the betrayed’s desperately wanting and deserving “the absolute truth” and the sadness, rage, and fear that accompanies it.

All of this lies in the Atonement phase — a working through of anger, fear, guilt, and shame. It’s a tightrope that has to be walked very carefully, and with as much openness as possible.

The problems in the relationship did not cause the affair but are important to change

Jennifer is totally responsible for going outside the marriage to get her needs met. That is clear. But affairs happen in contexts. And that context is Jennifer and Sam’s marriage.

Sam and Jennifer will want to create a fresh, enlivened relationship where both can recommit and leave behind the relationship that was not working. The task is to learn new skills and new ways of communicating so both can feel better about their marriage. They’re not going back — they’re going forward. They’re starting marriage #2.

If Jennifer is adamant about blaming the marriage and only the marriage, that’s not a good sign. In Gottman terms, she’d be stuck in the barn with the Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse and not moving forward. The same would be evident if Sam insisted that the marriage had been great with absolutely nothing amiss or broken. Both would be locked in defensiveness and contempt.

Drs. John and Julie Gottman teach that talking about the context of the marriage doesn’t belong in the “Atonement” process, but belongs in the second “Attunement” phase of treatment. This may be easier said than done. I’ve found that as long as distinctions are being made, and very clear boundaries are formed — that nothing happened in the marriage to cause the betrayer to betray — that both can be discussed. However, it’s far better to keep them clear from one another, if possible.

Give structure to communication about the affair

Dr. Shirley Glass points out in her book Not Just Friends that the betrayed partner often fits criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, with their emotional well-being heavily threatened and a sense of safety having disappeared from the marriage. It’s important to structure the sessions to help the betrayed work through that trauma, as slowly as is needed, and not amplify symptoms like hypervigilance, nightmares, or flashbacks.

And, in all seriousness, this process can’t happen quickly enough for the betrayer nor slow enough for the betrayed.

Jennifer’s job is evident. She must cut ties with Anthony. She needs to provide whatever information Sam needs to help him heal. Most people seem to want a lot of information, often coming in with pages of questions.

If Jennifer is reticent to proactively offer openness to what used to be more private choices (cell phone or social media account passwords, for example), that may be a signal that the hurtful impact of the affair is still not understood, or the betrayer has not fully taken responsibility. At that point, work directed at the betrayer, to try to understand their balking — whether it’s an issue still with the affair, or is it some other individual trait, such as a struggle with control — is vital for the therapeutic process to go forward.

It is best if the couple can wait and only talk about the affair in the therapist’s office. But some people just can’t wait, so we would suggest that they limit, perhaps even by strictly scheduling, the time that they talk about it. Each would need to agree that they will refrain from using the four horsemen during those conversations. This structure helps prevent emotional explosions or from the affair gaining any more power than it already has, while also honoring the need for healing.

The affair will be on everyone’s mind. But it’s got to be fenced in to some degree. You are looking for new information to use for recommitment.

People in Sam’s role can sometimes get lost in the details, wanting to know everything about the affair. For example, asking if Jennifer loved Anthony, or why she was attracted to him, may be important details for Sam to know. But Drs. John and Julie Gottman would suggest that he, and others like him, need to be careful, again recalling Dr. Glass’ admonitions concerning PTSD. He runs the risk of becoming re-traumatized by the revelation of intimate details, such as where the affair happened and what the sex was like. He can become obsessive, requesting too much information. Yet if not enough is asked and absorbed, it can lead to later regret.

What’s the goal here? Sam finally says to himself, “You know, I just don’t need to ask that question. I’ve asked all I need to ask. I’m okay with not knowing.”

Realize the need for trust travels in both directions

The last thing that Jennifer wants to realize is that 10 or 15 years down the road, Sam says, “You know, I never really forgave you for that affair. I want a divorce.” Or he might never say those words, and simply act it out passive-aggressively.

That is very sad. Couples have come to me years after doing therapy for an affair. There has been no true stage of reconciliation that Drs. John and Julie Gottman would call “Attachment.” The unforgiving spouse remains bitter, but may try to hide it. The unforgiven feels a loneliness that he or she doesn’t understand; it may be that everything “looks” fine, but underneath there is still distrust, blame, or anger.

Sam should take on the responsibility of giving reassurance to Jennifer that trust is building. He can say things sincerely, such as, “I wanted to text and ask you to take a picture of where you were at 10:00 last night when you were out of town, but I realized I didn’t need to. I’m past that.”

Jennifer can begin to feel hopeless if not given this information, or that her efforts are not being recognized. Both need to deeply understand and believe that the other is on board for a new commitment, that they both have chosen to remain, and are working on a new relationship dynamic that outshines their previous connection.

The process of healing from an affair takes time. Like all grief, it comes in waves. One day, it will seem like it happened a long time ago. The next? Either Jennifer or Sam can get triggered, and emotions will feel once again very raw.

Learning new skills of communicating about conflict, rebuilding trust, rekindling physical and sexual connection, giving time and attention to how the problems have affected the children or other family members — all of that can happen with time and energy.

There are many variations to the above. Such are the complications of being human.

The good news? It can be accomplished, and the commitment can be richer than ever. Not because of the affair, but because of the work done to make marriage #2 better than marriage #1 ever was.

Has your relationship experienced a sexual or an emotional affair? The Gottman Institute is currently seeking couples for an international study on affair recovery. For more information, click here.

The post Practical, Science-Based Steps to Heal from an Affair appeared first on The Gottman Institute.

It is worth noting that the author of this article  is a socialist-leaning voter and so the following article is more of a reflection of interviews conducted from May to June 2017.

“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.” John Adams reportedly said this back in the late 1700s, just after the American revolution.

Now, more than 200 years later, many young people still adhere to the same principles. Fighting with older ‘conservative’ adults or parents is incredibly common currently, with people getting more and more political at younger ages than ever before. Most young people, by the time they hit college (a whopping 60% ) are democratic or liberal leaning, 23% are unsure of their political alignment and 17% of students are republican/conservative, a 2017 Harvard Politics study finds.

The majority of college professors, too, are more liberal than conservative. According to a 2012 study, the liberal to conservative ratio of college professors is 5:1 across North America (Canada, Mexico and the US included).

Students being Liberal “make a lot of sense”, according to Janice, a 21-year- old Torontonian Ryerson student who I spoke to about being a political college student:

“ "We’re all more or less looking for a better future, right? So we have to get together and band together against the things we don’t like seeing.” Janice tells me, saying that now more than ever her politics is focused more on just what she believes, but mobilizing others to agree with her.

“Do you see yourself in the future with politics?”

“I’m a psychology major, so not really.” She says, laughing.

Across the pond – lake, really – at the University of Michigan, Jonas, a 19-year-old engineering student from Montgomery, Alabama, was raised conservative, and never really got out of it.

“I don’t feel like I need to defend myself and my beliefs in front of people, but I’m often asked to. A lot of people stop talking to me or calling me racist or an a**hole because I tell them that I’m conservative.”

What’s become more of an issue for students like Jonas is that they’re supposed have such an space around them that’s been designed by other students, but because of their political views, they feel like an outsider in a lot of cases.

“To me, it’s like I because I disagree with some of the views that they have, I’m not allowed to be safe as I learn. I didn’t come to college for my views to be challenged, I came here to become a doctor and then help some people.” Says Alessandra McNamara, who allowed me to use her full name for the record. “I’m female, I’m young, and for some reason those two things don’t allow me to be political the way I “should be”. In college, you’re supposed to have a voice… and I guess, yeah, like, you do but… You have a voice in college, but now it has to be the right one- your voice needs to be saying the same thing as everyone else or you’ll be isolated.”

"I've had beers thrown at my head, and I've been kicked out of parties and forced out of classrooms, especially last November." She remarks, remembering when she said that she voted for Trump last year she was ignored by most of most of the people she thought of as friends on campus. 

"If you align yourself with someone who wants to put me in harm's way and single me out because of who I am, I don't want to be around you." biology major and 24-year-old Allyssia says from Pace University in New York. "It makes sense to me."

Back in Canada, the political spectrum are less extreme, but expression is not. Most young Canadians are liberal-leaning, and shape their political understanding around the American two- sided spectrum. The difference is, Canadians tend to be more open-minded" "It's their opinion and what they believe, doesn't mean what they believe in is always right, though. It's important to see both sides of the argument." says Lyn, an 18 year-old from Toronto, Canada. 

In Canada, being conservative is very different from being conservative i the US.  "I feel like Canada has a soft form of conservatism, we're less left-and-right the way the 'States are, y'know?" That's from Lisa, a 20-year-old UTSC student of biology. 

And she's correct. In Canada, being conservative is far more laid back than it is in the United States. Both American and Canadian conservatives support the independence of their own nations, the idea of a free press and media and being progressive while maintaining 'traditional' values for the greater good. Canadian politics are not as black and white as American politics are. "In the  States, the Democrats and the Republicans are total opposites, they disagree on everything. In Canada, for the most part, both parties see things differently and approach the things they agree on differently too." says Adam, a York University political sciences student.

In the United States, as Adam mentioned, not being able to see both sides of the political spectrum and where your opposition is coming from is common, as Jonas notes : "Everyone does it: professors and dude-bros alike. There's no escaping them.  Someone's gonna judge your opinion and then tell you that you're wrong for believing in what you believe in and spend a ten-minute yelling session telling you that you need to re-align yourself- sometimes in front of the whole class."

Being conservative is a challenge because maintaining your political views throughout all of your years of getting your degree in American colleges is not an easy feat. "A lot of my conservative friends went to the other side to fit in." Alessandra says. "You feel really isolated, not just because everyone is telling you that you are wrong about the things you believe in but because no body is willing to listen to where you come from. I think they're afraid of us, especially the profs. Which is really weird, when you think about it."

But when you ask the more democratic- leaning kids on campus what they think about the republican students, most of the reaction sounds a lot like this:

“I feel like they don’t know what they’re doing. They have power, but they choose not to use to the help other people out. They use their politics to put other people down, to make themselves feel superior. They voted for a president that thought that way, and you can tell they don’t have a problem with the idea of a guy like Trump leading the country, or they would have voted for literally anyone else.” 22 year-old Jacob tells me. He also goes to the University of Michigan.

“I agree that we should listen to them more, but when it comes to voicing your opinions, especially at a place like the University of Michigan” (which prompts a ‘whoot whoot’ from his roommate, Chris) “When you’re talking politics, you use your voice to talk about, like, things that make sense to people. Cheaper education, better access to health care. Like, we’re young; we gotta start worrying about things that we have to deal with in the future.”

I ask him if he thinks that if he talks politics that people are going to listen to him and might even change some conservative minds.

“Yeah, I think so anyway. You need to make sure that you’re thinking about yourself when you vote. A lot of the con kids on campus are raised that way. They come from towns in the Midwest that are totally red. Of course they’re gonna be conservative. They gotta realise that they’re voting for themselves and that their parents aren’t watching them anymore. If I tell them what’s happening with their vote, and I’ve done this before, maybe they’ll change their minds. Sometimes it works, too.”

I asked Alessandra the same thing, and she said something pretty different.

“All of the democratic kids are yelling over each other, saying the same thing. They look really stupid while they do that, too. I try to listen to what they’re saying, but their opinions and ideas for the country are a little too up in the air for me. I believe in a free labour market in which people have to take the opportunities that they’re given. If they don’t take it, then that’s too bad and they’ve missed out on their opportunities. It’s a hard world and people aren’t going to make it any easier for you by getting criminals in the White House. Democrats think they will though.”

I asked her what her opinion was on people who think that young republicans are being brainwashed.

“It’s a load of crap, honestly. This is how I think, and I’m thinking realistically and for myself.”

I asked some who I interviewed what they want the future of politics to look like. They all said relatively the same thing, which I think was summed up best in Jacob’s answer:

 “Pretty much the same, but also really different… let me explain.”

““Right now, the world doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think we all want politicians who will get up and do something good, not just for our nation, but to make the world a better place. And that’s really challenging; you can’t get people like that anymore. I want for everyone to see eye to eye when it comes to where our country is going. I agree with the two party system, but maybe one where the views aren’t so different. We should all be supporting one another, but just not through politics, through others means, too.”

So what can we do?

"We just have to listen to each other." Jonas says, shrugging a little, because he knows what backlash he can get by saying that. "It's the irony of the open-minded conservative. People don't think you exist."

“Respect the democratic process, and allow people to express themselves. If you truly believe in something, you won’t have to defend it.” Suggests Alessandra.  

Jacob looked at this whole situation, from both perspectives (he also got a look at what the other  

interviewees said), and told me the following:

"We need to start to understand people beyond their ideas. Your political views do not summarize your entire identity, and we need to remember that about other people. You may not agree with the things other people say, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to listen. Political views only become violent when people become violent."

Lisa and Adam agreed, saying that listening to others allows for your thoughts to be challenged, and that because everyone is in the process of changing, it is important that we understand that our political ideas change, too. Allow yourself to be challenged. Your views aren’t forever, and it’s certainly not your job, as either a student, a professor or anyone else to change the political views of another person, except for when it is directly harmful, “then maybe try to convince them out of it.” Adam says, in a joking but serious expression.

I think it was Janice, who really sent it home: "Sure, people are going to disagree with you. That's how people are. That's democracy. This is proof the process is working. Some people take it too far and lash out if you disagree with them. That's not democracy, and regardless where you come from, it's not getting you anywhere."

Politics are complicated, and having your opinion being heard and understood is a challenge. Learning to listen to the other side, as much as that may go against everything you believe in is how one can discover what they truly believe in

 and who they support. Politics is thinking about yourself and what you want the world to look like, but remembering the needs of others as well. Being conservative - the minority - especially in places where all mindsets are to be considered equal, can be especially challenging for some students. So, no matter what side of the political spectrum you come from, step outside your echo chamber, listen to your opponent sand challenge your ideas. This is development, this is democracy, this is the future.

5 Red Flags Your Relationship Is Toxic

Do NOT miss these signs.

When we’re in the thick of our day-to-day life with an *******, we don’t see the long-term negative impact our relationship has on our mood, self-esteem, self-confidence, values, goals and our other meaningful relationships. We can transform from a motivated, healthy, happy person into a miserable, sniveling wreck no one wants to be around without even knowing it’s happening.

The 10 Biggest Mistakes Men Make In Relationships

This is reminiscent of the story of the frog who is put in a pool of cool water. He doesn’t realize it’s actually a pot on a stove that is slowly coming to boil. He’s cooked and ready to eat before he even knows it. And I don’t think we want to turn into a delicious pair of frog legs on our toxic roustabout’s silver platter.

Here are 5 signs you’re in a toxic relationship that show through changes in yourself.

1. Friends and Family Don’t Like Who You’ve Become When With Your Man.

It’s a red flag when your family doesn’t like your guy, but that reaction can cut both ways. Have you ever had someone who really loves you, someone who truly has your back, say something like this to you: “It’s not that I don’t like your boyfriend/lover/spouse. It’s just that I don’t like who you become when you’re with him. I feel like you’re not being your true self”?

I can’t tell you how many times I heard some variation of that line from friends and family while I was dating each of my heartbreakers. But I was in denial because I was neck-deep in an oxytocin-dopamine tsunami of addiction to the relationships and didn’t want to look too closely at what they were costing me.

My relationship with The Greek God encompassed most of my college years. And along with the damage he did to my body image, he dinged me in other ways, too. After several months of dating, he began having questionable relationships with other women. Consequently, I morphed from a carefree, fun-loving, popular co-ed to an isolated, loner who developed spy skills on a par with the CIA, doing those patented, codependent 3 AM stakeouts.

This was accompanied by digging through his personal papers and letters, driving hours to see if he was really where he said he was, then driving back without him even knowing I’d been there. My friends and family noticed how I transformed into a neurotic Geisha when my guy was around and a complaining harridan when he wasn’t in sight.

They tried to intervene, which made me pull away from them. And once I’d marginalized the closest people in my life, I further isolated myself in the toxic relationship.

2. You Become Unreliable and Inconsistent.

When the man we love is inconsistent and unreliable, we can often mirror him, becoming unreliable and inconsistent with everyone except our Romeo. For him, we’ll make ourselves available at a ping, waiting hours or days for him to deign to see us. But then we start being late for or canceling appointments with friends, family, and colleagues in order to be forever on-call for our unpredictable *******.

And as we wait at the beck and call of our lover, other meaningful relationships fall by the wayside. People stop calling because they know we’ll throw them over the second our rascal crooks his little finger. Pretty soon our lives become small, insular and lonely. And isolation is the worst thing that can happen to a relationship addict.

3. You Do Weird Things to Manage or Affirm the Relationship.

If you live in Venice Beach, as I did, you might seek the wisdom of a Shaman, a psychic, or a hypnotist. Anyone might predict a wonderful future for you and your heartbreaker if you can just figure out how to control him. Worse, you might rely on the wrong self-help book that affirms your choice to stay in your heart-stomping situation with the false belief you can influence your man by applying the tools presented within.

For a time John Gray’s still-popular Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus was my Bible. I’ll give you an example of the absolute time wastage that occurred when I invested in using the tools in Gray’s book.

Gray writes:

“When a Martian (men) gets upset, he never talks about what is bothering him. He would never burden another Martian with his problem unless his friend’s assistance was necessary to solve the problem. Instead, he becomes very quiet and goes to his private cave to think about his problem, mulling it over to find a solution.”

Gray explains that Venusians (women) need to be patient and let men come out of their cave when they’re ready. So I waited. And waited. And waited.

What I didn’t realize was that when you’re the only one scratching and fighting for the relationship, Gray’s advice can prolong your tolerance for very bad behavior and keep you in purgatory indefinitely. The reality is, a relationship is only as good as the person who tries the least.

4. You Turn the Narcissist’s Breadcrumbs into a Rustic Loaf.

The longer we stay in toxic circumstances, the more we deplete our jet fuel and self-worth. Until soon we’re giving the scoundrel credit for doing the absolute minimum to keep our relationship slogging along. Women trapped in soul-numbing situations are extraordinary bakers. They can take their chap’s breadcrumbs and whip them into a rustic loaf because they desperately want to justify staying with him.

For example, Caroline moved in with Toby, her boyfriend of three years, because she was certain that grappling him into a shared domicile would evolve into a marriage proposal. Toby, a non-committal, workaholic, traveling salesman, was emblazoned with red flags. But Caroline thought getting Toby to the altar would solve all of their problems.

Toby’s moping, lying, cheating and stonewalling would disappear, as would Caroline’s nagging, bitching, spying and auditioning for a wife. Predictably, once Caroline moved in, Toby’s moping ramped up. He hedged like a hedgehog against making plans with Caroline’s family and friends. And his workaholism doubled.

If You Do These 10 Things You’re Headed Toward Lasting Love (Yay!)

Their first Christmas together, Caroline tried to harangue Toby into helping her decorate their house for the season. She thought that if they hung tinsel, wreaths, and garlands together they’d morph into a “real” couple. Toby managed to be busy whenever Caroline wanted to decorate. With Christmas Eve fast approaching, Caroline decided to decorate the tree and house alone. She then scolded Toby for not helping her.

The next morning, she found Toby heading off for an extremely early work meeting. Caroline rolled out of bed to start another painful, obsessive, tiny little day. Then she discovered Toby’s contribution to their holiday home. There on the mantel, above their fireplace, he’d hung a teeny, tiny, fig leaf-sized Christmas stocking. He’d helped her decorate! That diminutive red stocking, with the white faux fur trim, made Caroline’s heart swell.

Sweet Jesus! He was trying! He loved her! He wanted to make her happy! Just look at that microscopic, imperceptible little boot! Any infinitesimal gesture on Toby’s part was a gem polished to a fine luster in Caroline’s heart until she began to expect less and less and less… until she finally gave him credit for almost nothing at all.

I’m happy to report that Caroline pulled herself up by the Christmas bootstraps and moved out of the home she made to catch Toby. She spent last Christmas decorating with her new roommate, minus drama, with lots of delicious hot chocolate and mildly inedible fruitcake.

5. You Become Addicted to the Cycle of Abuse.

It’s important, that I make it very clear that I’m talking about emotional abuse. If you’re in a physically abusive relationship put this down right now and immediately seek help. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline is at 1-800-799-SAFE.

This guest article originally appeared on YourTango.com: 5 Signs You’re In A TOXIC Relationship (That’s Going To End Badly).

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2017/03/13/5-red-flags-your-relationship-is-toxic/

5 Red Flags Your Relationship Is Toxic

Do NOT miss these signs.

When we’re in the thick of our day-to-day life with an *******, we don’t see the long-term negative impact our relationship has on our mood, self-esteem, self-confidence, values, goals and our other meaningful relationships. We can transform from a motivated, healthy, happy person into a miserable, sniveling wreck no one wants to be around without even knowing it’s happening.

The 10 Biggest Mistakes Men Make In Relationships

This is reminiscent of the story of the frog who is put in a pool of cool water. He doesn’t realize it’s actually a pot on a stove that is slowly coming to boil. He’s cooked and ready to eat before he even knows it. And I don’t think we want to turn into a delicious pair of frog legs on our toxic roustabout’s silver platter.

Here are 5 signs you’re in a toxic relationship that show through changes in yourself.

1. Friends and Family Don’t Like Who You’ve Become When With Your Man.

It’s a red flag when your family doesn’t like your guy, but that reaction can cut both ways. Have you ever had someone who really loves you, someone who truly has your back, say something like this to you: “It’s not that I don’t like your boyfriend/lover/spouse. It’s just that I don’t like who you become when you’re with him. I feel like you’re not being your true self”?

I can’t tell you how many times I heard some variation of that line from friends and family while I was dating each of my heartbreakers. But I was in denial because I was neck-deep in an oxytocin-dopamine tsunami of addiction to the relationships and didn’t want to look too closely at what they were costing me.

My relationship with The Greek God encompassed most of my college years. And along with the damage he did to my body image, he dinged me in other ways, too. After several months of dating, he began having questionable relationships with other women. Consequently, I morphed from a carefree, fun-loving, popular co-ed to an isolated, loner who developed spy skills on a par with the CIA, doing those patented, codependent 3 AM stakeouts.

This was accompanied by digging through his personal papers and letters, driving hours to see if he was really where he said he was, then driving back without him even knowing I’d been there. My friends and family noticed how I transformed into a neurotic Geisha when my guy was around and a complaining harridan when he wasn’t in sight.

They tried to intervene, which made me pull away from them. And once I’d marginalized the closest people in my life, I further isolated myself in the toxic relationship.

2. You Become Unreliable and Inconsistent.

When the man we love is inconsistent and unreliable, we can often mirror him, becoming unreliable and inconsistent with everyone except our Romeo. For him, we’ll make ourselves available at a ping, waiting hours or days for him to deign to see us. But then we start being late for or canceling appointments with friends, family, and colleagues in order to be forever on-call for our unpredictable *******.

And as we wait at the beck and call of our lover, other meaningful relationships fall by the wayside. People stop calling because they know we’ll throw them over the second our rascal crooks his little finger. Pretty soon our lives become small, insular and lonely. And isolation is the worst thing that can happen to a relationship addict.

3. You Do Weird Things to Manage or Affirm the Relationship.

If you live in Venice Beach, as I did, you might seek the wisdom of a Shaman, a psychic, or a hypnotist. Anyone might predict a wonderful future for you and your heartbreaker if you can just figure out how to control him. Worse, you might rely on the wrong self-help book that affirms your choice to stay in your heart-stomping situation with the false belief you can influence your man by applying the tools presented within.

For a time John Gray’s still-popular Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus was my Bible. I’ll give you an example of the absolute time wastage that occurred when I invested in using the tools in Gray’s book.

Gray writes:

“When a Martian (men) gets upset, he never talks about what is bothering him. He would never burden another Martian with his problem unless his friend’s assistance was necessary to solve the problem. Instead, he becomes very quiet and goes to his private cave to think about his problem, mulling it over to find a solution.”

Gray explains that Venusians (women) need to be patient and let men come out of their cave when they’re ready. So I waited. And waited. And waited.

What I didn’t realize was that when you’re the only one scratching and fighting for the relationship, Gray’s advice can prolong your tolerance for very bad behavior and keep you in purgatory indefinitely. The reality is, a relationship is only as good as the person who tries the least.

4. You Turn the Narcissist’s Breadcrumbs into a Rustic Loaf.

The longer we stay in toxic circumstances, the more we deplete our jet fuel and self-worth. Until soon we’re giving the scoundrel credit for doing the absolute minimum to keep our relationship slogging along. Women trapped in soul-numbing situations are extraordinary bakers. They can take their chap’s breadcrumbs and whip them into a rustic loaf because they desperately want to justify staying with him.

For example, Caroline moved in with Toby, her boyfriend of three years, because she was certain that grappling him into a shared domicile would evolve into a marriage proposal. Toby, a non-committal, workaholic, traveling salesman, was emblazoned with red flags. But Caroline thought getting Toby to the altar would solve all of their problems.

Toby’s moping, lying, cheating and stonewalling would disappear, as would Caroline’s nagging, bitching, spying and auditioning for a wife. Predictably, once Caroline moved in, Toby’s moping ramped up. He hedged like a hedgehog against making plans with Caroline’s family and friends. And his workaholism doubled.

If You Do These 10 Things You’re Headed Toward Lasting Love (Yay!)

Their first Christmas together, Caroline tried to harangue Toby into helping her decorate their house for the season. She thought that if they hung tinsel, wreaths, and garlands together they’d morph into a “real” couple. Toby managed to be busy whenever Caroline wanted to decorate. With Christmas Eve fast approaching, Caroline decided to decorate the tree and house alone. She then scolded Toby for not helping her.

The next morning, she found Toby heading off for an extremely early work meeting. Caroline rolled out of bed to start another painful, obsessive, tiny little day. Then she discovered Toby’s contribution to their holiday home. There on the mantel, above their fireplace, he’d hung a teeny, tiny, fig leaf-sized Christmas stocking. He’d helped her decorate! That diminutive red stocking, with the white faux fur trim, made Caroline’s heart swell.

Sweet Jesus! He was trying! He loved her! He wanted to make her happy! Just look at that microscopic, imperceptible little boot! Any infinitesimal gesture on Toby’s part was a gem polished to a fine luster in Caroline’s heart until she began to expect less and less and less… until she finally gave him credit for almost nothing at all.

I’m happy to report that Caroline pulled herself up by the Christmas bootstraps and moved out of the home she made to catch Toby. She spent last Christmas decorating with her new roommate, minus drama, with lots of delicious hot chocolate and mildly inedible fruitcake.

5. You Become Addicted to the Cycle of Abuse.

It’s important, that I make it very clear that I’m talking about emotional abuse. If you’re in a physically abusive relationship put this down right now and immediately seek help. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline is at 1-800-799-SAFE.

This guest article originally appeared on YourTango.com: 5 Signs You’re In A TOXIC Relationship (That’s Going To End Badly).

from World of Psychology http://ift.tt/2ng2aQ4 via IFTTT