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Showing posts from July, 2010

Abusive Betrayal of Love

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by Michele Toomey, PhD At first glance one would imagine that abusive betrayal of love refers to having an affair. That is not my focus here, however. Affairs constitute a betrayal of love, but not necessarily an abusive one. I am placing the emphasis on abusive, and that cruel act must have deliberate meanness, indifference to the pain being inflicted, and more often than not, punishment as its intent. For betrayal of love to be abusive, it must have some or all of these traits. In this particular commentary, I would like to direct attention to the abuse that frequently occurs when a relationship ends. Usually only one person wants to end a relationship. The other is often heartbroken and devastated at the prospect of losing the one s/he loves. Obviously, a very vulnerable time for both, if both have integrity and are invested in each other. However, if the one terminating the relationship lacks integrity, the only vulnerable one is the one being left. Rejection is a stinging

PTSD Symptoms from Abuse & Bullying

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This information was, in my opinion, so important for EVERYONE who has EVER been bullied -- whether as an adult or a child, online or off... verbally or emotionally abused, teased, put down, invalidated, smeared or slammed -- I am putting it here on my personal blog. I have, far too often, heard people I think should know better say -- "PTSD just PROVES [that person] is mentally ill." PTSD is NOT Mental Illness -- it is Psychological Injury. When we start to remove the stigma -- more people who need treatment & support will get it. If John McCain had become President? We'd have had a man in the White House who has PTSD. Think about it. Common features of Complex PTSD from bullying People suffering Complex PTSD as a result of bullying report consistent symptoms which further help to characterize psychiatric injury and differentiate it from mental illness. These include: Fatigue with symptoms of or similar to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (formerly ME

The Unpresidential President

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Barack Obama has managed a rare feat: The longer he holds office, the more he diminishes in stature. BY James W. Ceaser From charisma to populism—this is the slippery slope down which Barack Obama has been sliding over the past two years. In June 2008, Obama the candidate described his nomination as “the moment when .  .  . our planet began to heal.” In June 2010, Obama the president promised his partisans he would find an “ass to kick.” With the peculiar magic of his presidential campaign now a faded memory, Obama is shoring up support by the cruder method of divisive appeals. Long before the current (already hugely extended) campaign season began, Obama made it a practice to target opposition symbols (“the insurance industry,” “speculators,” “a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,” the oil companies), call out and assail individual opponents (Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner), and refer disparagingly to the Tea Party movement and Republicans in general (“this cr

What is a Paramoralism?

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Para-moralisms: The conviction that moral values exist and that some actions violate moral rules is so common and ancient a phenomenon that it seems to have some substratum at man's instinctive endowment level (although it is certainly not totally adequate for moral truth), and that it does not only represent centuries' worth of experience, culture, religion, and socialization. ...Any act can thus be proved to be immoral or morally proper by means of such para-moralisms through active suggestion, and people whose minds will succumb to such reasoning can always be found. In searching for an example of an evil act whose negative value would not elicit doubt in any social situation, ethics scholars frequently mention child abuse. However, psychologists often meet with para-moral affirmations of such behavior in their practice, such as in a family with the prefrontal field damage in the eldest sister. Her younger brothers emphatically insisted that their sister's sadistic tre

Truth as a Relative Quantity

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by Kathy Krajco [L]ike little children, narcissists view truth as a relative quantity, not an absolute. People whose thinking is thus screwed up go around talking about "your truth" and "my truth," "your reality" and "my reality." They have conveniently slipped from acknowledging that people have different points of view (and therefore different perspectives) into the logical error that they actually view different objects or events. I mentioned that such people think to determine THE truth by making their version bigger than yours. This is why people whose thinking is thus screwed up go around talking as though truth is determined by popular opinion. For example, here's the typical anti-American's favorite club: The whole world hates you Americans, so you're hateful. (Sorry, Charlie, the people full of hate are the hateful ones.) Anti-Americanism is collective narcissism, and we see the same behavior pattern in individu

Just Because They Are Women

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How to bring God's palpable presence back into our world.

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I often think about waking up in a world without my parents; being no one's daughter anymore. And being no one's partner since my marriage ended 10 years ago. Yes, I do have my beloved children. But, it would be a very lonely existence without Hashem. There is so much division in the world today. I hope that world leader's, particularly Obama - think very hard about whether their actions are TRULY fostering "estrangement or oneness." My kudos to Ms. Rigler for a terrific article. Waking Up to a World without God's Presence by Sara Yoheved Rigler How different is the world we live in! When the Temple was destroyed, the dogged illusion of Divine absence settled over our world like a perpetual fog. In this world where Divine hiddenness has replaced Divine revelation, we grope for proofs of God's existence, like fish debating about the existence of water. We are relegated to "believing" when once we simply knew. We struggle, through pra

The Meaning of Tu'Bav

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The Meaning of Tu'Bav Our Sages explain: Yom Kippur symbolizes God's forgiving Israel for the sin of the Golden Calf in the desert, for it was on that day that He finally accepted Moses' plea for forgiveness of the nation, and on that same day Moses came down from the mountain with the new set of tablets. Just as Yom Kippur symbolizes the atonement for the sin of the Golden Calf, Tu B'Av signifies the atonement for the sin of the Spies, where ten came bearing such negative reports which reduced the entire nation to panic. As a result of that sin, it was decreed by God that the nation would remain in the desert for 40 years, and that no person 20 or older would be allowed to enter Israel. On each Tisha B'Av of those 40 years, those who had reached the age of 60 that year died -- 15,000 each Tisha B'Av. This plague finally ended on Tu B'Av. Six positive events occurred on Tu B'Av: Event #1) As noted above, the plague that had accompanied the Jews in t