Sublime

In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me. • There was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from ev

Insecure attachment styles are actually strategies for managing the uncomfortable emotions aroused by Mother’s inconsistency, according to author Diana Fosha. “Their coping style— watching Mother like a hawk and clinging to her to reassure themselves she won’t disappear again—is their…

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Another foster-care buzzword is “independence,” which Paul counters with “interdependence.” “We’re all interdependent,” he points out. “The idea that we’re asking our young people to go out in the world completely alone and call themselves independent is crazy. We need to teach them how to be interdependent, which means teaching them how to have re

“Bullying is a problem in schools everywhere,” Ole tells me.28 “It has always been a problem and probably always will be. But true bullying—intentionally disempowering or isolating individuals and systematically demeaning and hurting them over a period of time—has not increased. It is no more common now than it was when I began my career twenty-fiv

Dad deprivation is the main hole in the heart common to boys vulnerable to gangs12 and to boys targeted by sexual predators.

All over the world terrorist regimes use isolation to break people’s spirit. This weapon of psychological terrorism is daily deployed in our nation against teenage boys. In isolation they lose the sense of their value and worth. No wonder then that when they reenter a community, they bring with them killing rage as their primary defense.

These are lost children looking for an identity, looking for a way to feel strength, to feel like they matter.

A child can be falsely empowered through neglect, as happens when kids are parented by gangs of peers in lieu of appropriate adults to guide them. Children need limits. Children’s natural grandiose, selfish tendencies need to be ameliorated by an adult.