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June 9 - August 6, 2023
every thought is preceded by a perception, every impulse is preceded by a thought, every action is preceded by an impulse, and man is not so private a being that his behavior is unseen, his patterns undetectable.
We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait.
Promises are used to convince us of an intention, but they are not guarantees. A guarantee is a promise that offers some compensation if the speaker fails to deliver; he commits to make it all right again if things don’t go as he says they would. But promises offer no such collateral. They are the very hollowest instruments of speech, showing nothing more than the speaker’s desire to convince you of something.
Trust that what causes alarm probably should, because when it comes to danger, intuition is always right in at least two important ways: 1. It is always in response to something. 2. It always has your best interest at heart.
Clearly, not everything we predict will come to pass, but since intuition is always in response to something, rather than making a fast effort to explain it away or deny the possible hazard, we are wiser (and more true to nature) if we make an effort to identify the hazard, if it exists.
It is precisely because some people are not familiar with violent behavior that they feel they cannot predict it, yet they daily predict non-violent behavior and the process is identical
Many believe the process of creativity is one of assembling thoughts and concepts, but highly creative people will tell you that the idea, the song, the image, was in them, and their task was to get it out, a process of discovery, not design.
Anger is a very seductive emotion because it is profoundly energizing and exhilarating.
Though we want to believe that violence is a matter of cause and effect, it is actually a process, a chain in which the violent outcome is only one link. The process of suicide starts way before the act of suicide. The same is true for homicide.
Because threats are often spoken from emotion, and because emotions are ephemeral, threateners often lose their will over time. Threats and promises alike are easy to speak, harder to honor.
If you can convince an extortionist that the harm he threatens does not worry you, you have at a minimum improved your negotiating position. In many cases, you may actually neutralize the whole matter.
When any type of threat includes indirect or veiled references to things they might do, such as “You’ll be sorry,” or “Don’t mess with me,” it is best to ask directly, “What do you mean by that?” Ask exactly what the person is threatening to do. His elaboration will almost always be weaker than his implied threat. If, on the other hand, his explanation of the comment is actually an explicit threat, better to learn it now than to be uncertain later.
People who refuse to let go often make small requests that appear reasonable, like Tommy’s letter of reference, though the real purpose of such requests is to cement attachment or gain new reasons for contact.
The option of engaging a pursuer will always be available to you, but once it is applied, you cannot simply go back to watching and waiting, even though you may find it wasn’t so bad by comparison.
Believing that others will react as we would is the single most dangerous myth of intervention.
JACA has shown you that people don’t just “snap.” There is a process as observable, and often as predictable, as water coming to a boil.
Checking references and checking with former employers is an absolutely critical duty of every employer.
We can all rationalize anything, and when an employer is too anxious to fill a position, intuition is ignored. As I mentioned earlier about hiring baby-sitters, the goal should be to disqualify poor applicants rather than qualify good applicants. Those who are good will qualify themselves.
The concept of appropriate supervision can be stated in six words: praise for performance—correction for errors.
Once the termination decision has been made, your meeting with the employee is to inform him of your decision, period.
The whole theme of the termination meeting should be that you are confident he will succeed in the future, find work he will enjoy, and do well.
Accordingly, if an employee makes threats when he is fired, the best theme for the reaction is “I understand you are upset, but the things you are talking about are not your style. I know you are far too reasonable and have too good a future to even consider such things.”
He could have benefited from the wisdom of Oliver Wendell Holmes: “The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.”
To override that most natural and central instinct, a person must come to believe that he or she is not worth protecting. Being beaten by a “loved one” sets up a conflict between two instincts that should never compete: the instinct to stay in a secure environment (the family) and the instinct to flee a dangerous environment.
I believe that the first time a woman is hit, she is a victim and the second time, she is a volunteer.
For men like this, rejection is a threat to the identity, the persona, to the entire self, and in this sense their crimes could be called murder in defense of the self.
persistence only proves persistence—it does not prove love. The fact that a romantic pursuer is relentless doesn’t mean you are special—it means he is troubled.
Stalking is how some men raise the stakes when the woman doesn’t play along. It is a crime of power, control, and intimidation very similar to date rape. In fact, many cases of date-stalking could be described as extended rapes; they take away freedom, and they honor the desires of the man and disregard the wishes of the woman.
If you tell someone ten times that you don’t want to talk to him, you are talking to him—nine more times than you wanted to.
Conditional rejections are not rejections—they are discussions.
The naive pursuer is usually distinguishable from conventional stalkers by his lack of machismo and his lack of anger at being rejected.
Men who cannot let go choose women who cannot say No
To avoid these situations, listen to yourself right from the start. To avoid escalation if you are already in a stalking situation, listen to yourself at every step along the way. When it comes to date-stalkers, your intuition is now loaded, so listen.
But families can’t sue Satan or Allah, so record stores and musical groups are sometimes all they’ve got.
The heavy metal in trains surely has resulted in many more deaths than the heavy metal in music, even so-called death metal music.
Fathers are so important because they teach boys various ways to be men. Sadly, too many boys learn from the media or from each other what scholars call “protest masculinity,” characterized by toughness and the use of force. That is not the only way to be a man, of course, but it’s the only way they know.
No ceremony attaches to the moment that a child sees his own worth reflected in the eyes of an encouraging adult. Though nothing apparent marks the occasion, inside that child a new view of self might take hold.
Still, even though it is so expensive for us, mistreatment will probably continue until we take an entirely different view of children, not as temporary visitors who will someday grow into citizens, but as full-fledged, fully contributing, fully entitled members of our society, just as they are right now.
Assassins teach each other, each learning something from the ones before.
Getting caught for some awful violence should be the start of oblivion, not the biggest day of one’s life.
Weak security improvements—including those you might make in your own life—are sometimes worse than doing nothing because they give false peace of mind and convince people that safety is being addressed when it is not. Poorly designed security fools everyone… except the attacker.
When you accept the survival signal as a welcome message and quickly evaluate the environment or situation, fear stops in an instant.
When it comes to survival signals, our minds have already done their best work by the time we try to figure things out. In effect, we’ve reached the finish line and handily won the race before even hearing the starting pistol—if we just listen without debate.
Worry is the fear we manufacture—it is not authentic. If you choose to worry about something, have at it, but do so knowing it’s a choice. Most often, we worry because it provides some secondary reward.
Anxiety, unlike real fear, is always caused by uncertainty.
I have gotten great benefits from taking the voice of skepticism that I used to apply to my intuition and applying it instead to the dreaded outcomes I imagined were coming. Worry will almost always buckle under a vigorous interrogation.
Being exposed to constant alarm and urgency shell-shocks us to the point that it becomes impossible to separate the survival signal from the sound bite. Because it’s sensationalism and not informationalism, we get a distorted view of what actually poses a hazard to us.
