agirlinlove

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel unsure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. As we let our own Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

‘Drive your dead over the edge…. Take that dead person passing for the living, and just leave them off. In life, don’t be ashes, be the flame…’  Clarissa Pinkola Este

Don Imus And Bernard McGuirk re “Nappy-Headed Hos”    

I’m linking to this not at all to bring up the Imus nastiness, though perhaps reminders and thoughtful look backs aren’t so bad.  But instead because my son was mean to his cousin last night… first time ever he used language that was nasty and in this article Clarissa Pinkole Este talks so clearly and honstly about the pschological reasons children start or try out tormenting behavior… honestly I have my whole life been on the other end and the one thing I will not allow is my own son to bring up his own shell of nasty.  The language the tone, even the laugh, is modled after a neighborhood kid and we made it clear, you do not act like him, or treat people as he does or you will not spend time with him.. and we explained why and we told him we understood the alure but it was false and it would do him no good.  Reading this article with what we as parents (and with my sister) were tyring to express, well she of course explains it perfectly.  It was like clear rain water to read it, clarity, and renewing my own strength in what I believe is right and wrong and why children torment and how crippled are those who grow up to be tormentors…  I over quoted it here because I want easy access to it, the whole article though is well worth a read.

—exerpt —

In psychology of groups, being brutal with others is catching, like an infection. Thuggery and torment by one, are contagions to those who are not immune to ‘joining in;’ to those who are being thoughtless in the moment, who are impulsive, easily distracted, afraid to be thought soft, fearful of being punished or losing some advantage for not joining in, wanting favor for their families, wanting to keep a friend more than wanting to hold to an ethic, wanting to be part of a coterie that calls itself ‘elite,’ feeling pressured to keep up a false persona, or simply not weighing inevitable negative consequences yet to come for those who proliferate the dehumanizing of others.

Children try out taunting one another, and sometimes gang up on one another. However, with adult leadership, they soon drop those behaviors and instead learn civility toward those they have little in common with, and favor an authenticity of friendships with others. Children are thus helped ‘to grow up’ by both peers and adults who notice and invite them to a higher bar. They may waver in learning these skills because they are young and still practicing. But they do learn discernment as they continue to practice.

But, some, for any number of reasons, instead learn to seek excitement in insulting and being cruel… most often for an outer and an inner payoff of some kind. They often try to inveigle vulnerable others to join them in spewing… in part because they take a kind of –not happiness, although they are often guffawing and giggling while tormenting others– but rather a kind of very evanescent security…a security that comes from seeing others add to the roil by copying their own poor treatment of others.

Most often, tormenters and menacers carry a painful secret as well: they cannot bear to be lonely or without the approval of others. Thus they seek like-kind. Somewhere in life, each decided that admiration is not available to or for them. They turn to ‘negative forms of admiration’ that do not satisfy either, but amongst humans, to not be recognized for anything at all is far worse than being a consistent carrier of negativity and a seeker of negative attention.