8 posts tagged “problems”

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Lazarus Long, fictional character in Robert A Heinlein novels

"Neurotic" in this case may be taken to mean "emotionally excessive to the point of being harmful."

Insecurity breeds jealousy. The two are not irrevocably linked. Insecurity can also lead to bullying, to lack of an ability to commit to a relationship, to various emotional problems other than neuroses, to addictions, to violence and rage, to bad relationships and to divorce.

Consider how prevalent these are in our society.

They are so common that social scientists refer to them as social problems, meaning that so many people have these problems that the numbers alone create further problems in churches and clubs, in communities, in the workplace, in legislative assemblies of government, in countries, even at the United Nations.

People learn to feel secure during their maturation, as they grow from children, through adolescence, into adulthood and beyond. They key word in that last sentence is "learn." People learn to feel secure. It doesn't come as a matter of course. People learn insecurity as well.

If security or lack of it is learned, who teaches it? We all help in the process of teaching insecurity. Insecurity is another word for fear. People learn insecurity in their families, as children, in school (not intentionally in the classroom), in the playground, in various groups and unhealthy friendships. They learn it from television and newspapers that encourage us to fear each other, on the street, in offices, in elevators, in our homes. They learn it from clerks in stores who ignore them while helping other customers who came in later.

Where do people learn security? That which should be learned is usually taught by someone, isn't it?

No one teaches people how to be secure. No one teaches them that fear is not just harmful, but unnecessary. In the United States, the recently retired president, self-titled "the war president," taught the necessity of believing in a War On Terror (with what results?) and he personally controlled the status of alerts (Amber Alert, Red Alert).

Learning to avoid fear and how to feel secure can be taught. It's a matter of understanding certain facts and mastering some skills. If it can be taught and if it's so important and so damaging to us personally and to our communities and our countries, we should be teaching it.

The information needed and the skills to be learned are available. They are neither hidden nor secret. They simply are not taught.

Are you afraid of anything? Do you feel insecure? Lots of people do, but it's not a necessary consequence of modern society as ultra-conservatives would have us believe.We fear and we feel insecure because we have not learned how to avoid these harmful emotions.

Someone has something to gain by making us feel afraid and insecure in such massive numbers. Of that you may be certain. I won't point fingers because it will not take much thinking on your part to figure out who is responsible for your fear and insecurity.

The economy is bad, are you afraid to lose your job? Unless you die within the next two years, you will survive the recession and get another job. Plan now what you would do and how you would go about it if you were to lose your job. If you don't make a plan, maybe you have something to worry about. If you do, you won't need to worry because you will know exactly what you will do.

If your spouse died or unexpectedly announced his/her desire for a divorce, what would you do? With a plan, these events would bring unhappiness. But they would not necessarily destroy your life. Having a plan of what you would do in case of tragedy is not a self fulfilling prophesy. It's simply being ready.

There are two ways to avoid insecurity and fear. You learned them by reading this article.

It would be wise if this kind of information and these skills were taught to everyone. It could be taught in schools, if we wanted it.

It would cost almost nothing to prepare teachers to teach social and emotional skills. Just give each teacher a book about it and the authority to teach it.

Imagine a world without fear.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow secure and self confident children into adults who won't contribute to the social problems we endure today and who will lead emotionally and socially healthy lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Your life today is a result of your thinking yesterday. Your life tomorrow will be determined by what you think today.
- John C. Maxwell (Think on These Things, Beacon Hill Press, 1979), American leadership coach (b.1947 )

Don't think you are alone in believing that life is mysterious, that reality is impossible to understand. Anyone who doesn't think that has allowed his brain to settle with what he has been told to believe and to understand.

As you read this sentence, there are nearly seven billion versions of reality among us humans. What's more, by the time you finish reading this article, many of those realities will have changed. Some people will think differently, thus they perceive the reality of that moment differently than they did before.

Can you remember what you thought about the world ten years ago? It's not the same as it is now, is it? In fact, it wouldn't have been the same for you five years ago, one year ago, even a few days ago. Everything you experience alters your sense of what is real.

If you pay attention to (believe) what the media tell you, you will believe that the world is rapidly becoming a more terrible, even horrifying, place. It isn't, based on a huge survey of factors around the planet, but it serves the needs of the media for us to experience some fear about the way of the world, enough that we will tune in to their next broadcast or read their next newspaper or magazine.

If you believe those who criticize you--many do, even if you are not aware of it--then you will see yourself as a clearly inferior being among a much more superior group of fellow humans. They want you to feel that way. If you do, then they have changed your reality. If you do not believe them and act contrary to what they think of you, eventually you will change their reality by giving them a different impression about you.

Even the belief you have about the reality of the world--your world--this moment will be different from someone close to you, such as your spouse. What's more, your spouse's (friend's, mate's, mother's, sister's) sense of reality where it concerns you will differ significantly from your own sense of reality about yourself.

I am reminded of the chipmunks I see outside my window where I live. Chipmunks (known properly as the eastern chipmunk) are solitary squirrels that live in burrows they dig in the ground. They fight with every other chipmunk they meet, usually over food or burrow space, throughout the year (except when they are sleeping during winter). But when mating time comes, they are great romancers and lovers. Once the deed is done, with as many mates as they can find, they return to their solitary existence. When the females have tended to their young, they send them off to fend for themselves, as most rodents do, so they can be alone again.

Being more sociable creatures, we don't try to live alone for most of our lives except to mate. Yet mating is one of the few things we do that we all agree about. Many of us try to avoid procreating during the process, but we still want to have sex because it's fun, pleasurable, satisfying and most of us get a good feeling by helping our partners to enjoy themselves and to feel good.

Once the sex is over, we become relative strangers who cohabit, friends and roommates who live together for their mutual benefit. Until it's time to have sex again.

How can two people ever stay married under circumstances like that? Actually, it's not that hard. But the condition is that we must always consider and work toward the best interests of our partner (or immediate family). Sometimes (often) that means putting their best interests ahead of our own. When that doesn't happen--when one person's own best interests take precedence for themselves most of the time--a relationship is little more than a way to pass time between episodes of sex. Eventually, the relationship will fail.

For some people in a failing relationship, their reality is that their marriage is good and healthy, until the other person passes them the word that it isn't. We may call it betrayal or cheating, but it's simply a matter of two people having realities that are too different from each other's.

A good relationship is not a matter of compromise, as we are taught. Compromise is part of it, but only as a consequence of putting the best interests of the other person first. Compromise comes after, not first. Compromise only comes first in business relationships.

How can we put the best interests of our significant other first if we aren't sure what those best interests are? If you think that your other half's best interests are the same as yours most or all of the time, then you likely don't know what the other person's best interests are.

It has wisely been said that a good relationship is not a matter of staring lovingly into each other's eyes, but of looking outward in the same direction and seeing similar realities.

Just a little something for you to think about.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions to social problems that most people and governments consider realities of modern life, but that aren't. They can't see the solutions because they don't look in the right directions. The solutions are easy and cheap, but hard to find it we aren't looking for them in the right way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

As I write this I am experiencing a high level of anxiety brought about by stress from many different sources over a period of several weeks, my present purpose being to convey not my feelings but the effects that stress over a long period of time has on my thinking and decision making. The effects of stress on one person can affect another person similarly, if not identically, thus my experience can be a learning situation for you.

I have experienced depression and its effects in the past, though that was cleared entirely by my taking vitamin D supplements to compensate for the lack of sufficient direct sunlight on my skin to allow my body to create vitamin D on its own. The effects of depression bear striking similarities to the effects of stress/anxiety over a long period of time.

With depression I found that triggers would set off a bout of anger for a period of several minutes (up to an hour), then the emotional energy would dissipate and turn into what most of us would call depression. With stress, the anger comes to stay, varying in degree enough that it could often be called intolerance of the behaviour of others, inability to understand the life situations of others (lack of empathy) or a strong desire to get away from the company of specific people, rather than it being labelled easily as anxiety.

My present anxiety caused by long term stress has not resulted in any thoughts of suicide, which depression has done in the past. While I seek relief from the effects of my anxiety, I do not want to resort to easy solutions such as medication, addictive behaviour or the ultimate easy way out, suicide.

Why should you care? One or more people you know (perhaps many) may exhibit the some similar behaviours as I do right now, for the same causes. You may know nothing about the causes of the people you know or my own because we don't talk about them. We only talk about the effects, the bad behaviour, sometimes our own but usually of others who we think act weird or permanently irritable.

Stress has caused me to lose sleep--a considerable amount over a period of weeks--and this could easily compromise my immune system as well as causing me to exhibit symptoms of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation alone could cause irritability, inability to get along with others and a short fuse on the temper. Coupled with long term anxiety it could result in amplified instances of anger, intolerance, not paying attention to the needs of loved ones, not taking proper care of loved ones due to an egocentric attitude, even a desire to generate conditions which could destroy a close relationship just to have something "happen" to give a person the feeling that he or she is in control of something.

Stress can cause loss of sleep, but the sleep loss effects add to the effects of long term anxiety, rather than simply overlapping them. One doubles up with the other, so to speak.

Now we have causes which could result in such well known behaviours as road rage, office rage, marital arguments, marital incompatibility (real or imagined), disconnects in relationships with a person's own children, lack of interest in sex (at least of the softer, gentler, more loving kind), erectile dysfunction, inability to cope with other personal problems, even turning to addictive behaviours or substances for some form of relief.

Enter drugs, prescribed and otherwise. Prozac is the most prescribed drug in North America. Legal and illegal sales of Viagra and Cialis flourish. As many as 25 percent of people in many communities may have used marijuana or one of its derivatives

in the past year. The rates of divorce in most countries of the West hover around or above 50 percent. Examples of physical and emotional abuse surface frequently. Police must deal with family problems on about one-quarter of their calls in many communities. I don't have statistics to show what effect martial problems could have on other socially unacceptable behaviours, such as fights in bars or even theft from employers.

Where do people who suffer from these problems turn to find socially acceptable help to solve their problems? A family doctor will likely prescribe drugs, which solve nothing, merely cover up symptoms. Some--the lucky ones--get referred to counsellors who specialize in helping people who suffer from anxiety symptoms caused by high stress. Unfortunately, that part of the health care community is so fixed on a steady source of income that treatment may not be the best because it's in the financial best interests of the practitioner to have the professional help last as long as possible.

The whole ethic of teaching children about what they must do to "succeed" in the working world prepares them to face and accept stress and long term anxiety, though not how to cope with them.

We teach kids to not just enter the rat race, but to believe that this is the way life is and should be, and that they should learn to "enjoy it" by making as much money as possible and finding as many "interesting" ways of spending it as they can.

This article cannot present instant cures for complex problems. It can only point to the way that those with a concern for solving those problems should turn.

Treat broken adults one by one and we continue with our present kinds of problems. Teach children how to cope with the lives they will live in the future, as adults, and we change the path of the future for our descendants.

Change is possible if we know what we want to achieve and where to begin that change process.

Teach the children.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can cope with their lives as adults better than today's adults can.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

When you blame others, you give up your power to change. - Douglas Noel Adams, English author (1952-2001)

No one likes to blame themselves for anything. It's not easy to accept fault, then lie down nicely and wait for the consequences to assault.

That's not what Adams is suggesting we should do. He's recommending that we change ourselves to account for the new learning we gained by making the mistake, by committing the crime or the sin, by simply being a fallible human like everyone else.

Change is what growth is about. Change in our lives is more important today than ever before in history.

It used to be, in past centuries and millennia, that the older people were the wiser ones. In the past, the sum of human knowledge changed very little over a lifetime, so the longer one lived, the more one knew. That applied to human experience--personal or vicarious--as well as to information. That is, an old and wise person could speak to the wisdom of a younger person taking a particular action or making a specific decision because he or she would know that the way proposed did not work in the past when others had tried it.

Today the sum of human knowledge doubles every century. It's totally impossible to keep up with it. Older people are more inclined to fall behind with their grasp of new technologies and ways of thinking. They tend to be behind the mainstream, not ahead of it. Most old people are not wise in the traditional sense of the word. They are likely backward. So the younger generations tend to ignore their advice because they don't have the wisdom that older people of past generations were able to accumulate.

Old people today have less value to the functioning of their society and their culture today than ever before in history. The reason is that younger generations need different things from the older generation than the younger generations of the past needed. And the older ones have not changed to fulfill those new needs. Of course there are exceptions, as there are with any generalization.

That disconnect can change. But only when people accept that they must learn and continue to change throughout their lifetime.

Every change is not necessarily right. Some are wrong. Wrong in every conceivable way except that they give more power to one or more individuals. See the history of Hitler or today's Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe for confirmation. That requires older people who may have the time and the improved level of wisdom relating to change to speak up and gather people to work toward reversing or eliminating the results of the power mongers who made the wrong decisions.

Would removing Mugabe today result in the same consequences as removing Saddam Hussein did in Iraq? Answering that question well requires much greater cognitive functioning and knowledge retention than life decisions did in the past.

A few years ago we blamed Saddam for the state of health of Iraq. So the US and its allies removed him. That resulted in a war that has lasted for several years. The change that was needed was not simply removal of a dictator, which opened up animosities that captors of Saddam could not imagine. As it happened, Saddam (with his sons) was the one individual who was preventing a civil war in Iraq. Removing him removed the obstacle to civil war.

No one wants to remove Kim Jong Il, of North Korea, because even he was able to change when those who opposed him chose to work with him rather than against him. North Koreans will benefit as a result of changed approaches to apparently intractable problems. Not only has North Korea been removed from the notorious Axis of Evil list (only Iran remains on the list), but the people of North Korea may look forward to some day being able to eat a full meal. That's a big change. It resulted from a big change in approach by governments interested in the problem with the dictator.

Blaming doesn't work. It creates dead ends. And too often dead people.

There are no dead ends, in reality, only people who can't change their ways of thinking enough to see other possible alternatives. As Mr. Spock said in the old Star Trek series many times, "There are always alternatives." Seeing alternatives requires changes in thinking.

Bill AllinTurning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who will be able to learn and change throughout their lives because they have the right foundation to build on from early childhood.Learn more at http://billallin.com

We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same.
- Carlos Castenada, mystic and author (1925-1998)

We get out of life what we want, what we put effort into creating for ourselves.

As a Canadian, I am quite familiar with the favourite topic of Canadians meeting strangers or casual friends in a setting such as in an elevator or in line at a supermarket checkout. We talk about the weather or some level of government.

The weather is always too hot, too cold (Canada ranks as the coldest country in the world), too wet, too dry, too much snow, always too something. Governments always get raked over for something they have done wrong or something that they have done that is expected to have tragic results in the future.

Though we may have something good to say about the weather or a government in an extended conversation with a friend, those shorter casual meetings always deal with what's wrong. We complain as a matter of course. It's part of our culture.

Have you noticed how annoying someone who works nearby you is? Why can't your spouse do those few things that are important to you the way you want, at least once in a while? Kids clothes are absurdly expensive, they don't appreciate the clothes when you buy them without them on hand to try them on and give their blessing, and they make the most atrocious choices when given the opportunity to pick their own because they want to dress like their friends.

Why don't auto makers build cars to last, the way they do with trucks? Why do television newscasts always deal with bad stuff, isn't anything good happening in the world? Why do emergencies happen at the worst times so they mess up your day? Murphy was right with his law.

Get the idea? Life's a bitch, then you die, as the saying goes. Live your life focussing on the negatives and complaining about everything that catches your attention and life sucks.

Some local initiatives try to get people to avoid complaining. They exist around the world, but receive little media attention because the media does what we want them to do, report what is bad. You may not have heard of any of them. Here's an idea.

Live a complaint-free life.

Most of us have no idea how often we complain. What we know too well is how often others close to us complain, especially when they complain about us. How about trying to cut all complaining out of your life?

Here's how it works. It's best to begin with two or more people who are close to each other (house mates, co-workers) so that they can point out to the other(s) when they complain.

Select an elastic band that fits loosely over your wrist. Each time you catch yourself complaining (or are caught by the other), either snap the elastic on your wrist or transfer it to the other wrist. If you snap the elastic, don't do it hard enough to hurt yourself, just hard enough to help you remember. Both methods are used and both have their supporters.

There doesn't have to be a prize for the "winner" because everyone wins this game. It's really a lifestyle change. What you will try to do is to beat your own record for complaint-free days. It's not a competition because competitions end.

Be aware that it won't be easy. When you begin you will find yourself not being able to get through one day without a complaint of some kind. When you do get through one day, then two and more, the reward is double. First there is the success of setting your own record.

The second reward, which you will find becoming greater as you achieve longer periods of success at having complaint-free days, is that your life will be better. You will feel better about the world and about yourself.

Along with that goes the relief from stress, which many of us don't realize we experience every day. That results in better health. And better sleep.

You don't have to get a big raise, divorce your spouse or give your kids to Rumplestiltskin to feel better and live better. You have to stop punishing yourself, which is what you do by complaining.

Complaints, especially frequent ones, are like a prison you build around yourself. You don't realize what you have done until someone points it out to you. Of course you wouldn't have built a door in your prison cell because you didn't even have a plan to build it. It just happened.

Now you can build a new landscape for yourself. You can build real and positive structures in your landscape because it's entirely within your control. You aren't in control of anything so long as you live your life from complaint to complaint.

Remove the negatives that hold you down--stop complaining--and you will have built a different life for yourself.

Your culture may be filled with complainers, but that doesn't mean you have to be part of those who suffer by beating themselves up by complaining.

At first you may seem a bit odd to others because you have changed, for those you meet who knew you as your old personality. Then they will realize how you have changed. They will want to know how you accomplished it. Tell them. Explain how you did it, by eliminating one complaint from your life at a time.

Your life will never be totally free of complaints. You might not even want that because you do need some causes to make your life worthwhile.

There are always ways to say something in a positive manner that you used to say as a complaint. It's called constructive criticism. That doesn't mean that you criticize to help someone. It means that you point out a path for someone to follow that will bring benefit to that person (as well as to you, maybe).

Criticism that stops with a complaint is destructive. Criticism that continues by providing a path that will make someone's life better--especially if you point this out at the time--benefits the other person, you and the whole world as your kindness and caring spreads.

Yeah, kind of like what I just did. I told you that you complain too much, then gave you a path to follow to make your life better and healthier. You likely didn't even think of it as criticism because it showed you a way to improve your life.

That's constructive. Go find your elastic now.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers so that they have the tools to help children grow into healthy, confident, competent, complaint-free adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

"In life you can never be too kind or too fair; everyone you meet is carrying a heavy load. When you go through your day expressing kindness and courtesy to all you meet, you leave behind a feeling of warmth and good cheer, and you help alleviate the burdens everyone is struggling with."
- Brian Tracy

Some will always think you a sucker for being so nice. They may even criticize you and try to take advantage of you.

Too bad. Jealousy will do that to people.

They hate to see others who do good works, who do charitable acts without expectation of reward, who try to help others, because it doesn't conform to their miserable and depressing viewpoint of humanity.

They are so focussed on themselves and the dirty tricks and misfortunes fate has played on them that they can't look at the world from anyone else's point of view.

If you can't think what life must be like inside someone else's skin, you can't appreciate the hardships that others endure. Those who can and do look at life from another's point of view usually (in my experience, always) find that they wouldn't trade their life and their troubles for those of anyone else.

That's a strange phenomenon. When we only look at our own problems and consider how hard life is on us, we seem to have the worst problems in the world. When we seriously think about the problems that others must endure--really learn what they are and how other people struggle to cope with them--we never want to trade ours for theirs.

Think of any famous person you know, especially someone whose life you may have studied to some extent. Not just the good stuff, but the bumps, potholes and sinkholes of that person's life as well. The more you learn about the real life--the inside story that the public doesn't usually learn--the more likely you will be to be thankful you don't have that person's problems.

Look at the people you meet every day, the people closest to you, with the same eyes. Every one of them struggles with problems and almost every one will hide them so that you learn nothing. Everyone wants you to think they are fearless, until proven otherwise. Everyone wants you to believe they never make mistakes, until they are caught.

Everyone wants you to believe that they can make it on their own, no matter what their problems and no matter how little help they have with them, until they break down.

Sometimes that breakdown is emotional. Sometimes it shows up as an addiction. Often it appears as unusual or antisocial behaviour, though this is usually done away from the eyes of others these people know. Sometimes we learn about that person's problems as a result of suicide or murder, or both.

If you are only thinking about your own problems and not those of others around you, when they go over the edge you may not be prepared. You may not be able to help.

You may miss the signs and live to regret it for years afterward.

Other people have it worse than you. If you dig deep enough, you may find that everyone else does. Be gentle. Cut them some slack. Forgive. Offer a shoulder, or some time to listen.

You may save a life. You will certainly enrich your own in the process.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for people who want to teach others, especially children, how to cope with life's problems and how to help them understand the vulnerability of others they know.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Roman emperor, stoic philosopher (121 - 180 CE)

As emperor for about two decades of the greatest empire until modern times, Marcus Aurelius knew what it would be like to allow external problems to prey on his mind. Though he was known as one of the five great emperors of Rome, there was always a lineup of powerful men who wanted the job and had the swords and henchmen needed to cause him to lose his life.

Any empire has problems and a great emperor has great problems that prey on his mind day and night. He had the wisdom to separate the operations and vicissitudes of his position from the conducting of his life. Not an easy task, surely.

Considering the number of quotations attributed to him that pass around the internet nearly two millennia after his death, Marcus Aurelius distinguished admirably between himself and his people, his empire and its conquered people and occupied lands, even between himself and life itself.

Thus he knew well that to allow external influences to cause you pain and worry was to adopt the pain and worries of the world. He wouldn't do it. He respected himself too much.

Look back at your own life for a moment. Remember back ten years. What sorts of things troubled you then? Do they still trouble you now? Almost no one can say their problems of old still trouble them, unless one of their problems is lack of self confidence.

A decade ago my life seemed to be hanging by a thread due to financial problems. Sometimes I wished I could just die so that the pain would go away. Until one day I had coffee with a friend who is a chartered accountant. Just when I was thinking that my next meal might have to come from a soup kitchen, he said "You're a long way away from being bankrupt, or even from severe financial hardship."

When I stepped away from my self destructive thoughts after our casual meeting, I could see that by rearranging my finances I could pay all my bills and have a decent life. My fear of becoming poor kept me from doing what I could to improve myself. I had emotionally hog-tied myself and thrown myself into a downward spiral.

That all ended that same day. As Marcus Aurelius said, I used my power to revoke external influences that were ruining my life.

When I consider how far I have come in the past ten years, that very special life lesson that came at a time of great personal crisis in my life may have been one of the best things that has happened to me.

The amazing thing to me is not that life changed for me, because others long before me obviously knew that could happen. The amazing lesson for me was that I had the power to refuse to allow problems I had no control over to affect my life.

Since that time I have developed two different medical syndromes which impact every day and hour of my life. But I know how lucky I am that I don't have to let them bother me. I emphasize the positive in my life and ignore the negative, at least I refuse to give it any power over me. I am the positive part of me; the negative comes along, but no one cares about it, including me.

I enjoy freedom today that I never had before my great crisis (or previous ones) because I refuse to let problems I can't control affect me. And the ones I can control, I fix.

Try it. I give you the gift of freedom, if you choose to accept it.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that shows adults how making small changes in their own lives can improve them, the lives of their children and everyone else who knows them. It tells you what you need to know.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.
- Zig Ziglar

Let's first off make a major distinction between finding fault and offering ways and means for correction and improvement. Finding fault is destructive, while offering constructive criticism should be seen as coming from someone who cares.

Some say that fault finders want to raise themselves up by bringing others down, that they want, in effect, to climb over the broken bodies of those they vanquished. I disagree with that analysis. Fault finders have very low opinions of themselves--perhaps hate themselves sometimes--and want to bring others low so that they feel they are not alone at the bottom of the social heap. They may not seem insecure, but they are. So are bullies, who fit as well into this analysis as fault finders.

Fault finders have something missing in their lives, something critical to their wellbeing. It could be described as a feeling of self worth. But lacking a feeling of self worth or self esteem makes it seem as if these people are responsible for their own problems. They are surely responsible for how they deal with their problems, but not how they found themselves in that position in the first place.

The origins of lacking self esteem or self worth lie in childhood. It's often attributed to a lack of love or a lack of time spent by at least one parent with the child. No child understands time not spent by parents on them. Their whole lives revolve around learning about their world. The foundation of that world is their parents. When parents don't spend enough time with their children, they leave the foundation of the lives of their children unsecured.

There is no such thing as "quality time." That's a euphemism, an excuse, an alibi for parents giving something else greater importance than their children. Kids have no concept of "quality time." To them, there's time spent and time not spent. They keep mental notes. Time not spent hurts.

As to the lack of love, that is quite subjective. Many people, especially those who live hectic lives in modern cities, do not have a clear concept of what love is. They may not have grown up with love in their lives, so they have no idea how to look for it in their mates and little concept of how to give it to their children. They try. In my long career as a sociologist and teacher I have rarely met a parent who has not tried to be a good parent, to the best of their abilities.

If they lack ability in parenting, it's because they were not given parenting information and taught parenting skills before they needed them.

The children may also have lacked touch by parents. Loving touch is only now being discovered to contribute to the wellbeing of children, including to their health. When kids lack touch by people who love them, they feel alienated from their world. They create strange worlds for themselves, worlds that often do not correspond well to the world their parents want them to live in.

When they reach adulthood, they continue to treat others with the same lack of love and touch, especially their own families, because they don't know what others need, never having learned the lessons themselves. They often lack self esteem, which they exhibit by criticizing others. Sometimes it takes the form of bullying.

Critics, of the destructive variety, lack love and touch in their lives, at least a sufficient amount of it to give them balance, peace and a healthy measure of self respect.

Those who offer help in the form of constructive criticism may be misunderstood by those who lack sufficient self esteem and self respect (self love) as being critics. That partly explains why so many well meaning people stop trying to help others, because they have been rejected, rebuffed and even attacked by those they tried to help in the past.

By the time someone misinterprets constructive criticism (help) from others as destructive criticism, they have already reached the point of being firmly in the position of lacking self respect and love themselves.

One common characteristic of people who lack love, who lack the ability to sympathize or empathize with others, who don't know how to achieve self respect, self love or self esteem is that they vehemently deny it. Very few people, other than the most humble, will admit that they don't know how to find love, to show love or to give love. Even love of themselves.

These are hard lessons to learn. Just as a person who was once addicted to something is always a recovering addict, someone who once lacked love, loving touch and self respect will always be in the state of recovering from it, even if they learn the skills.

If people don't learn these thing as children, they tend to live the rest of their lives in a state of recovery, even if they have learned and found what they needed. In other words, even the most secure person who has found these treasures as an adult will "fall off the wagon" once in a while, will succumb to self doubt and insecurity. They, too, will usually deny this. However, having once found what they needed, they usually recover.

The only real solution to this deficit in the lives of so many adults is to teach new parents what they should know to give their children what they need. Since so many of today's adults don't have that knowledge or those skills, the fastest way to get them into the right hands is to actively teach them in classes, such as at night school.

Just as Lamaze classes have become immensely popular because young adults want to know how to get through the birthing process properly, classes in parenting would be extremely popular with young adults because they want to be good parents.

They want to be good parents. They need the opportunity to learn.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book for parents and teachers about what they need to learn to give children what they need, when they need it. It's a lifeline, a starter course in book form.
Learn more at http://billalliin.com