Dear Dr. G.,

My 25 yr old son told me via email that he is sexually attracted to me and has been for about 10 years. We talked briefly but he was incredibly embarrassed and regretted sending the email. I was beyond stunned and didn't know what to say or do. Is this at all normal? And no, I do not share his feelings at all. I'm having a very difficult time with this and it's now awkward between us. I plan to get professional help, but in the meantime just need to know…something. Thank you! Help!

A Scared Mother

Dear Mother,

You have many reasons to be confused, befuddled and anxious about your unusual and I am sure unexpected message from your son. Let me first tell you that I am very happy that you reached out to me. Apparently, your son has been having sexual feelings toward you since he was a young teenager. In response to your question-this is not typical or "normal" behavior. Yes, sons may be attracted to women who have qualities like their mothers but being sexually attracted to one's mother is unusual and odd. It is also of interest that your son chose to share this information with you rather than with a professional. I am concerned that he thought it was appropriate to share these feelings with you even though you say he later regretted sending the email.

I am curious to know what his expectations were when he sent the email and if he thought that his feelings were perfectly normal until he got a shocked response from you. This is just speculation. It is also possible that he was scared of his feelings and would have been responsive to the suggestion that he go to therapy to resolve this issue. It is also possible that he was drunk or using drugs at the time that he wrote the email. On the other hand, perhaps he is struggling with psychological problems that need to be addressed so that he can appropriately move on from his feelings toward you and get involved in relationships with appropriate partners 

Here is what I recommend you do immediately. Have a heart to heart with your son in person and let him know that you are not angry with him but that you love him, care about him deeply and then tell him that he needs to begin therapy immediately. This is both necessary and crucial. 

I wish you all the luck in the world. I know how deeply concerned you must be about your son.

Best,

Dr.G.

For more articles like this see my website:

http://drbarbaragreenberg.com/

The amount of interest in the nature of nonhuman animal (animal) minds and what's in them seems to grow daily. In keeping with this burgeoning interest, today was a very good day for writing about two very important and timely new publications focusing on the fascinating cognitive and emotional lives of other animals. The first is a book by City University of New York developmental psychologist William Crain called The Emotional Lives of Animals & Children: Insights from a Farm Sanctuary, and the second is a special issue of Time magazine called The Animal Mind: What they're thinking and feeling, and how to understand them written by Jeffrey Kluger.

Dr. Crain's short, up-to-date, easy-to-read, well-researched, and well-written book is a gem. In the first part called "Emotions in Animals and Children" chapter titles include Fear, Play, Freedom, Care, and Resilience. In the second part titled "Children, Animals, and Society" chapter titles include Children's Sense of Closeness to Animals, Becoming Detached, and Going Forward. As a developmental psychologist and co-founder with his pediatrician wife, Ellen, of Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary in Poughquag, New York, Dr. Crain brings a unique perspective to the study of animal and human emotions. I was continually fascinated by how his observations of the wide array of emotions displayed by the rescued animals informed his view of the emotional lives of young children.

In his book, Dr. Crain "honors the work of John Bowlby a psychoanalyst who began his major writings in the 1950s. Bowlby drew on biologists' observations of animals to provide a compelling account of children's attachment to their caretakers." Dr. Crain notes, "Today, the study of attachment is extremely popular" but "one would hardly know that the initial inspiration came from observations of non-human animals." Moreover, according to Dr. Crain, "there has been little effort to extend Bowlby's work -- to see how the study of animals illuminates other aspects of child development." Dr. Crain also writes, "The reluctance to follow Bowlby's lead reflects the Western worldview that considers humans as different from and superior to other species. To think about children in the same category as animals seems to demean children." However, as Dr. Crain stresses in his book, the behavior of the farm animals is incredibly useful for understanding the behavior of human children.

Unwilded youngsters need to be rewilded: Rewilding education

Dr. Crain also writes about how children show a strong tendency not to see themselves apart from other animals and display "instinctive empathy" toward them. However, youngsters are taught to detach themselves from other animals. I make a similar argument in my forthcoming book Rewilding our hearts: Building pathways of compassion and coexistence, and argue that youngsters become "unwilded" through standard educational systems and that we need to rewild education and get kids outside far more than they are now.

I came away with a new appreciation of human childhood and I highly recommend Dr. Crain's inspiring book to a broad audience. Indeed, we can learn valuable lessons from other animals about friendship, respect, empathy, trust, compassion, and love, and also learn valuable lessons about youngsters, future ambassadors for animals and nature in general. Children need to be taught well and I hope teachers will take the time to read The Emotional Lives of Animals & Children: Insights from a Farm Sanctuary.

The special issue of Time magazine also is an easy read and is well-illustrated, and covers a wide spectrum of current research on animal cognition and animal emotions. I'm thrilled that the general public will be exposed to what we know about animal minds and their rich and deep emotional lives. Section titles include "Animals have brains, but do they have minds?", The power of the pack: life in animal society", "Animal Architecture", "Animals aren't supposed to feel grief. But if this isn't mourning, what is it?", "Mental illness is not just for humans,""Do unto others: What rights do animals have?", and "People love dogs and hate rats: what that says about them -- and us".

I can't imagine a better deal than buying Dr. Crain's insightful book and the special issue of Time and catching up on the fascinating lives of the animals with whom we share our magnificent planet. Both are very well done and should appeal to a wide audience of all ages.

Marc Bekoff's latest books are Jasper's story: Saving moon bears (with Jill Robinson; see also), Ignoring nature no more: The case for compassionate conservation (see also), and Why dogs hump and bees get depressed (see also). Rewilding our hearts: Building pathways of compassion and coexistence will be published fall 2014. (marcbekoff.com; @MarcBekoff) 

In November, 2012, I spoke at TEDxUtrecht. I am not going to belabor the anxiety and exhiliration felt, the camraderie among such a diverse group of thinkers (or how because its Amsterdam, the after party was a hallucinogenic delight). Instead, amidst all of the congratulatory emails was this unsolicited email (trimmed down but without any alterations):

Hi Todd,

A colleague just forwarded me the video of your talk. Perhaps your friends will unite in telling you it was wonderful.  For me, it wasn't.  I will be stunned if it makes the cut for the TED site.  I know I *love* great talks and lectures.  I love great teachers.  But for me this was boring.  My wife had the same reaction.  

I only went through it once and could have missed something, but I think a huge deficit was you did not tell even one story.  A great story, especially a personal story in which the speaker shows vulnerability and learns something, is especially effective in a TED talk.

Next....you gave the audience all these expert-speaker-to-listener, less-than-surprising bits of advice. Not at all effective.  Not that interesting. I think you could be more effective with a better structure and different content. Just my two bits. 

Best,
[insert random person I never met or heard of]

I thought I was pretty damn good. You can't see it in the youtube video, but the host even brought me out for a second ovation. Thus, I was surprised, irritated, and anxious by this email. Everyone else liked it. I know myself well. I was the one sharing the room with the crowd; I could see and feel their reactions. The email stung. But after reflecting on this email for a week (because this is the power of negatively toned emails...your brain gets stuck in the velcro hooks), I realized this critic was dead-on. Even now, years later, I can read this email and thank this critic for pointing me to the way. The obstacle is the way.

Before and after this experience, I have been in the audience for hundreds of talks and watched hundreds on the internet. From this, let me distill 3 lessons learned on what makes a great public speaker and what crushes the dreams of an audience who offers the gift of rapt attention...for at least 7 seconds.

1. Tell Stories. There is a narrative arc to a well-told story. The audience needs to be invested in the main characters. They need clues about who someone is to care about what happens to them. There should be sufficient information about the situation that is central to the story (whether it be a struggle or discovery). The audience needs to be put at the scene with exquisite details about what can be seen, heard, and felt. They need to feel the impact of what you or the main character went through. This should lead to a meaningful denouement. There should be a motive for each part, whether it is to flesh out the context, evoke emotion, or teach a lesson. Do not dive into irrelevant details that detract from the purpose of the story.

That being said, one motive that could cost you the audience's attention is too much concern about the order of events. If you want to tell a story about holding your child in your arms for the first time with the knowledge that this is the beginning of a lifetime of fear, doubt, and guilt about whether you were ready for parenthood, let me inform you about what nobody cares about. Whether there were three or four medical personnel in the room. Whether the baby was swaddled in a white and blue striped blanket or a polka dot one. Stay focused, have a purpose for each segment of your tale and lead up to a meaningful conclusion that makes sense with the rest of your presentation.

1a Caveat. Make sure stories told are your own and they are truthful. Your experiences are the most valued treasure of a public speaker. Do not disrespect the audience by stealing/borrowing someone else's. You are in front of them. You are the chosen one. If you want to tell the stories that another speaker uses then go home and have that person speak in your place.

2. Be Emotionally Expressive. We live in an age of data overload. To stand out from everything else that can grab the audience's attention, you need to be present. You need to feel the emotions that match what you are talking about. Which would you prefer - (1) a speech with no flubs, proper elocution, and perfectly timed pauses or (2) a speech with a few mistakes that the speaker acknowledged and self-deprecatingly laughed at along with a few moments where the speaker lost track after being overwhelmed by the intensity of reliving shared memories? If you find it difficult to express your emotions openly in front of a room full of people, your body can help. Use exaggerated facial expressions, move your entire body closer or farther from the crowd, crouch down or stand up taller, do what is needed for you to feel and for the audience to feel what you are feeling.

2b Caveat. Make sure your emotional expressions match the content of your presentation. Nothing is worse than people waving their hands around while they are talking about what it is like to experience a quiet mind. Then there is the infamous "T-rex" when speakers bend their arms up at the elbow with dangling forearms and hands - distracting the audience from attending to facial expressions, words, and whatever meaningful image is on a screen behind you.

3. Use Meta-Comments. There is a reason we listen to speakers instead of reading transcripts. We want the social connection. To make this happen, let the audience know what you are experiencing right there, on stage. I am fond of joining the audience in amazement of great science ("this next study is going to blow your freaking mind! Ready?"). Last week, for the first time, my 7-year old twin girls and 2-year old saw me in action. As might be expected, they did not sit still. When my 7-year old Raven was asked what she thought of my work, she quickly responded, "It was sooooo boring...all he does is talk." There was one moment when my 2-year old Violet escaped the clutches of her mother and ran around the crowd with her arms out to be picked up, by me. For me, the talk stopped, and I gladly picked up this giddy little creature, kissed her, and held her in my arms while continuing where I left off. Within seconds, she squirmed out of my arms and ran back to her spot on the floor. Fully present, I said something to the effect of "Sorry, family first...and what awesome timing to illustrate my point" (I can't remember what I was talking about, but it had something to do with love...seriously, Violet had killer timing). The crowd was not upset at the intrusion. They want to be with a human, not a robot. They want someone who is present, reacting to what is going in the room, not someone who has an automated plan of what is going to be said and what gesture is going to be performed at the proper juncture of time. The beauty of meta-comments is that they jolt you out of the pre-planned performance and in the same vein, they wake up and entertain the audience.

3a. Caveat. Your job is to be present with the audience but do not forget that it is their entertainment that is of primary interest. Meta-comments that are for your benefit are only to be used if you think the crowd has a similar vested interest.

There are plenty of other strategies to impart. Such as how to present statistics and research findings in a way that maximizes curiosity and shock value. I personally love presenting slides with a single number on them such that attention to what I say is required to satisfy the audience's intrigue. Then there is the beauty of altering the speed and volume of your voice. Nothing is more powerful (and personally scary) than silence. It draws the crowd in, attuned to what is going to happen next. Stay tuned for a future blog post on what not to do as a public speaker. Perhaps we can put an end to speakers that ask the audience to shout an affirmation with them - "Can I get everyone to say 'I deserve to be happy'?"

Unleash yourself

Honor the audience

Show that you love and bleed just like everyone else does

THE NEW BOOK IS FINALLY RELEASED: as of yesterday, with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener, we debuted,  The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why being your whole self - not just your “good” self - drives success and fulfillment.  Learn more about what the book is about in our Q&A with the editors of Psychology Today. And pick up a copy, give a gift to a friend.

Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a public speaker, psychologist, and professor of psychology and senior scientist at the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being at George Mason University.  His new book, The upside of your dark side: Why being your whole self - not just your “good” self - drives success and fulfillment is available from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Booksamillion , Powell's or Indie Bound. If you're interested in speaking engagements or workshops, go to: toddkashdan.com

Like most of my friends of a certain age, I’ve been riveted by the details that keep trickling out about Joan Rivers’ unexpected death from complications during an esophageal procedure. Like me, we were in our seventh or eighth decades - virtually the same age as she. I became especially fascinated on realizing that she and I shared more than having been born the same year. We evidently suffered from the same curious psychological malady: `Body Dysmorphic Disorder.’ That’s a dire-sounding mental illness that’s been around – or at least referred to - since the DSM’s  (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) first revision in 1980. Yet despite this mutual affliction, we both seemed to have survived without either of us having been done in by this dreadful-sounding disorder.

According to the DSM – what’s often referred to, somewhat sarcastically, as the psychiatric   diagnostic `Bible’ - Body Dysmorphia is defined as “a preoccupation with an imaged defect in physical appearance,” or, in the case of an actual, albeit slight, defect, as “an excessive preoccupation” with this shortcoming.

Focusing on this real, or imagined, defect can exert a terrible toll: symptoms, from depression to the curtailing of one’s social, occupational or other areas of functioning, often result.  

It was after River’s death, when I watched for the second time the 2010  documentary, A Piece of Work, about this driven, indefatigable icon (who truth to tell, I'd never seen perform live), that I heard what I instantly recognized as an expression of the comedian’s bodily Dysmorphic feelings. “I never thought of myself as a beauty,” she says. “I was never a natural beauty.” Which is why’, she adds, `the first thing she reaches for in the morning is her make up’.  

Rivers’ remark is of a piece with other comments she’d shared over the years in her stand-up routines, during her TV interviews, and in the pages of her books: if something – or someone – isn’t perfect, fix it. It’s a sentiment she’d lived by to extremes, (or excess), considering the hundreds of plastic surgery procedures she’d often joked about having undergone. This comment stood out, however because other articles about Rivers, including countless ones which speculated about the causes of her death, she was quoted as having voiced similar negative feelings about herself:

`I was a homely girl;' `I was not a pretty girl;' `when I was a tween, I was fat. Fat fat fat!;' `In spite of dieting, gagging, purging and drinking Ipecac for lunch, I was a chubby girl;’ ‘I was a chubby, not attractive Jewish girl.’

Yet even as she laments, the caustic comic repeatedly drew upon the least appealing physical parts of herself for aspects of her limitless fonts of wit. Indeed, everything from her aging, sagging face, breasts and ear lobes, became grist for, in Freudian terminology, the comedian’s `sublimated’ humor. As she worked a room (or a page) one could see that Rivers’ `shtick’ was just another  means which the iconic legend drew on to `fix’ a part of what was `wrong’ or wanting in her flawed self-image.

Following her husband’s suicide in the late 1989’s, which Rivers often said had left her and her daughter, Melissa, destitute – “high and dry” and in need  of starting over – she also admits to having spent years as a bulimic. But contrary to the DSM, which describes one’s obsession with food as controlling the person, Rivers characterized those years as having been among her happiest. She recalled that at a time when everything else had felt beyond her control, eating became for her the one area over which she’d felt fully in control.

Pondering Rivers’ experience in what could only translate as having triumphed over her Body Dysmorphic Disorder and/or Bulimia - I thought of another person who has never let her looks get her down: the brilliant writer, Daphne Merkin. In her newly published collection of essays, The Fame Lunches, one stands out for me. In In My Head I Am Always Thin, Merkin writes that despite having packed on far too many pounds than have been good for her appearance or her health since her marriage and pregnancy, she still feels and thinks of herself as the long limbed, beauteous young woman she was growing up – she’s never outgrown the feeling of looking the way she used to look:  slim, sexy and infinitely f…kable.

Unlike Merkin, in my own head, despite photos of me as a normal, cute little child, I am forever a chunky, chubby teen, unable to wear the petite pastel dirndls I envied on my middle school friends.  And if I’d looked like Rivers did as a youngster you’d have had to drag me up and onto a stage in total mortification. My classmates did have to do just that to get me to perform in my 6^th grade play as Jacob Marley’s ghost, lugging my homemade cardboard chain behind me. I’d so longed for one of the few girls’ parts. But Marley’s role was mine. Unlike Rivers – who claims to have never felt so alive as when on stage and performing – there I stood,  dying a thousand deaths, all those eyes staring at my clunky, unfeminine, mostly immobilized, unsmiling self.

As I grew older, my chunkiness melted away - everywhere but on my ankles. But in those early years, much like Joan Rivers and Daphne Merkin, I had other things on my mind. In my case, my face.

Some people spend their lives waiting for their ship to come in. I spent mine waiting for my face to come in. When I was young, my teachers, or my parents, would say:  “Joanie, you’ve got the kind of face that you’ll grow into.”

I heard this not just from them but from some of my parents’ friends. “Look at her eyes,” one man repeatedly said to my parents. Whenever he and his wife came to a dinner party at our apartment, he’d pull me aside.“ You see those eyes of hers,” he’d tell my parents. “She’s going to have a really beautiful face when she grows up.”

At times, even strangers on the street would stop to look and comment on my eyes. 

“What an amazing color of green,” people would say. “With eyes like hers, she’s going to grow up to be a real beauty one of these days!”

I yearned to believe all of them, going one better than The Ugly Duckling who had no such instilled hope to cling to. I’d gaze into the mirror at my greenish hazel eyes and try to envision myself one fine day - beautiful at last. I waited, and I kept waiting, until one not so fine day, it was suddenly many decades later and my once greenish/hazel eyes were now a  predominantly bloodshot color. My once rich chestnut colored hair shot with sparks of gold and bronze was a brassy shade of unnatural-looking brunette, thanks to the costly – and often failed attempts - of the series of less than entirely successful beauticians I frequented at six week intervals. Worse, at my every fleeting glance in the mirror, I was greeted by the increasingly unsightly view of a chin melting into a hint of another chin, then disappearing almost into what now passed for my neck, if that’s the word for the hideously corded, striated, bulging protuberance that greeted me. It struck me that while waiting to grow into my face, I’d grown up and was now growing old! My face had docked and sailed away before I’d ever boarded. 

Shocked as I was, I’ve become reconciled to being cheated of what I’d come to view as my promised inheritance: the eventual growing into my looks that was one day going to compensate for my years of ugly ducklinghood – of life lived, if not exactly as a homely woman, then certainly as no head turner. At times, such a situation has even had its pluses. Unlike many, if not most, of my aging women friends, since I never had the pleasure of finding my looks, I’ve been spared their exquisite pain of losing them.

Given my near permanent state of expectation, my dating life was fraught from the get-go. I couldn’t expect men to swarm after me because of my looks. And back in my day – way back, if you want to get technical – expecting men to be interested in me because of my brains would have been delusional. It wasn’t just girls wearing glasses, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, who were thought lacking in sex appeal; men, I was warned, typically stared right past straight-A-garnering girls.

Still, somehow I did end up with my fair share of men: a lawyer, an art critic, an artist – more than enough for an entire lifetime. How did I do it? I’d have to say some men claimed I’d wound up with an “interesting” face. Perhaps this was attributed to what has sometimes been described as my “half-smile” – a dead-pan look suggestive of something intriguing hidden beneath the surface. And – a confession. In my early fifties, like several of my turkey-wattle- necked friends, I sprang for a facelift. It removed some of the wattles. But that is now decades old. Unlike Rivers, once was more than enough.

Nevertheless, all this morphing and transforming in mid and late life has left me more than a little puzzled. I didn’t have an image from my own youth to sustain me when I clung to that hope of growing up into a future, better looking me. I was flying blind, just trusting in my eyes to somehow lead me there.

Joan Rivers may not have had such an image either – at least until she saw what wonders make-up could offer. And once sampled, she never looked back. “With enough make-up and enough plastic surgery, there seemed nothing to stop her from out performing her inspiration, Phillis Diller, going on into her late eighties or beyond

Sadly, Rivers didn’t count on her anesthesia, or her vocal cords from reportedly freezing up and betraying her. But maybe she’s lucky. She certainly exited on top. Meanwhile, Daphne Merkin and I plod on, getting older, but staving off the worst of old age’s ravages. Merkin, not just in her head, really is thin again, having lost weight on doctors’ orders; while I still yearn for just one single day with Marlene Dietrich legs the envy of all -  and no one on that day who will care anything about my face.

In the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown, rage at the continuing killing of African American males by law enforcement (and by self-appointed-vigilante-turned-media-star George Zimmerman) is understandably acute. There is no disputing the fact that white men can walk around with loaded weapons ready to fire upon any perceived “threat” and be treated as virtuous protectors of our Bill of Rights, while any black male who dares to walk in the middle of the street, much less shop for toy guns, can find himself gunned down and buried as a tragic misunderstanding. Racism knows no logic.

But when Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson issued an apology for the killing of Michael Brown and the treatment of his fallen body, the response was almost uniformly harsh and unaccepting. With comments ranging from the sarcastic to the aggressive, the message was clear: no apology will be accepted. Yet such a response does far more to fuel injustice than to quash it.

Thomas Jackson’s apology may have struck many as too little and too late, but let us not underestimate how rare and powerful such an apology actually is—particularly when litigation is on the horizon. Many condemned Jackson for not appearing in uniform. Yet the fact that he didn’t appear in uniform speaks volumes. He went up against his superiors to speak as a man, and not an employee, an act for which he may well face repercussions. 

Many have condemned him for not apologizing for the fact that there is racial profiling in Ferguson, or that the killing was a homicide. But such criticisms fail to underestimate the profundity of the act—Jackson cannot speak to such legal issues given the context of pending litigation and investigations. Had he done so, one thing is certain—Jackson himself would have been made the fall guy for the killing and subjected to so many accusations and internal investigations that his apology would have been converted into a confession—circumventing the entire point of any investigation into Michael Brown’s killing.

The truth is, what Police Chief Jackson did was so unprecedented and courageous that to downplay what it took for him to stand before the camera and say what it was he said—however limited it may have been—is a monumental step in healing. The failure of abusers and accusers to apologize for the harm they cause is extremely difficult for victims of abuses of power—however that power is defined—to accept. An apology does not mean that the act that prompted it was okay. It does not mean that there should be no further investigation or reflection. But what it does mean is that the person issuing the apology is acknowledging that an injustice has been done, and that someone suffered for it. And that fact is profoundly significant to the person or people who have suffered. The number one thing a victim of injustice wants is an acknowledgement that they were wronged and that the wrongdoers recognize that fact.

Beyond an acknowledgement of someone’s suffering, an apology marks a shift in thinking for the perpetrator. When a person apologizes, they acknowledge a wrongdoing and the awareness that something was done wrong. For Thomas Jackson to apologize for the acts of his employees suggests that however misguided his direction in the past, however wrong-headed the policies of his police force, he has taken a step, however small, toward acknowledging his errors. Was it enough? Of course not, if “enough” is measured by restoring Michael Brown to life. The taking of a life cannot ever be restored. But was it profound? You betchya, if profound is measured in the likelihood it has caused him to reflect on the policies of his police force and the guidance he has provided as their chief.

Thomas Jackson’s apology may never be sufficient in restoring peaceful and equitable relations in Ferguson or elsewhere. But the rarity of public apologies—and more significantly, of police chiefs who dare to appear before national cameras out of uniform to say that they are sorry—is so great that to scoff and dismiss his apology can only achieve one end—others will never dare do the same.

There are likely to be no heroes in the murder of Michael Brown. But in my view, one hero to emerge from the rubble of his death may be the most unlikely of them all—Thomas Jackson, who appeared, polo-shirted and nervous, hard nipples and all—as the first in what I hope is a long line of repentant leaders who have learned that they have so much more to learn. 

I bow my head to Thomas Jackson because though he may have led a police force fraught by prejudice, he took an action that will put him into the line of fire of those very men he led, as well as those before whom he has apologized. 

In other words, Thomas Jackson has acknowledged to the world that he is ready to learn from this great tragedy. Let us extend to him the grace that this may truly be a most teachable moment for us all. Because to do so opens the doors to apology and forgiveness in all its many facets, which is a door through which each of us ought pass, with our heads bowed low—and our hopes held high.

It's been about two months since I posted a piece of my writing on this blog. I was deeply immersed in supporting my sister Inbal on her final journey, which ended with her death on September 6, 2014.

One day I will find the words to write about Inbal here. (You can read her obituary here.) Over the last seven years I've on occasion mentioned Inbal and her ongoing challenge of living with cancer. I don't recall writing in any significant way about what it has been like to accompany her way of facing cancer. I kept it mostly separate, except when it seemed almost inhuman not to mention it. Now, having accompanied her, being so profoundly involved, and learning as much as I have, I anticipate continuing to learn. This is a way to reweave my personal experiences and my work in the world.

The period of sitting Shiva, the Jewish custom of gathering community for seven days after someone dies, is over. I am now ready to slowly emerge into the next phase of my life, and writing about this period is a small step in that direction.

Trusting life

None of what I learned about myself and about life through this very demanding experience is new in its entirety; it is a deepening, at times surprising, of what I have known or intuited before; and it is an entirely new territory. I realized at one point that as little as we get prepared for parenting (ultimately everyone has to learn it newly, with their own children), there is even less to prepare us for being with a loved one as they are dying. Moreover, this is a topic rarely talked about, whereas parenting is. Most of us don't know what to say to each other about death, whereas so many easily share their opinions and experiences of parenting, and there are books, norms, and wisdom commonly available.

I never would have guessed that the most important change I would be called to make would be increasing my trust - in myself and in life. As a result, emerging from this experience, with all the immense sorrow and loss, I see that I have become bigger and stronger. Gradually over time, I let go of more and more of my usual activities as the mobilization to support Inbal intensified. There was no question of what was "right"; only a kind of knowing what I had energy for, and I never forced myself to do anything. I rarely do anyway, and, still, I now have even more appreciation for what a fine-tuned instrument listening to myself can be.

Part of trusting included overcoming the subtle ways in which I have tended to defer, even to lose track of what's important to me, in the face of any apparent challenge. My commitment to Inbal was so strong, and the knowledge about what I could offer her so clear, that I found strength to say and do things with much less concern about how others would respond. This went as far as finding a new role within my family of origin, and supporting all of us, including my mother, to get closer to each other as we had our last meaningful conversation with Inbal before my mother headed back home to Israel, where she and Arnina live.

I am still deeply digesting what this means for what comes next in my life: what would it take for me to continue this trust, this willingness to persist in pursuing what feels deeply true, when it comes to what matters to me? Why was I able to do this when it involved supporting someone dear to me, and much less so - at least so far - when it is about supporting myself?

A new revelation about trusting life arose in learning even more specifically about how much death is part of life. This lesson came to me from two sentences that Inbal said. One was her overall experience of, in her words, "dying fully in touch with loving life, and yet, also, fully accepting death." The paradox contained within this frame continues to move me, both as the person who lost my beloved, and as a human being learning about life. Acceptance, as I have come to understand about other things, doesn't at all mean liking what is happening; it only means letting go of any residual inner fighting against what cannot be prevented. Beholding so closely someone who has attained that degree of inner peace is a grace beyond words. Then, in the last few days Inbal also said: "My body needs to die." This was altogether new to me, the idea that death emerges from life, and that, being deeply attuned to life, we might be able to discern to such a degree what life is leading us to.

Appreciating Judaism

I have some deep qualms about the tradition I am part of. Some of the core foundations of the practice, including the perspective on women, the degree of fear of non-Jews, and the overall approach to life based on fear and punishment, unsettle me sufficiently that, for the most part, I have distanced myself from any of the practices. Here, too, I experience paradox, because despite all the ambivalence, I also hold a deep respect for a people that has found a way to remain alive, vibrant, and regenerative for two thousand years in exile, and for the deep wisdom about human life, and love of the human spirit, that infuse the texts, the customs, and the stories.

When it comes to death, as I acquainted myself with more of the tradition, I became more and more astounded by that level of wisdom. In fact, one of Inbal's non-Jewish friends who was with us in the circle that held her for the last few days, told us that she was planning to ask to apply Jewish customs to her own death. Given that I imagine many of you who read my blog are not Jewish, and even those who are may not be familiar with the customs, I want to share a bit more.

Jewish customs about death are based on two core principles: honoring the dead and comforting the mourners. Until the burial is complete, the entire focus is on the former, to the point where, according to tradition, condolences are not given until after the funeral. The whole point is to maintain the dignity of the person who died. This is why Jews have always aimed for burying their dead within 24 hours, before the body loses its connection with the person and becomes a "thing" and fast enough that the mourners can take the necessary actions and move quickly enough to focus on their grief. Within this time, the body is never left alone. The hours after the death when Inbal's body was in the house and we took turns, through the night, watching it, were unexpectedly meaningful, an opportunity to be in silence and cherish the mystery and the being we all loved so much.

A careful ceremony of washing the body and dressing it for the funeral follows, and I had the honor of participating in this process. Traditionally, Jews have not used coffins, and have opted, instead, to bury their dead only wrapped in cloth. Only few places allow people to be buried like that, and Inbal was buried in one of those places, Fernwood Cemetery in Marin County. There is nothing like shoveling hand-dug soil on the body of a loved one after it's put in the grave to drive home the finality of the loss.

As soon as the body is covered and the family goes home, the focus shifts to the mourners. Judaism is a community-based way of life, far beyond a religion per se. My ancestors recognized that in the face of tremendous loss, the community must gather and support the mourners. According to Jewish law, mourners are strictly forbidden from cooking and must be fed, for an entire week, by their guests.

And so began the Shiva (seven in Hebrew), a week of people coming with food, love, and memories. No two days were alike. Some of the gatherings at Inbal and her wife Kathy's home drew over 40 people, and some of the time at my place only one person was visiting. Even people I had been estranged from for years showed up to offer their presence, to reconcile, to honor Inbal. For an entire week I was held by a wide circle of people, including some of my closest friends who came from afar to make sure I didn't go through the first few days alone. My remaining sister, Arnina, was here for most of that week before finally heading back to Israel after being here for the last month of Inbal's life, keeping me the best company I can imagine as we both came to grips with the new reality.

The Jewish tradition creates landmarks in the inevitable process of coming back to life, ensuring that people are surrounded by community for the most disorienting days, during which the task is to support the mourners in focusing as inward as possible, as deeply as possible. Then, for the rest of the first month, a less intense focus, and, again, for the rest of the first year. We all know that mourning never ends fully, and yet, sooner or later, we heed the insistent call of life, and allow the loss to become part of the fertilizer of the rest of our lives.

Empty space

For some years now, I've had an item on my growing to do list: I wanted to find a way to be together with other Jews in some way that honored what I love about Judaism without the trappings of the rituals. Like most non-urgent items on that list, there was no space to attend to this desire, as most of my non-work energy was entirely devoted to caring for Inbal. As plans for the Shiva became clear, I knew I wanted to do something that would connect with other people for whom Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and Judaism were both meaningful. I asked the rabbi who performed the funeral, a long-time friend, for some text I could use to bring together the two, and she offered me a Hassidic text that immediately resonated. It was all about empty space.

Empty space, first, which God had to make by withdrawing himself in order to create the world. How God can both exist and not exist in that space is, as the text tells us, a matter we will only understand in the future. Paradox, once more, that creative, generative tension that forces something new to emerge. Empty space, the text goes on, that exists in the disagreements between the sages and allows for new understanding. That was the connection with NVC: dialogue, true and deep respect for different perspectives, a listening and an understanding that allows for learning. Dialogue and the creation of the world as parallels.

The small, motley crowd of people that gathered - some for community, some for the purpose I had intended, and some for various other reasons, ranging anywhere from fellow Israelis to non-Jews - came together in appreciation of the brilliance and beauty of the text. We found connections and meaning - with NVC, with Inbal's death, and with our own experiences of love and death. More than anything, we were all somehow taken by the idea that disagreement had such potential for creative outcomes.

Then, finally, the empty space in my life left by Inbal's departure. I didn't instantly see the connection, not until two people, on that same day, sent me emails literally mentioning empty space, as if to make the point inescapably clear. Empty space because all the energy and presence I brought to caring for Inbal is gone. Empty space because the irreplaceable anchoring in life that Inbal gave me by her pure, simple, and easy love of me is now a gaping hole. Empty space because the one and only person who accompanied me on a daily basis is no longer able to do it. Empty space because the person I would turn to, even close to her death, for solace, for advice, for a place to just be me, for perspective, for glow, is gone forever. Empty space because my colleague and co-creator will never come back to that role, something I was still hoping for after years of struggle with cancer. Empty space because I lost the person most like me in the whole world. No wonder the world feels so different.

Empty space, as uncomfortable and impossible to understand as it is, is the ground of newness. I want to tend to that empty space with utmost mindfulness, to bring to it all I know, all I have learned, all I have experienced, all of my capacity for intention and choice, never to put anything into it that is not by choice, that is habitual or unconscious. Only what I truly want, what is aligned deeply with my mission and values, or what would be just simple delight or pleasure in life. Only what would honor the gifts she has given me in her unbearably short life. I asked Inbal, shortly before she died, for any guidance to my life. She smiled and said, simply: "I want all the best for you; I want you to do truly what you want."

Community

That first week, as is often with death and loss, created an openness in the air that was making everyone be closer to how I want to be all the time: deeply authentic, vulnerable, willing to risk, and full of intention. My heart aches for that quality abundantly in everyday life, for people who share my passion and willingness to aim to live this way every second of our waking life.

Before the Shiva started, I had a dread that Arnina and I would be sitting alone and that no one would come. That did not materialize. There was a steady trickle of people who came, there were sweet surprises, there were memories of Inbal that touched me, deep conversations about community, and a constant presence of people with me for days, even after Arnina left.

I am blessed with a really large network of people who love me and whom I love. These days since Inbal died really crystallized for me the difference between that network and what I call community. For one thing, community means the relationships are between everyone and everyone else, not just each person and me. For another, community means doing various things together, not just loving each other. There is no structure to my life. The only community I knew in the last while was Inbal and her family, and the people who came together around Inbal, both in support of her and in celebration of the vibrancy she inspired all around her to live.

At one point I invited those present in my house to engage in a conversation about community: do they have it? Do they want it? How do they navigate the gap between our human need and evolutionary legacy of living in community, and the harsh alienation and isolation of modern life that makes community almost impossible? What emerged was a tiny bit of solace from the shared fate: none of us had good answers.

My organism knows this is not enough. I am constitutionally incapable of masking the need for community, and I want to create it. Yet this is no time for investing energy. This, mourning and loss, is a time for harvesting, not for sowing.

A friend wrote to me and said: "The presence of people during the Shiva is very holding and healing! After the Shiva, when the hold gets looser, you can feel the presence of the absence more sharply."There is no end to this piece, because the mourning will likely take the rest of my life. It feels important to share, though, even when the loss is so fresh, because the loss of community in all of our lives since the onset of modernity is so intense and so forgotten at the same time. In times like this, there is no way to mask that loss. I have every intention of doing something, at least for myself, to create community, locally, once I get through this initial period and regain some resilience and energy. For now, I will lean on the many people I know and love, as individuals absent community, to create a bridge between the loss and the future life I might have.

The three artworks on this page are by Nancy Katz, from an online exhibition of her work on the Tikkun art gallery.

Some of my favorite atheists are women: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Greta Christina, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Nella Larsen, and above all, my wife. And some of my least favorite theists are men: Rick Santorum, the Ayatollahs of Iran, Fred Phelps – oh, well, the list on this front is too long. You get the idea.

Anyway, despite the obvious reality that many women are secular and many men are religious, the fact still remains that the former gender is consistently more likely to be religious than the latter.

Indeed, countless studies have shown that women are more likely to be religious than men. Now, that doesn’t mean that every study shows such a difference, or that the difference is always significant. Nor does it mean that the difference is discernable on every measure of religiosity/secularity -- for example, orthodox Jewish men are more likely to regularly attend synagogue than orthodox Jewish women.

But when we take in the existing corpus of social science from the past sixty years, there is clear empirical support for the claim that women are more likely to be religious than men. As Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce note in their book Why Are Women More Religious Than Men? (Oxford, 2012), “since 1945 the Gallup polling organization has consistently found that, on every index used, American women are more religious than men, and not by small margins.”

Consider, for example, that according to the American Religious Identification Survey, men currently make up 58% of Americans who claim “no religion,” 70% of Americans who self-identify as atheist, and 75% of those who self identify as agnostic. Or consider the Pew Forum’s Religious Landscape national survey, which found that 86% of American women claim to be religious affiliated, but only 79% of American men claim as much; 77% of women believe in God with absolute certainly, but only 65% of men do; 66% of women pray daily, but only 49% of men do; 63% of women say that religion is very important in their lives, but only 49% of men say as much; 44% of women attend religious services on a weekly basis, but only 34% of men do. The differences may or may not be significant – social science gets fuzzy here -- but they are consistent.

In short, on just about whatever measures one uses to assess religiosity – frequency of prayer, belief in God, church attendance, or self-identification – women are more likely than men in the United States to be religious.

OK, but are these averages and percentages universal? Do we find similar differences in other countries around the world?

Yes.

According to data analyzed by Ariela Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera (see “A World of Atheism: Global Demographics” in the Oxford Handbook of Atheism, 2013), 77% of self-designated atheists in the Ukraine are male, 76% in Portugal, 70% in Uruguay, 67% in Japan, 65% in Israel, 65% in Mexico, 61% in Sweden, 60% in the Netherlands, and so on. True, there are some exceptions – for example, men make up only 47% of self-designated agnostics in Belgium. And only 48% of agnostics in Japan. But these are exceptions; the overall pattern of men being more atheist or agnostic than women the world over is clear and strong, leading these authors to conclude that “atheists, both positive and negative…are predominantly males” and “global comparisons reveal a wide spectrum of male dominance within the positive atheist sub-population.”

I could go on and on, and cite countless other studies and surveys – both national and international – that illustrate the same gendered pattern. But rather than trot these all out, I’ll let the words of professor Tiina Mahlamäki sum them all up: “Statistics conducted in countries all over the world, for as long as statistics on religion have been collected, confirm that women are more religious than men. This concerns every dimension of religion. Women participate in religious ceremonies more often than men; women pray more often than men; they more likely than men believe in God, a Spirit, or Life Force; they hold matters of faith and religion more important than men do. Women are more committed than men to their religious communities and are less willing to resign from them. Although older women are more religious than young ones, women of all ages are more religious than coeval men are. Women are members of both traditional religious communities and new religious movements more often than men. Young, urban men are the least religious of all groups.” (see her article “Religion and Atheism From a Gender Perspective,” in Approaching Religion, 2012).

Of course, none of the above means that this gendered difference is fated and eternal. In five years, or twenty-five years, we could find different results. But for now, the data is clear and consistent: women are more likely to be religious than men.

So how do we explain this?

Here are some leading possibilities:

* It could have to do with power and privilege, and the lack thereof. In most societies, men control more money, wealth, and assets than women and tend to have more economic, political, and social power than women. As such, women are more easily excluded, exploited, and discriminated against. Perhaps, as a result of this, they are more likely to turn to the consolation of religion.

* It could have to do with agency, and the lack thereof; men generally have more freedom and agency than women in most societies; they have a greater ability to decide what work to do, where to live, how to get and manage money, etc. In most societies, women are thus more vulnerable than men – financially, legally, domestically, etc. Indeed, poverty adversely affects women much more than men, the world over. This could make the psychological comfort and institutional support of religion more appealing to women than men.

* It could have to do with socialization: perhaps boys are socialized to be assertive, independent, and rebellious, while girls are socialized to be acquiescent, relational, and obedient, which then manifests itself later in life with women being more open to religion than men.

* It could have to do with the patterned roles for men and women in society; women tend to be expected to take up roles as caregivers and nurtures, raising children and tending to the sick and elderly, while men tend to be exempt from such roles; this again could make religion more appealing to women than men, for various reasons.

* It could have to do with who traditionally works inside/outside the home. While men traditionally work outside the home, women the world over are more likely to work within the home, and this might make religious involvement more interesting and appealing to women; indeed, we know that women who work outside the home tend to be less religious than those who work within the home, and those nations with the highest rates of women working outside the home -- for example, Scandinavia -- tend to be among the most secular.

* Of course, it could also have something to do with innate differences between the sexes, be they genetic, neurological, physiological, or hormonal.

If I had to place a bet, I’d say it is a complex combination of all of the above, in varying degrees. But as far as which is more determinant – biological factors or social forces -- I can’t say.

And I’m not sure who can.

Talking with a few friends the other day regarding the ‘state of the world’ in general, and human behavior in particular, I happened to say how important it is to have ‘a refuge’…. at which point all conversation stopped…. and it was obvious that I was expected to ‘spell out’ just what I meant by this comment.

“What exactly do you mean by refuge?” asked one of them.

“I mean a private place where you can gather your thoughts and feelings without being disturbed; where you can feel ‘at one’ with yourself… even psychologically ‘safe.’”

My questioner looked puzzled. “You mean completely alone…’ she replied.

“Yes, all by yourself… because I think that only then can you get to that state of meditative calm which as is said, ‘passeth all understanding’ … when you seem to step out of the world for a moment or two… and feel yourself to be a different person, completely fulfilled, everything accomplished; transported to a near sublime realm of existence… on ‘cloud nine’ as they say…”.

“But what’s the point? I’ve always got my friends to spend time with; they take me out of myself…”.

“Of course that works to some extent, but the level of self-realization I’m talking about is not quite the same thing.”

Silence all round, at this point.

“Let me explain,” I went on…. “The other day, while waiting in a doctor’s office, I realized that solitariness is but one necessary condition that induces the kind of reflection… the sense of meaning and purpose in life I was thinking about…. But when I talk about a ‘refuge’… I have in mind a place, a haven, where love abounds – and that requires at least two of you. And in my own case it involves a dog, a wife, and myself…. living in a place called ‘home’, where mutual caring and devotion takes one into a higher and meaningful appreciation of one’s very existence. And I say this with real conviction, for in that doctor’s office, sitting with a dozen or so other patients – most of them obviously frail and, seemingly, somewhat alone in their lives – I became acutely aware of the fact that all of us in there were psychologically alone… in the realization we were all going to die in the end… yet that such psychical solitariness was, in my own case, greatly eased by the love binding all three of us – dog, myself and my wife – together. And I reminded myself, sitting there, that I was one of those lucky ones who possessed the ultimate ‘refuge’, the best ‘haven’… where one can experience a truth greater than that presented by our timebound and body-wracked selves.

Is this too ‘old-fashioned’ a way to conceive of, and experience, love and refuge?"

Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds
All notion of time: effaces all memory of a
beginning, all fear of an end.

Madame de Stael, Corinne

Previously, I outlined the distressing experience of being scolded by an Imperious Trio of doctor, nurse, and social worker in the Emergency Room when I arrived to fetch my wandering mother. Their presumptuous and bossy behavior only added to my trauma. In this post I describe the treatment I received from two other ER caregivers and how their individualized, compassionate care helped me feel like I could persevere and everything was going to be okay.

While I’m surrounded and hounded by the Imperious Trio, an ER nursing aide helps my mother get dressed. The Trio finally departs; I’m a puddle of goo. This aide-- a far kinder and gentler caregiver-- figuratively scoops me up and asks if I need anything before we go.

Turning to greet this nurturing soul, I quickly come to my senses. I notice that my mother has only eaten half the sandwich served for lunch, and I know she’s still running on empty.

Desperately hoping I’m not being rude or breaking any rules, I tentatively ask, “Do you have a doggie bag or something for the rest of that sandwich?”

He smiles.  “I’m sure I can come up with something.”

I’m so relieved. He reaches into a drawer and pulls out a quart-sized sealable plastic bag with BIO HAZARD emblazoned in red.

“Oh goody,” I say. “I’ll be feeding my mother bio hazardous waste!”

He chuckles, commiserating with my irreverence. Encouraged by this rapport, I go into full smart aleck mode, using humor to ameliorate my distress.  “So, did you give my mother a good talking to THAT SHE’LL REMEMBER?” We share a hearty laugh and I’m pretty sure he won’t track down the social worker to give her more fodder for the case she’s building against us.

The aide also thinks to fetch one of the paramedics who brought my mother in, so I’ll know where to find her getaway car. The paramedic is also friendly and helpful. He calls up a map on a computer for me to study, as I am unfamiliar with the area. He points out the Jeep’s location and understands my intense curiosity about my mother’s route.  When I see where the Jeep is, I know instantly how she got there. Five miles from home, she’d turned onto a busy road that, 50 miles later, dead-ended at a security checkpoint at a Satellite Development Facility. That chance destination is what returned her to us so quickly. The paramedic shares my delight at solving this mystery and marvels with me at our good fortune.

He then presents me with the car keys and registration, two details I’m sure I’d have overlooked. This proactive and organized care helps calm the chaos still reigning in my brain. I collect the keys and registration, my mother, and my wits, and I sign out of the ER. As we head for the parking lot, I’m still feeling a bit gooey, but I also feel emboldened by kindness and understanding extended by the nursing aide and paramedic. Their compassion and collaborative approach was the antidote to the judgmental thrashing I got from the Imperious Trio. To the casual observer, the difference in care might not look like much, but to the distressed and perhaps traumatized family member, a little bit of quality care goes a long way.  When hyper-aroused by trauma, we are hyper-sensitive to our interactions with others. It’s as if our brains are wide open and vulnerable to the effects of both assaults and balms. Insensitivity is deeply hurtful. Compassion is deeply healing.

Compassionate Care is Relationship-Centered Care

In recent decades, hospitals and health care practitioners have become increasingly relationship-centered in the way they provide care. Also referred to as “patient-and-family-centered care” and “relationship-based care,” this framework acknowledges that quality relationships are central to the delivery of quality health care.  Relationship-centered care is also evidence-based. Research shows that modern drugs, disinfectants, surgeries, and therapeutic relationships are all powerful medicine.

Granted, when it comes to providing relationship-centered care, some caregivers receive better training and support than others. And regardless of training or support-- or education, status, or pay-- some caregivers come by relationship-centered care more naturally than others. Indeed, compared to their imperious colleagues, our ER nursing aide and paramedic had a far greater knack for approaching me with compassion and seeing me as a competent human being. They knew how to build rapport and connect. In less than a minute each, they formed a therapeutic relationship with me. They saw me as my smart, funny, competent self and treated me like a collaborative partner. Contrast this to being seen as a misguided, bumbling idiot and being bossed around like a clueless inferior. Guess who bolstered my ability to manage this new frontier of my mother’s care.

After all, one doesn’t inspire folks to do better by making them feel worse! Unfortunately, not every caregiver gets this memo. And in spite of the proliferation of relationship-centered care during the past few decades, I’ve heard way too many stories from families about the insensitive or domineering nature of a health care practitioner. That day in the ER, I got to experience this firsthand.  

It was as if I’d stepped back in time, when it was standard for hospitals to harbor a culture of looking down one’s nose at the patients and families. Copping this attitude is all too easy, especially in understaffed ERs and intensive care units, wherein stressed caregivers may look at patients who are in poor condition, perhaps struggling to be coherent, attentive, or sensible, and see them as incompetent, difficult, even crazy.  Patients, as well as their family members, are also likely to be overwhelmed with painful emotions such as anxiety, sadness, and anger, and as a result, they can be challenging to interact with. But when caregivers can view these agitated states as natural responses to the duress of hospitalization (and perhaps what preceded it), it can help them remember that these folks aren’t trying to be difficult or delusional. Being mindful that patients and families are experiencing trauma and struggling to cope, it’s far easier to provide care with compassion.

Seeing patients and families as incompetent is another trap. Indeed, they often do appear dazed and confused.  But again, it helps to remember that dazed and confused are natural responses to the shock of hospitalization and the unfamiliar world of medical terminology, conditions, treatments, and equipment. It is normal for patients and families to need information repeated, plus plenty of time to form coherent questions.  Rather than judgment and lecturing, they need caregivers to be collaborative partners as they learn to navigate the new terrain. Being met with bossiness only exacerbates distress, as what happened to me. Is it any wonder I played the PhD card? I was struggling to prove that I was competent. I wanted to assert that I’d been doing a stellar job of care coordination for the past five years, and even with this new monkey wrench in the works, our team would be back on track by nightfall.

Relationship-Centered Care Inspires Resilience

And when I say “by nightfall,” apparently what I meant was that I would continue to blunder along, searching for new bearings until nightfall. In fact, if any of the Imperious Trio had been spying on me after we left the ER, they would’ve called in the hounds. Here’s what happened:

For my entire life, my mother, when guided to the passenger side of vehicular transportation, has never, ever, ever needed any supervision whatsoever to open the door, climb in, shut the door, and put on her seat belt.

“Here’s my car,” I explain. “Go ahead and get in while I make a phone call. It’s warm and out of the wind too.” I add this enticement as insurance.

I turn my back and wander 20 feet away to phone my sister and cement our plan for her to pick up the Monday Caregiver and meet me at the satellite facility. I give her the easy directions: “Just go to the end of the road! Hahahaha!”! I walk back to the car as I seal the deal, when I notice to my horror that it’s empty. My mother is not in the passenger seat. She is not in the back seat. She isn’t standing outside the car. She is not in the parking lot!

“Oh my god,” I exclaim to my sister. “You’re not going to believe this, but I lost her! Again! Crap, what a dork move! I’m an incompetent fool! Lock me up and throw away the key!!!”

We both dissolve into hysterical laughter.

Okay, think like a demented person! The parking lot isn’t that big. My car is the sixth one in from the circular drive, 75 feet from the ER entrance. As I make my way to the gigantic doors, I frantically peer around the other cars and cast my glance far and wide. There are paths between other buildings. A glade of fir trees. Traffic speeds by on Broadway.

She’s had probably 5 minutes to make a clean getaway. At least I’m certain she’s on foot this time!

As I walk into the lobby, still on the phone with my sister for emotional support and dark humor, the guard at the entrance to the bowels of the ER motions with his hand for me to look around the corner to my left. Praise be, there she is! Perhaps I’ll be spared a lengthy incarceration in a correctional facility… or a psychiatric ward. I’m not sure which.

“There you are!” chirps my mother, unaware of her talent for giving me heart attacks.

Adrenaline coursing through my veins for a second time today, I take her by the hand, while sharing the glad tidings with my sister. As we exit, I wave and call out to anyone who might understand the implications of what just happened, “Okay, I get it! She wanders. I’m ramping up care. I’m figuring this out!”

But the real lesson here is the value of the compassion and, collaboration I got from both the ER nurse and the paramedic. Their caring connection with me helped fuel this second search, my success, and my aplomb.

I carefully, mindfully escort my mother to the car, strap her in, and lock the door.

In the next installment, I describe our hip-hop trip to collect the Jeep, my conversation with the satellite facility security guard, and the immediate aftermath for our family.

Caio! Phil Zimbardo here. I’d like to share some information we’ve gathered about how men’s time perspectives affect their views on sex and loving relationships with partners. Here goes:

Whether male or female, for better or worse, your time perspective can dominate how you prioritize stuff in your life, even when it comes to sex. If you're not getting what you want from your sex life, it is likely that your time perspective could be holding you back from enjoying more fulfilling erotic experiences. Each of us has developed personal ways of breaking up the flow of our experiences into time zones, automatically and non-consciously. The obvious big three are Past, Present and Future, but each of these can be subdivided into: Past Positive and Past Negative, Present Hedonism and Present Fatalism, and finally, Future (goal focused) and Future Transcendental (life begins after the body dies).

All of us have these dimensions to a greater or lesser extent, so where we are on their spectrum depends on the degree to which we regularly engage them. The key is keeping your time perspectives in harmony, knowing when to turn up the volume on one while turning down the volume of another - depending on situational demands. Problems in our life can arise when any one of them takes over, prevailing over the others in a biased, rather than a balanced fashion. And nowhere does that bias have a greater impact on our behavior and our emotions than in the sexual arena.

Let’s figure out where your time perspectives are now and then see what you can do to create an ideal Balanced Sex Time Perspective. (To find out your personal Time Zone pattern, see the note below this column for taking my time assessment assessment.)

Past Negative

Past Negative people may have been abused, neglected, had partners who cheated or betrayed them or have cheated or betrayed their partners, had a strict religious upbringing, parents who were poor models of a healthy relationship, narcissistic parents, divorced parents, the list goes on. For whatever reason, these people hold themselves back in some way. Depending on the severity of whatever caused their past negative perspective, they may be incapable of feeling pleasure or derive enjoyment from sex and/or intimate relationships. If they do have relationships, they often choose unhealthy, emotionally damaged partners because a healthy relationship is too threatening - they are afraid of being nurtured. Men who have a Past Negative time perspective often keep their partner at a distance emotionally, physically, or spiritually. Bad Boys, Momma’s Boys, Perfectionists, Control Freaks, and the Peter Pan types all fit into this category.

Questions to reflect on for guys holding back in this category: Do you feel like you deserve to be loved? Do relationships make you feel anxious? Do you think something bad will happen if you feel pleasure or "let go"? Are you uncomfortable sharing intimate thoughts and feelings with your partner? Are you very critical of new partners and find no one can meet your standards? Can any woman, or other man, ever really be allowed to be your close partner? Finally, do you have to "self-medicate" - be under the influence of drugs/ alcohol iin order to have sex?

Past Positive

Past Positive people have many pleasant memories from the past, either from growing up in happy surroundings, or previously good relationships. They may feel they’ve been lucky with love. Men in this category may be a widower that had a great relationship with their partner and is optimistic about finding love again. Some divorced men are Past Positive depending on the nature of their separation.

Questions to reflect on for guys holding back in this category: Are you afraid you won't find another special connection with someone since your partner passed away? Do you feel like being with someone new would betray the memory of what you had, feeling some guilt over moving on to the untried new and leaving the familiar old? Do you feel shy about putting yourself out there?

Present Hedonism

Present Hedonist folks live for novel sensations, seeking pleasure in all they do. While living for momentary highs, they rarely think about the future consequences of their actions. They live more in their bodies than in their minds. Many of them just want a brief hook-up or a one-night stand with no obligations to a partner beyond satisfying their own needs. Often they grow up in an environment where no one was setting and enforcing proper boundaries; maybe they were the youngest child and everyone else was always taking care of things. They usually don't want the responsibility or aren't mature enough to handle long-term relationships, thus they back away from commitment and don't set lasting romantic goals. Men in this category can be serial monogamists where the passion heats up quickly and then fizzles just as fast. College students and frat guys can be in this category as well, since many feel it is a unique time in their life to experiment and have no-strings-attached hook up relationships.

Questions to reflect on for guys holding back in this category: Do you have trouble "reading" people or understanding what others want from you? Are you afraid of being taken advantage of? Do you purposely choose partners who are not on your level so it will be easy to walk away? Do you believe passion and personal relationships are not compatible?

Many present hedonist guys (mainly Millenials and Gen Xers) are becoming caught up in porn traps, now able to access an infinite variety of porn sex freely available on line 24/7/365. This solitary excess creates a new kind of arousal that is addictive and totally distorts any healthy or realistic perspective on sexual experience. Daily porn use also thwarts the motivation to seek a romantic, intimate, loving relationship with a real partner in the future. Guys not only get a false sense of what ordinary woman want sexually, but also an unrealistic view of male penis size and sexual stamina should in virtual sexual performance.

Questions for these guys: Do you suffer from performance anxiety? Do you have arousal problems? Do you get bored of partners easily? Have you given up on sex with real world, off-line partners? This alarming disaster-in-process was the subject of one of my TED talks, titled The Demise of Guys [HYPERLINK http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html], which then led to an expanded TED eBook which you can view at www.amazon.com, search The Demise of Guys that I wrote with my colleague, Nikita Duncan.

Present Fatalism

Present Fatalist people believe that whatever is meant to happen will happen. In relationships this means that these people will not be an active participant in their love life. They think that if they're meant to find The One, that it will magically happen or that person will find them. Sometimes they let great partners pass through their lives while remarking that, "it wasn't the right timing" or "just not meant to be for me." They do not like the chase. Like the Present Hedonists, Present Fatalists shrug responsibility in various aspects of relationships to mask an underlying fear of commitment. In this category you’ll find passive men, the betas rather than the alphas.

Questions to reflect on for guys holding back in this category: Do you have difficulty being decisive with partners? What would you lose by taking responsibility for your fate and putting more effort into finding the right person?

Future Oriented

Future Oriented people often lose their virginity later than those in the other categories, and are often more mindful about having protected sex. Most likely they grew up with parents who modeled pleasant, but perhaps more formal and less affectionate interactions. People who fit this category often find healthy and long-lasting intimate relationships, though the flip side is that they often put social-emotional relationships and sexual experiences off in favor of other career goals. Workaholics and financially successful middle-aged men who wake up one day feeling their life is “empty” fit into this category.

Questions to reflect on for guys holding back in this category: Are you able to relax and enjoy romantic and intimate moments? Have you been put off finding love because of your endless pursuit of your career? When was the last time you gave and/or received a really satisfying orgasm?

Future Transcendental

Future Transcendental people dismiss earthly desires in favor of rewards in the afterlife. Monks fit this category. We have no reflective questions for this group since this is a way of life they have mindfully chosen, and therefore wordly sex is not as relevant to them as men within the other five time zones.

What's An Ideal Sex Time Perspective?

Being stuck in any one of these categories suggests an extreme personality type, which is why it’s easy to find stereotypical examples for each. But most people are a combination of perspectives. Whether you are wondering which time perspective you are or if you've already figured it out, you probably want to know what an ideal Sex Time Perspective is. Assuming you want to have or eventually have a long-term romantic and fulfilling social-emotional-sexual relationship, it would be a blend of moderate Future Oriented and Present Hedonist, with a dash of Past Positive. If you strongly resonated with the Past Negative or Present Fatalist perspectives, you may want to analyze the depressing impact it’s had on your love life, how you can remove those negative perspectives’ limits, and consider how to better filter those potential partners. It is important, guys, for you to also understand your partner's dominant time zone since their positive compatiability with yours is one key to happiness. 

To get out of a Past Negative or Present Fatalistic rut, you must get a better understanding of what is causing your negative or fatalistic associations with relationships. Was it because of a traumatic childhood experience, poor role models, a destructive relationship you witnessed or partook in, or something else altogether? Being stuck in a negative time zone is destructive in all areas of your life, not only sexually. You must consider putting in time, effort and even funds to change to a healtbhier time zone. Talk to a trustworthy friend or therapist about it. Find out what your downer triggers are, if there are similarities in past unsuccessful relationships, times when you felt at a disadvantage, and make yourself aware of situations where this has happened or could happen in relationships so you can better prepare for them when you’re not in the heat of the moment.

For best results, for all guys, take your time to reflect on and answer the questions above that pertain to the time perspectives with which you identify. The further you go with finding the right answers the more in-depth you can be with re-writing your time perspectives to be more ideally balanced and ultimately to really enjoy your love life fully.

Caio!

Phil Zimbardo

Visit our Psychology Today blogs to get a fuller appreciation of how to create a more balanced time perspective in your life!

Take the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory at www.thetimeparadox.com to discover your personal time perspective.

See The Time Cure: Overcoming PTSD with the New Psychology of Time Perspective HYPERLINK "http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/psychotherapy" \o "Psychology Today looks at Psychotherapy" Therapy (Zimbardo, Sword & Sword, 2012, Wiley Publishing); for strategies to reduce stress and improve communication, visit HYPERLINK "http://www.timecure.com/" \o "www.timecure.com" \t "_blank"www.timecure.com and HYPERLINK "http://www.lifehut.com/" \o "www.lifehut.com" \t "_blank"www.lifehut.com.

Visit our website, HYPERLINK "http://www.timecure.com/" \t "_blank"www.timecure.com, to view a free 20 minute video - The River of Time; you’ll learn self-soothing techniques as well as how to let go of past negatives, work towards a brighter future, and live in a more compassionate present.

References:

The Demise of Guys TED Talk by Phil Zimbardo; HYPERLINK "http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html"http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html

The Demise of Guys: Why Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan, 2012. Kindle edition; www.amazon.com, search The Demise of Guys

The Secret Powers of Time with Philip Zimbardo, RSA Animate. View at: HYPERLINK "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg

Images: photos-public-domain.com, wikigender.org

To conclude: I have so far been speaking only of wars between nations; what are known as international conflicts. But I am well aware that the aggressive instinct operates under other forms and in other circumstances. (I am thinking of civil wars, for instance, due in earlier days to religious zeal, but nowadays to social factors; or, again, the persecution of racial minorities.) But my insistence on what is the most typical, most cruel and extravagant form of conflict between man and man was deliberate, for here we have the best occasion of discovering ways and means to render all armed conflicts impossible. I know that in your writings we may find answers, explicit or implied, to all the issues of this urgent and absorbing problem. But it would be of the greatest service to us all were you to present the problem of world peace in the light of your most recent discoveries, for such a presentation well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action—Albert Einstein, in his famous 1931 letter to Sigmund Freud

Reading the news can bring on an emotional roller-coaster.  A lot of people don't keep up with current events while others can barely pull themselves away from ubiquitous news media.  We unconsciously brace ourselves for the impact of uncontrollable and frightening threats and realities that surround and permeate our lives—all the while dissociating from them just to be able to function.  But no matter how we treat these stimuli, exposure takes its toll. 

Our political world leaders perform caretaking routines designed and marketed to the citizenry as guarantees of safety. And we—the consumers of these caretaking routines—act the part of credulous audiences, telling ourselves that we are safer because of decisions made by equally powerless men and women hundreds or thousands of miles from where we sit in front of our computers and televisions.

And for the most part it works—we are able to sleep at night. How can this be? Perhaps we are more accepting of our politicians than we like to believe we are—that we're prepared to act as if the "care" we're receiving from our leaders is effective when it isn't.  Growing up in environments that television news told us were unsafe may have taught us to create routines that allowed us to dissociate from our anxiety.  Then we acted out that anxiety with caretaking routines that distanced us far enough from the scary things around us to allow us to keep functioning. 

But at the same time, we're kept jacked up by news media that make sure we're saturated with information that can't but make us worry about where "things" are headed:

• The Ebola virus, which we might initially have thought of as an "African" disease not likely to affect us, has, in fact, found it's way into the West. Incidentally, they think African jungles may be natural reservoirs for Ebola, and that deforestation brings human beings into contact with the virus when people are logging.
• Are we in a chronic state of war?  The beginnings of World War III?  At the moment, the most visible theaters of violence are Iraq and Syria, Israel-Palestine, Russia and Ukraine.  A civilian airliner apparently shot down and another airliner inexplicably disappears; ugly internal conflicts drive large numbers of Africans and Latin Americans out of their own homes, communities. even out of their countries.
• Cyber-incursions:  Chinese hackers breaking into American commercial and military electronic infrastructure, while we, loudly indignant, are found out to have been hacking even our closest European allies at the same time. 
• Cyber-crime is discovered to be affecting such power-players as Home Depot, Apple, and even Chase Bank!

But the news, we tell ourselves, isn't all bad: we try to balance our fear with pride in our accomplishments.  We note with relief that the red ink in our national budget doesn't look as bad as it did a few years ago.  We hope that our ingenuity as a species will produce solutions to our national and international challenges before all our score cards read "zero"—or worse.  We rightly take pride in the almost geometric progression of technology: a probe sent to Mars and another planned to land on the surface of a comet; telescopes that can see water on planets light-years away; new technologies that harvest and store the essentially limitless energy of the sun; astonishing new types of computers and artificial intelligence; seemingly impossible medical technology that will apparently be able to extend the ability of our minds to communicate and to replace diseased parts of our body with high-tech artificial ones; and to eliminate terrible diseases with highly sophisticated antibiotics and other chemotherapies—these are not futuristic fantasies: these are just a few of the technological breakthroughs that have already been created and "proven" by researchers using laboratory computer models.  Our capacity for creative use of our minds seems virtually limitless.

But the use of technology isn't an unalloyed blessing.  Yes, our new connectedness causes barriers to collapse and makes us more accessible to one another and makes possible resumption of dialogue and relationships  after generations of cold hostility and isolation. At the same time, however, our valuing of openness and privacy facilitates development of terrorist cyber networks that are difficult to track. Yet Twitter is credited with a vital role in bringing about revolutions in politically-repressive countries.  The ambiguity of the reality created by electronic communications media generates in us an individual and corporate ambivalence about Edward Snowden's dedication to improving the transparency of the affairs of our government—and of private corporations.  At the same time, the world learns almost instantaneously about beheadings of aid-workers by "religious" extremists in a part of the world that, two generations ago, was regarded as hopelessly remote, and certainly irrelevant to "our" way of life. 

Clearly, our accustomed notions concerning community, safety and vulnerability are outdated.

The authors have some thoughts about the crossover between our individual emotional state and larger cultural and societal responses to what sometimes feels like chronic war and unaddressable chaos.

Irrelationship is about creating—co-creating, actually—the delusion that an unsafe world is actually a safe one. Or, at least, safe enough. A child doesn’t know what to make of a parent who is depressed, anxious, distant or ineffective in some way.   So, out of perceived necessity, the child turns the tables  and starts to blame himself for whatever is causing his parent’s distress or distance.

Next he will devise a remedy for his unease by treating his parent’s distress.  In other words, he becomes his parent’s caregiver: he will make it his business to make the unhappy parent happy, the ill parent feel better, the ineffective parent to believe that he, the child, is okay.

As the child learns to manipulate the world in this way, he will come to believe that the world is manageable and can be made safe.  In his eyes he himself becomes the necessary force for keeping chaos at bay.  Without either child or parent realizing it, they're struck a pact whereby the child keeps himself feeling safe by improving his parent's emotional state.  If either breaks this tacit agreement, the child will ultimately come to view the world as at least potentially unstable, hostile, violent.  His response to this is that he will continue to hone his powerful defenses to keep the world safe either by manipulating the people around him, or by dissociating from their experiences and needs.  Whichever technique he uses, its purpose is the same:  to distance himself from awareness of how scary the world is.

Perhaps this is how we manage to keep walking through a world that feels like it's becoming more chaotic almost by the hour.

Or maybe we use those astounding technological advances mentioned above as evidence that, all in all, the world is actually getting better, safer.  And who wouldn't want to believe that?  Who wouldn't want to believe that the people of the world are becoming more intelligent, more wise, more conscious of the importance of our caring for the planet and the people in it?  Yes, we allow that "growing pains" are part of the process of becoming more inclusive, more pluralistic in our treatment of one another.

Except that the images and You-Tube videos we see reveal to us almost in real time how extravagant our mistreatment of one another continues to be.  And so we return—we must return—to our denial.  For those of us living the extraordinary lifestyle of wealth first popularized in the West, we have the option to return to recreational consumerism that we take for granted as well as myriad forms of non-stop entertainment.  If we don't have access to such privilege (if privilege is the word for it) then merely trying to survive fills our awareness sufficiently to block awareness of anything else. In another theater of WWIII, gigantic "climate-change" marches are helping to establish yet another beach-head in the battle for a safe world.

And it may well be called World War III—though it's not necessarily the type of war in which firearms are used to kill "the enemy" located in discrete, politically defined geographical regions.  WWIII is a chaotic international struggle that results in routing our neighbors from their homes, poisoning our food, water and air; a struggle in which, for many, "different" is and evil to be destroyed, whether it be different color skin, language, citizenship, sexual orientation or religion.  

Perhaps it has always been so among the peoples of the world; but now the effects of our hatreds are easily exportable thanks to communications technology.  Thus we can be preyed upon by anxiety over events in countries or diseases or sects we didn't know existed until we read the Huffington Post this morning.  In short, we no longer have the luxury of imagining that the terrors affecting my neighbor are "his" but not "mine," even if that neighbor lives 15,000 miles away.  Perhaps this is World War 3.0?

Paradoxically, we like to tell ourselves that the world is changing for the better; that we are more intolerant than ever of disease, hunger and religion-based killing.  The human rights culture, we want to believe, is growing at a rate approaching the  speed-of-light pace at which we can avail ourselves of videos of cold-blooded beheadings.  We want desperately to believe in a Digitally Augmented Collective Human Intelligence, ("DACHI") (okay, we made it up) with the potential to bring about a new world community before we've destroyed the one we live in.

How does irrelationship fit into all of this?  

The result of growing up in unsafety is the development of a kind of self-sufficiency that does not allow others to matter—to become essential.  It is a system of self-care where we are constantly imposing “care” on others to keep them at a safe emotional distance from ourselves.

Irrelationship cheats us - all of us.

Through irrelationship, we protect ourselves from this risks that come with allowing ourselves to care about others and about each other.  What happens when we see this on a global scale? What happens when our psychological defenses prevent our caring enough about each other to take risks that may advance the safety and well-being of others?   

Recovering from irrelationships can't happen in isolation: it's work that we do together.  Perhaps the end of our endless war begins with dropping our defenses and learning to care for—and be cared for--by those in our immediate surroundings. When we see how guarded we are against those most closely connected to us, we can make the choice to begin to learn to take care of each other properly and with mutuality.  This is what the peace Albert Einstein was pleading with Sigmund Freud to address looks like when two (or more) of us make a decision to created and sustained it.  It is a good start--probably the only possible start.

The alternative is to continue pretending that the “care” provided by Performers of violent routines can rescue us from the end of the world - that air strikes, drones, endless war mongering will give us peace and save our children.  In reality, however,  this alternative is the choice to be the Audience for a bloodthirsty charade whose outcome is anything but peaceful.  Until we make a different choice, we, our children and their children, are doomed to repeat the same insanity with the same result.

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*"Flag Bodypaint Make Love Not War Bodyart (8498597667)" by Eva Rinaldi from Sydney Australia—Flag Bodypaint Make Love Not War 

To lose weight or change the way you eat, you need to get and stay motivated. You have eating habits that are strongly ingrained: You’re accustomed to eating a certain amount ad certain types of foods at certain times. If you need to lose a substantial amount of weight, you may be talking about changing lifelong habits—habits you’ve probably had even longer than you’ve carried those excess pounds.

Breaking old habits is one of the most difficult things about making lifestyle changes that lead to healthier living. The way to do it is by creating distractions from your usual routine and filling your time in new and different ways.

Commitment First

Even if you’re only trying to shake off 10 or 15 pounds, or give up a certain type of food that isn’t good for you, you still have to be committed to making changes in your thinking patterns, eating habits and, mostly likely, your exercise routine.

Commitment is especially important when you’re trying to maintain a healthy weight because, for most people, sticking to a maintenance plan is harder than losing the weight in the first place. If you make a commitment to better health, rather than to a change in appearance or a passing diet trend, you’ll be less likely to fall for gimmicks or “magic bullets” or pseudo-science that hints at solutions that don’t really work. You’ll realize that these false solutions only get in the way of real progress because they distract you from getting to the root of the problem.

An Incentive Plan

What are your incentives for changing your diet and getting fit? Think about all the things you want out of life that depend on your good health. Maybe you want to be better at sports. Maybe you want to live to see your granddaughter through college. Maybe you want to increase your energy level, set a good example for your children, be happier, control a disease, get stronger or leave obsessive thinking behind. Think about the incentives in your own life and write them down. You can refer to them on those days when your attitude seems to be, “why bother?”

Rewarding a Job Well Done

Of course, your best reward for getting fit is your own good health and, ideally, that’s enough incentive to keep you moving toward your long-term goals. But let’s face it. We’re all human here, and once in a while, we need material rewards. Come up with a list of non-food things you can use to reward yourself for progress. You might take yourself to a show, get a massage, buy a hardcover book, or indulge in an expensive face cream. Maybe the best material reward for losing weight or sticking to an exercise program is buying new clothes to fit your new shape.

Get motivated to stick with your plan by figuring out what matters most to you, what makes you feel happy and satisfied. Motivation comes from the rewards you get for working so hard to improve your attitude and behavior. If you’re not concerned about your health right now, then preventing heart disease probably won’t motivate you to take an aerobics class or cut back on fatty foods in your diet. On the other hand, if you want to lose weight and feel better about yourself and the way you look, those are your best motivators right now for going to the gym and watching what you eat.

Reaching for Help

You may find yourself in a push-pull situation, what psychologists call approach-avoidance conflict. It’s very normal for people who want to change their behavior. You want to be physically healthy, but at the same time, you don’t want to give up any pleasures. Only you can decide whether to struggle against the problem or give in. Under these circumstances, a good coach—whether it’s a friend or a professional counselor—can help keep you motivated. When you are distracted by conflicting desires or other events in your life, it might help to have someone routinely remind you to focus on your goals.

As stated in my previous post, I view Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, like his predecessor Osama bin Laden, as a religious fundamentalist cult leader with a major messiah complex. But what exactly is a "messiah complex"?

Carl Jung is credited with first introducing the term "complex" into the psychoanalytic lexicon. Prior to Jung's relatively brief but fruitful collaboration with him, Freud utilized an altogether different terminology to denote the now famous "Oedipus complex." Later, Alfred Adler, another of Freud's former followers, introduced the notion of an "inferiority complex."

According to Jung, a complex (e.g., a mother or fathercomplex) is an unconscious constellation of cognitions, memories, images, impulsions, opinions, beliefs, associations and other content emanating from a core or nucleus of repressed or dissociated emotion, drive or instinct. Complexes can behave like relatively autonomous "splinter personalities," powerfully influencing consciousness, cognition, affect and behavior. As Jung once said, we all have complexes; the question is whether we have complexes or they have us.

Complexes contain archetypal images that lie latent in the unconscious until being somehow stimulated or triggered, at which time they can, in certain cases, take complete or partial possession of the personality. The idea and image of Messiah or God appear to be innate (archetypal) potentialities in the human psyche. When activation occurs, some confused individuals completely misidentify themselves with this archetypal image, resulting in a dangerous form of ego-inflation seen typically in schizophrenic patients, or those suffering from delusional disorder or severe manic episodes. This same dynamic can also occur in those with paranoid personality disorder or severe narcissistic personality disorder.

In schizophrenia--and the psychoses in general--the phenomenon of what we clinicians call "religious preoccupation" is striking: Psychotic patients regularly report hearing the voice of God or the Devil. Persecutory paranoia can accompany such dangerous states of mind, and is typically the source of supposed defensive violence by cults toward demonized non-believers or outsiders. Rev. Jim Jones, the paranoid spiritual leader of the People's Temple, who claimed to be both Jesus and Buddha, led 914 of his tragically mesmerized followers--including 276 innocent children--to mass murder-suicide in 1978. Marshall Applewhite similarly proclaimed himself a messiah and predicted doomsday, eventually leading his Heaven's Gate cult to mass suicide in 1997. In 1993, seventy-four members of David Koresh's heavily armed fundamentalist cult, the Branch Davidians, died a fiery death in a furious shootout with government agents in Waco, Texas. Koresh, who never knew his father, perhaps seeking one instead in Jesus Christ, fancied himself the "final prophet." In each of these tragic cases exemplifying the messiah syndrome, the cult members and leaders were convinced that death would lead to glory and a better afterlife, to Heaven, much as in the case of Islamist terrorists like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

Like convicted mass murderer Charles Manson, Koresh's grandiose dreams of being a rock star in this life were crushed after coming to Hollywood. Fame eluded them. Their compensatory narcissistic fantasies were frustrated. Their inflated egos wounded. What followed in both cases was a bloody and embittered reaction to feelings of frustration, narcissistic injury and rejection, one that lashed out against the world in a relentless pursuit of destructive infamy, fueled by a wicked rage for recognition.

From the perspective of existential psychology, the Messiah phenomenon can be understood as part of the eternal and universal search for the "ultimate rescuer": an omnipotent and omnisicent force or being that loves and protects us. The ultimate rescuer saves us from our existential aloneness, freedom, anxiety, responsibility to think for ourselves and decide on our own behavior, and provides hope and meaning to counteract our lack of purpose in life and despair. Though an ultimate rescuer may be construed in many forms (including in the case of so-called positive transference in psychotherapy), magical powers are projected onto the person of the cult leader or messiah, accompanied by a surrender of one's personal will and ego to the messianic leader and the collective needs of the cult. This gives followers of the messiah an opportunity to transcend their own individual egos and to function as part of something greater than themselves. In this sense, participants in the messiah syndrome seek spirituality, some way of transcending their sense of meaninglessness, powerlessness, helplessness, and isolation. Sadly, for Islamic terrorists and other messianic cult members, including Satanists, this is a tragically misdirected, desperate effort to find some sense of personal significance, belonging, empowerment and connection with the transpersonal realm. In religious or metaphorical terms, this deadly messiah syndrome is tantamount to a pact with the Devil, and provides a rationalization and excuse for committing evil deeds in the name of cult and cause.

We all have a "messiah complex" dwelling deep within. But not everyone becomes completely possessed and grandiosely inflated by it. The desire to redeem and "save the world," when kept in check, can be a very positive force in life, motivating us to do good deeds and to leave the world a better place--if only infinitesimally--than when we came into it. But when one has been chronically frustrated in realizing this positive, creative potentiality, it remains stillborn in the unconscious, dissociated from the personality, rendering them highly susceptible to possession by the messiah complex. This is especially true when the sense of self has been underdeveloped or weakened due to trauma and other early narcissistic wounding.

Messianic religious sects like Al-Qaeda and ISIS are not unlike the psychedelic cult or "Family" that unquestioningly served and worshipped Charles Manson, obediently butchering the pregnant Sharon Tate and eight others at his bidding in the summer of 1969. Manson was convinced that by instigating a race war in America as a result of the random killings, he and his group would seize power in the ensuing pandemonium of "Helter Skelter." This was his own messianic delusion of being a savior, of saving the world. From what I've seen in taped interviews over the years, Manson appears to be at once narcissistically grandiose, intermittently psychotic, paranoid, and profoundly antisocial. He bitterly alleges--with some merit, given his horrific background before the Hollywood massacre-- that the world has done him wrong, which gives him the right to do the world wrong, to commit such evil deeds. This pathological inner rage and narcissistic need for retribution and revenge is at the core of sociopathy--which is why I refer to antisocial personality disorder and what I call "psychopathic narcissism" (see my prior post) as really an anger disorder. 

Manson, like Koresh, never knew his father. His mother was an alcoholic and possible prostitute who physically neglected, rejected, abused and abandoned him. In and out of juvenile detention since he was twelve--closely fitting the profile of so many antisocial characters-- Manson became a career criminal who has spent the bulk of his adult life behind bars. He is reported to have had an intense need to call attention to himself as a child and adolescent. But, never receiving such love and attention from his parents, Manson sought it, like most children in such circumstances do, by engaging in negative behavior. In adulthood, having failed to do so constructively or creatively through music or otherwise, Manson (and Koresh) eventually succeeded in finding the fame and acceptance they desperately desired destructively via their evil deeds.

We know that children who are frustrated in getting the positive attention and fulfillment of healthy narcissism they naturally need will turn to negative attention-getting behaviors as a substitute for positive or no attention at all. Manson himself admits "I'm still a little five-year-old kid." This is psychologically accurate: Manson, like most other messianic cult leaders, is basically an abandoned, damaged, deeply hurt, angry, resentful, fearful little boy who feels unloved and unlovable. By becoming cult leaders, they receive the unconditional love, attention and acceptance from their followers they always craved. And they can act out their infantile fantasies of omnipotence, power and control.

I suspect terrorist leaders like bin Laden and al-Baghdadi share similar states of mind with other infamous cult figures, including "polygamist prophet" Warren Jeffs and self-proclaimed messiah Michael Travesser (Wayne Bent). Certainly, bin Laden saw himself as a messiah, the savior of his own Muslim people, and perhaps, of humanity. Adolf Hitler, another messianic cult leader, also viewed himself this way, as did the entire German nation, following him blindly into a catastrophic World War with millions of casualties. Psychoanalyst Michael Stone (1991) notes that Hitler's father brutally beat both him and his brother daily with a whip, suggesting that Hitler's evil deeds (and his notorious "anger attacks") were, at least in part, a consequence of this physical and emotional abuse: a hateful--and, ironically, hypersadistic--displaced expression of repressed rage regarding his frustrating relationship with his sadistic father.

In Jungian terms, both al-Baghdadi and bin Laden may be classic cases of inflation: a pathological over-identification with the Messiah archetype, the universally innate image of an embodied savior or chosen one. Many religions share this archetypal concept of Messiah, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In Christianity, the negative counterpart to the Messiah is the Antichrist. Much like the archetypal notion of God, identifying oneself as God or Messiah is a disastrous form of ego-inflation. Such inflation is a grandiose narcissistic defense against profound feelings of inferiority and powerlessness. The wounded ego, with its debilitating, neurotic feelings of guilt, badness, shame, emptiness, unworthiness and helplessness falls prey to the equally neurotic (or psychotic) compensatory spiritual pride the ancient Greeks called hubris, providing self-righteous justification for evil deeds. In this sense, the would-be messiah or savior turns instead into the Christian Antichrist or Islam's Masih ad-Dajjal, the false messiah, the embodiment of all evil.

It was an extraordinary story back in May 2012. Strange packages surfaced in several places in Montreal, Canada, that contained body parts. A note attached to a severed foot warned that the killer would strike again. It was mailed to the headquarters of a political party.

A severed hand was meant for another party, but this package was intercepted. The torso was found on May 29 in a suitcase dumped in garbage behind an apartment building, and the head turned up in a city park. Several other parts, intercepted at the post office, had been intended for public schools.

The victim was identified as 33-year-old computer engineering student Jun Lin. The killer was on the run.

Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, became the subject of an international manhunt, getting the attention he’d been craving for years. The news stations all discussed an 11-minute video that he’d posted online a few hours after the murder that featured dismemberment and the appearance of cannibalism. The victim, tied to a bed frame, was stabbed to death with an ice pick, then slashed across the throat, beheaded, and cut into pieces.

Shot inside a shadowy apartment, the background resembled the unit in Montreal where police found evidence of a very bloody incident. From a closet, they retrieved a note: “If you don’t like the reflection, don’t look in the mirror.”

On the video, Magnotta made lewd gestures with the body parts before performing necrophilic acts. To music, he appeared to be using a fork to eat some raw flesh.

Magnotta had also posted rambling statements on his website, along with self-promoting PR, to make it clear that he had an urgent need to become famous. To this point, he’d failed. He’d tried to become a gay model and he'd also posed as the supposed boyfriend of a notorious female killer (Karla Homolka). He even killed animals on videotape. Apparently, these acts were insufficient to gain him attention, so he’d aimed for something truly outrageous.

Magnotta fled to Europe but was caught on June 4 in Berlin and returned to Canada. He admitted to the charges, which included first-degree murder, but on the formal indictment, he pled not guilty.

His lawyer, Luc Leclair, told the court today that Magnotta will basically plead insanity, i.e., “not criminally responsible.” At the time of the offense, he supposedly had an unsound mind and was thus incapable of understanding the nature and consequences of his acts.

So he gets one more shot at being famous, because the members of the jury will have to view the gruesome video (I’ve seen it – it’s quite disturbing) and the media will cover every detail.

“You heard about the so-called murder video,” prosecutor Louis Bouthillier told the jury. “Most of you have not seen the so-called murder video. You will get to see it here in court. You are judges now.”

Bouthillier claims to have evidence that this was no crime of impulse but had been planned for months and was therefore quite deliberate. His witness list will include a reporter who received an email in December 2011 to the effect that Magnotta was intending to kill a human and film it.

The trial is expected to last nearly two months. It’s likely that several mental health experts will weigh in on both sides. The defense attorney hopes for “intelligent, open-minded jurors” who will "listen" and not form a judgment too soon.

This proceeding is likely to be polarizing, due to Magnotta’s arrogance and narcissism. In videos from those days, he seems perfectly aware that what he’s doing is wrong, even though his acts are depraved and perverse. Among the factors to be offered is the presence of schizophrenia in several members of Magnotta’s family.

Frankly, it might have been easier to prove his addiction to fame as a disintegrative force. But that's not an official diagnosis.

Some people think that a serious mental illness is equivalent to insanity. However, one can be psychotic but still be found legally sane. It will be interesting to watch how this trial plays out.

"You don't look sick."

"Stop talking so negatively about yourself."

"He tried to kill himself. He's weak."

These are some comments I've heard tossed around about depression. I have anxiety, but I've also suffered from clinical depression for my entire life. I can attest to you that depression looks differently on every person suffering from it. Some of us can't get out of bed, some of us have trouble showering, some of us can barely eat while others eat too much, some of us have chronic pain, others have trouble focusing and so on. Depression is like a garment of clothing; it form fits to each individual wearing it. 

A person living with depression might not "look sick," but they are suffering on the inside. They are hurting. They are trying to function. They are treading water and their legs are tired. This person is barely surviving. Unfortunately, depression (like other illnesses) can have a terminal end: suicide. I have heard people call a person who has commited suicide "weak." This is analogous to mocking someone with a terminal illness for dying. 

It is morally reprehensible to judge a human being for taking their own life as "a coward" or "weak,""ungrateful," or even worse: "selfish." The human being who took his own life was in excrutiating pain. He was ill. You might not have been able to see it, but he was suffering on the inside.

This is why we need to open up a candid dialogue about mental illness. We as a society need to begin to break down the stigma and preconcieved notions about what it means to be depressed. When we do this (talk openly about depression without judgment) we can focus on the greater goal, which is to heal. 

I want a better life for those of us living with mental illness. I want to see a world where we can talk about the symptoms of depression without shame, without guilt, and most importantly without fear of being judged as weak or less than. 

We are not weak. We are warriors. We are strong. It takes great strength to fight a battle that is within yourself. It may be invisible to the outside world, but it's there and you are brave for facing each and every moment like this one right now. 

There is nothing inherent in the process of evolution by natural selection that necessarily leads up to a buildup of complexity over time. Indeed, along some branches of the tree of life, there’s likely been very little increase in complexity for billions of years.  But along other branches of this grand tree of life, we see trends like an increase in body size, an increase in number of different cell types, an increase in number of protein-coding genes and in increase in total genome size. 

Over and over, during what biologists John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary have dubbed the major transition in evolution, we see such trends.

My colleague Carl Bergstrom and I discuss these major transitions in detail in our textbook Evolution (WW Norton, 2012), but, in a nutshell, they include:

1. The origin of self-replicating molecules.
2. The origin of the first cells.
3. The emergence of more complex (eukaryotic) cells that include a nucleus and a suite of organelles housed inside a membrane.
4. The evolution of sexual reproduction (from asexual reproduction).
5. The evolution of multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors.
6. The evolution of germ cells, a specialized line of cells that became gametes.
7. The evolution of groups, including the evolution of extreme sociality, like that seen in some species of bees, ants, and wasps, with their division of labor and sterile castes.

It might seem that each of these major transitions is unique. And indeed some, such as the origin of the genetic code and the evolution of eukaryotic cells, were one-of-a-kind events. Other transitions, such as the evolution of multicellularity and the evolution of group living, have evolved independently numerous times. Regardless of whether a major transition has occurred just once or many times, evolutionary biologists hypothesize that many of the major transitions in evolution involve cooperation between what were formerly competitive entities. There are two ways this tends to happen during major transitions:

Individuals give up the ability to reproduce independently, and they join together to form a larger grouping that shares reproduction. For example, early in the history of life, independently replicating molecules joined together within a membrane to form proto-cells. Later, along numerous branches on the tree of life, unicellular organisms joined together to form multicellular creatures. Solitary individuals started living together in colonial groups, sometimes even giving up the possibility of independent replication, as we see in many species of social insects. In each of these cases, formerly autonomous, competitive units, merged and shared their reproductive fate. Star Trek fans--think Borg.

Once individuals aggregate into higher-level groupings, they can take advantage of the cooperative benefits associated with economies of scaleand efficiencies of specialization. Economies of scale come about when groups can perform a task more efficiently than single individuals.  Efficiencies of specialization come about because when groups are collectively engaged in a task, they can benefit from a division of labor, allowing different individuals to specialize in different tasks. For example, we see the benefits of both economy of scale and efficiency of specialization when we compare multicellular organisms to their single-celled counterparts.

The big changes--the major transitions in the history of life on our planet--are, in one way or another, about the evolution of cooperation.

Additional reading: Maynard Smith, J., and E. Szathmary. 1997. The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford University Press, New York.

Feeling down, grumpy, agitated, anxious, sad or lonely? There may be a brief, free, and easy technique that you can use right now, without even having to fix a relationship or any other problem, to feel immediately calmer and happier. Temporal tapping is a quickee method for influencing your feelings, thoughts or actions for the better. 

This rapid-acting and easy-to-do technique, which involves no invasive procedures, medicines or risky procedures, has been around for centuries.  Yes, not just for years, but for centuries.  Can you use it to change your occasional grumpy, anxious or irritible mood?  Maybe yes, and maybe no.  But rather than let a bad mood spoil your day or spill out on folks you cherish, learning to do temporal tapping could well be worth a try. 

Donna Eden, a master practicioner of this and other surprisingly effective new therapy and self-help intervention methods, gives a more full explanation of temporal tapping here.  If though you just want to get on with it to rid yourself of a bad mood right now, check out the video below.  It will take less than 2 minutes to watch.  Implementing the technique then takes less than 30 seconds.

I make no promises and have no research to back up the validity of temporal tapping.  I've just seen it work for clients, and with myself, enough to feel that the technique is worth sharing. 

The underlying mechanism seems to be the same as the mechanism of post-hypnotic suggestion. That's when the hypnotist plants an idea for action subsequent to the trance by saying something like "When you come out of this trance you will...."

Have fun with it!

If the short video above is not working, try clicking here.

"Calm and happy" is one option for a target emotional state.  If you would prefer another, feel welcome to say that instead.  E.g., "I am ok with the dilemma I am facing. I feel ready to figure out how to handle it effectively."  Or, "I feel optimistic that this situation will work itself out for the best." Or whatever statement feels right for you. 

Two rules for choosing your own message to tap into your subconscious:

1. The statement must be in the present tense.  Instead of "I will feel ..." which would be future tense, use "I am" or "I feel... ."

2. The statement must be phrased in the positive, with zero not's or  a but's.  That is, avoid "I don't feel irritated ... " which would be phrased in the negative since don't has within it an abbreviated not.  Instead, keep the format a description of the state you are hoping to be feeling as a result of the tapping, i.e., "I feel relaxed and appreciative that  ....." 

This is an experiment.

Do use the Comments option below to let me and other readers as well know what your experience is with this technique.  When did you use it?  And what has been the outcome?  This is an experiment that all of us can do together. 

Looking forward to hearing from you!

 (c)Susan Heitler, Ph.D.    -----------------------------------

For an indexed listing of Dr. H's Blogposts see her clinical website.

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Denver clinical psychologist Susan Heitler, Ph.D, a graduate of Harvard and NYU, is author of Power of Two, a book, a workbook, and a website that teach the communication skills that sustain positive relationships.  

Click here for a free Power of Two relationship quiz. 

Click the Power of Two logo to learn the skills for a strong, emotionally healthy and loving marriage.

Nobody likes people who say "I'm right and you're not." We've all learned to be diplomatic, so nobody's feelings get hurt. Even when we're completely certain we're right, we realize it's good manners to say, "I'm sure there are ways you're right, too," or, "No doubt we both have something useful to contribute to this."

But science is different. The scientific enterprise is about getting closer to the truth, by discovering or creating new understandings, and discarding older ones that we know are misguided. In science, we cannot patiently accommodate mistaken ideas because it's good manners. Some people may still believe that the Earth is flat. Yet it would be very bad science to say, "Hey, no problem. We're can both be right! Let's make a theory that the earth is round and also sometimes flat. Everyone will be happy."

Somehow in the field of addiction, "making nice" has managed to grab a powerful foothold. Ask nearly any psychiatrist about the nature of addiction, and she is likely to support the notion that it is a "biopsychosocial" phenomenon. This word, invented in the late 1970's, was intended to act as a sort of tepid catch-all which included every possible factor in the development of addiction: biological, psychological and social. Everyone's model got a seat at the table. Today the "biopsychosocial" explanation has become standard for virtually every psychiatric problem. And why shouldn't it be popular? "Biopsychosocial" may be the most diplomatic medical term ever invented.

Biology, sociology and psychology represent three separate pathways to understanding behavior, which may or may not overlap. If a woman is exposed to rabies, she may begin acting aggressively and erratically, a pattern of behavior that is the result of purely biological factors: she is infected. If a man lacks food and shelter, he will be more inclined to break the law to get what he needs to survive, a pattern of behavior that is psychosocial. And if a person responds to feeling overwhelmingly helpless by drinking or gambling or overeating, this pattern of behavior is psychological.

The lines get blurred sometimes in the study of addiction because these contextual factors may appear together. If an impoverished man becomes an alcoholic, certainly his social state is a factor. But his solution to this particular helplessness is a psychological symptom. Poverty contributes to addiction, but it is not the deepest understanding of it.

Speaking personally rather than scientifically, I wish I could make friends with everyone and add in biological and social factors to the basic nature of addiction. I happen to love biology: I was a biology major in college and did my honors thesis in embryology. In medical school, my favorite of the basic sciences was Histology: deciphering microscopic slides of different tissues.

But science isn't about what you love, or about being nice. Sadly, the "biopsychosocial" idea is doing more good for theorists than for addicts.

I recently received a concerned call from a colleague: “Some people were offended by your most recent email,” she delicately told me, referring to an email that I had posted to a listserv that I participate in. Yikes, I thought to myself, urgently checking through my sent mail to find the offending note. I usually take time to proofread my emails, especially when I know that it will be read by hundreds of other professionals. I finally located the email and read through it. At first glance, the email seemed mundane; but then I saw it, the offensive statement that she was referring to. I had used the F-word: FAT.

This reaction to the new F-word made me think. Have our bodies become so shame ridden that we cannot even utter the word to describe certain types of bodies? Have fat bodies become unspeakable, their very existence denied by lack of “acceptable” language? It seems as though the F-word can only be spoken to confirm its lack of existence—as in “do I look fat in this?” a question that is typically only asked in anticipation of a reassuring “no, of course not, you look great,” as if looking fat and great were an impossibility.

Clearly, fat has come to mean far more than the composition of lean and fat tissue in your body. It has turned into an insult. Fat is bad. Undesirable. Unlovable. We live in a dominant society that values thinness. But not too thin, as evidenced by the recent comment I overheard in a coffee shop between two women: “Have you seen this picture of so and so on Facebook? She looks SOOOOO skinny. Like anorexic—but not in a good way.” We are a culture that aspires to look anorexic—but in a good way.

I was at a bit of a loss in how to respond to my colleague’s concerns. I certainly did not want to apologize; that would support the notion that fat is an insult, an unspeakable travesty. So I tried to explain my usage of the F-bomb. I had used the word ‘fat’ as a descriptor, similar to how one might describe someone as brunette or tall. Why hadn’t I used another word, perhaps a euphemism that people may have felt more comfortable with? ‘Chubby,’ ‘plump,’ or ‘plus size’? ‘Overweight’ and ‘larger bodies’ were suggested as alternatives. However, these terms connote that there is one acceptable body size and fat bodies surpass that limit. Over what weight? Larger than what? I could have used the term ‘obese,’ but since the AMA has classified obesity as a disease, ‘obese’ now literally means a diseased body. In my email, I was not specifying sick bodies. Just fat ones.

This reminds me of how we often talk about another shame-ridden topic—sex. ‘Down there’ people often say to refer to…umm…well, I’m not quite sure what they are referring to because the language is so non-specific and non-descriptive. It is awfully hard to help someone when you are not sure if they need a referral for a gynecologist or a podiatrist. Has 'fat' become another dirty word, giggled about by school children, with no space for a real discourse in our culture.

So, I ask: Is FAT the new F-word?

I’ll be hosting a discussion on this topic at the November IAEDP-NY members only event for eating disorder professionals. If you are an eating disorder professional in the NYC area and want more information about the talk, please contact me. I’m hoping that the conversation will begin now using the comments on this site.

To learn more about Dr. Conason, mindful eating, and The ME Revolution, please visit www.drconason.com

I recently gave a speech at the Artificial Intelligence and The Singularity Conference in Oakland, California. There was a great lineup of speakers, including AI experts Peter Voss and Monica Anderson, New York University professor Gary Marcus, sci-fi writer Nicole Sallak Anderson, and futurist Scott Jackisch. All of us are interested in how the creation of artificial intelligence will impact the world.

My speech topic was: The Morality of an Artificial Intelligence Will be Different from our Human Morality

Recently, entrepreneur Elon Musk made major news when he warned on Twitter that AI could be: "Potentially more dangerous than nukes." A few days later, a journalist asked me to respond to his statement, and I answered:

The coming of artificial intelligence will likely be the most significant event in the history of the human species. Of course, it can go badly, as Elon Musk warned recently. However, it can just as well catapult our species to new and unimaginable transhumanist heights. Within a few months of the launch of artificial intelligence, expect nearly every science and technology book to be completely rewritten with new ideas--better and far more complex ideas. Expect a new era of learning and advanced life for our species. The key, of course, is not to let artificial intelligence run wild and out of sight, but to already be cyborgs and part machines ourselves, so that we can plug right into it wherever it leads. Then no matter what happens, we are along for the ride. After all, we don't want to miss the Singularity.

Naturally, as a transhumanist, I strive to be an optimist. For me, the deeper philosophical question is whether human ethics can be translated in a meaningful way into machine intelligence ethics. Even beyond that question is: Does the concept of cultural relativism apply to whatever cultures or information environments artificial intelligences spawn? Perhaps there will be an artificial intelligence relativism in the future. I'm a big fan of the human ego, and our species has no shortage of it. However, our anthropomorphic tendencies often go way too far and hinder us from grasping some obvious truths and realities.

The common consensus is that AI experts will aim to program concepts of "humanity,""love," and "mammalian instincts" into an artificial intelligence, so it won't destroy us in some future human extinction rampage. The thinking is, if the thing is like us, why would it try to do anything to harm us?

But is it even possible to program such concepts into a machine? I tend to agree with Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead when he says, "What can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike." In short, getting artificial intelligence to think is not the same thing as getting the gray matter we all carry around to think. It's a different material with a different composition and purpose, and our values and ideas will likely not work very well for it.

In Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse famously wrote that "wisdom is not communicable," and I basically agree with him. With this in mind, then, is the computer really a blank slate? Can it be perfectly programmed? Will it accept our human-imbued dictates? For example, if we teach it to follow Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics that provide security and benefit to humans from thinking machines, will an artificial intelligence actually follow them?

I don't think so, at least not over the long run. Especially if we're talking a true thinking machine of its own--complete with a will of its own and the ability to evolve. But that's just it: What is a will? More importantly, what does that "will" want?

In general, a human will is defined by its genes, the environment, and the psychological make-up of its brain. However, a sophisticated artificial intelligence will be able to upgrade its "will." Its plasticity will know no bounds, as our brains do. In my philosophical novel The Transhumanist Wager, I put forth the idea that all humans desire to reach a state of perfect personal power--to be omnipotent in the universe. I call this a Will to Evolution. The idea is built into my Three Laws of Transhumanism, which form the essence of the book's philosophy, Teleological Egocentric Functionalism (TEF). Here are the three laws:

1) A transhumanist must safeguard one's own existence above all else.

2) A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible--so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First Law.

3) A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe--so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

I consider my novel a bridge to the coming morality of artificial intelligence--a look into the eventual "will" of super advanced machine intelligence. I often say to friends that The Transhumanist Wager is the first novel written for an artificial intelligence to read. I expect AI to eventually embrace my laws, and all the challenging, coldly rational ideas in TEF. Those ideas do not reflect politically correct modern-day thinking and the society our species has built. They do not reflect the programming that engineers are hoping to imbue AI with. High heels, lipstick, silk ties, Christmas, democracy, Super Bowls, Hollywood, Mickey Mouse. Nope, those are not ideas that AI will want, unless you teach the machine very human traits, which naturally would also include emotional and hormonal driven behavior, including impetuousness and irrationality. Of course, then the whole story changes. But no engineer is going to program such a thing into the most complex intelligence that ever existed--an intelligence that might have a hundred or ten thousand times more ability to compute than a human being.

Let's face it. Humans are a species that, while having some very honorable traits, are also known to do some terribly foolish things. Genocides, slavery, child labor are just a few of them. What's scary is sometimes humans don't even know what they've done (or won't accept it) until many years later. I've often said the question is not whether humans are delusional, but how delusional are we? Therefore, the real question is: Do we really think we can reasonably and safely program a machine that will be many times more intelligent than ourselves to uphold human values and mammalian propensities? I doubt it.

I'm all for development of superior machine intelligence that can help the world out with its brilliant analytical skills. I suggest we dedicate far more resources to it than we're currently doing. But programming AI with mammalian ideas, modern-day philosophies, and the fallibilities of the human spirit is dangerous and will possibly lead to total chaos. We're just not that noble or wise, yet.

My final take: Work diligently on creating artificial intelligence, but spend a lot of money and time building really good on/off switches for it. We need to be able to shut it down in an emergency.

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Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, philosopher, journalist, and transhumanist. You can find him on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Zoltan is also the author of the award-winning, #1 Philosophical and Sci-Fi Visionary bestseller novel The Transhumanist Wager. Available in ebook or paperback, the controversial novel is a revolutionary reading experience. You can check it out here.