Tag: psychology

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson

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This entry is part 49 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts get published with some lag. I’m trying to be more punctual, though, and this one’s very recent. There’s a vogue these days for criticizing people who talk about parental failings as a root for one’s problems, and believe me, I get it. As a parent, you cannot be perfect, cannot always be present, and you’re going to screw up sometimes: either your patience wears out when it shouldn’t, or you say the wrong thing, or you can’t understand your kid’s behavior because you missed some context, or… well, there are …

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The Middle Passage

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A word of warning: though this post is titled “The Middle Passage,” it’s not about African slave transportation routes. It’s titled after the book it discusses, which is a psychologist’s account of midlife crisis. Just in case someone thought it would be something else.  When the Incomparable Mrs. Jiwaku talked about James Hollis’ The Middle Passage—she’d been reading a Korean translation of the book—she was quite passionate about it, but I found myself skeptical: a self-help book about the midlife crisis, by a Jungian psychologist? Three sets of alarm sirens went off in my head, which you can guess from …

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Normal Sadism, Weak Boundaries, and Social Unhappiness

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I was having a discussion with someone about life in Korea–someone who feels pretty much like I do about it–and something interesting crossed my mind. It’s the concept of “normal marital sadism” that was coined by the therapist David Schnarch to describe the very common form of emotional sadism that seems to develop in a lot–a lot–of marriages. He published an article on the concept back in May of this year, in Psychology Today: People who refuse to acknowledge their own hatred, vindictiveness, and punitiveness are the most pernicious people to those they love. You can’t learn to control hostile impulses you …

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It Worked

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If you’re a Boing-Boing reader, no point in trying — you know what’s in this video and it won’t work. But if you aren’t, then watch this video once, paying careful attention to how many times the balls are passed between people. Count ’em up. Make sure you get the exact number of passes. Here’s the video. Then click and see what to do next. DON’T read this until you’ve counted up the exact number of passes.

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The Best Kind of People?

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Is it really a surprise when Sarong Party Girl says the best kind of people in the world are sluts? I just heard the other night, a smoker declaring that the most sociable, companionable, agreeable people in the world are smokers. To this I say, well, maybe. But you have to remember the Avian Rule: in Koreanized Chinese, 유유상종 (Yu-Yu Sang Jong). In English, that’s, “Birds of a feather flock together.” Sluts tend to get along well, and appreciate one anothers’ highjinks well. Sluts together, if they are aware of one anothers’ sluttiness, are a recipe for shared mutally consented …

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