Now, for the first time, three generations are living together under one roof and are quickly encroaching on one another's fragile orbits. Eighty-six-year-old Bob Cole is adrift in his daughter's house without his wife. Anne Obermeyer is increasingly suspicious of her husband, Hugh's, late nights and missed dinners, and Hugh, principal of the town's preschool, is terrified that a scandal at school will erupt and devastate his life.
Fifteen-year-old tennis-team hopeful Julia is caught in a love triangle with Sam and Carl, her would-be teammates and two best friends, while her brother, Teddy, the star pitcher of Cooperstown High, will soon catch sight of something that will change his family forever.
When Anne discovers a battered copy underneath her parents' old mattress, the Obermeyers cannot escape the family secrets that come rushing to the surface. With its heartbreaking insight into the messy imperfections of family, love, and growing up, Callie Wright's Love All is an irresistible comic story of coming-of-age—at any age. Tanya Guerrero's All You Knead Is Love is a contemporary middle grade coming-of-age novel about a twelve-year-old multiracial Filipino and Spanish girl who goes to live with her grandmother for the summer, gaining confidence through a newly discovered passion for baking, perfect for fans of Hello, Universe and Merci Suarez Changes Gears.
Sometimes you find home where you least expect it. Twelve-year-old Alba doesn't want to live with her estranged grandmother in Barcelona. She wants to stay with her mom, even if that means enduring her dad's cutting comments to them both.
But in her new home, Alba forms a close relationship with her grandmother, gains a supportive father figure and new friends, and even discovers a passion and talent for baking.
And through getting to know the city her mother used to call home, Alba starts to understand her mother better—and may just be able to make their family whole again. As her son grows up from little boy to adult man, a mother secretly rocks him each night as he sleeps. This original and lucid account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being draws on the latest scientific research.
Three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain. A General Theory of Love demonstrates that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are.
Real life is messier than the movies. A bold, thought-provoking novel from the exceptionally talented, Steven Camden. Skip to content. All About Love. All About Love Book Review:. All about Love. All about Love Book Review:. What Love Is. What Love Is Book Review:.
It s All About Love. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and.
Here, at her most provacative and intensely personel, the renowned scholar,. Breakthrough courses are aimed at adult education classes and also at the self-study learner. Each course offers authentic, lively, conversational language through a coherent and carefully structured approach. The books are in full colour with attractive photographs and artwork giving a real sense of the country and its culture.
A rising star in philosophy examines the cultural, social, and scientific interpretations of love to answer one of our most enduring questions What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. The narrator arrives in Berlin, a place famed for its hedonism, to find peace and maybe love; only to discover that the problems which have long haunted him have arrived there too, and are more present than ever.
As he approaches his fortieth birthday, nearing the age where his father. Tanveer Singh is a law student based in Ludhiana. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.
Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, feminism lovers. Your Rating:. His favorite way of lying was withholding. H is motto was "just remain silent" when asked questions, then you will not get "caught in a lie.
In Dorothy Dinnerstein's groundbreaking book The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise, she shares the insight that when a little boy learns that his powerful mother, who controls his life, really has no power within a patriarchy, it confuses him and causes rage.
Lying becomes one of the strategic ways he can "act out" and render his mother powerless. Lying enables him to manipulate the mother even as he exposes her lack of power. This makes him fee l more powerful.
In her work Harriet Lerner talks about the way in which patriarchy upholds deception, encouraging women to present a false self to men and vice versa. In Dory H ollander's Lies Men Tell Women, she confirms that while both women and men lie, her data and the find ings of other researchers indicate that "men tend to lie more and with more devastating consequences.
Lots of men shared with me that it was difficult for them to te ll the truth if they saw that it would hurt a loved one. Significantly, the lying many boys learn to do to avoid hurting Mom or whomever becomes so habitual that it becomes ha rd for them to distinguish a lie from the truth. This behavior carries over into adult- hood. Often, men who would never think of lying in the work- place lie constantly in intimate relationships.
This seems to be especially the case for heterosexual men who see women as gullible. Many men confess that they lie because they can get away with it; the ir lies are forgiven. To un- derstand why male lying is more accepted in our lives we have to understand the way in which power and privilege are accorded men simply because they are males within a patriarchal culture. UVF and a " real man " has a lways im plied th at when necessary men ca n take action that breaks the rules, that is a bove the law.
Patria rchy tells us da ily through movies, televi- sion, and magazines that men of powe r can do whatever they want, that it's th is freedom that ma ke s them men. The message gi ven ma les is that to be honest is to be "soft.
John Stolten berg's book Th e End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Con science analyzes the extent to which th e masculine identity offered m en as the ideal in patriarchal culture is one that requires all males to invent and invest in a false self. From the moment little boys a re taught they should not cry or express hurt, feelings of lonelin ess, or pain, that they must be tough, they are learning how to mask true feelings.
In worst-case scenarios they are learn- ing how to not fee l anything eve r. T hese lessons are usu - ally ta ught to ma les by other ma les and sexist mothers. Even boys raise d in the most progressive, loving ho use- holds, where parents encourage them to exp ress emotions, learn a different understanding about masc ul inity and feel- ings on the playground, in the classroom, playing sports, or watching television.
They m ay end up choosing patri- archal m asculinity to be accepted by other boys and af- firmed by male authority figures. W e learn to 'master' language so that we can control the world around us.
Even though we learn to blame others for our unhappiness and misery in relations hips we also know at some unspoken level how our masculinity has been limited and injured as we touch th e hurt a nd pain of realizing how little we seem to feel ab out a nything. This inability to co nnect wi th o thers ca rries w ith it an ina bility to assume responsibil ity for ca using pain.
T his denia l is most evide nt in cases where men seek to justify extreme violence toward those less powerful, usually women , by suggesting they are the o nes who are really victi m ized by females.
Regard less of the intensity of the male masquerade, in- w a rdly ma ny men see themse lves as the victims of love- less ness. Like everyone, they learned as children to believe that love would be present in their lives. Alth ough so ma ny boys are ta ught to be have as t hough love does not m a tter, in their hearts they yearn fo r it. T hat yearning does not go aw ay si mp ly because they become men. Lying, as o ne form of acting o ut, is a way they articulate ongoing rage at the fa ilure of love's promise.
To embrace patri ar - chy, they must actively surrender the longing to love. V E Patriarchal masculinity requires of boys and men not onl y that they see themsel ves as more powerful and su- perior to women but that they do whatever it takes to maintain their controlling position.
This is one of the rea- sons men, more so than women, use lying as a means of gain ing power in relationsh ips. A commonly accepted as- sumption in a patriarchal culture is that love can be pres- ent in a situation where one group or ind ivid ual domi nates another.
Many people believe men can domi nate women and children yet still be lo ving. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung insightfully emphasized the truism that "where the will to power is param ount love w ill be lacking. I TIS NO accident that greater cultural acceptance of ly- ing in this society coincided with women gaini ng greater social equality. Early on in the feminist movement women insisted that men had the upper hand , because they usuall y contro lled the fina nces.
Now that wo men's earning power has greatly increased though it is not on a par with men's , and women are more economically independent, men who want to maintain dominance must dep loy sub- tler strategies to colonize and disempower them. To the degree that she trusts her male comp ani on, lying an d other forms of betrayal will mos t likely shatter her se lf-confidence and self-esteem.
Allegiance to male domination requires of men who em- brace this thinking and many, if not most, do that they maintain dominance over women "by any means neces- sary. This is a socially acceptable form of coercion. And lying is one of the most powerful weapons in this arsenal. When men lie to women, presenting a false self, the terrible price they pay to maintain "power over" us is the loss of their ca- pacity to give and receive Jove.
Trust is the foundation of intimacy. When lies erode trust, genuine connection cannot take place. While men who dominate others can and do ex- perience ongoing care, they place a barrier between them- selves and the experience of love.
All visionary male thinkers challenging male domina - tion insist th at men can ret urn to love only by repudiating the will to domina te. In The End of Manhood, Stoltenberg continually emphasizes that men can honor their own self- hood only through loving justice. V E people ca n have. When a man has decided to love manhood m ore than justice, there are predictable consequences in all his relationships with women.
Learning to live as a man of conscience mean s deciding th at your loyal ty to the peo- ple whom you love is always more important than w hat- ever lingering loyalty you may sometimes feel to other men 's judgment on your manhood. Since the values and behavior of men are usually the standards by which everyone in our culture determines what is acceptable, it is important to understand that con- don ing lying is an essentia l component of patriarchal thinking for everyone.
M en are by no means the only group who use li es as a way of gaining po we r over others. This is one of the primary themes in Lerner's The Dance of Deception.
With shrewd insight she calls women to ac- count for our participation in structures of pretense and lies-particularly within family life. Women are often comfortable lying to men in order to manipulate them to give us things we feel we want or deserve. We may lie to bolster a male's self-esteem. These lies may take the form of pretending to feel emotions we do not feel to pretending levels of emotional vulnerability and neediness that are false.
Heterosexual women are often schooled by other women in the art of lying to men as a way to manipulate. Many examples of the support females receive for lying concern the desire to mate and bear children. When I longed to have a baby and my male partner at the time was not ready, I was stunned by the number of women who en- couraged me to disregard his feelings, to go ahead without telling him. They felt it was fine to deny a child the right to be desired by both female and male biological parents.
No deception is involved when a woman has a child with a sperm donor, as in such a case there is no visible male parent to reject or punish an unwanted child. It disturbed me that women I respected did not ta ke the need for male parenting seriously or believe that it was as important for a man to want to parent as a woman. I could not imagine bringing a child into this world whose father might reject him or her because he did not desire a child in the first place.
Growing up in the fift ies, in the days before adequate birth control, every female was acutely conscious of the way unwanted pregnancies could alter the course of a young woman's life.
Still, it was clear then that there were girls who hoped fo r pregna ncy to emotiona lly bind indi- vidual males to them forever.
I thought those days were long gone. Yet even in this era of social equality between the sexes I hear stories of females choosing to get pregnant when a relationship is rocky as a way of forcing the male to remain in their life or in the hope of forcing marriage. More than we might think, some men feel extremely bound to a woman when she gives birth to a child they have fathered. The fact that men succumb to being lied to and manipulated when the issue is biological parenting does not make it right or just.
Men who accept being lied to and manipulated are not only abdicating their power, they are setting up a situation where they can "blame " women or justify woman-hating. This is another case where lying is used to gain power over someone, to hold them against their will. OVF an absence of deception or frau d.
However, when women lie we lend credence to age-old sexist stereotypes that suggest women are inher- ently, by virtue of being female, less capa ble of truth tell- ing. The origins of this sexist stereotype exte nd back to ancient stories of Adam and Eve, of Eve's wi llingness to lie even to God.
Often, when information is withheld by women and men, protection of privacy is the justification. In our cul- ture privacy is often confused with secrecy.
Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with tho ughts and feelings-where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share w hen we w ant to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing infor- mation.
H ence, many recovery programs stress that "you are only as sick as your secrets. If she didn't, I would. I felt that keeping this information a secret from him would violate the commitm ent we had made as a cou- ple to be open and honest with each other. By withholding this information from him, joining his mother and sisters, I would have been participating in fam ily dysfunction.
While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weak- ens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not us ually "know the emotional costs of keeping a secret" until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy in- volves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust. Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary rea- son many of us will never know love. It is impossible to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth when the core of one's being and identity is shrouded in secrecy and lies.
Trusting that another person always intends your good, having a core foundation of loving practice, cannot exist within a context of deception. It is this truism that makes all acts of judicious withholding major moral dilem- mas. More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling. Such a commitment is diffi- cult when lying is deemed more acceptable than telling the truth.
Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth. Practically every mental health care practictioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gu- rus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers.
If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether or not I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say, I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situa- tion, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response.
In today's world we are taught to fear the truth, to be- lieve it always hurts. We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potentia l losers. Bombarded with cul- tural propaganda ready to instill in all of us the notion that lies are more important, that truth does not matter, we are all potential victims. Consumer culture in particu- lar encourages lies. Advertising is one of the cultural me- diums that has most sanctioned lying.
Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to con- sumerism. And lies strengthen the world of predatory ad- vertising. Our passive acceptance of lies in public life, particularly via the mass media, upholds and perpetuates lying in our private lives.
In our public life there would be nothing for tabloid journalism to expose if we lived our lives out in the open, committed to truth telling. To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false se lf to mask fear s and insecur- ities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense.
Break- ing through this denial is always the first step in uncov- ering our longing to be honest and clear. Lies and secrets burden us and cause stress. When an individual has always lied, he has no awareness that truth telling can take away this heavy burden.
To know th is he must let the lies go. When femin ism first began, women talked openly about our desires to know men better, to love them for who they really are. W e talked about our desires to be loved for who we really are i. And we urged men to be true to themselves, to express themselves. Then when men began to share their tho ughts and fee lings, some women cou ld not cope. They wanted the old lies and pretenses to be back in place. In the seventies, a popular Sylvia greeting card showed a woman seated in front of a fortune -teller gazing into a crystal ball.
The caption on the front of the card read : "He never talks about his feelings. OVF will be sorry. It is harder to be manipulative. At times women find it d ifficult to hear what many men have to say when what they tell us does not conform to our fantasies of who they are or who we want them to be. The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings.
The wounded child inside many fem ales is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling we reinforce the notion that lies are better.
To be loving we wiliingiy hear each other's truth and, most im- portant, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love. Anyone wh o is tru ly concerned for the spiritual growth of another knows, consciously or in- stinctively, that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a relationship of constancy.
When we can see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love. We have all heard the maxim "If you do not love yourself, you will be unable to love anyone else. Yet more often than not we feel some degree of confusion when we hear this statement.
The confusion arises because most people who think they are not lovable have this perception because at some point in their lives they were socialized to see themselves as unlovable by forces outside their control.
We are not born knowing how to love anyone, either ourselves or somebody else. However, we are born able to respond to care. As we grow we can give and receive atten tion, affection, and joy. Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. ABour l. OVE Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. It is no easy task to be self-lov ing. Simple axioms that make self-love sound easy only make matters worse.
It leaves many people won- dering why, if it is so easy, they continue to be trapped by feelings of low self-esteem or self-hatred. Using a work- ing de finition of love that tells us it is the action we take on behalf of our own or another's spiritual growth pro- vides us with a beginning blueprint for working on the issue of self-l ove.
When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and respon- sibility, we can work on deve loping these qualities or, if they are already a part of who we are, we can learn to extend them to ourselves. Many people find it helpful to critically exam me the past, particularly childhood, to chart their internalization of messages that they were not worthy, not enough, that they were crazy, stupid, monstrous, and so on. Simply learning how w e have acquired feelings of worthlessness rarely enables us to change things; it is usually only one stage in the process.
I, like so many other people, have found it usefu l to examine nega tive thinking and behav- ioral patterns learned in childhood, particularly those shaping my sense of self and identity.
However, this pro- cess alone did not ensure self-recovery. It was not enough. While it is important for us to understand the origins of fragile self-esteem, it is also possible to bypass this stage identifying when and where we received negative sociali- zation and still cre ate a found ation for building self-love.
Individuals who bypass this stage tend to move on to the next stage, which is activel y introducing into our lives con- structive life-affirming thought patterns an d behavior. Whether a person remem bers the deta ils of bei ng abused is not important. When the consequence of th at abuse is a feeling of worth lessness, they can still engage in a pro - cess of self-recovery by finding ways to affirm self-worth.
T he wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem. Nathaniel Branden' s lengthy work Six Pillars of Self-Esteem highlights important dimensions of self-esteem, " the practice of living consciously, self- acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living pur- posefully an d the p ract ice of persona l integrity. We da re to ask ourselves the basic questions w ho, what, when, where, an d why. Answering these questions us ua lly provides us w ith a level of aware- ness that enlightens.
Usually it is th ro ugh reflection that indi vidua ls who have not accepted themselves make the choice to stop lis- tening to negative voices, within and outside the self, that constantly reject and devalue them. Affirmations work for anyone striving for self-acceptance. Although I had for years been interested in therapeutic modes of healing and self-help, affirmations always seemed to me a bit corny. My sister, who was then working as a thera pist in the fie ld of chemical dependency, encouraged me to give affirma- tions a try to see if I would experience any concrete changes in my outlook.
I wrote affirmations relevant to my daily life and began to repeat them in the morning as part of my daily meditations. At the top of my list was the declaration : "I'm breaking with old patterns and mov- ing forward with my life.
Affirma- tions helped restore my emotional equilibrium. Self-acceptance is hard for many of us. There is a voice inside that is co nstantly judging, first ourselves and then others. Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice. Once we begin to rep lace negative th inking with po sitive th inki ng, it becomes utterly clear that, far from being realistic, negative thinking is absolutely d isenabling.
When we are positive we not onl y accept and affirm our- selves, we are able to affirm and accept others. The more we accept ourselves, the better prepare d we a re to take responsibility in all areas of our lives. Com- menting on this third pillar of self-esteem, Branden defines self-responsibility as the will ingness " to take responsibil ity for my actions and the attainment of my goals.
For exa mpl e, rac ism , sex ism , an d homop hobi a all create bar- riers and concrete incidents of discrimination. Simply tak- ing re sponsibility does not mean that we can prevent discrimi natory acts from happening. But we can choose how we respond to acts of injustice. Taking re spons ibility means that in the face of barriers we still have the capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximize our wel l-being.
Every day we practice this shape shifting to cope with realities we cannot easily change. Many women are married to men who were unsuppor - tive when they decided to further their educations. M ost of these women did not leave the men in their lives, they engaged in constructive strateg ies of resistance.
Returning to work boosted her self-esteem and changed the passive-aggressive rage and depression that had developed as a consequence of her isolation and stag- nation. M aking this decision and finding ways to realize it was not an easy process, however. Her husband and children were often disgruntled when her independence forced them to accept more household responsibility. In the long run, everyone benefited.
And it goes without say- ing that these changes boosted he r self-esteem in ways that showed her how self-love made it possible to extend her- self in a constructive way to others. She was happier and so were those around her. In order to makes these changes she had to make use of another vital aspect of self-esteem, "self-assertiveness," defined by Branden as "the willingness to stand up for myself, to be who I am openly, to treat myself with respect in all human encounters.
Our attempts at self-assertion failed as an adequ ate defense. Many of us learned that passivity lessened the possibility of attack. Sexist socializa tion teaches females tha t self-asserti veness is a th re at to fe mininity.
Accepting this faul ty logic lays the groundwork for low self-esteem. The fear of being self- assertive usually surfaces in women who have been trained to be good girls or dutiful daughters.
In our childhood home my brother was never punished fo r talking back. Asserting his opinions was a positive sign of manhood. When my sisters and I vo iced our opinions we were told by our parenting adults that this was negative and unde - sirable behavior.
We were told, especially by our dad, that female self-assertion was not feminine. We did not listen to these warnings. Even though ours was a p atriarchal household, the fact that fema les far outnumbered the two ma les, my da d and my brother, m ade it safe for us to speak our m inds, to talk back. Luckily, by the time we were young adults the femi nist movement had come along and validated that having a voice and being self-assertive was necessary for building self-esteem. One reason women have tra ditionally gossiped more than men is because gossip has been a social interaction w herei n women have felt comfortable stating what they really think an d feel.
Often, rather than asserting what they think at the appropriate moment, women say what 5 9. OVE th ey think w ill please the listener. La ter, they gossip, stat- ing at that moment t heir true thoughts. This division be- tween a fal se self invented to please others and a more authentic self need not exist when we cultivate positive self-esteem. Gloria Steinem's best-seller Revolution from With in cautio ned women about the dan- ger of achieving success w ithout doing the necessary groundwork for self-love and self-esteem.
She found that achieving women who still suffered internalized self-hatred invariably acted out in ways that undermined their success. And if the self-hating successful person did not act out she may have lived a life of private desperation, unable to tell anyone success does no t, in fact, reverse crippled self- esteem.
To complicate matters, women may feel the need to pretend that they are self-loving, to assert confidence and power to the outside world, and as a consequence they feel psychologically conflicted and disengaged from their true being. Shamed by the feeling that they can never let anyone know who they really are, they may choose isolation and aloneness for fe ar of being unmasked.
T his is true of men as well. Me n who reside at the bottom of our nation's economic totem pole do this and so do men at the top. President Clinton engaged in deceitful be- havior, betraying both his personal commitments to his family as well as his political commitment to be a paragon of American values to the people of this country. He did so when his popularity was at an all-time high.
Having spent much of his life achieving against the odds, his ac- tions expose a fundamental flaw in his self-esteem. Al- though he is a white male, Ivy League- educated and economically well off, privileged, with all the accompa- nying perks, his irresponsible actions were a way of un- masking, of showing to the world that he really was not the "good guy" he w as pretending to be.
He created the context for a public shaming that no doubt mirrors mo- ments of childhood shaming when some authority figure in his life made him feel he was worthless and that he would never be worthy no matter what he did. Anyone who suffers from low self-esteem can learn by his exam- ple. If we succeed without confronting and changing shaky foundations of low self-esteem rooted in contempt and hatred, we will falter along the way.
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