Lifelines

The truth about life and love.

by Gordon Livingston

Fear and its Antidotes

A central idea of the society is interdependence: the conviction that we are all in this together and that we will succeed or fail based on our ability to hear heartbeats other than our own. This idea is where our best hopes reside. Read More

Falling Out of a Tree

Underneath the air of professional detachment necessary to do our jobs lie our own anxieties and discouragement. Read More

Why should we support the troops?

They volunteered (albeit with insufficient information) to be where they are and do what they do. Like the Roman Legionnaires of old they have chosen to fight their country’s foreign wars. Whether they made the right decision only they can say. Read More

The First Duty of Love Is to Listen

We are aware at some level that the ability to listen is highly correlated with other desirable traits such as kindness, unselfishness, and empathy. Read More

Love and Suffering

And yet the questions of why we are here, how best to live, and the meaning of human suffering remain answerable only by the bargains with life that each of us choose to strike. Read More

Honesty Is a Prerequisite for Courage

We cannot allow ourselves to be lied to, or worse, engage in a process of self-deception. In psychotherapy I am continually confronted with this problem. I point out to people that there are many things about ourselves that we believe that turn out not to be true. Read More

Attachment Is the Source of All Suffering

How each of us confronts loss, in ourselves and in those we would help, defines us as few other attributes can. What we reveal in our attitudes toward grief and mourning determines whether we have anything to teach others. Read More

You Have Never Suffered Enough

And so we suffer twice: the broken lives and withered hopes inflicted by and upon the addicted in their relentless pursuit of the evanescent pleasure that substances produce AND the suffering we as a society exact on those who use and traffic in these substances. Read More

Fear Lurks Behind Perfectionism

We are not taught by our parents or the culture that really good sex occurs in the context of a relationship in which the participants care about themselves and each other equally. Read More

The Risks of Being Honest with Ourselves

We search so hard for heroes to inspire us that the word hero itself has lost much of it meaning. Risk and choice are no longer required; simple competence or the putting on of a uniform is now sufficient. Read More

At the Heart of Anger is Sadness

Our political discourse has been degraded by the rise of an angry and self-righteous minority that thinks it is legitimate to impose their vision of the future through threats to damage our political and economic systems if they don’t get their way. Read More

Faith, fear, and philosophies of governance

Somewhere between the narcissistic belief that we individually are the center of the universe and the conception that we are actors in a preordained play stage-managed by God is a large area in which we operate under the constraints of time and chance, but still have choices about how to live. Read More

Infidelity and intimacy

Infidelity is more than a violation of a promise (“forsaking all others”) it is an unmistakable indicator of selfishness, on the part of someone in whom we have reposed our best hopes. Read More

Lies, loyalty, and fear

It is a challenge to maintain a sense of unity among a people as diverse as our own. There are many who would divide us for political or personal gain. But nothing has the power to unite us like fear. Read More

The best of compasses does not point to true north

Do you believe that people are basically good, inclined to fairness and generosity, or are they born selfish, and socialized only by the application of limit-setting and punishment? Read More

It is a sense of meaning that nourishes the soul

Pleasure is not the absence of pain; nor is health the absence of disease. It is what we do and who we are with that makes us happy. In a larger sense our mortality confronts us with questions of meaning. Read More

Tiger mothers and the case for fear-based parenting

The debate takes place against a background of concern about narcissism and a sense of entitlement that, fairly or unfairly, are seen as implicit cultural values in 21st century America. Read More

Reflections on a massacre

True paranoia requires that we believe in a malign intent to injure us, to render us helpless, to take from us what is rightfully ours, to deprive us of our rights, our property, our freedom Read More

The role of chance in human affairs.

An important component of of our knowledge of how the world works is how to cope with the passage of time, especially the all-important process of knowing what to hold onto and what to relinquish. Read More

It is better to be spent than saved.

Our consumer society is likely to celebrate the quick solution: the drug that will provide relief, the replacement of the old with the new, the triumph of form over substance. Read More

Sense and sentimentality

The opposite of truth is not necessarily the lie. It can also be another form of dishonesty, namely sentimentality. Read More

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

Look at the smiling bride and groom in their wedding pictures. Can you imagine that they will end up some years hence bored to distraction with each other? Read More

Moral certainty and the true believer

Unfortunately, people who are filled with the Holy Spirit are often not satisfied simply to persuade. Sooner or later the need to coerce others into listening begins to surface. Read More

The important questions are unanswerable.

We want to bask in the warmth of devotion that overlooks, even indulges, our failings. Apart from our mothers, this pleasure can be a little hard to find--or to maintain over time. Read More

Paradox governs our lives

Amid all this diagnosing and describing of human behavior, we are still confronted with the essential questions of how to live, how to discern what it is that we are responsible for, and what we must accommodate. Read More

Memorial Day

It might be argued that as professional soldiers it was our obligation to participate in whatever conflict our political leaders of the moment deemed necessary. We knew that this is what we had been trained for (at public expense) and there were few among us who did not feel that it was our duty to fight when asked. Read More

Teaching violence

When an obsessive need for control collides with the reality that much of our world and the people in it refuse to be controlled the result is frequently some
combination of anger and anxiety.
Read More

The political uses of fear.

Are people fundamentally flawed, hedonistic and selfish, difficult to socialize, restrained only by fear of punishment? Or do we all carry within us a capacity for both good and destructive behaviors which becomes manifest in the contexts we create for ourselves in the form of our social institutions?

It is easier to be angry than sad.

Was there ever a time when too little expression of anger constituted a big problem? If so, that time is definitely not now. The country is at war; we worry about road rage; our entertainment presents us with endless images of violence; our favorite spectator sports involve car crashes or men knocking other men senseless. Our national history, indeed the history of the world, is one of unremitting conflict, much of it over what deity to worship.

The problems of the elderly are frequently serious but seldom interesting.

This is why the old have such a deserved reputation as complainers. If we become preoccupied with our physical selves when we are young we are thought of as hypochondriacs. When we think (and speak) primarily of our aches when we are old, we are just bad company.