Psychology Today

There is almost always a hidden agenda in the use of communication techniques.

Those who feel compelled to defend their egos tend to violate their deeper values

Reactaholism is the major addiction of our times. The others tend to start as attempts to ease the chronic powerlessness of reactaholism.

In the heat of ego defense, truth is the first casualty.

No weight control program can succeed by dominating your consciousness with food and weight. A successful program must develop a conditioned response to regulate eating automatically, without having to "stop and think about it." The trick is to condition the core hurt (inadequacy or unworthiness that makes you want to overeat) to stimulate core value - a sense of yourself

External regulation of emotions is a no-win venture, even if you go about it through seduction rather than coercion. It’s just too hard to regulate an internal system by controlling external conditions. That’s like a thermostat trying to keep it comfortable in the room by blowing warm or cool air around the outside perimeter of the building.

People near the end of life tend to regret not having been more compassionate and loving to those they love.

All alarm systems, negative feelings included, are calibrated to give false positives. You don’t want a smoke alarm that doesn’t go off until the house is in flames; you want it to go off when there’s just a little smoke. The Toddler brain functions as if the smoke alarm is the fire, instead of a signal that a fire might possibly exist.

Blame makes us feel powerless and keeps us focused on damage rather than solutions. The great magnifier of stress is blame, and its result is the hidden killer in stress: resentment.

People betray loved ones because of reasons like “I felt like it,” or “I want to get my needs met.”

Children learn emotion regulation by modeling, not by what parents tell them. Anger is an attribution of blame. If parents are blamers, children, especially high testosterone boys, are more likely to have anger problems. (Testosterone doesn't cause anger but amplifies it considerably.)

Feelings may forge relationships, but values sustain them. The power of love is not what it feels like. The enormous power of love comes from the value and meaning it brings to our lives.

Your children are not responsible for your childhood; let them have their own.

A surefire way to destroy your relationship is to diagnose your partner with a personality disorder or other “character disease.”