Remember book reports when we were in school? For some they were a dreaded terrible thing, for others they were fun ways to recall your favorite book and an easy format to tell someone what the book was about. I've decided to post some reports of books I've read recently; let's jump right in.
* To willingly confront a problem early, before we are forced to confront it by circumstances, means to put aside something pleasant or less painful for something more painful. It is choosing to suffer now in the hope of future gratification rather than choosing to continue present gratification in the hope that future suffering will not be necessary.
* The speech of the neurotic is notable for such expressions as "I ought to, "I should," and "I shouldn't," indicating the individual's self-image as an inferior man or woman always falling short of the mark, always making the wrong choices.
* Neurotics make themselves miserable, those with character disorders make everyone else miserable.
* It is the parents themselves who visit their sins upon their children. That's what the Bible means when it states that children pay for the sins of their parents.
* The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
* What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn?
* Love is too large, too deep to ever be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words.
* The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex linked erotic experience.
* To the contrary, we perceive him or her as perfect, as having been perfected. If we see any flaws in our beloved, we perceive them as insignificant little quirks or darling eccentricities that only add color and charm.
* The process of growing up usually occurs very gradually, with multiple little leaps into the unknown.
* It is precisely because I valued myself that I was unwilling to remain miserable in a school and a whole social environment that did nor fit my needs.
* Second, not only does love for oneself provide the motive for such major changes; it also is the basis for the courage to risk them.
* Finally, it is only when one has taken the leap into the unknown of total self-hood, psychological independence and unique individuality that one id free to proceed along still higher paths of spiritual growth and free to manifest love in it's greatest dimensions.
* Only when we are willing to undergo the suffering of such changing can we become the parents our children need us to be.
* To fail to confront when confrontation is required for the nature of spiritual growth represents a failure to love equally as does thoughtless criticism or condemnation and other forms of active deprivation of caring.
* No marriage can be judged truly successful unless husband and wife are each other's best critics.
* If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.
* If I truly love another, I will obviously order my behavior in such a way as to contribute the utmost to his or her spiritual growth.
* To attempt to love someone who cannot benefit from your love with spiritual growth is to waste your energy to cast your seed upon arid ground.
* The first obligation of a genuinely loving person will always be to his or her marital and parental relationships.
* Lacking empathy narcissistic parents usually respond inappropriately to their children on an emotional level and fail to offer any recognition or verification of their children's feelings.
* Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's loving for itself.
* It's no wonder that you are all having difficulties in your marriages, and you'll continue to have difficulties until you come to recognize that each of you has your own separate destiny to fulfill.
* For the most part mental illness is caused by an absence of or defect in the love that a particular child required from its particular parents for successful maturation and spiritual growth.
* It has ben further suggested that the absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy.
* We tend to believe what the people around us believe, and we tend to accept as truth what these people tell us of the nature of the world as we listen to them during our formative years.
* Our first notion of God's nature is a simple extrapolation of our mothers and fathers or their substitutes.
* If we have loving, forgiving parents, we are likely to believe in a loving and forgiving God.
* The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.
* I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.
* You Worship the truth. The track record for belief in God looks pretty poor. It is tempting to think that humanity might be better off without a belief in God.
* It would seem reasonable to conclude that God is an illusion in the minds of humans-a destructive illusion and that belief in God is a common form of human psychopathology that should be healed.
* They may even think of religion as being itself a neurosis a collection of inherently irrational ideas that serve to enchain people's minds and oppress their instincts toward mental growth.
* There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. righteousness. Rigidity. Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is almost endless. But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God?
* We know very well why people become mentally Ill. What we don't understand is why people survive the traumas of their lives as well as they do.
* Love was defined as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." When we grow, it is because we are working at it, and we are working at it because we love ourselves. It is through love that we elevate ourselves.
*Do we really know what electricity is, for instance? Or where energy comes from in the first place.
* They will destroy the light in their own children an in all other beings subject to their power.
* Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. They hate goodness because it reveals their badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of self-awareness.
* They will actually destroy others in this cause. If necessary, they will even kill to escape the pain of their spiritual growth. As the integrity of their sick self is threatened by the spiritual health of those around them.
* They will seek all manner of means to crush and demolish the spiritual health that may exist near them.
* I define evil, then, as the exercise of political power, that is the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion in order to avoid extending one's self for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth.
* Most people most of the time make decisions with little awareness of what they are doing. They take action with little understanding of their own motives and without beginning to know the ramifications of their choices.
* Anyone who has worked for long in the political arena knows that actions taken with the best intentions will often backfire and prove harmful in the end.
* Depressive symptoms are a sign to the suffering individual that all is not right with him or her and major adjustments need to be made.
* The unpleasant symptoms of mental illness serve to notify people that they have taken the wrong path, that their spirits are not growing and are in grave jeopardy.
* Those who have faced their mental illness, accepted total responsibility for it, and made the necessary changes in themselves to overcome it, find themselves not only cured and free from the curses of their childhood and ancestry but also find themselves living in a new and different world. What they once perceived as problems they now perceive as opportunities. What were once loathsome barriers are now welcome challenges. Thoughts previously unwanted become helpful insights.
* Genuinely loving people are by definition, growing people.
* For the journey of spiritual growth requires courage and initiative and independence of thought and action.
As you can see I got a lot out of reading this book and I'm glad I did. You can take a look at the 6 books I wrote and published here: https://www.lulu.com/search?sortBy=RELEVANCE&page=1&q=Jodie+Spartz&pageSize=10&adult_audience_rating=00
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