A BULLY-PROOF VEST FOR YOUR CHILDREN

Since 9-11 happened, our cultural climate has been filled with fear and hate.  Our children are exposed to more and more bullying on television, in movies,  in social media, and even in political ads and debates.  When the police or FBI go into a dangerous situation, they wear a bullet-proof vest.  When your children or grandchildren are subject to the abuse of mean people at school, they need to protect their hearts too, with a bully-proof vest.  Here are ten tips that will serve as protective layers in your child’s very own flak jacket.

  1. Never think or talk like a bigot Imitating or getting even with bigoted bullies will only provoke them, or other bullies. So treat everyone alike: be polite to them from a safe distance, and don’t gush on them.  When you think about things other people can’t much control, like their race, health, size, beauty, gender, income level, cultural background, or academic, musical or athletic ability, don’t treat people special or ignore them based on these things.
  1. Make your peace with any visible flaws you can’t hide.  This is how God made your body, and it’s where life has placed you—make the best of it. Focus on your strengths.  People in general will tease you about something until you show them it doesn’t bother you.  That’s the good you can bring out of the bad situation of their nasty teasing.  “That’s the way I came into the world, the way God made me. Is that a problem for you?”
  1. Be kind to your enemies now and then.  Realize that bullies have been badly bullied themselves at home. Remember that “it’s hurt people who hurt people.”  Since they are at their worst when they are most insecure, pray for them, and build up their confidence with smiles, greetings and little compliments when they are not acting badly.
  1. Play it cool—don’t run or walk away.   When bullies come at you, acknowledge them briefly with eye contact, a little smile and nod, then walk on by.  Don’t give them the pleasure of turning on their headlights and watching you act like a deer and hightail it.
  1. Never let ‘em see you sweat.  When they attack you, don’t give them the pleasure of seeing that you are hurt, scared, mad, embarrassed, or even surprised. Showing any of these feelings is like blood to a shark. So practice your comeback lines before going to school, like, “Is that what you think? . . . OK, whatever.” Then smile, shaking your head slightly, and rolling your eyes as you walk off to save face.
  1. Don’t surrender territory, money or possessions to bullies.   This would only encourage the bullying behavior.  If they insist, let them take what they want by force, and turn them into the authorities.  Be sure you have witnesses (see 9. below).
  1. Break the tension with a smile and even a little laugh.   Act like you expected to be disrespected, and show that you are amused they would try this again to get you to lose your cool.  Imagine you’re standing back from the scene, watching with amusement the sport of them trying to make you lose your cool.  With rehearsal in front of a mirror, reinforced by prayer, you can be prepared to show a smile, and deliver lines like this:  “Whatever!”, “You crack me up!”,  “You have a good day too”, or “Blessings to you as well.”
  1. Don’t let your parents overprotect you.   Instead of playing the helpless, innocent, stupid victim, and letting them fight your battles for you, stand up for yourself. If you need back-up support, use what’s at hand (peers, school authorities).  Calling on parents first just opens you to more teasing about “Mommy and Daddy’s little baby.”
  1. Do use the protection of your peers.   Think of things to talk with your fellow students about, and continue your conversation as you walk between classes.  Bullies like to pick you off when you’re alone.  With a buddy, there will always be a distraction, so you can pay attention and talk to your friend instead of the bully.  When that fails, your friend can serve as a witness to what happened.  This will empower school authorities to discipline the bullies when their abuse is over the line of what’s punished at your school.
  1. Choose friends who try to follow 1 through 9 above.   They will be good role models and coaches to help you figure out just how to apply these tips in your situation.  If your current friends have many of these bad habits, see which of your buddies want to grow up with you.  Don’t hang with those who don’t.  Otherwise, you’ll be exposing yourself to even more harm, the collateral damage from bullies’ aggression against your wimpy friends.

See peacefulschoolsinternational.org for more help.  Tips like these will be needed for life later on, because bullies don’t disappear when you graduate from high school.  These same techniques work wonders for adult bullies wherever you find them, at work, at home, or at parties.

When you practice these tips long and hard enough, they will become second nature to you.  “Fake it ‘til you make it” means that once you learn to act like bullies don’t bother you, they won’t.  They won’t even bother with you, and even if they do, it won’t really bother you anymore.  That gives them the smack in the face they deserve—a life well lived is indeed the best revenge.

Why Some are Choosing Traditional

Values in our Pornified Culture

Sexual energy, beautiful bodies, romantic love, and close relationships -- as much as they are idolized in our culture, there is nothing inherently good or bad about them. They are all morally neutral resources, because they can be used for good or bad purposes. Whether or not we have them isn’t nearly as important as how we give or take them.

Except for money, we don’t call anything counterfeit anymore. Because we’ve been given so many glamorized distortions of genuine romantic intimacy, most of us wouldn’t know it from its knock-off imposters. Counterfeit things are now being marketed very effectively by calling them virtual. We increasingly prefer our virtual realities to our realistic virtues.

Unless we make other plans, this culture will teach us its hedonistic values and beliefs. Madison Avenue and Hollywood give us virtual versions of romantic intimacy on the big screens we have at home, and the little ones we carry with us. This virtual reality teaches us to use sex and love for pleasure, amusement, and anesthesia. It tells us our identity and self-worth come from the sexiness and youthfulness of our bodies, not from how we use them to leave the world a better place. Pursuing false intimacy brings us enmeshment and autism in our relationships, leaving us with a residue of loneliness, shame, and resentment in our hearts.

Our virtual realities breed chemical or behavioral addictions and mutually dependent relationships. They also generate compulsive habits of avoidance, such as commitment phobia, intimacy anorexia, reproach for our body images, and porn-induced erectile dysfunction.

Celebrations of counterfeit intimacy in the media erode the warnings we should have been given in our childhood against pornography. Today both our men and women, young and old, are being trained by a HUGE underground industry to neglect our prom queens, and hook up with porn queens instead. Instead of a girl we’d have to warm up ourselves, one who saves her best for the life partner of her dreams, men are being taught to settle for a pre-heated actress, or even a virtual fem-bot. These will merely infect us with an empty craving for self-administered orgasms.

Our movie, television, advertising, and porn industries hire the best technological minds out there, and pay them the absolute top dollar. Too often we let ourselves get trained by the cleverest forces in our sick society. We don’t always know when we have laid ourselves open for reverse inspiration, for evils from down below.

 

People who masturbate to pornography generally don’t realize they are training their brains to want porn instead of a person. Pavlov’s dogs became turned on to a bell being rung just moments before the juicy highlight of their day. We also become more and more aroused by whatever brings us to our sexual climaxes. Dr. Pavlov is the porn industry, and if we aren’t careful, we are as dumb and as driven as his dogs.

We can scare our children away from pornography, but it doesn’t work with our teenagers. Fear backfires, because most adolescents are intuitively rebellious, inquisitive, and counter-phobic. To show how mature and independent they are, they’re inclined to run like the wind toward whatever we try to scare them away from. Parents and teachers need to take a different approach to sex and love education.

I am a social scientist, and a pragmatist. I am not writing this as a member of any religious faith, but rather as a seeker of heaven on earth. I am trying to reach Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists alike. I am appealing to our common sense of what matters most to us all, to what research confirms most of us will come to believe is best for all concerned over the fullness of time. I am presenting certain values that deep down we all know are good for us, values that throughout the centuries have been promoted by cultures whose citizens were genuinely happy because they got along well with each other. These are not the values of nations which are waging war against their neighbors or their own citizens. These are the values of peace-loving peoples.

Instead of trying to inculcate these values by pushing them or pounding them into our youth, I think we do better to draw these values out of our young people. That is after all the meaning of the Greek word educare, to draw forth from. We can help them discover that deep down, we all need the same things. We can challenge them to consider how the futures of our love relationships will be empty and lonely if we don’t live by the following five principles:

These days, most young people are offered some pretty juicy invitations for recreational sex. Before responding, we all need to ask ourselves what recreational sex will give us, and all the others who will be affected now or later on in our lives. Does it give us the good stuff on the left below, or the stuff on the right, things that will eventually make us and others sick:

We had better train our brains, or else technology will do it for us. Another challenge is to protect our hearts from the hard shells that can grow around them. That hard shell may protect us from hurt in the short run, but it guarantees us loneliness and rejection down the road. Sure, it keeps hurt out, but it also holds hurt in. Our protective shell keeps our romantic love trapped inside with our old hurts, and keeps the love of others locked outside. We reap what we sow. What we feed, we will eat. What are we feeding?

So far, all we have talked about is just knowing what’s wrong, and how we got there. Especially in this area of addictions, changing our habits is very difficult. If we just fight it with cleverness and willpower, and pray to a God embodied merely in organized religion and not also 12-step recovery, research and my clinical experience show that our odds aren’t very good for success. Lasting change usually requires more than inspiration, education, and effort. Our chances for success improve greatly when we also use the people, principles, practices, and prayers of recovery. For starters, seekers of recovery from porn addiction can go to sexhelp.com, thebodypositive.org, nofap.com, and mynewlife.com.

However you get there, I hope you find genuine intimacy in this life, the kind that not only lasts, but gets better with age. For those who find it, it is quite the delicious foretaste of heaven. It is the orientation program that’s heaven on earth.

 

 

 

THE ART OF DISENGAGEMENT

 

Sometimes disengagement is very painful for one partner, who may for the moment be clinging to or pursuing the mate in order to unload his or her distress. Other times, roles can be reversed. This article is for both of you.  To be done without creating new problems, healthy disengagement requires a 4-step process: Understanding, Envisioning, Preparing, and Succeeding.

 Understanding

Understand and remember these facts:

Envisioning

Recognize the purposes of disengaging from unhealthy conversation in order to pursue healthy communication:

Preparing

  1. Decide on rules you will try to follow for healthy communication. You may want to start with the “Ground Rules for Marital Conflict” you can print out from my website below (see “Blog”, then “Marriage”). For these and other items below, if mate doesn’t offer suggestions in writing within a time frame you give, you can start using your own until you can both amend your list.
  2. Each of you will need an in-house sanctuary, a place where your mate agrees to leave you alone when you go there to get yourself together. You will also need an in-town overnight sanctuary, a place you can leave the house and go where you will be safe, where your presence can be verified, and where your mate cannot get to you for the night. This ideally would be the house of a friend or relative agreeable to the spouse.
  3. Agree in advance on one subject at a time for discussion, and stick to it. Don’t change the subject. Proposals of a subject for discussion can be made live, or through text or voicemail, but we don’t start into a painful discussion without agreeing on its focus.
  4. Express the purpose/subject as a forward-looking positive goal. Begin with a solution in mind that will appeal to both parties. Research has demonstrated clearly that discussions tend strongly to end the way they are started. Your mate will be much more likely to agree to a discussion that has such a purpose. If talks begin looking backward at negatives, that’s how they will likely end. If they begin with looking forward to positives, that’s probably how they will end.

Succeeding

                  Use these time-out procedures in this order.

  1. One-finger warning: raise index finger to point up, and to stand between your eyes and your mate’s. Instead of interrupting, this signals that a rule of healthy communication is being broken, and you are not listening until the mate takes the dysfunctional message back, apologizes for it, and assures you that it will be avoided in the remainder of the discussion. You may point to the list of agreed-upon rules to signal your partner which rule or rules are being broken, and how the messages need to be revised. “Oh, I’m sorry, I was raising my voice too high, reading your mind and heart, and attacking your character. Let me rephrase. . . . ”  Then the finger goes down and the conversation can be continued. If it isn’t recognized or apologized for, isn’t rephrased properly, leave your finger up to warn that with the next violation, you are going to your in-house sanctuary.
  2. 10- or 20-finger time-out warning: raise all 10 fingers between your two faces, palms out, to indicate you are taking a 10-minute time out to your in-house sanctuary. As with the first warning, if it is heeded, and a proper apology and reassurance is given, and if you are allowed a minute or two of silence to gather yourself before lowering your hands, you may decide to stay. If you need 20 or 30 minutes, flash your hands a second or third time. Both set timers on your phones to signal when time is up. If you are left alone and not bothered by partner during this time, you will come back to the discussion to resume listening.
  3. Time-out to garage: raise both hands high in the air to signal that this is your second time out during the discussion, and you will take it in the garage, with windows rolled up. It is for an automatic 30 minutes. As with the first warning, if it is heeded, and a proper apology and reassurance is given, and if you are allowed a minute or two of silence to gather yourself before lowering your hands, you may decide to stay. If you are left alone and not bothered by partner during this time, you will come back to the discussion to resume listening.
  4. Overnight time-out: the warning this is about to happen is a brief double toot of the horn with both hands raised. As with the first warning, if it is heeded, and a proper apology and reassurance is given, and if you are allowed a minute or two of silence to gather yourself before lowering your hands, you may decide to stay. If you are left alone and not bothered by partner during this time, you will come back to the discussion to resume listening. To make this departure safer and smoother, you may want to leave your car in the garage pointing outward, with an overnight bag packed and stowed in the back. The deal is that you will go directly to the agreed-upon overnight in-town sanctuary referred to above.

In explaining and carrying out this plan, the stock remarks you can make to a partner through a note or a voicemail are: “I am just following your lead here. I am giving you the space that your behavior says you need. Actions speak louder than words to me.” [The actions are rule violations, and the words are words of reassurance that are fresh promises made on top of broken ones.]

It helps to recognize five natural times of the day to start the day over and reconnect, by expressing mutual agreement to use healthier communication: getting out of bed in the morning, breakfast, lunch, supper, and going back to bed. Whether you are in the same room, in another part of the house, out in the garage, or across town, it is always good to start the day over with a text or voicemail that expresses forgiveness and willingness to resume communication on non-stressful, everyday topics. These are also appropriate times of day for prayer, and perhaps to offer to pray together as a way of starting the day over, and inviting healthy communication to resume.

Remember that merely refusing toxic communication drives it underground, and it usually emerges later in an even more toxic form.  It is much better to offer healthy communication later, toward a constructively focused goal.

 

Questions?

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Dr. Paul F. Schmidt