Swirling in a squirrel cage of perpetual motion, the head-committee meets, argues, votes out the guidance available from emotions, and successfully keeps serenity at bay and chaos close at hand.

I need to keep you from knowing me. I have already rejected me, but if you knew how flawed I am, you would also reject me…and since this is all I have, I could not...

The dysfunction was not the character of one person, it was the split of family by divorce, with the ripples felt for eternity by bloodline.

This is what we desire in intimate relationships but this deep connection is often so frightful that most do not take advantage of the opportunities presented for honesty.

… I slipped our wicker bed and walked the sands where we were also roughly repeated: some young couple, “you did,” “I didn’t,” “you sure the fuck did” – they huggedthat bicker to their chests...

If you should choose to look at those files, you will have to live with the consequences of your choices while, at the same time, being mindful that these choices will not only effect you,...

For an entire wing of the G.O.P., a dysfunctional government, whose only visible activity is mismanaging crises, is not an embarrassment but the vindication of a worldview.

Reading Chip’s college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he’d bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of...

It’s my opinion, with some people, just knowing they are alone, living inside of their own miserable, self hating, dysfunctional mind, with their own immature, insecure, self pitying self is its own revenge. Their existence...

It wasn’t love, not quite, but it was almost there and it was desperate and I didn’t know how to put it into words. It was the back and forth of him, the hot and...

A victim evokes sympathy, right? Victims are not responsible, right? Victims have the moral high ground… someone else is causing the misery, right? Victims can easily justify why they are right. Victims allow themselves to...

Awkward silences rule the world. People are so terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war rather than face an awkward silence.

Teenagers can spot hypocrisy a mile away and here I was telling them how to cope when they witnessed the shambles of my own life and how I was living.

No mean person is mean all the time. The whole point of being mean is to fluctuate so that you can hold out the hope for someone. So someone will hold out the hope that...

Change is threatening to the status quo.

To be exploited fundamentally means to be confused. When you’re not confused you can’t be exploited because you have clarity about the situation. To confuse people you must provide contradictory information. People who really want...

Boundaries represent awareness, knowing what the limits are and then respecting those limits.

And could you, from a place of love, actually stand up and, use force, to give someone back, the suffering, they were trying to put on you? Would I do it? Maybe it would even...

Chaos limits the free-flow of love and becomes a roadblock to what family members want most and sadly, it becomes the normal for the family.

Thomas had a younger sister, Ester, who was a facsimile of the womanizer brother, who had behaviors that mirrored her brother’s treatment of women, for she treated men the same way, for the same reasons....