behavior on Avoidance

The avoidance of pain is the beginning of all unhealthy behavior.

Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.

Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.

One of the ways we punish ourselves for not being more or better or thinner or stronger is by trying to squeeze ourselves—force ourselves, even—into all kinds of ill-fitting relationships. With other ...

For generations, psychologists thought that virtually all self-defeating behavior was caused by repression. I have now come to believe that addiction is a separate and even more self-defeating force t...

Fear is a “mighty wind” indeed. The wreckage left by the toxic wind of fear is evident everywhere. We are afraid of the unknown, afraid of one another, afraid of poor health, afraid of death, and afra...

Herod symbolizes the terrible destruction that fearful people can leave in their wake if their fear is unacknowledged, if they have power but can only use it in furtive, pathetic, and futile attempts ...

The advantage (if you can call it that) that addicts have is that they have their identifiable addictions. Whether you are an alcoholic, a drug addict, a compulsive gambler, or an uncontrollable overe...

At a recent gathering of seminary professors, one teacher reported that at his school the most damaging charge one student can lodge against another is that the person is being “judgmental.” He found ...

But what will not Ambition and Revenge Descend to? Who aspires must down as low As high he sor’d, obnoxious first or last To basest things.

The definition of the word habit, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a usual way of behaving: something that a person does often in a regular and repeated way.” In the American Journal of Psychology it...

If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart after a while.

Behavior modification that’s not empowered by God’s heart-changing grace is self-righteousness, as repugnant to God as the worst sins people gossip about.

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior.

We only learn to behave ourselves in the presence of God.

The psychotherapist M. Scott Peck spent many years of his practice as an agnostic. He, along with thousands upon thousands of his colleagues were taught that evil was a social construct, and therefore...

In the vast, frozen wilderness of the Arctic, an Inuit hunter used a clever technique to trap a wolf. He took a sharp knife and carefully coated its blade with layers of animal blood, letting each lay...

Bullying has been around as long as children have lived in groups. Often, adults minimize or ignore it, reasoning: "we all have to go through it—I did, and I'm ok" or even "it build...

Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will present...

Desire alone, divorced from the will, ruins peoples’ lives time after time. In our public life and even among leaders of our denominations or church organizations, time after time we see a desire that...

Everything that is extreme is destructive. So do not suddenly throw away your armor, or you may be found unarmed in the battle and made an easy prisoner. Our body is like armor, our soul like the warr...

Resentment is like a poison we carry around inside us with the hope that when we get the chance we can deposit it where it will harm another who has injured us. The fact is that we carry this poison a...

One afternoon, I was playing with my son in our living room when I suddenly smelled something burning. I stood up and walked around, nose high in the air, sniffing furiously. My wife smelled it too, s...

Patience is not simply the ability to wait, it’s how we behave while we are waiting.

In his Rule for monasteries, St. Benedict considered grumbling a serious offense against community life. He wrote, “If a disciple grumbles, not only aloud but in his heart … his action will not ...

O Lord God, You have commanded us to believe in Jesus; and I would flee to no other refuge,  wash in no other fountain,  build on no other foundation,  receive from no other fullness,  res...

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.

Too many people hear the word capacity and assume it’s a limitation. They assume their capacity is set—especially if they’re beyond a certain age. People give up on the idea that their capacity or the...