Destructive Behavior

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

Leader: Since we have a great high priest who can sympathize with our weakness, let us boldly approach the throne of grace, confident that there we will receive God’s mercy and grace in our time of ne...

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 ...

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...

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

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

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 ...

I think the hardest thing in life is to forgive. Hate is self destructive. If you hate somebody, you're not hurting the person you hate, you're hurting yourself. It's a healing, actually, ...

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...

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

I know most of us have probably heard enough stories about the Titanic, but it does stand as an amazing monument to the famous saying, slightly altered, “pride goes before the fall/destruction.” (Prov...

Researchers have found that when prisoners are placed in solitary confinement with little human contact and minimal sensory stimulation, severe psychological and physical issues often ensue: depressio...

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

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...

Psychiatrist James Knight describes in graphic detail the experience that members of Alcoholics Anonymous experience: These persons have had their lives laid bare and pushed to the brink of destructi...

Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our ...

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...

A number of years ago I was discipling a young man who had recently been released from the state’s juvenile detention center. As a teenager he had been hooked on drugs, and he had resorted to stealing...

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...

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 ...

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...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde...

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Societies the world around are currently in desperate straits trying to produce people who are merely capable of coping with their life on earth in a nondestructive manner.

There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he ...

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.