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Loving the Child Within Is Not Enough
Current psychology is often blind to the existence of the larger
being of which we are a part. Because of that blindness, many highly
regarded therapeutic experts have a habit of dictating impossible cures.
A group of prestigious doctors, for example, appeared on TV's Phil
Donahue Show67 determined to show how you can confront stress as
one human in isolation. If you're a housewife and society seems
convinced that your daily chores are on a par with garbage collection,
the specialists gave the impression that all you have to do is sit at the
kitchen table and talk yourself into self-respect. One homemaker stood
up in the audience and put the prevailing notion in two short
sentences. "It all depends on the image you project," she said. "If you
think well of yourself, other people will think well of you."
Thinking well of himself was not enough to save Scipio
Africanus from the contempt of the Roman Senate. Nor will it be
enough to magically alter the degree of respect the Western World
accords to those who clean house, cook, and raise children.
One of Donahue's guest authorities declared in no uncertain
terms that "you don't have to be a victim of what society or what
anyone else thinks of you." But according to psychologist Sol Gordon,
founder of The Institute for Family Research and Education, projecting
a positive attitude works not because of changes it makes on the
individual psyche, but because of improvements it generates in
relationships with others.
The best way to turn the self-destruct mechanism off is not to
weep over childhood traumas until we can finally love the child
within. It is to realize that the self-destruct devices are turned on and
off by current social forces: our sense of how we measure up to the
standards of those we respect, and our relationships with friends,
husbands, wives, and even our dogs and cats. (The idea that
relationships with animals can protect our physical and emotional
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