Here’s a post from our pal Pete of Full Permission Living, called, Learning to Love Your Hate on Mother’s Day. As always, he’s urging mothers to take better care of themselves. Who can argue with that?

I have been very hard on mothers during the past year, its true, but invariably my criticism has been in the direction of urging mothers to take better care of themselves, to focus on their own self-acceptance and seek gratification in their adult life. I have tried to encourage mothers to trust nature more, and to trust their kids, without trying to control or "fix" everything.

In that regard, Donna Fish, a psychoanalyst writing on the Huffington Post offers a perfect Mother’s Day gift entitled, "Love and Hate in the Time of Parenting." It beautifully informs us that having feelings of "hate" for your kids at times is not only normal, but beneficial, if experienced consciously and without guilt.

Here are some excerpts from Donna:

"I want to help all you parents out there learn why and how it is vital to embrace your intense feelings of hatred at times towards your kids. Don’t feel guilty. This is not to give yourself a free pass, or a rationalization, but rather to let you know why in fact it is a vital part of teaching your children how to tolerate ambivalent feelings. Part of being a human being and part of relationships.

"I promise you, this is not coming only from the Mom perspective of how I feel at times when I am in the biggest fight with my kids. It comes from the training I have gotten as an analyst, when I was told by one of my best teachers: ‘good enough is not only ‘good enough’, it is vital to help kids tolerate disappointment, and learn to hold onto us in their minds in the face of their own anger and hatred."

I love that! I have said that many times to mothers – "Good enough is good enough." Perfect is not only not an attainable goal, it is not a desirable goal. One of the biggest and most important tasks of growing up is learning how to accept all of one’s feelings, especially the negative ones. And children, like the little sponges that they are, learn by example through absorption. If you feel guilty for every moment of anger, sadness or fear you have, your kids will pick up on that guilt, and incorporate it into their evolving personality. They will then treat their own feelings as suspect, not legitimate or acceptable.

Here’s more from Donna:

"Now we are talking primitive feelings here, right? But name me an intense relationship that doesn’t involve love and hate, and I will say that is not intimate. Or deeply involved."

Exactly. In interpersonal relationships, you cannot hate someone you don’t love and expect love from, nor can you love someone without having feelings of hate at times. But experienced in a clean way, the moments of hate are not a problem.

Continue reading Au Contraire: The Occasional Note From Peter Loffredo →

Our pal Pete over at Full Permission Living wants to know whatever happened to the best and the brightest?

I for one am totally over the discussion of Barack Obama’s "elitism." As Jon Stewart asked so perfectly the other night: "Don’t we want someone ‘elite’ running our country?" Whatever happened to the best and the brightest? I don’t want a president I can drink beer (or Royal Crown shots) with.  I can drink beer with my best friend, Steve.

I want a president who is exceptional in his or her intelligence and wisdom, maturity and emotional stability, someone with grace under pressure and flexibility mixed with determination, and finally, someone with honesty and integrity. I don’t care a bit whether my president can bowl or windsurf or knock down whiskey. What’s going on around here?!

Here’s our pal Pete from Full Permission Living and the new blog, Full Permission Writing.

I watched a funny movie last night that I haven’t seen in a long time – "Defending Your Life," starring Albert Brooks and Merryl Streep. It’s about two people who recently died and had to make their cases to the heavenly powers that be as to whether they would be allowed to stay in Heaven, or needed to be returned once again to live another lifetime on Earth. The determining factor on which the two would be judged was how well they learned to manage and overcome fear.

I found this quite fascinating. Fear. Not anger or greed or selfishness, but fear as the mortal sin that could prevent one from moving on to eternal bliss. I got it. Yes, fear. Why? Because fear, not hate, is the true opposite of love. In all disciplines of true understanding, be they spiritual or psychological, fear is understood to be the antithesis of love. Hate is an ugly, distorted expression, to be sure, but fear is what prevents love its expression and therefore leads to hate.

Love and hate are both based upon self-identification. In other words, you do not bother to love or hate someone you cannot identify with at all. In fact, you often love or hate another individual because the person evokes in you glimpses of yourself. And in the other person, you sense your own potential. In his or her eyes you see what you can be. But… you must first love yourself before you can love another. You cannot hate yourself and love anyone else, and as I discussed in my recent blog entry, "Full Permission Loving," love is the thing we all fear the most. (See that entry for the reason why we fear love so intensely.)

Lately, I am struck by how much hatred has begun to infuse our public discourse around the presidential campaign, and in particular, how much hatred is being directed at the least hateful candidate, Barack Obama. Spewing so much less vitriol than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain, Obama is spreading a message of unity and hope, and yet to watch the two other candidates and the far right pundits and talking heads, you’d think he was the devil incarnate. Why do they fear him, and therefore hate him, so much? Is there something so insidious about Mr. Obama that I am somehow missing, even after thirty years of studying the nature of human beings as a psychotherapist and sociologist?

Is Barack Obama really the Antichrist? Or could it be that perhaps those individuals who hate him have become so fearful of facing how separated they’ve become from their own best potential, so unable to inspire anything but negativity, anger and despair in others, and so removed from their genuine capacity to love, except abstractly of course, like loving the flag or the cross or the "troops," that they must seek to denigrate and destroy anyone who puts forth a message that is positive and loving? We’ve been here before haven’t we? Martin Luther King, the Kennedy’s, Ghandi, and of course, Jesus himself, all messengers of hope and unity, all brutally murdered for delivering that message. King himself once said this: "Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true."

I can’t predict what will happen in the public square as this election year progresses. As a species, the human race seems to barely be in its adolescence developmentally, and we know how that goes so often. Maybe these more optimistic words by MLK can offer us some solace: "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.

This from our pal Peter, who’s feeling the heat for harping about the narcissistic tendencies of local children.

Some
bloggers have become annoyed with me because I appear to be harping on
concerns about narcissism being inculcated in our young due to
overly-indulgent/overly enmeshed parenting.

My reason for persisting in
trying to illuminate this problem, however, is not simple pettiness (or
narcissism) on my part. I am adamant about this issue because the
effects of narcissism go far beyond irritating behavior in restaurants
or coffee shops or bookstores. As Paul Krugman points out in his column
in today’s NY Times, narcissists wreak havoc on our society and world
because of their self-centered lack of empathy for the needs and
feelings of others.

One difficulty in facing up to this epidemic is that the origins of a
narcissistic disorder can seem benign in childhood because narcissists
are generally not created from harsh, abusive parents, broken homes or
any number of early traumas. Narcissists are created from parents who
give their offspring a false sense of entitlement, parents who try to
prevent their kids from having to experience the natural frustration
that comes from living in a social environment where the needs of
others may conflict with their immediate desires and impulses.

Here’s Mr. Krugman on some of the damaging effects on a macro scale:

"It has long been clear that President Bush doesn’t feel other people’s
pain. His self-centeredness shines through whenever he makes
off-the-cuff, unscripted remarks, from his jocular obliviousness in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the joke he made last year in San
Antonio when visiting the Brooke Army Medical Center, which treats the
severely wounded: ‘As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself —
not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won.
The cedar gave me a little scratch’…

Arguably, the current state of
the Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a
chance of getting nominated…We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to learn
that these men are monstrously self-centered…All of which leaves us
with a political question. Most voters are thoroughly fed up with the
current narcissist in chief. Are they really ready to elect another?"