Maladaptive Quotes & Sayings

The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated - if there's not pharmacological intervention - it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.. — Terence McKenna

Homeschooling is a journey not a destination, always seek to improve what you are doing and teach with a mind that is open to new possibilities and experiences. — Tina Razzell

If we want to improve, first we have to recognize our own maladaptive coping skills, called codependency, then change. — David W. Earle

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. — Margaret Atwood

Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive. — Lawrence M. Krauss

Aspects of culture can also be described as vestigial, where once-adaptive cultural adaptations become maladaptive when environments change. — Anonymous

In France they spend six months training policemen, then they give them a gun and put them on the streets, and I don't know that that's enough. The film's not against the police - although I think that if someone wants to be a cop there's got to be a problem. — Mathieu Kassovitz

Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety. — Irvin D. Yalom

You're really not right, are you? (Sin)
With my background and genetic makeup, buddy, you're lucky I'm as normal as I am. (Kat) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The thing about Bollywood is that you can't just quit it even if you have little fame. You have to stick around and keep trying. — Kangana Ranaut

It should be apparent that the belief in objectivity in journalism, as in other professions, is not just a claim about what kind of knowledge is reliable. It is also a moral philosophy, a declaration of what kind of thinking one should engage in, in making moral decisions. It is, moreover, a political commitment, for it provides a guide to what groups one should acknowledge as relevant audiences for judging one's own thoughts and acts. — Michael Schudson

Wounded parents often unintentionally inflict pain and suffering on their children and these childhood wounds causes a laundry list of maladaptive behaviors commonly called codependency. These habits restrict people to love-limiting relationships causing much unhappiness and distress. — David W. Earle

There are 4 billion cell phones in use today. Many of them are in the hands of market vendors, rickshaw drivers, and others who've historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Information networks have become a great leveler, and we should use them together to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want. — Hillary Clinton

Most DID patients are rather muted compared to those cases incorrectly assumed to epitomize the condition (Kluft, 1985b). The personalities enact adaptational patterns and strategies that developed in the service of defense and survival. Once this pattern, which disposes of upsetting material and pressures rapidly and efficiently, is established, it may be repeated again and again to cope with both further overwhelming experiences and more mundane developmental and adaptational issues.
Once the DID that developed in order to cope with intolerable childhood circumstances has achieved some degree of secondary autonomy, it becomes increasingly maladaptive. — Richard P. Kluft

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that - however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today - once benefitted our species. — Carl Sagan

Adaptive learners expect to succeed (hopeful), whereas maladaptive learners expect to fail (hopeless). Adaptive learning promotes confidence, well-being, and an elated mood, whereas maladaptive learning saddles dogs with apprehensiveness, worry, insecurity, and generalized anxiety. Dogs that generally expect to fail are constrained to exist in a small corner of life where they feel most secure and likely to succeed. Dogs — Steve Lindsay

There's only one question that matters, Ms. Lane, and it's the one you never get around to asking. People are capable of varying degrees of truth. The majority spend their entire lives fabricating an elaborate skein of lies, immersing themselves in the faith of bad faith, doing whatever it takes to feel safe. The person who truly lives has precious few moments of safety, learns to thrive in any kind of storm. It's the truth you can stare down stone-cold that makes you what you are. Weak or strong. Live or die. Prove yourself. How much truth can you take, Ms. Lane? — Karen Marie Moning

Sandy leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss her back, pressing myself against her, my excitement about the investigation rolling over, accelerating, transforming into that other big feeling, that exhilarating and terrifying feeling - not love, but the thing that feels like love - bodies rising to each other, nerve endings opening up and seeking each other - a feeling I know, even as it floods into my veins and my joints, that I will probably never feel again. Last time, for this. — Ben H. Winters

Being nonreactive to destructive or hostile behaviour does not imply passive acceptance of it. Rather, it means we need to deal with it, take off our blinders and see the unacceptable. To redirect the destructive enery, we must dance with the shadow, not kill it. When we can achieve this stance, we learn to confront maladaptive or nonproductive behaviour matter-of-factly, without becoming embroiled in the heat of our own emotions. This nonreflexive style of being in the world is potent. — Adele Von Rust McCormick

The ambivalent strategy involves clinging to the care-giver, often with excessive submissiveness, or adopting a role-reversal in which the care-giver is cared for rather than vice versa. Here feelings of anger at the rejection are most conspicuously subjected to defensive exclusion. Although these strategies have the function of maintaining attachment in the face of difficulties, a price has to be paid. The attachment patterns so established are clearly restricted and, if repeated in all relationships, will be maladaptive. — Jeremy Holmes

Attachment is central to the context in which all other action systems mature. If attachment is disrupted early in life, it may lead to maladaptive functioning in various areas of life because the most basic action systems do not function well. Attachment relationships assist individuals in regulating their emotions and physiology, providing basic internal and relational stability. — Onno Van Der Hart

While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its problems. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous. — Sam Harris

No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions. — Terence McKenna

Artists are never appreciated at lunchtime," Kelly mumbled as she stuffed her camera into her pocket. — Alex Gino

Patients must be willing to give up their maladaptive coping styles in order to change. For example, patients who continue surrendering to the schema - by remaining in destructive relationships or by not setting limits in their personal or work lives -perpetuate the schema and are not able to make significant progress in therapy. — Jeffrey E. Young

ALLOW THE SENSATIONS TO BE PRESENT, BUT DO NOT ACT ON THEM This is probably the hardest thing to do when you start using the Four Steps. When you refuse to give in to the content of your deceptive brain messages by not performing the action your brain is telling you to do, your Uh Oh Center fires even more intensely, which makes you feel extremely uncomfortable. You want to do virtually anything to get rid of those sensations, both physical and emotional, and know that simply following your deceptive brain messages will accomplish that task in the short term. The problem, as we all must learn the hard way over time, is that doing so will only fuel the negative messages and further entrench the maladaptive circuits ever more powerfully into your brain. Said another way, short-term relief rapidly causes more pain and suffering, not less. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

You're saying Stevie's problems are because we taught him to believe in Santa Claus?" asked Step, incredulous. "On the contrary. I think Santa Claus is, by and large, quite beneficial, for when the child is finally allowed - or forced - to recognize the nonexistence of Santa Claus, then the child is able to go through the vital intellectual process of reconstructing reality in light of new evidence, complete with back-forming new stories to account for past events. This prepares the child for many other disillusionments and gives her vital and well-supported experience in maintaining her grip on reality independent of the stories told to her at any given time." "So Santa Claus is good," said Step. "Santa Claus is usually not maladaptive," said Dr. Weeks, — Orson Scott Card

There is no greater bore than perfection. — Richard Connell

Sometimes you don't need words to say what's in your heart. — Ruth Ozeki

Functional analysis: learn your ABC's In addition to monitoring, try to track the events that immediately precede and follow your problem behavior. Do you drink more when something makes you feel angry? Lonely? Happy? What happens right after an angry outburst? Does the other person give in? Do you have a drink? Or do you withdraw to be alone? What makes you crave a piece of cake? How does eating it make you feel? This "functional analysis" can illuminate what is controlling the parts of your life that seem out of control. It is easy as A (antecedents) B (behavior) C (consequences). Antecedents can trigger a problem behavior, while the consequences reward or strengthen it, no matter how maladaptive it is. — James O. Prochaska

It's not that I don't like words. There's sometimes no need for words. — Claire Denis

An explosive outburst - like other forms of maladaptive behavior - occurs when the cognitive demands being placed upon a person outstrip that person's capacity to respond adaptively. — Ross W. Greene

Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he lived his life - every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him - everybody had a reason to be and a place to land. Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit down. — Robert Goolrick

Oratory is good only if it has the qualities of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment, while in the case of letters there is no such need whatsoever. — Isocrates