Behavior that is rewarded is repeated. And the reverse.

This is about authoritarian tendencies. This is about command and control. This is about power. This is about ego. This is a consistent pattern.

You learn that "I’ll always look after you" and "You’re mine for life" can sound menacing, are used as a warning over and over again.

Punishment? Reward! Punishment? Reward!

The patterns of gratification are simple, and seem to fall into two patterns, the Great Bitch and the Poison Maiden.

Pain patterns are vicious cycles, unconsciously passed from generation to generation in deeply entrenched behavioral and relational paradigms. They cannot be changed from the outside, only from within. Fear gives way to comfort, pain to healing, anger to peace, despair to hope, only when the heart of a person or the soul of a people feel safe enough to emerge from the hardened shell of self-preservation and become open to new possibilities. A hurting humanity cannot be healed by force, by arguing, shaming, threatening, manipulating. Those merely feed the pain patterns and harden their protective shells. Love, acceptance, empathy, compassion, those are the gentle rain that blossoms hurt into healing, transforming pain patterns into the peaceful flowering of a healthy, heart-whole humanity.

Thoughts are tyrants that return again and again to torment us.

First silence. Then denial. Then support of the insupportable. Then vilification of the dissenters. The pattern is as old as time.

Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe
they should be. They become very self-abusive, and they use other people to abuse themselves as well.

Any pattern of emotion or behavior that is continually reinforced will become an automatic and conditioned response. Anything we fail to reinforce will eventually dissipate.

I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil and violence.

The exercise of one coercion always makes another inevitable.

Corruption and brutality are modeled and expected and rewarded. It becomes normal. And anyone who stands up to it, who tells them it’s wrong, is beaten down. Or worse.

Can the high level of violence in patriarchal cultures be attributed to people's chronic, if largely unconscious, rage over the denial of their freedom and pleasure? To what extent is sanctioned or officially condoned violence — from war and capital punishment to lynching, wife-beating and the rape of "bad" women to harsh penalties for "immoral" activities like drug-taking and nonmarital sex to the religious and ideological persecution of totalitarian states — in effect a socially approved outlet for expressing that rage, as well as a way of relieving guilt by projecting one's own unacceptable desires onto scapegoats?