In the course of human relations, we frequently make agreements with one another. Because disturbed characters are not reliable, trustworthy, or prone to play fairly, making any kind of agreements with them can be a risky business indeed.

Ultimately, people have power only over one thing: the execution of their free will.

Despite frequent social sanctions, aggressive personalities often persist in their aggressive defiance of society’s rules and limits.

Information is power. And children have considerably less information than we do about the world around them.

How actively useful are boundaries in the therapeutic relationship? They are obviously a part of the ‘real world’ in which both client and therapists live, organising and managing their money and time. But in some humanistic, relationship-based schools of therapy, they seem to bring out a certain contradiction…

The lesson that it is facilitative not to press others to disclose, and to communicate that lack of pressure explicitly, is a useful one in all kinds of relationships; mothers persistently asking their children to tell them what happened at school springs to mind, as does the situation in which the stereotypical wife ‘asks the husband to talk about his feelings’.

Psychology today reports on ‘permaparenting’, the phenomenon of young adults coming back to the nest for indefinite amounts of time, or never leaving it at all. It paints a fairly bleak picture of young adults who are not mature enough to leave, and parents who are not mature enough to let them.