You are being threatened with violence for voicing your displeasure within the relationship

They used two different request letters. The first version featured statistics about the magnitude of problems facing children in Africa, such as the following: The other version of the letter gave information about a single young girl: Any money you donate will go to Rokia, a seven-year-old girl from Mali. Rokia is desperately poor and faces the threat of severe hunger or even starvation. Her life will be changed for the better as a result of your financial gift. With your support, Save the Children will work with Rokia's family and other members of the community to help feed and educate her and provide basic medical care and hygiene education. The researchers then gave participants one of the two different letters and looked at how much money they wanted to contribute. On average, the people who read about Rokia contributed twice as much as those who read the statistics. It seems that most people have something in common with Mother Teresa: when it comes to our heart, one individual trumps the masses. She says she talked to Katrina, listened to and sang Queen and Bon Jovi (The Show Must Go On and Bed of Roses were her greatest hits, she says) and got a chance to say her goodbyes before they even really met in person. The ten days between Leslie's learning that the baby would not survive and her going into natural labour gave her a chance to come to grips with what was happening and to prepare for the baby's arrival. Although every mother in this sad situation may have a different opinion, Leslie calls her doctor's instructions to let the pregnancy and nature take their course the best advice she received during that tumultuous time. She feels that, had she gone into the hospital for tests and come home the next day with no baby, it would have been too much of a shock, and she really would have been, in her words, screwed up. Of course, the option of waiting out the birth of a child who has died is not always realistic; For my little sister, however, waiting was the best course of action. She related her situation to me, saying, You would carry your dead child as long as you could--that's what a mother does. And I certainly get that. If I could have, I'd have never left that Ottawa funeral home sitting room. I would have sat at Lauren's side for as long as they would let me, no question.

I'm not sure we would have done so well if Mom and Dad had told us we were ordinary. So what is the right place for narcissism in a healthy life? Thirty years since this conundrum first entered my mind, with the help of other thinkers and mentors, my life experience and my clients, I have arrived at some answers. Healthy narcissism thrives when we use it more as a muse than a foundation--when we embrace the ordinary, and when we open ourselves to a variety of sources of input from others. The Narcissistic Dream My sister and I frequently touch base on our creative projects, and invariably, our childhood conditioning enters the conversation. She, also a therapist, is a singer-songwriter currently recording her second album. We both entered the world with big dreams, stoked by the encouragement of our father, and we both have fallen many, many times. She recalls producing her first album early in her artistic development, Grammy visions in her mind, and performing one CD release concert at an almost-empty venue. I cringe as I recall the modelling and talent search I entered years ago. To prove this argument, they ran a second study. In this, they asked people to think in an analytical way by asking them questions such as, `If an object travels at five feet per minute, then by your calculations how many feet will it travel in 360 seconds? Both groups were then given the Rokia letter and, as you can probably guess, the analytically primed people gave less than the people who were primed to feel before they read about Rokia. Researchers dubbed this the `drop in the ocean effect', after Mother Teresa's famous words: `We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. The neurologist Donald Calne sums up the lesson we can learn from this when creating change in our own lives: `The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions. As human beings, we move and create change when our feelings and emotions are touched. As human beings, we move and create change when our feelings and emotions are touched. This point was illustrated in The Heart of Change by John Kotter and Dan Cohen, who interviewed over 400 people across the United States, Europe, Australia and South Africa in the hope of understanding why change happens. Summarising the data, Kotter and Cohen said that in most change situations people initially focus on logical solutions, which leads them to miss the most important issue:

And so it was, on a frigid January night, in the same hospital where her mother and father had been given the worst news expectant parents can receive, Katrina made her arrival into the world, weighing just over two pounds. Leslie was taken to a private room, where the speakers that carried regular announcements reminding mothers that it was time to feed their babies, and so on, were mercifully turned off. A gentle and kind female Salvation Army officer, who came in at four o'clock in the morning, cleaned and dressed the little grey baby and took pictures of her for her parents, which, along with those clothes, would later be given to them as keepsakes to look at whenever they felt they were ready. Leslie says she regrets having chosen not to hold Katrina in her arms. Her reason at the time for not doing so? I couldn't, she says. I just couldn't. I gave birth naturally; I still had to dilate and go through contractions, and although the pushing wasn't that hard, I still had to endure all that, even though she was smaller. The whole birthing was exactly like the next three that I had, she says. Unlike my sister, I do not have a trained voice, and I took the stage to perform in front of an auditorium I now wish had not been full. I knew it was a bad sign when, as I received my critiques, a judge commented on how much she liked my shoes. I read comments about my gown and how poised I was. Of the little that was said about my voice, one word popped out--a word that strikes horror in anyone raised with musical appreciation. At the end of the competition, I waited to find I had received no callbacks. As I looked around the lobby at prepubescent contestants talking with potential agents, I felt a wave of shame. What was I thinking? What was my sister thinking? We were thinking we were special. And, as experts like Twenge and Campbell might have predicted, this belief set us both up for our subsequent falls.

This is true even in organisations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thoughts. Kotter and Cohen say that most people think change happens in this order: ANALYSE-THINK-CHANGE. You analyse a situation, then you think about it and then you make the necessary changes. In a normal environment that might work pretty well, but change situations don't look like that. Because of the uncertainty that change brings, analytical arguments will not overcome the reluctance to shift perspective or habits. Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful changes, the sequence of change is not ANALYSE-THINK- CHANGE but rather SEE-You're presented with evidence that makes you feel something. It might be a disturbing look at the problem, a hopeful glimpse of the solution or a sobering reflection of your current habits but, regardless, it's something that hits you at the emotional level. This means that we need to make sure we are engaging how we feel to help us to change, and also that to make change happen through others it's vital that we make sure their emotions are brought into play too. Whoever you are trying to influence needs to care. But now I wish I had held her, because I didn't feel I was a good mother by choosing not to do that. Her husband didn't hold the baby either, but he did see her in the Salvation Army officer's arms. Tiny Katrina was buried in a little white lace coffin in a plot near her paternal grandmother. As is the case with most stillbirths, I'm told, the funeral home did not charge for the infant's coffin. There was no definitive cause given for the death; Words of sympathy to parents of children who did not survive gestation or birth must be as carefully chosen as those delivered to other grieving parents. In this case, there are a few extra phrases to avoid, including there must have been something wrong with her, at least you didn't give birth to a child with deformities, God needed another angel, or it's all for the best. Once again, if people can't think of anything to say that they're 100 percent sure is going to be of comfort, it's best just to offer a hug, a meal or quiet support. A loss is a loss is a loss. Whether it comes after seven months (in or outside of the uterus), seven years or seven decades, the death of a loved one with whom you've bonded is sure to cause heartache.

As much as the two of us bemoan the burden of our inflated visions--my sister recently complained, This follow your dreams shit is just too much work--those visions have pushed us into worlds otherwise off-limits to two girls from rural Minnesota. Narcissism is healthiest as a source of inspiration and unhealthiest as a dietary staple. The toddler rises up to walk, for the first time looking down on the world. In that moment, he can do anything. He has power, authority, and lives at the center of everything. This is the narcissistic dream, and it doesn't last long. Nor should it. The fall is as important as the rise. Soon the child learns to reconcile his vulnerability with his power--another rapprochement. But before we go there, let's set the pause button on that rise, that unsustainable high. They need to feel what you feel. The food writer Nigel Slater acknowledged the power of emotions in his memoir Toast, detailing his childhood years as remembered through their association with food. In one incredibly moving account, he recalls how his father helped him to deal with the overwhelming grief which engulfed him following his mother's death at the age of nine and how this helped forge a stronger relationship between them. He recalls that the night after his mum's funeral, he saw two white marshmallows on his bedside table: `I had never been allowed to eat in bed, and when my father came upstairs to tuck me in, I asked if they were for me. Of course they are. He said, I know they're your favourites. He explained how he had read a school essay written shortly before my mother's death, in which I had described them as being the nearest food to a kiss. Each night for the next two years I found two, sometimes three, fluffy, sugary marshmallows waiting for me. It was my mother's goodnight kiss. Think back to when you were a kid and wanted to ask your parents for some money or, as an adult, if you wanted to invite someone out on a date.