#david richo

[gatheringbones]

[“Love or any deep connection with another person, however brief, does more than just satisfy us in the present. It ripples back in time, repairing, restoring, and renovating an inadequate past. Sincere love also sets off a forward-moving ripple and a resultant shift inside us. We get to the point where we can think: “Now I don’t have to need quite so much. Now I don’t have to blame my parents quite so much. Now I can receive love without craving more and more. I can have and be enough.” The person whose journey has progressed to that point is ready to love someone intimately.”]

david richo, from how to be an adult in relationships: the five keys to mindful loving, 2002

[soiledlight]

“Our heart is the soft center of the egoless self and it has one desire: to open. The heart is the capacity to open.… It contains our ability to reach out so it is the antidote to despair.… Contemplation of Jesus’ Heart shows us how deep we really are, how vast our potential for love, how high our aspiration for the light.” –David Richo

[evvywevvy]

just rereading a book about coming to terms with being raised by emotionally insecure parents, for no reason

[kenzeaye]

How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration by David Richo

[that-is-just-so-typically-me]

“Disappointment is a kind of loss: the loss of what we had hoped something was, or could be. At bottom is the loss of an illusion to which we cling or on which we relied — but the only thing that can be lost, after all, is illusion.”

- David Richo

I need a cigarette after reading this lmao

[lyri-c]

David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships

“To know the night is a lot like knowing poetry, and knowing poetry requires what Keats called “negative capability,” the capacity for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” To know the night means having the clarity that some things are and should be and always will be hidden, for the night has been, or is, or should always be, the time of lovers, revolutionaries, and other conspirators. The night world is that which should be, or once always was, veiled.”

— Anne Boyer, from her essay “The Fall of Night”, Lapham’s Quarterly, Volume XII, Number 1 | Winter 2019 (via kitchen-light)

[tetedump]

Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should... With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

- Max Ehrmann - quoted in When the Past Is Present, David Richo

[nelfs]

I resist the infantile urge to punish and reject those who hurt me

[honigimohr]

Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.

David Richo

[swallowerofdharma]

Yashiro’s Cruel God part one

Disclaimer: this post contains a detailed and straightforward analysis of chapter 25. Doumeki isn’t the villain, if you were worried about that. Actually I must apologize because I wanted to talk about him too, but as usual I started this meta with Yashiro and got carried away. This is also why I am dividing it in parts to avoid having a very very long post. So other parts will hopefully follow to fully elaborate the premise I made. Thank you for understanding. And please take care of your wellbeing, if mentioning Yashiro’s stepfather upset you, maybe skip this one.

Premise: not a matter of perfection but of balance

This person I followed reblogged the Declarations of healthy adulthood by David Richo in big big font and - having only one thought on my mind apparently - I read all that text in Yashiro’s POV. I actually don’t think that this is a perfect model or anything, and I am generally skeptical of self help books (I only assume this is something like it), but why not use this as an example, while considering something that I find interesting about Yashiro and Doumeki? During the discussion about the latest chapter, I said something along the lines of Doumeki representing young love, while Yashiro’s approach has been more mature, and I meant it thinking about Yashiro being aware and cautious about hurting others [and being intentional when he does, since he put a bullet in Doumeki’s leg] and being quite self reliant, and yes I know that he is also afraid of being hurt/loved! in previous posts here, I have mentioned that Yashiro’s acceptance of his past is only-in-part denial or downplaying of trauma, because it has been also a strategy and an impressive sign of his maturity and determination to live in the present. Isn’t it exceptional that Yashiro doesn’t seem all that resentful of his parents? That he openly says that he doesn’t blame others? We have to confront his words always mindful of the fact that he usually is an unreliable narrator, but in many instances he says the truth or half truths and his demeanor confirmed that he did some of what David Richo proposes: I accept full responsibility for the shape my life has taken; I accept that I may never feel I am receiving - or have received - all the attention I seek; One by one, I drop every expectation of people and things; I let go of blame, regret, vengeance, and the infantile desire to punish those who hurt or reject me; No one can or needs to bail me out. I am not entitled to be taken care of by anyone or anything, I let go of control without losing control.

I thought that it was very interesting to consider the Yashiro/Doumeki dynamics from different angles, like older/younger, or even realist/romantic, for example. The point of this experiment isn’t to make a comparison of merit nor to talk about a character in better light than another. Maybe those differences need to be confronted or balanced: for example the realist maybe needs some of the romantic’s idealism to soar and not be stuck on the ground. Yoneda-san might be onto something so human and amazing here. An important clarification is due before saying anything else. As characters that are written as full human beings, with their complexity and contradictions, Yashiro and Doumeki can’t be put neatly into the opposite categories I proposed. The story is much more dynamic, so I ask you to take a further step and put those opposites at the ends of a spectrum and to move our characters freely in both directions. Yashiro tends toward being effectively the older and more realistic one but he has traits that make him move down towards the other end too, even to the extreme of being childish. Consider for example these other statements, from the Declarations of healthy adulthood: I need never fear my own truth, powers, fantasies wishes, thoughts, sexuality, dreams, or ghosts; When change and growth scare me, I still choose them. I may act with fear, but never because of it; I am still safe when I cease following the rules my parents (or others) set for me; If people knew me as I really am, they would love me for being human like them. These points clearly demonstrate Yashiro’s unresolved problems, where he is stuck if you want, and why probably nobody believed me when I pointed at him as being mature (eh, he has his moments tho, you can’t deny that).

I challenge everyone to consider that those four points in particular are quite challenging for most people in general, but particularly so for someone who has fear/betrayal as the foundational principle in their childhood instead of a normal amount even a scarse amount of parental love/safety. And I want to underline childhood here, not teenage years or later.

I need never fear my own truth, powers, fantasies wishes, thoughts, sexuality, dreams, or ghosts. Yashiro here is a mix of contradictions, because he outwardly seems to own those things, even making them a point of his persona, but most of those things are based on the lies he told himself, or his stepfather told him: see this other point

I am still safe when I cease following the rules my parents (or others) set for me. Isn’t this statement extremely helpful to understand Yashiro’s situation? To feel safe he had to build his personality according to the rules of the one who had all the power over him and had already taken away any sense of security from him. This is probably one of those things that can be hard to understand when you have never been there. Most notably, not only in the manga this has been pointed out, but it has been pointed out by Yashiro himself. He is self conscious of this, he knows that he lied to himself as a child, that he had to, and he is constantly choosing to continue lying because that is still the only foundation he has. There was no familial love, no other relative safety. Letting go of the lies actually means going to pieces and breaking down.

This isn’t different from what happens to people who are tortured. Yashiro’s father completely took away any sense of security and safety. The aggravating circumstances were that Yashiro as a child didn’t have any other point of reference or knowledge to understand what was happening with his body and in that state of mind what his father told him had to be the only truth possible. Parents who abuse their children most often don’t even realize what they are doing to its full extent. That’s the immense cruelty of these types of situations. The rules are lies, but the lies are rules to follow to be safe:

You like it when it hurts, right? If it doesn’t hurt, I can’t get into it.

What happened in chapter 25: why now?

Yashiro didn’t want to have sex with Doumeki and said so repeatedly. Doumeki has grown on him, behind liking his physical appearance or using him as a substitute for Kageyama: Yashiro truly liked this person and he liked that Doumeki was impotent. Thanks to that, Yashiro grew comfortable around Doumeki and with comfort and safety comes familiarity. When Yashiro discovered that the impotence was gone, he was angry and terrified. They had become too close and now the premise has changed and Yashiro couldn’t trust Doumeki or himself anymore. I won’t analyze here the scene in the shower but I’ll skip to the point. Doumeki only understood that his love was required, that he was wanted and stopped thinking. He acted passionately like any young person who had a normal foundation in love would. He didn’t understand anything that Yashiro asked or why there were mixed signals and what it all meant. He pushed and hurt and broke without being aware of what he was doing.

And Yashiro was trapped in a situation he had tried to escape from his all life: with a person who felt familiar, a person he loved and relied on, in the safety of a home, who wanted sex and was going to do what he wanted regardless of what Yashiro had to say. Yashiro desperately tried to control what was happening through usual patterns, making it hurt, asking Doumeki to do from behind, detaching the sex from his emotions, but he couldn’t and for the first time in his life sex was different from what he knew, because while Yashiro had loved his stepfather, his father didn’t love him and he didn’t treat him like Doumeki did. And every lies built around his father’s abuse came to the surface. Including the fact that his father never loved him. Doumeki broke him indeed because he broke through the lies/rules upon which Yashiro had intentionally built his entire personality/safety. And he wasn’t ready for it, he specifically said he didn’t want it, he had known all along, he already knew when men before Doumeki tried to make love to him and when he built a strategy to specifically avoid being confronted with those lies/rules. He didn’t love those men. He did love Doumeki though. But once again Yashiro didn’t have a choice. And he was physically hurt and recovering after being shot and knowing his life was in danger outside of that room. He had just discovered that Doumeki lied about being impotent the previous time he touched him in the car and before that. It was probably the worst timing possible for making love. At some point Yashiro grew resigned and even reciprocated a little, reaching for Doumeki, caressing his face, and he even reassured him before he fell asleep. There were words that Doumeki said that Yoneda didn’t disclose fully, choosing instead to immediately took us in the flashback with Yashiro. I think it is probable that what Doumeki said was something that Yashiro’s father had said and that we are going to confront before the end of the manga. I personally want to know these words more than what Yashiro said while an airplane passed by and Doumeki was unconscious. Morbid maybe on my part.

I have stated that I am not going to make Doumeki a villain here. The point of this analysis is just to see where Doumeki was in terms of maturity. To be continued…

[nat-20s]

If I had stupid richo fuck off money I WOULD be hiring David Tennant and Catherine Tate as we speak. And I WOULD be making them play the king's loyal advisor and a charming but dastardly rogue who secretly working to assassinate the king in legion with the queen. And they WILL both question their allegiances because they're slowly becoming devoted to each other.

[gatheringbones]

[“Sometimes, the abuse is so subtle that we fail to notice it. Sarcasm, ridicule, teasing, “kidding,” or continual criticism, for instance, starts to feel less like abuse and more like a part of the background noise. Sometimes one partner does not meet the other’s needs, but since he also does not do anything major to upset the apple cart, Adam and Eve go on in the relationship without thinking of options such as change or separation: He will never be so bad that you will leave him but never so good that he will satisfy you. In either case, we may fool ourselves into hoping for change rather than working for it.

If hope doesn’t include a plan for change, it is actually hopelessness and avoidance of change. What we do not change, we choose. Is this the message we get from the partner of our distress: “Stay with me and I won’t give you what you want,” or “Come back and I still won’t give you what you want”? We cannot be fooled forever. One day we allow ourselves to know and then take action.

Emily Dickinson, in her poem “’Tis not that dying hurts us so,” compares two kinds of birds in Massachusetts, those that stay the winter and those that migrate to warmer climes. She then says: “We are the birds that stay.” To be “the birds that stay” in wintry New England when wisdom would send us to Mexico is a cruel fate to impose upon ourselves. We can use it as a metaphor for a relationship in which we stay with someone who does not nurture us: we need a loaf and beg for a crumb from someone who’s afraid to give a loaf and hardly willing to give a crumb. To live in Massachusetts winter after winter and then say, “enough of this,” and move to California takes some pluck and then yields the warmth we hoped for. However, we may be conditioned to accept that our lives are not supposed to be comfortable. Likewise, we may believe that relationships will never work for us, that we are meant to be unhappy and unfulfilled. With that perspective, we may not be able to muster an “enough of this” when we find ourselves in pain. Instead we may ask ourselves, “Why bother?”

To live with abuse is dangerous because it can make our wish to suffer equal in strength to our will to be safe. We think, “Nothing I can do will stop him from hurting me,” or “Nothing I can do will make her love me.” A frightening conclusion can result: “Nothing matters, and I don’t care.” Such deep despair can take the form of poor self-esteem, disease, distortion of the body by overeating, self-abuse, addiction, risky jobs or hobbies, accident-proneness, anorexia, the belief that we can’t improve our lives, and so on. These all boil down to a wish to die. We might even seek relationships that guarantee protection against having to look at or process our issues. A partner may be appealing to us precisely because he implicitly promises that we will never have to confront, process, and resolve any issue very deeply, never have to change an intimacy-defeating style. We may think, “He is superficial and just as scared to confront things as I am, so I am safe here.” In such relationships we forge a tacit bargain to be what Emily Dickinson’s poem calls “Shiverers round Farmers’ doors” awaiting a “reluctant Crumb.”]

david richo, from how to be an adult in relationships: the five keys to mindful loving, 2002

[yourspiritguide-quotes]

Befriending the shadow is really about learning to love

We let the dark out to let love in

- David Richo

[my-quotes]

Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.

-David Richo

[madamlaydebug]

“Our wounds

are often

the openings into

the best and most

beautiful part of us.”

- David Richo

[cleverwordsandotherstuffilike]

"Success is in the sincerity of our intention, not in getting it right every time. So even if we often fail to live up to our goals, as long as we keep returning to our efforts, we are living enlightened lives." David Richo