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This is http://www.essayz.com/a9002131.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %DIFFERENT KINDS COERCIVE HEALTHY ACCEPTANCE LOVE 900213 The kind of context in which we have a chance to grow to healthy maturity depends upon the kinds of acceptance which we enjoy or suffer. We may be accepted in coercive ways which do not give us a chance to be true to ourselves. A bright and attractive woman may be accepted only as a sexual object to be available for the use of men, but not as a scientist with whom men might comfortably collaborate in scientific research and teaching. The way in which others reject us and/or accept us plays a major role in defining who we may become; especially if there is a consistent pattern in the ways in which different people accept us. If we are always avoided when we are open and honest about our emotions, we learn to live emotionally barren lives in which emotions erupt in senseless violence, if ever. We may be accepted only when we are not authentically being our true selves; and so be taught to be dishonest. Through selective acceptance we may become conformists who always do what is expected, who lack any sense of creativity, and never take any meaningful initiatives. We may be rejected whenever we are authentically our true selves; and so taught to conceal our true identity. Through patterns of rejection of our authentic selves others never get to know us; and eventually we come to the point where we do not know ourselves, do not know who we really are. We may be accepted only as actors in a drama over which we have no control; and over which the other actors in the drama have no independent control, all being victims of a drama without meaning. In such a tragic drama everybody does what everybody else expects in a violent pattern of coercive expectation and coercive acceptance. Who people are and how they grow and change are not objective realities which are determined by impersonal facts and processes. Neither are such realities fully determined by the will and actions of people themselves. Who people are and how they grow and change are realities which depend significantly upon the ways in which they are accepted and rejected; and upon the logic of those ways. The logic may not be reasonable and may be based upon false perceptions; and yet have the power to coerce and kill any spark of authenticity, creativity and initiative. People are not objects and cannot be understood as objects; objectively. People grow to become who they are, and change as they do change, in large part because of the ways in which they are accepted and rejected; because of the reasons perceived for their acceptance and rejection. The force of the acceptances and rejections resides in the perceptions of them and their logic; not in intentions. It is not objective realities which are paramount, but perceptions which are paramount in how we are rejected and/or accepted. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================