The idea that opposites attract has frequently been debunked.  Probably, the reason for this is that people think that when (and if!) opposites attract that the partners are totally opposite to each other.  That is not so because if total opposites attracted relationships nowadays would not last for long, even the six or seven years duration for roughly one third of all marriages.

Does the career we have chosen have a much deeper purpose than the pursuit of our work goals?  After all, when we think that our most important work of all is to know ourselves and to cut the ties that bind us to past and present relationships, is it possibly a reality that our career choice carries a deeper message regarding our unconscious drive to be true to ourselves.  The self is ingenious in the ways it attempts to draw attention to the unresolved conflicts that continue to block our progress within ourselves and between ourselves and others.  

In a two-parent family, the first relationship that a male has with a woman is with his mother and the first with another male is with his father.  Similarly, the first relationship that a female has with a man is with her father and the first with another female is with her mother.  A further issue is that the first marriage relationship that children in two-parent families witness is that between their parents.  All of these different relationships have a profound impact on children and how, as adults, they feel about themselves and feel towards each parent and toward other males and females.

Intimacy phonetically accurately defines the word: ‘into-me-see’.  It would appear then that intimacy is about the other person loving you for your self and not for what you do!  Certainly, a parent’s relationship with a child needs to be of a nature that is unconditional loving of the unique person of the infant.  When a child does not experience this unconditional physical and emotional holding of his person, he will hide his true nature and develop a false self in line with the troubled and defensive ways his parent has responded to his presence.  For example, a parent who loves and infant because he is so helpless is not loving her child, but is loving his helplessness.  

Angela Patmore, author, who served in the Metropolitan Police External Experts Stress Advisory Group, claims ‘there really is no such thing as stress.’  Indeed, she goes on to say that ‘stress is a mythical malaise – a designer disease.’  Does this mean that when a mother is stressed out from the constant wailing of a baby, or an employee is bullied daily in the workplace, or a person is stressed out from overworking, rushing and racing or a woman is terrified because she might have breast cancer, that all of these stress responses are imaginary, not real?  And the many men who take their lives because of deep inner turmoil, is Patmore saying this is not real?