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Anyway so that was what my weekend was like.

Uh, so tonight,

or this evening, we're this evening.

We are talking about standing up to bullying and aggression in life.

I'm going to talk about it from a couple different perspectives, focusing on one specific

perspective which will become clear. It's very common in my work which is basically teaching is only a very small part of what I do.

The vast bulk of my week is spent one-on-one

spiritual counseling and in much of the work I do it involves helping people who are living their adult life in some ways still trapped

in the beliefs and behaviors that were applicable to earlier phases of development, childhood, young adult life.

To one degree or another we all develop to survive family systems and

socialization with peer groups which can be very painful and institutions which can be challenging such as educational institutions.

We all develop survival strategies, essentially coping mechanisms and ways to get through and very often these approaches make complete sense in one part of

our lives but fail to adapt very well in adult life.

A classic example being avoidance coping, of which tonight's talk is somewhat related.

Avoidance coping is the child's understanding that when a parent or an adult figure is angry with us, it's terrifying and the best thing to do is avoid having a conflictual conversation.

So the child will navigate around seeing certain people

or will dodge importance topics of conversation as an attempt to stay safe. In adult life if we practice avoidance coping where we avoid

...