A crucial challenge is to stop treating disillusionment as a problem or something negative, and use it as an awakening force. Neither flee from nor lose yourself in your shame. Stay present with it, feeling it as fully as you can, nothing where in your body you sense it most strongly. Remember that the more compassion and vulnerability you can approach your shame with, the greater the odds are the you will handle it skillfully. To be disillusioned is to see through illusion, in conjunction with releasing its hold on us. We thus become disenchanted, no longer spellbound by our conditioning. And far more able to skillfully approach our edge. As such, disillusionment is a kind of sobriety, a catalyst for waking up, a great opportunity.  #RyanPhillippe 1 of 10

Honor is the acknowledgment which the World makes of a man’s respectability. Challenging—and being challenged by—others is essential for our growth as is nurturance, but this does not mean that relational challenge is always a good thing. As a person shifts the dominant locus of power-and-love from warm and appreciative to the hostile and resisting, we come indifferently dependent personality. Rather than being either warmly close or hostilely distant, I tend to become neutral. All good ends can be worked out by good means. Those that cannot, are bad; and may be counted so at once, and left alone. I can only be dishonored by perpetrating an unjust action. Look, all who were angry at you will be ashamed and humiliated; your adversaries will be reduced to nothing and perish. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 10

Nonchalance, detachment, and unconcern characterize the love dimension. There is a kind of matter-of-factness in the relationship. People are neither turned on nor turned off by an individual like me. I do not fear inspection. I cannot act in disguises. Thrust Nature back with a pitchfork, it will return. I do not wish to have it in my power to do hurt, and my aims are not at secrets.  I acknowledge your strength and competence because direction, domination, and leadership characterize the power dimension, where there is a strong expectation that you carry the full load of responsibility, but I have built you up and put you on the spot and you are talking about: “I can’t handle what’s here and I don’t care what happens. You take care because I will not. I am inadequate and inferior, so don’t count on me.”  #RyanPhillippe 3 of 10

Randolph Phillippe

If we deliver our challenge poorly (with a closed mind and cold heart), we are left shipwrecked on the reefs of our differences; and if we do not deliver it, we drift on stagnant seas, removed not just the reefs but also the depths. Transparency, integrity, and emotional literacy are closely linked. And do not make such practice something you engage in only when you are in the mood! You experience yourself as nothing and so do not participate in what is going on. All you do is focus on your own exaggerated abasement. Since I have known you, you never give any evidence of expectation or plans. “Who am I to want or need anything?” is the attitude. The sense of resignation comes across powerfully and persuasively, and what you do grows increasingly limited.  #RyanPhillippe 4 of 10

People say there is a restriction of wishes and wants. No serious involvement can be seen of me in the community, and they feel like I am an indifferently dependent to be an ever-present and an everlasting statue, not allowed to interact. By acting nonchalantly dependent, I reduce the anxiety and uncomfortableness of having to be responsible and responsive in any way. I am being sensitive to the impact my delivery is having. Your behavior directed towards me makes me happy to have the opportunity to do what I do every day.  However, I feel the pull of your managing, directing, bossing, domineering, and so I tend to respond with strong impersonal behaviors because you have been trained to look down on me and leave me alone. My apathy and resignation secured disengagement for myself and more domination from you. You withdrawing is an appeal for freedom. Even libertinism has its laws of honor at least.  #RyanPhillippe 5 of 10

If you do not recognize and have some degree of intimacy with whatever we have, you can use it as a means to dehumanize or abuse others—however civilized or rational its demeanor—we pose a danger not only to ourselves but to others, no matter how nicely we generally behave. What really matters here is not so much the presence of this inner darkness, but the kind of relationship we choose to have with it. To seek freedom from others is neither unusual nor abnormal. In freedom I find breathing space necessary for my own being and becoming. However, the exaggerated search to avoid real involvement creates the static between us. Since you have the authority, you decide what to do. I really do not care what it done. Since I am a weak and inferior person, you must manage both of us. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 10

I was a shy boy, ultrasensitive, and dreamy, and I was also peaceful. I remember being pursued by two bullies every day after school when I was seven or eight; it was a mile walk to the house from school, and they were usually a short distance behind me, taunting me and chasing me and throwing rocks at me, but not quite catching me. (This may have been the start of my high school track career.) However, one day they did catch me. I still recall the spot, a grassy area near the local store. I was terrified, feeling them upon me in a noisy chaos of fist and shifting weight, but I fought back. To my utter surprise, I defeated them both, outwrestling them and forcing them into submission, as though I had been trained to do exactly that. Honor is a more valuable thing than life.  #RyanPhillippe 7 of 10

Whatever initial direction we provide for such individuals quickly intensifies into chronic domination. We find ourselves irritated and annoyed by the lack of response. We disapprove of their behavior and eventually disregard their presence. By means of their complaint, resistant passivity, they successfully avoid outward activity and inward change. All that matters is getting out from under having to be part of anything and having to relate to anyone. Precisely because one is both weak and withdrawn, others are expected to be strong and involved. It is easy to stay hard in our anger, masking any vulnerability or hurt we might be feeling. However, it is harder to feel and express our anger while maintaining at least some care for the one we are angry at, not letting our anger slip into reactivity and aggression.  #RyanPhillippe 8 of 10

Probably the biggest challenge for men in shifting from unhealthy to healthy anger is that of being vulnerable in their anger, letting the heatedness and intensity of it coexist with some degree of heart, and openly feeling and showing whatever emotions are co-arising with their anger, like sadness or grief. Empty platters make greedy stomachs, and where scarcity is kept, hunger is nourished.  Larger windows do something different. They make the house self-conscious, more open and vulnerable, more unsure. Large picture windows change seeing through into looking at and being seen, instilling paranoia in the house. It is as if the inside did not wish to be exhibited or displayed, its veil of mystery removed. At night when lighted from within, the house is betrayed by the large window. Are passersby not embarrassed to be so privy to the inner life of the house? However, the inner glow of light through small windows, on the contrary, lets those who pass by sense the inner warmth of an interior life.  #RyanPhillippe 9 0f 10

His cloak of religion was always ready to cover the dirty stable. The room without a window is the prison cell of the house. Such rooms reflect only individual personality, as if the house did not matter. Prisons lack windows for exactly this reason. They are places without dreams. The criminal becomes a criminal to himself when faced with his own image on every wall; the object of the architecture of the prison is to impress upon the criminal who he is: to appeal to his conscience to seek forgiveness. Love frequently dies of time alone—much more frequently of displacement. We would feel suffocated without windows; windows give breath to the house. With breath comes rhythm and a different inferiority than empty space which is static because it cannot experience the constant exchange of inside and outside.  #RyanPhillippe 10 of 10