One of the fortunate—and sometimes unfortunate—aspects of human biology is that we contain within us the physiology for extraordinary pleasures.  When we are psychologically in balance, our capacity to derive enjoyment from our senses and our bodies, whether through eating or exercise or sex, enriches our lives immeasurably.  But when we face underlying turmoil or pain or unhappiness, we can use our inborn capacities for pleasure as shields against thinking and feeling our emotions—literally harnessing our brain chemical messengers and neurotransmitters like infusions of drugs.
 
Sexual addiction is one of the dark roads men and women travel in order to avoid their feelings and the complexities of their life stories.  They turn to sex to “drug” themselves and relieve deeper feelings of anxiety or depression or boredom or loneliness.  In doing so they not only deprive themselves of journeying toward a true understanding of the roots of their negative feelings, they cause a lot of collateral damage.  That damage can include shattered families, a loss of respect in the community, legal problems, financial problems and health problems.
 
Sexual addiction is also unique in that it can now be “fed” 24/7 through the Internet, which provides countless graphic images and videos that are the equivalent of a constant infusion of alcohol or heroin.  Gambling addicts at least have the rate-limiting step of their own finances as a potential brake on their dependency.  Drug addicts have to procure their substances.  But sex addicts can mainline their drug through magazines, the Web, escort services and relationships built only around physical satisfaction.
 
For these reasons, it can take a long time for sex addicts to come to terms with the fact that their addiction is harming them or others.  Most sex addicts aren’t arrested with prostitutes in hotel rooms; they’re wasting good years in one emotionally anonymous relationship after another, or wasting hours and hours on the Internet, or wasting the potential for true closeness with their children because they are driven to divorce by their needs or distracted by recruiting their next lover.  What are the signs and symptoms of sexual addiction?  Here are some to consider:

– Underlying anxiety or depression when the activity related to sex is resisted.

– A need for exposure to sexually stimulating material or relationships that overshadows the need for real emotional, interpersonal connections. A need for exposure to sexually stimulating material or relationships that overshadows the need for real emotional, interpersonal connections.

– A preoccupation with sexual fulfillment or fantasies that interferes with daily life, one’s employment or one’s marriage.

If you or someone you love has any of these symptoms, a psychiatrist or psychologist is a good place to turn for help. Remember, the fact that we have the anatomy and physiology for pleasure of many kinds means that we are, as human beings, also at risk for redirecting those healthy pleasures into pathology.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement including www.livingthetruth.com. Dr. Ablow can be emailed at info@keithablow.com.

The two pilots who overshot Minneapolis by 150 miles, remaining out of communication with air traffic controllers for over an hour, have blamed their silent detour on being distracted by their laptops. Captain Timothy Cheney and First Officer Richard Cole have denied falling asleep, instead explaining that they were reviewing their schedules on their computers.

Whether or not Cheney and Cole were sleepy, this “lost in cyberspace” story is a wake-up call for all of us. The amazing undertow of new technology is indeed powerful enough not only to distract many of us, but to pull us completely off-course in our lives.

The same moving cursor, clicking keys and bright light emanating from Cheney and Cole’s laptops can be hypnotic to millions of Americans, who are disoriented by the lure of their computers and the false comfort of navigation systems. How many traffic accidents on roads, after all, are being caused by people texting while following the voice prompts and LED arrows of their navigation systems.

Not only are we at risk to forget where we are going on the road or in the sky, but we can lose sight of who we are, what our real goals are and what our real emotions are. As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” The technologies we are deploying in a wholesale way across the nation and across the globe will have dramatic psychological effects we can’t predict.

We’re already seeing people who I believe are more violent online than they would be if they weren’t “projecting” themselves into cyberspace. Cyberbullies gang up mercilessly on school kids they haven’t even met. Young women on YouTube broadcast themselves beating other young women.

I have evaluated more than one client in my own practice who was charged with possession of child pornography who I doubt would ever have accessed inappropriate images were he not removed from his sense of self and his core identity by the infinitely depersonalizing distance of a computer keyboard and computer screen. Think about it: If two highly trained pilots can veer 150 miles off course because their laptops suck them into a black hole of inattentiveness, isn’t it possible that computers can lure otherwise good and decent people to very indecent acts?

I believe they can.

I have also counseled couples in which either the wife or the husband engaged in racy, inappropriate behavior online (including e-mails) that I doubt would have ever occurred without the seductive draw of being relatively anonymous, nearly disembodied and technologically “over-powered” by the use of computers and the Internet.

When we consider that much of the world’s military planning and actual weaponry involves the use of depersonalizing technology and computer simulations, we should begin to wonder whether unthinkable acts could be possible (especially by rogue regimes) as people drift off course in more than one way.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement including www.livingthetruth.com. Dr. Ablow can be emailed at info@keithablow.com.

With the change in seasons now fully upon us, days are getting shorter, and the risk of seasonal affective disorder is turning into very real suffering for literally millions of Americans.  Most of this suffering can be prevented, if people recognize the cause of their symptoms and get help.

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) most often visits patients during the fall or early winter.  It has also been called “winter depression” or “winter blues,” but its symptoms mimic major depression of any other kind—the distinguishing characteristic in this case being its connection to less sunlight.   Those symptoms can include sadness, tearfulness, decreased concentration, decreased self-esteem, low energy, alterations in sleep patterns and appetite, loss of interest in hobbies and work and, in severe cases, thoughts of suicide.

If you have struggled with repeated bouts of depression in the past, it’s very important to figure out if you can identify this kind of seasonal pattern.  But SAD doesn’t necessarily manifest itself with serious symptoms every year, so all of us need to be alert this year to whether we’re burdened by it.

SAD costs the economy dearly in lost productivity from employees, employers and entrepreneurs fighting its symptoms.  But it will also inflict an additional and very substantial financial burden on the millions of families directly affected, at a time when so many families are struggling already.  That’s one reason why SAD may be a bigger threat this year than the H1N1 flu, even though SAD gets a lot less attention.

SAD responds to the same treatments used to fight non-seasonal depression.  Psychotherapy is tremendously helpful, as is exercise and, when indicated, medication.  Another promising and safe treatment is transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), which involves repeatedly stimulating a particular area of the brain using magnetic waves. 

I have seen many, many of my patients also benefit tremendously from the use of bright light therapy, which involves sitting for a short time each day in front of specially designed portable lights (which are relatively inexpensive and widely available) that replicate sunlight (without exposing the user to any damaging “tanning” light).   One of these devices is called the goLite, but just Googling “bright light therapy for depression” will bring up lots of choices.  If fall and winter and “down” times for you, then get one of these lights and use it.  It could change your life—for about $150.

It’s time we took SAD very seriously, given the fact that it causes so much damage to so many lives and is so responsive to treatment.  It’s the psychiatric epidemic that comes every year—and one we already know how to defeat.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement including www.livingthetruth.com. Dr. Ablow can be emailed at info@keithablow.com.

Part of my residency training in psychiatry was spent working on the locked unit at the Shattuck State Hospital in Massachusetts.  It was there that I learned strategies to keep people safe when voices or visions or delusions made them threaten others with harm—whether verbally or physically.  The strategies were very important, because some of the folks on the unit had never been violent, while others had been court-ordered to the Shattuck after committing very violent crimes, including murder.  We needed to protect not only the staff, but patients, too.
 
The lessons I learned at the Shattuck are ones that the Administration should keep in mind in dealing with Iran.  After all, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears either to be a pathological liar with extremely violent intentions and a willingness to distort history or to actually be delusional.  In either case, he qualifies as an inpatient on a locked psychiatric unit.
 
Here are lessons from the Shattuck:
 
1. It is highly desirable to listen to every patient, even those with delusions, because their truth may be audible, despite the content of their speech being insane.  Someone with grandiose delusions, who believes he is the savior of the planet, may actually be expressing deep feelings of low self-esteem.  Similarly, the desire to obtain nuclear weapons and destroy one’s neighbors may relate to internal feelings of having been annihilated.  So it may be with Iranians, whose self-esteem and willingness to be led by a madman (notice the contracted words mad and man), may reflect their internal feelings of vulnerability.

2. When a delusional or violently ill patient seeks to arm himself, he is to be watched extremely closely and repeatedly searched.  There can be no negotiation on this account, as the violent or delusional man cannot be trusted.

3. When the delusional or violently ill patient is found to have secreted away a weapon, it must be presumed that he fully intended to use it and that he will be very angry that he cannot.  Therefore, he must be rapidly disarmed and then placed in quarantine, lest he either rearm himself or attempt to show his strength using his fists or a discarded needle.  On a psychiatric unit, that means a room search, confiscating any weapon and placing the patient in the locked quiet room.  In Iran, it means destroying Iranian nuclear facilities, then isolating the country, then searching for any other threats.

4. Psychiatric patients at the brink of violence are not comforted by, nor dissuaded from that violence, by quiet speech or bargaining.  They are comforted by a show of force that convinces them that they are better off in the good hands of a healer than left to  the chaos of their own intentions.  Even four-point restraints can be a comfort to a man out of control whose mind knows not the limits of rational thought and action.

5. Time is of the essence.  When a psychiatrist on a locked unit feels a patient is about to become violent, the thought processes inside that patient often have been brewing for a very long time.  At that point, making the unit safe has to precede more elegant attempts at healing.

6. The other patients are watching.  This means that the psychiatrist’s response to a violent patient will either quiet the unit (for which you may read the Middle East) or inflame it.  Permissiveness is always perceived by the unstable as a call to chaos.

7. Always read the clinical history of every patient for any past episodes of severe violence.  The past is a good indicator of the future, even when great progress would seem to have been made.  Witness the recent embracing of terrorists by Muammar el-Qaddafi.

8. Keeping the unit safe is not about hating anyone.  Even the violent patient is a worthy human being at the core.  But that does not mean that the patient is not a grave risk to himself or to others.  There can be no fear of taking action, nor any joy in doing so.

As it was at the Shattuck, so it is in Iran.  I hope Dr. Obama is listening.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement including www.livingthetruth.com. Dr. Ablow can be emailed at info@keithablow.com.

The recent murder cases of Annie Le at Yale, possibly by 24-year-old Yale lab technician Raymond Clark, and of Trisha Leffler by accused Craigslist killer Philip Markoff obviously took the lives of two young women and shattered the lives of their families.  I have treated parents of murdered children, as well as their siblings, and know that the surface scars may fade over time, but that the internal emotional bleeding—the complicated grief—never seems to end. 
 
Less attention is paid to the other victims of such horrific crimes—the families, girlfriends and friends of the killers.  Both Raymond Clark and Philip Markoff were not only the sons of mothers and fathers, but both men were engaged to be married.  In both cases, if convictions are obtained, their fiancés are left to pick up the pieces of their psyches, battered by the knowledge that they had loved and committed themselves to men who were pathologically violent.
 
When one’s son or daughter, husband or wife, or fiancé turns out to be a stranger full of darkness, it is a reckoning with reality like few others.  I have counseled such individuals and seen the tears in their eyes and the stress in their faces as they tried to make sense of how someone seemingly so close to them could have been, in fact, infinitely far removed. If people who profess their love can keep their darkest truths under wraps, who and what can be trusted in the world?
 
Many, many people know something about the challenges that face the “survivors” of intimate connections with murderers.  After all, my practice has long been populated by those who were injured by assailants who played the role of parents, teachers and mentors. Their ability to trust is often long in being reborn, relying not a little bit on how trustworthy and reliable I can be as a clinician.  Such is the miracle of human empathy:  the example of a decent, caring relationship can mend some of the damage done by a harmful one, even a predatory one.
 
Yet to have lived with or loved a killer is a special case.  The journey back from that kind of terror and self-doubt has several ingredients.  First, it has to be said that there are among us men (and women) who can indeed wear what the great psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley called a mask of sanity.  Having buried their destructiveness and rage deep inside them (until it explodes) they become people imitating people, doing those things that seem kind and respectful, without feeling kind or respectful.  They are playacting, and they can be better at it than the best actor in any movie.  Scott Peterson, who killed his wife Laci and their unborn son Conner, was such a man—likeable, with good manners, able to win women over with one-liners harvested from movies and chilled champagne tucked in a backpack for a romantic hike.
 
So those who share their lives with killers can take some solace in the fact that many pass themselves off as normal, even to law enforcement officials and psychiatrists. That’s the easy part.
 
The harder part is understanding that there can be a reason why those who turn out to have loved killers find themselves in that rare psychological territory.  And often that relates to their own willingness to distance themselves from core feelings of anger and anxiety and accept the surface of things. Very often the lovers and best friends and even parents of killers have had traumatic life experiences that paved the way for them turning a blind eye to their emotions and instincts, making them the ideal partners for predators. 
 
Predators can sense when they are in the presence of others who will take them at their word. 
 
Like most of our emotional challenges in life, the biggest hurdle to healing for those with a killer in the family is looking inside themselves, at the very things they have tried to avoid seeing.
 
Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement including www.livingthetruth.com. Dr. Ablow can be emailed at info@keithablow.com.

Elizabeth Bernstein, writing in the Wall Street Journal, astutely observes that the promise of Facebook and Twitter—to bring people closer by putting their lives online, with up-to-the-minute updates—can have the opposite effect.  Many people, she writes, use “friending” and “tweeting” as a surface and synthetic way to talk about the fun outings they’re planning or the fact that they just closed another sale at work. 
 
“I’m tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or event write a decent email,” Bernstein writes, “yet spend hours on social-media sites, uploading photos of their children or parties, forwarding inane quizzes . . . or tweeting about their latest whereabouts.”
 
That’s just the beginning from a psychological point of view.  Facebook and other social-media “destinations” not only provide cover from more genuine and intimate human interactions, they can encourage people to present themselves as actors in their own semi-made-up life stories.  They can remove people from reality, heightening their narcissism (which we all have, to a lesser or greater extent), making them not only self-obsessed, but intent on projecting a multi-media fictional representation of how happy and successful and social they are. 
 
As Marshall McLuhan wrote, the medium is the message.  There is no avoiding the fact that social-media sites call upon members to use a keyboard, hard drive and computer screen, together with photos, video and words to create evolving autobiographies for “broadcast” on the Web.  This very process creates a kind of dual existence, consisting of one’s real life and one’s life on-line.  The online version can pull people away from their deepest thoughts and emotions and relationships—from what constitutes their real selves—into the abbreviated or evasive or attention-grabbing kind that can be packaged for mass consumption. 
 
This is more than an academic concern.  It’s a human and clinical concern.  The distance between a person’s contrived self and real self is the growing place for anxiety and depression.  Today’s social-media sites can expand that distance until, distracted too long from the noble and, ultimately, healing battle to understand oneself and others for real, swells of genuine emotion feel like tidal waves. 
 
Indeed, I have already worked with several clients for whom using social media sites has, in and of itself, coaxed them away from the truth about their lives, toward a kind of technologically intoxicated vacation from it.  Together, we struggle to take the journey back.
 
Anatole Broyard, the late and great NY Times book critic, once wrote, “Inside every patient, there’s a poet trying to get out.”  We could now add that behind every Facebook profile, there’s a real life story just waiting to be told.  
 

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.

Jaycee Duggard, now reunited with her family after being held captive for 18 years by convicted sexual offender Phillip Garrido, is reportedly struggling with symptoms consistent with Stockholm syndrome.

During her ordeal, which began at age 11 when she was kidnapped by Garrido, she has apparently bonded with him. The term Stockholm syndrome was coined by psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted police during the robbery of a Stockholm bank. The robbers held bank employees hostage for just six days. Yet that was long enough for the hostages to become emotionally attached to their captors and defend them to police, even after being freed. Duggard was held hostage more than 1,000 times as long as the Stockholm bank employees.

She was alone much of that time, not part of a group. There was no hint that anyone was searching for her. Her first sexual experiences were almost certainly with Garrido. She bore him two daughters. Her survival and theirs depended, every minute of every day for 18 years, on acquiescing to him and pleasing him. He was not only her kidnapper and rapist, but the man who kept her fed and clothed and kept her makeshift hovel dry when it rained. When she wept, it may have been he who comforted her and reassured her that everything would be alright—because he loved her.

The human mind is resourceful. It can conjure comforting fictions to protect itself from realities that would, if seen clearly, lead to unbearable fear, despair, sadness, insanity or suicide. The fact that you are an 11-year-old girl, safe at home, snatched off the street, never to see your parents again, held by strangers who can punish you ceaselessly at their whim, as severely as they see fit, day or night, is simply too much truth to live with.

So it is understandable that that 11-year-old would eventually grasp for anything that felt like safety, even the myth that her kidnappers were, for example, sent by God to take care of her, usher her into womanhood, give her a family and make sure she was never again exposed to the darkness and danger of her prior, sinful existence. Jaycee Duggard’s road back depends upon the mind’s agility, too. Because now she must see that she was in danger from predators who posed as her saviors. She must somehow find her original sense of self, revisit the horror it must have been to cede all control to her assailant and take the journey from viewing herself as a helpless victim to seeing herself as a survivor.

While I am not treating Jaycee Duggard, I have helped hundreds of people take this journey. Because her story—while far more dramatic—is a cousin to every story of an abused girl or boy who clings to parents who are that only in name and not in deed, parents who erode self-esteem by inflicting emotional or physical suffering on their offspring. These children, like Ms. Duggard, fear they will be abandoned or that they are unlovable and they ally with their “captors,” too. Only from the relative safety of adulthood, in a healing and therapeutic relationship, are they able to admit the terrible truth that what they took for love all through childhood was never that, and that finding what they need in the world will mean seeing what was unfairly denied them. Stockholm syndrome, it turns out, is far more common than most people think. It doesn’t take a bank robbery or an abduction to trigger it. It happens in many, many “homes” that are that only in name.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.

Ryan Jenkins was a famous reality TV star.  He had appeared on the VH-1 series Megan Wants a Millionaire, winning the $1 million prize.  He was selected for the third season of the VH-1 reality show “I Love Money,” and reportedly won the $250,000 prize on that show, too (which apparently will not air). 
 
What Ryan Jenkins really was in reality (as in, real life) was a violent man who had been sentenced to 15 months probation and ordered to complete domestic violence counseling after assaulting his girlfriend during 2007. He also was apparently capable of killing his ex-wife Jasmine Fiore and then removing the tips of her fingers and her teeth, in an attempt to prevent police from identifying her (which they ultimately did, ironically, by tracking the serial numbers on her breast implants).  He then fled and hung himself from a coat rack in a motel room in Canada.
 
The underlying character of a man asserts itself eventually, no matter how many scripts he is handed or how well-honed his acting skills.  
 
The truth is that most reality television shows have nothing to do with real life or with real emotions or with real people.  Most showcase situations that never occur in our genuine day-to-day existences and run the risk of attracting participants who are on the run from their feelings, not at one with them.  These “stars” are often quite different from actors like DeNiro or Pacino or Streep.  They aren’t practitioners of any particular art form and don’t know the first thing about getting into and out of character.  And they might not need to because they are always acting.  They may be particularly good at what they do because they lack a core self and can adapt to the unreal, real-life predicaments into which they are written. Their narcissistic needs for approval and applause and fame and their lack of a desire for privacy may, in fact, be intense enough to qualify as psychopathology.  They run to fake dramas because they have been running their whole lives—from core sadness and rage and shame.
 
Ryan Jenkins was gifted as a reality TV star because he was a tortured human being.
 
Just think about Jon and Kate Plus 8 “playing” parents to sextuplets by putting them before the lens of a camera that can’t help but distort their developing emotions and perspectives.  Great parenting there, huh?  They qualify as reality TV stars because they aren’t real parents, not because they are.
 
The real, real Ryan Jenkins was a person full of rage and self-hatred who terrorized more than one woman, killed his ex-wife, then hung himself.  If he had managed to live longer without taking any lives, he probably would have won some more prize money and gotten more famous.

Postpartum depression is well-known in women who have given birth.  As many as 15 percent of new mothers may experience all the symptoms of major depression in the months following a delivery.  These symptoms can include low mood, low energy, tearfulness, altered sleep patterns, changes in appetite, inability to concentrate, low self-esteem.  They can even include suicidal thinking or bizarre and false beliefs called delusions, which are a form of psychosis. 

Thankfully, awareness of postpartum depression in women has increased dramatically amongst clinicians and the general population. 

What many fewer people realize is that new fathers can fall victim to postpartum depression, too. In my own practice I have seen it happen several times, and research indicates that perhaps 10 percent of men become acutely depressed in the postnatal period.  Their symptoms mimic those of women with the disorder, but they may be even less likely to get help because they believe admitting to their suffering would make them look weak at a time when they want to be seen by others as especially strong.

In the men I have treated, the joys of having a new son or daughter have mingled with complex worries about whether they would be able to support larger families, whether they would lose the affection of their wives and whether they would be equal to the daunting task of being role models for their children.   For some, becoming fathers seemed to bring them uncomfortably in touch with their own mortality, as they contemplated being survived by their offspring.

I have noticed a particular vulnerability to postpartum depression in new fathers who had strained or frankly painful relationships with their own dads.  The recreation of a father-child bond, albeit in a different time and place, with a very new role, can bring a man into unbearably close contact with unresolved conflicts from his own childhood.   “How am I supposed to be a father when I wasn’t fathered at all myself?” one of my patients asked me.

Fortunately, postpartum depression in men responds to the treatments that relieve clinical depression in other settings.  Psychotherapy can be invaluable, as can antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications.  A new technologies, called rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation), has also been approved by the FDA. 

Using the tools in our therapeutic armamentarium, psychiatrists can defeat depression in over 90 percent of cases.  That means that recognizing the signs and symptoms of the condition is half the battle. 

So if you know a man struggling with his mood and his energy level weeks or months after his partner gives birth, don’t assume it’s all about staying up with the baby. Share what you now know about postpartum depression:  It doesn’t just affect new mothers.

Great leaders and great political movements have a lot in common with the finest therapists and best psychotherapy: 
 
1)   They are relentlessly courageous about exploring that which might otherwise remain under cover—that which might otherwise be accepted as true without real inspection and understanding. 
 
2)   They practice a kind of quiet and reflective, yet insistent and intellectually piercing non-cooperation with liars and lies.
 
3)   They are colorblind and blind to socioeconomic status.  They see people as individuals with worthy thoughts and rich life stories, regardless of whether they are black or white, penniless or affluent.
 
4)   They are non-violent, whenever any alternative exists, which it almost always does.
 
The high ground in the health care debate and the debate over whether we remain a capitalistic society or a socialistic one will be taken and held by that group that adopts these four principles. 

Presently, I believe that the opponents of massive, unexamined changes in the health care system, a reduced level of autonomy as citizens and a powerful parental role for government in private industry and private affairs occupy that ground. Oddly and surprisingly, it is this group—the vocal opposition in town halls and at tea parties, the relatively well-heeled and well-healed group that activists have labeled insensitive in the past—that is exposing the limits of the present system to remain open to every idea and give every man and woman a fair hearing (not just those who claim to be disadvantaged or disenfranchised).  It is this group that is being met with walls that urge them to just wait and see, or just shut up, or just go away. 
 
So it is time to be doubly sure that the vocal opposition remains the loyal opposition. 
 
It is time to be triply sure that the opposition remains non-violent. 
 
The right to bear arms, which will also be under assault soon enough, should be held dear and married to the greatest reticence imaginable to use them. 
 
We are all learning together that the tools of change that once opened doors to minorities and to disempowered and worthy peoples all over the world are the very same tools that can keep in place the worthy structural beams upon which our great society was built. 
 
If leaders turn out to be reluctant listeners, protesters should speak in greater numbers, in more places, with more clarity and creativity and insistence, but never with hatred and never with fists clenched or one hand on a stick.  Let the frustrated purveyors of falsehoods and enemies of freedom use those tactics.  They always fail.
 
The psycho-political lessons learned from those shut out of the system must now be adopted to save the system.
 
There’s something elegant and inevitable about that.  The truth always wins—in public policy and in therapy.