The only thing worse than making a mistake is keeping it bottled up inside. Learning from the mistakes of others could help you embark on the healing journey of sharing and working through a mistake of your own, with someone you trust.
From 2011 to 2020 her husband, Dominque Pelicot, was drugging her and using a chatroom called "à son insu" ("without her knowledge") to invite local men to rape her while she was unconscious. He might never have been found out had he not been caught taking pictures up women's skirts in a supermarket.
There was a lot of physical abuse and sexual abuse. It was all chalked up to God - like God was directing them to do it, that they were preparing me for later in life. They would pull Bible verses and say, 'See, this is why it's okay.'
When you're a kid, you don't know you're lower-middle-class. You just know your life; I knew my father came home tired every night from his pipefitter job, hands still dirty even after washing them three times. Moreover, I knew we fixed everything ourselves because calling someone cost money we didn't have, and I knew hand-me-downs from my older brother and that vacation meant visiting relatives.
Leaders are expected to set clear direction while remaining open to challenge. To move quickly with decisive action while also taking people with them. To hold authority while fostering shared ownership and to deliver results without eroding trust.
She looked at me like I'd lost my mind. 'Because I said I'd clean their house, so I clean their house. What's so hard to understand about that?' I thought she was missing the point. Turns out, she was the only one who got it.
Gina was one of the golden girls of my circle-charming, smart, and seriously cool. As our other friends rode through their mid-20s on roller coasters of elation and despair, Gina maintained an almost daunting level of emotional perspective. She gave birth to a child who experienced cognitive impairments and cared for him without losing either her detachment or her sense of humor. She went through cancer surgery with her usual rueful grace.
It's become almost a cliché to talk about how consistently organizational change fails. Study after study finds that roughly three-quarters of change efforts don't achieve their objectives. There are underlying forces that work against us adapting to change-including synaptic, network and cost effects-that lead to resistance. Another problem lies in how we study change itself. Typically, researchers at an academic institution or a consulting firm interview executives that were involved in successful efforts and try to glean insights to write case studies.
Following some of the arguments in Ernest Becker's 1973 study The Denial of Death, he proposes that such crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality. In Britain, we eschew open coffins, for instance. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. We can hardly even bring ourselves to say die, preferring euphemisms such as pass away.
Research in psychological resilience suggests this kind of adaptation is a capacity that develops in response to adversity, not in the absence of it. Resilience isn't a factory setting. It's forged under heat. The person who seems unbothered at the dinner party, who shrugs off criticism with genuine ease, who doesn't need to win the argument: they almost always went through a chapter where they cared so deeply about someone else's opinion that it warped the shape of their days.
Breaking down the walls of denial in my DID system of parts has been anything but easy, but it has been necessary to thrive. I was sitting across the table from my closest friend from graduate school as we co-worked. She is also a mob daughter, but from a different lineage. We were discussing how only now, in 2026, am I fully grasping who my father actually was, despite beginning trauma-informed therapy in 2012 and spending a life savings to survive, understand, and heal.
By the time people reach their seventh decade, they have learned many lessons. From a psychological standpoint, they understand what really matters. They have learned what to let go of. They know what they need to be happy. They also acknowledge the importance of being kinder to themselves and how relationships and experiences are more important than possessions. They tend to reflect on lessons learned and often recover more easily from adversity. They also focus on wanting the best for their loved ones.
If you have ever experienced proper rejection and that would be most of us it may stand out in your mind for a long time, like a boulder lodged in the landscape of memory. And it can hurt literally. The late anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studied human behaviour in the context of romantic love, showed that rejection and physical injury have much in common.
When Serena Williams strode onto the Wimbledon grass, her legendary power was never in question. Her serve was crushing. Her backhand was unstoppable. But she wouldn't go to the net. She'd see a short ball, the kind that screams "approach," and she would hesitate to volley and miss the point. Serena was not playing at her full potential because of a story in her head.
