Attitude | Children | Father | Goals | Guidance | Kids | Leadership | Parents | Perspective | Self | Self Image | Value

YOU WILL ALWAYS BE A BUM
Gordon McDonald, writing in The Effective Father, said that a 42-year-old man allowed him to look into his life and see what made him what he is today: A man who is frantically working himself into exhaustion; one who spends every dime he makes for impressive artifacts of luxury and success; a volatile human being whose temper explodes at the slightest hint of disagreement or criticism… I asked Tom to tell me about his childhood. At one impressionable point in boyhood, when (he) was… displeasing his father… his father said to him, “Tom, you will always be a bum!” Whenever his father was angry the same prediction would be repeated until… the words could not be removed. Thirty years later Tom still suffers from his father’s verbal abuse. Those words drive him day and night… to attempt to prove that his father was wrong. Ironically, even though Tom’s father is dead, the habit patterns of Tom’s inner…