So What's Your Story?

“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.”

–The Invitation by Oriah

Unlike the metamorphosis that occurs to a butterfly or a frog, telling a story will probably not dramatically alter your character, physical structure, or even circumstances. However, as a storyteller, you can imagine it did.

I want to know what your story is…

7 Billion Stories in the World

I don’t care what you do or what you own.  I just want to know who you are. What about your uniqueness, the experiences you’ve had and the learnings you’ve gained. I want to know your story.

So what is your story?  Everyone has one. No two stories are the same. There are over 7 billion people in this world and none are like you. You are unique. Your entire life journey including your upbringing, challenges, hard learned lessons, your experiences, achievements and gifts, are all a series of footprints that have brought you to this very moment in time as you read these words.

Every person you walk or drive past on the street has their own story. Every person in front of you in line at the grocery store has their own story. Every friend and work colleague in your life has their own story. The old man who lives up the street and wanders past my house each day has his own story. The girl on the bus sitting opposite me right now who has tears in her eyes, she has her own story. The boy in the library who never stops laughing, even when his mother constantly asks him to be quiet, he has his own story too.

Think about the millions of moments, the series of events that leads each person to cross your path. Who are they really underneath that exterior? Where did they come from? What do they long for? What makes them tick? Will you ask?

Life is a tapestry of people weaving in and out of your life, people come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. Everyone has something to offer and share with you. Imagine treating every person you encounter, no matter how fleeting, as an intriguing story waiting to be told. But the story can only be told if someone asks to hear it. Will you ask? That person you see standing before you, no matter who they are, young or old, rich or poor, angry or kind, is like a blockbuster movie ready to enthrall you. But, first you have to buy a ticket.

Cocktail Conversations

As I stood in a room full of people at a cocktail party once, I realized that every opening conversation was dominated by this question, “What do you do?” We seek to understand and define people by their ‘doing’ in the world. For some reason we categorize and rank people’s worth in this world by what they “do.” Does what you do matter more than who you are? No. What you do is only a small part of who you are. Do we care about each other enough, and are we interested enough in what we can learn from each other, to stop asking “What do you do?” and start asking “Who are you?  What is your story?”

So, I’d love to ask you something, and I’m not asking a rhetorical question.  I really want to know…

• What is your story?
• Where were you born?
• Where do you live now?
• What makes you smile?
• What is the most important life lesson you’ve learned so far?
• What is your deepest fear?
• What is your greatest dream for your life?
• Who are you?

Normalizing the Question

There is only one way that we can normalize this “What is your story?” question in our society. And that is by starting to ask it, and by each of us individually being willing to answer it wholeheartedly, knowing that the person asking it genuinely wants to know.

Superficial chit chat about what we “do” and what we “own” doesn’t have to dominate our interactions with those closest to us or with complete strangers.

I don’t know you at all. You’re a complete stranger to me. But I genuinely want to know your answers.

I’ll go first…

Here’s my story.  

My name is Cassandra Leigh Taylor. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the long formal name, so I go by Cass or Cassie. Only a select few can get away with actually calling me Cassandra [my mother included when she disapproves of something I’ve done].  I am the youngest of three children in my family. I wanted to note that to make sure that I can confirm that being the baby child really does has its advantages. You get away with much more, tattling is expected, and all the special privileges, everything that you’ve heard is definitely true. Moving forward, my sister wasn’t around much in my childhood, not because of any terrible thing or anything, but more for due to our significant age difference.  Technically, my sister is my half-sister, though that doesn’t make us any less siblings. I spent a lot of time growing up looking at her pictures, mailing her handmade drawings of her favorite cartoons, writing letters, etc. She was very much a part of my childhood without necessarily being present. There is more to discuss with the topic of my sister, but that’s for later in my story. 

My family owns a business and has since before I was born.  With that knowledge, it is to be expected that my parents were very busy; mostly my dad. Now that I’m older, I can see that my mom took some time away from the business to raise my brother and I. She spent all of her time with us, and I can’t imagine that it was pleasant all the time. My brother and I were wretched as kids. My mom was great to us. We had movie nights and camp out in the living room. She let me camp out in my blanket nest under the dining room table whenever I wasn’t feeling well. She let us run up and down the aisles at the store after hours while she did her work. She would get up early to take us to school and make sure to pick us up at the bus stop every day. She would help me with my homework, and make me cute outfits from really cool patterns she’d get at the fabric store. My mom was really the best.

As a kid, my parents got my brother and I into the youth bowling leagues. It became our family affair. We were all in bowling leagues, we would all go to state, we would all get trophies and medals and patches. It became something really big for me as a kid. We would hang out there with all the adults on the adult league nights and would go every Saturday morning for our youth leagues. Everybody knew who I was in the bowling community, though, I’m sure that was just based on who my parents were.  [huge fast forward, that hasn’t changed. Everyone in town knows me because of who my parents are.] 

Being a girl didn’t stop me from doing stuff with all the boys. My dad got me into shooting archery at a young age also. It was one of my summer hobbies, up until I got 3rd place in a shoot and received my first trophy at the age of 12. Around that time, I started thinking spiders were gross and I faded away from the tomboyish charm that I had. 

Around the age of 14 I started getting into the local youth groups, mainly because that’s what all my friends at school were doing. We were never really raised in the church community. We were just raised to be good people.  I don’t think that it was because my family every had anything against the church, it was more just that instilling us with good manners and good qualities like honesty and integrity, were the basics of being a good natured human being.  

I came to find out that it wasn’t exactly something that I wanted, it was more what the popular kids wanted.  Most of the way through elementary, I was more of a follower. I wanted to be part of the popular crowd, but I never really did anything to try to join the popular crowd. So around Jr High, I broke free from that morale and tried to find out who I was as a person [a young adult who had no idea what i wanted kind of person]  I dyed my hair, I wore my makeup how I wanted, I used the money I got from my job at the family business to buy my own clothes for my own self-expression, I listened to new music, I wanted to pave my own way. Some would call it going through the “goth phase” but I still call it my chance to break away from the heard. I made new friends that liked me for who I was, like my personality and sense of humor, instead of because I just agreed with everything they said or laughed at all their stupid jokes. EVENTUALLY, I did fade out of that phase, but not for a few years. I mean, I still to this day dye my hair black, but that’s more to accentuate my fair porcelain skin. I got involved in extracurriculars including volleyball, basketball, softball, track, vocal, plays/musicals, speech and drama, and my part time job and small excuse for a social life. But my few friends and great experiences lead up to a lot of good memories. 

A huge event that I should mention from my life was in 2005. I was close to getting my school permit, so my family bought a used car for my brother and I for school. That car had more in store for our young lives than I had ever anticipated. 

We had had that car for a total of 3 days before something tragic happened. To spare you the gory details, I'm sure you guessed that an accident occurred. Of the 4 people in the car, only two survived. My brother...and me. It was devastating for the other families involved because our families were close.  The other two in the vehicle were Sam Ahrens and Nathan Bass. My brother's best friend, and my best friend's brother. I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks and I missed the funerals. I had a massive head injury, a concussion, some cuts and bruises, a huge seat belt burn and a bite through the tongue. I was out of school for a month, and out of sports for a whole year. It was worse for my brother. He broke his leg, I want to say that he broke a rib, but what he endured emotionally was so much worse than anything he could have endured physically.

After the crash, he was still conscious and aware. He no only had to see it all, but he had to climb out of the vehicle to see the wreckage and ruins. I will never know what he saw. To this day, I still have not seen the photos of scene. But beyond that, he went back to school much earlier than I did, only to deal with the worst form of bullying I've ever seen in my entire life. People who didn't understand what had happened, who didn't consider the accident, who didn't know us personally or the relationship we had with the boys, called him things like murderer, killer, and things of that nature. He was tormented not just by the other kids, but by his own mind. He never let it show, but a sister knows. My heart wept for him. To this day, I'm not sure how he really feels about the whole ordeal, but he has accepted what has happened that it wasn't his fault.

This experience, though horrid and unforeseen, has taught me to take the day as it is and make the most of it; To not your loved ones for granted; To appreciate the little things and get past the things that don't really matter; because we don't know how long we'll be here, we don't know what we're going to have time for, or what we're going to miss out on.

Now that the water works have burst, it's a good segway into the next piece of my story. This is where we get back to my mother. As a typical teenage girl, I went through my "angst" phase. I fought her every step of the way. Looking back now, I feel like I was the worst teenager ever. I don't know how my parents tolerated me, my mouth, and my actions. I know it is just what teenagers do, but that's no excuse. Growing up my mom and I were best friends, and then I went straight into hating her. Not like truly hating her, but I didn't understand at the time that she was trying to help me make better decisions for myself. I respect that now.

None that ever lasted more than a few months. High school was really my time to branch out my personality and find my style. Where people really started to get to know the real me and know me for more than what my parents were. I had a few semi serious relationships while I was in high school. At the time, being that it was all I knew, I thought I was in love. I thought it was all I was destined for. I blew off my friends to spend all my time with the guy of the month [not to imply that I got around, but there were a few suitors]. That was until my senior year of high school.

...

Oh my senior year of high school. I fell in love at first sight [or so I thought].  The next portion I'm going to speak about was a good portion of my young adulthood. His name was Eli. He was the only boy that I couldn't just walk up and talk to without stumbling over my words and getting so flushed in the face that I thought i was having hot flashes. So I knew that there was something about him that I just couldn't ignore. Eventually, as the story goes, we talked, we dated, we loved. He was my first real and serious relationship. Equivalent of 7 years passed together. I'm not going to go into detail about the good and the bad of this relationship, because we could be here for days while I talk about that alone. But I will tell you what I learned.

Through our conquest, I learned what it was like to be loved, to be put on a pedestal, to be betrayed, to belong, to be burned, and to stand up for myself. My experiences with Eli made me the person that I am today. I now know, in detail, what I want in a person, and what I don't want. I can honestly say that I am a more complete woman now for having had the opportunity to learn and grow with him. Of course, now I know better. These sorts of relationships are the reason that for so long, I projected out that true love was a myth. 

Let's backtrack for a second. Aside from my first real long term boyfriend, I got a violent shove into adulthood as I graduated high school and had to start making real decisions that I wasn't ready to make. I didn't know what it was like to make life altering decisions, like choosing a college or a major, or a place to live, or what type of job to get, or how to pay for all the adult things that I was now in charge of. I was barely used to choosing my own lunch every day, let alone preparing for life. I wasn't ready to leave my tiny podunk little hole-in-the-wall town. I wasn't ready to start figuring out life yet. I felt like I had just barely started living. So I needed help.

This is just another instance when my mom was there for me, even when I was being a total cunt to her. And I don't use that word. She helped me decided on a college and a major and an apartment. And when I say helped me decided, I mean she decided for me.  I started out in a cheap community college right out of high school. I knew enough, logically, to not waste my time and money in a place that cost an arm and a leg. But don't get me wrong, when I say cheap community college, I don't mean that it wasn't worth the education that I received. In fact, it had the best teachers I've ever had! But I started out in Graphic Design. My mom knew that I loved art and I loved to draw and made the two and two connections. So that was that.  I spent 2 years there full time, 1 year part time, before I made a realization that I was mediocre at graphic design. Like better than an average Jane on the street, but not good enough to really make a career out of it. Which lead me to take some time off. I looked at it like if I can't make a decent career out of it, what's the point in finishing?  

Now I understand that it looks better to be able to finish something than it does to say that I've tried a few different times. After taking a year off or so off of school, I decided to go back for Accounting. Huge 180, right?  My job at the time gave me the bookkeeping skills working behind a counter which led me to that decision.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed every minute of my time in my accounting classes. It was a math problem to me. Which I loved. Math and problem solving. Those were my things. But unfortunate events ensued that lead to me dropping out because I didn't have the time to dedicate to class. At that time in my life, I had to make the financially responsible decision and choose work over school. I was paying for school out of pocket at that time, working 3 jobs to put myself through school. Needless to say, I was busy. 

Eventually, I had a chance to go back again to try and finish my accounting degree, but by then, my ambitions had changed. My fascinations had altered enough to make accounting not fun for me anymore. Which in turn lead to me making another huge decision. I could quit and try to really figure out what I wanted out of my education, OR I could spend the time and money to finish and not really follow through with being happy. I chose to figure my life out.  

By now I'm 25. I have no degree. I had been going to school off and on for about 7 years. I had a failing relationship. And all at the same time, all of my closest friends were going through the best parts of their lives. One graduated from a university as valedictorian and received a job in her specified career. Another met the man of her dreams and was recently engaged. Another was about to bring a beautiful baby boy into the world. It just seemed like everyone that was important to me, that helped me gauge the level of life I should have been on, were all leaving me in their dust. Figuring out life like pros, while I was just a kid in an adult's body. Didn't have a clue. I knew enough to go to work, pay my bills, eat food and sleep on a regular basis.  Everything else? Not a fucking clue! 

The next two years flew by doing the same things every week. 

Go to work.

Go Home.

Go to work.

Go Home.

Go to work.

Go Home.

Every damn day. That was my life. I didn't branch out. I didn't do anything fun because I didn't have the time to do it. I had a few other relationships within that time, trying to learn how to be in an adult relationship is a lot harder than just acting the part. 

FAST FORWARD TO TODAY.....

Today, I am 27 years old. I own my own home. I have a few thousand in credit card debt, but my car is paid off. I'm trying to find a better job to help pay for my mortgage. I'm accepted to Iowa State University to be enrolled in the spring of 2018. I'm more adult now than I have ever been.  I have an adorable little kitty that is now currently 6 years old. [I got her when she was 6 weeks old] I have a few friends, but none of them live anywhere near me. And I have the most amazing boyfriend that I could every ask for. And When I say that, I don't mean like the relationships I've had in the past. This is the healthiest relationship that I have ever been in. We talk about everything, even the uncomfortable things that nobody wants to talk about. We haven't breached into sharing our toilet time yet, BUT I think I'm wearing him down. *wink wink!*  

I won't go into a lot of detail but lets just say it took a long time to be upgraded to girlfriend in this relationship. If you know why, know that you're blessed to be special to us. The patience and sincerity that has been put into this has really truly made me realize how important it is to know who you're with. Inside and out. 

To make a long story a little bit shorter. My story is that through everything that I have been though, I'm a better person for all of it. I know that I've been through a lot in my 27 years. More than I feel most people would every need to go through. But throughout it all, I'm grateful. I am who I am because of the things that have shaped me.  My upbringing, my experiences, my thoughts and feelings, my need for self expression. All of it.

My perception of life is forever changed. As I hope that stories like this help you with yours.


Now....
What is your story?

Cyber Bullying: How Big Of a Threat It Is

The angst and ire of teenagers is finding new, sometimes dangerous expression online—precipitating threats, fights, and a scourge of harassment that parents and schools feel powerless to stop. The inside story of how experts at Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and even members of the hacker collective Anonymous are hunting for solutions to an increasingly tricky problem. Below is a story from TheAtlantic.com that has multiple stories associated with cyber bullying and the effects that they cause. But it also touches on different ways to try to STOP these horrific interactions from happening.


In the annals of middle-school mischief, the Facebook page Let’s Start Drama deserves an entry. The creator of the page—no one knew her name, but everyone was sure she was a girl—had a diabolical knack for sowing conflict among students at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Middletown, Connecticut. “Drama Queen,” as I came to think of her in the months I spent reporting at the school to write a book about bullying, knew exactly how to use the Internet to rile her audience. She hovered over them in cyberspace like a bad fairy, with the power to needle kids into ending friendships and starting feuds and fistfights.

In contrast with some other social networks, like Twitter, Facebook requires its users to sign up with their real names. Drama Queen easily got around this rule, however, by setting up Let’s Start Drama with a specially created e-mail address that didn’t reveal her identity. Wrapped in her cloak of anonymity, she was free to pass along cruel gossip without personal consequences. She started by posting a few idle rumors, and when that gained her followers, she asked them to send her private messages relaying more gossip, promising not to disclose the source. Which girl had just lost her virginity? Which boy had asked a girl to sext him a nude photo? As Drama Queen posted the tantalizing tidbits she gathered, more kids signed up to follow her exploits—a real-life version of Gossip Girl. She soon had an audience of 500, many drawn from Woodrow Wilson’s 750 students, plus a smattering from the local high school and a nearby Catholic school.

Students didn’t just message rumors to Drama Queen; they also commented in droves on her posts, from their own real Facebook accounts, or from other fake ones. As one kid wrote about Drama Queen on the Let’s Start Drama page, “She just starts mad shit and most of the time so do the ppl[people] who comment.”

Drama Queen was particularly ingenious at pitting kids against each other in contests of her own creation. She regularly posted photographs of two girls side by side, with the caption “WHOS PRETTIERRR?!” Below the pictures, commenters would heckle and vote. One such contest drew 109 comments over three days. When it became clear which contestant was losing, that girl wrote that she didn’t care: “nt even tryinqq to b funny or smart.” The rival who beat her answered, “juss mad you losss ok ppl voted me ! If you really loooked better they wouldve said you but THEY DIDNT sooo sucks for you.” This exchange nearly led to blows outside of school, other students told me. And they said a fight didbreak out between two boys who were featured on Let’s Start Drama, in dueling photos, above the caption “Who would win in a fight?” They reportedly ended up pummeling each other off school grounds one day after classes.

Melissa Robinson, who was a social worker for the Middletown Youth Services Bureau, quickly got wind of Let’s Start Drama because, she says, “it was causing tons of conflict.” Robinson worked out of an office at Woodrow Wilson with Justin Carbonella, the bureau’s director, trying to fill gaps in city services to help students stay out of trouble. Their connecting suite of small rooms served as a kind of oasis at the school: the two adults didn’t work for the principal, so they could arbitrate conflict without the threat of official discipline. I often saw kids stop by just to talk, and they had a lot to say about the aggression on Let’s Start Drama and the way it was spilling over into real life. “We’d go on Facebook to look at the page, and it was pretty egregious,” Carbonella told me. Surfing around on Facebook, they found more anonymous voting pages, with names like Middletown Hos, Middletown Trash Talk, and Middletown Too Real. Let’s Start Drama had the largest audience, but it had spawned about two dozen imitators.

Carbonella figured that all of these pages had to be breaking Facebook’s rules, and he was right. The site has built its brand by holding users to a relatively high standard of decency. “You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user,” Facebook requires people to pledge when they sign up. Users also agree not to fake their identities or to post content that is hateful or pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic violence. In other words, Facebook does not style itself as the public square, where people can say anything they want, short of libel or slander. It’s much more like a mall, where private security guards can throw you out.

Carbonella followed Facebook’s procedure for filing a report, clicking through the screens that allow you to complain to the site about content that you think violates a rule. He clicked the bubbles to report bullying and fake identity. And then he waited. And waited. “It felt like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean,” Carbonella said. “There was no way to know if anyone was out there on the other end. For me, this wasn’t a situation where I knew which student was involved and could easily give it to a school guidance counselor. It was completely anonymous, so we really needed Facebook to intervene.” But, to Carbonella’s frustration, Let’s Start Drama stayed up. He filed another report. Like the first one, it seemed to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Facebook, of course, is the giant among social networks, with more than 1 billion users worldwide. In 2011, Consumer Reports published the results of a survey showing that 20 million users were American kids under the age of 18; in an update the next year, it estimated that 5.6 million were under 13, the eligible age for an account. As a 2011 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project put it, “Facebook dominates teen social media usage.” Ninety-three percent of kids who use social-networking sites have a Facebook account. (Teens and preteens are also signing up in increasing numbers for Twitter—Pew found that 16 percent of 12-to-17-year-olds say they use the site, double the rate from two years earlier.)

Social networking has plenty of upside for kids: it allows them to pursue quirky interests and connect with people they’d have no way of finding otherwise. An online community can be a lifeline if, say, you’re a gender-bending 15-year-old in rural Idaho or, for that matter, rural New York. But as Let’s Start Drama illustrates, there’s lots of ugliness, too. The 2011 Pew report found that 15 percent of social-media users between the ages of 12 and 17 said they’d been harassed online in the previous year. In 2012, Consumer Reports estimated that 800,000 minors on Facebook had been bullied or harassed in the previous year. (Facebook questions the methodology of the magazine’s survey; however, the company declined to provide specifics.) In the early days of the Internet, the primary danger to kids seemed to be from predatory adults. But it turns out that the perils adults pose, although they can be devastating, are rare. The far more common problem kids face when they go online comes from other kids: the hum of low-grade hostility, punctuated by truly damaging explosions, that is called cyber-bullying.

What can be done about this online cruelty and combat? As parents try, and sometimes fail, to keep track of their kids online, and turn to schools for help, youth advocates like Robinson and Carbonella have begun asking how much responsibility falls on social-networking sites to enforce their own rules against bullying and harassment. What does happen when you file a report with Facebook? And rather than asking the site to delete cruel posts or pages one by one, is there a better strategy, one that stops cyber-bullying before it starts? Those questions led me to the Silicon Valley headquarters of Facebook, then to a lab at MIT, and finally (and improbably, I know) to the hacker group Anonymous.

The people at Facebook who decide how to wield the site’s power when users complain about content belong to its User Operations teams. The summer after my trips to Woodrow Wilson, I traveled to the company’s headquarters and found Dave Willner, the 27-year-old manager of content policy, waiting for me among a cluster of couches, ready to show me the Hate and Harassment Team in action. Its members, who favor sneakers and baseball caps, scroll through the never-ending stream of reports about bullying, harassment, and hate speech. (Other groups that handle reports include the Safety Team, which patrols for suicidal content, child exploitation, and underage users; and the Authenticity Team, which looks into complaints of fake accounts.) Willner was wearing flip-flops, and I liked his blunt, clipped way of speaking. “Bullying is hard,” he told me. “It’s slippery to define, and it’s even harder when it’s writing instead of speech. Tone of voice disappears.” He gave me an example from a recent report complaining about a status update that said “He got her pregnant.” Who was it about? What had the poster intended to communicate? Looking at the words on the screen, Willner had no way to tell.

In an attempt to impose order on a frustratingly subjective universe, User Operations has developed one rule of thumb: if you complain to Facebook that you are being harassed or bullied, the site takes your word for it. “If the content is about you, and you’re not famous, we don’t try to decide whether it’s actually mean,” Willner said. “We just take it down.”

All other complaints, however, are treated as “third-party reports” that the teams have to do their best to referee. These include reports from parents saying their children are being bullied, or from advocates like Justin Carbonella.

To demonstrate how the harassment team members do their jobs, Willner introduced me to an affable young guy named Nick Sullivan, who had on his desk a sword-carrying Grim Reaper figurine. Sullivan opened the program that he uses for sorting and resolving reports, which is known as the Common Review Tool (a precursor to the tool had a better name: the Wall of Shame).

Sullivan cycled through the complaints with striking speed, deciding with very little deliberation which posts and pictures came down, which stayed up, and what other action, if any, to take. I asked him whether he would ever spend, say, 10 minutes on a particularly vexing report, and Willner raised his eyebrows. “We optimize for half a second,” he said. “Your average decision time is a second or two, so 30 seconds would be a really long time.” (A Facebook spokesperson said later that the User Operations teams use a process optimized for accuracy, not speed.) That reminded me of Let’s Start Drama. Six months after Carbonella sent his reports, the page was still up. I asked why. It hadn’t been set up with the user’s real name, so wasn’t it clearly in violation of Facebook’s rules?

After a quick search by Sullivan, the blurry photos I’d seen many times at the top of the Let’s Start Drama page appeared on the screen. Sullivan scrolled through some recent “Who’s hotter?” comparisons and clicked on the behind-the-scenes history of the page, which the Common Review Tool allowed him to call up. A window opened on the right side of the screen, showing that multiple reports had been made. Sullivan checked to see whether the reports had failed to indicate that Let’s Start Drama was administered by a fake user profile. But that wasn’t the problem: the bubbles had been clicked correctly. Yet next to this history was a note indicating that future reports about the content would be ignored.

We sat and stared at the screen.

Willner broke the silence. “Someone made a mistake,” he said. “This profile should have been disabled.” He leaned in and peered at the screen. “Actually, two different reps made the same mistake, two different times.”

There was another long pause. Sullivan clicked on Let’s Start Drama to delete it.

With millions of reports a week, most processed in seconds—and with 2.5 billion pieces of content posted daily—no wonder complaints like Carbonella’s fall through the cracks. A Facebook spokesperson said that the site has been working on solutions to handle the volume of reports, while hiring “thousands of people” (though the company wouldn’t discuss the specific roles of these employees) and building tools to address misbehavior in other ways.

One idea is to improve the reporting process for users who spot content they don’t like. During my visit, I met with the engineer Arturo Bejar, who’d designed new flows, or sets of responses users get as they file a report. The idea behind this “social reporting” tool was to lay out a path for users to find help in the real world, encouraging them to reach out to people they know and trust—people who might understand the context of a negative post. “Our goal should be to help people solve the underlying problem in the offline world,” Bejar said. “Sure, we can take content down and warn the bully, but probably the most important thing is for the target to get the support they need.”

After my visit, Bejar started working with social scientists at Berkeley and Yale to further refine these response flows, giving kids new ways to assess and communicate their emotions. The researchers, who include Marc Brackett and Robin Stern of Yale, talked to focus groups of 13- and 14-year-olds and created scripted responses that first push kids to identify the type and intensity of the emotion they’re feeling, and then offer follow-up remedies depending on their answers. In January, during a presentation on the latest version of this tool, Stern explained that some of those follow-ups simply encourage reaching out to the person posting the objectionable material—who typically takes down the posts or photos if asked.

Dave Willner told me that Facebook did not yet, however, have an algorithm that could determine at the outset whether a post was meant to harass and disturb—and could perhaps head it off. This is hard. As Willner pointed out, context is everything when it comes to bullying, and context is maddeningly tricky and subjective.

One man looking to create such a tool—one that catches troublesome material before it gets posted—is Henry Lieberman, a computer scientist whose background is in artificial intelligence. In November, I took a trip to Boston to meet him at his office in MIT’s Media Lab. Lieberman looked like an older version of the Facebook employees: he was wearing sneakers and a baseball cap over longish gray curls. A couple years ago, a rash of news stories about bullying made him think back to his own misery in middle school, when he was a “fat kid with the nickname Hank the Tank.” (This is hard to imagine now, given Lieberman’s lean frame, but I took his word for it.) As a computer guy, he wondered whether cyber-bullying would wreck social networking for teenagers in the way spam once threatened to kill e‑mail—through sheer overwhelming volume. He looked at the frustrating, sometimes fruitless process for logging complaints, and he could see why even tech-savvy adults like Carbonella would feel at a loss. He was also not impressed by the generic advice often doled out to young victims of cyber-bullying. “ ‘Tell an adult. Don’t let it get you down’—it’s all too abstract and detached,” he told me. “How could you intervene in a way that’s more personal and specific, but on a large scale?”

To answer that question, Lieberman and his graduate students started analyzing thousands of YouTube comments on videos dealing with controversial topics, and about 1 million posts provided by the social-networking site Formspring that users or moderators had flagged for bullying. The MIT team’s first insight was that bullies aren’t particularly creative. Scrolling through the trove of insults, Lieberman and his students found that almost all of them fell under one (or more) of six categories: they were about appearance, intelligence, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or social acceptance and rejection. “People say there are an infinite number of ways to bully, but really, 95 percent of the posts were about those six topics,” Lieberman told me.

Focusing accordingly, he and his graduate students built a “commonsense knowledge base” called BullySpace—essentially a repository of words and phrases that could be paired with an algorithm to comb through text and spot bullying situations. Yes, BullySpace can be used to recognize words like fat and slut (and all their text-speak misspellings), but also to determine when the use of common words varies from the norm in a way that suggests they’re meant to wound.

Lieberman gave me an example of the potential ambiguity BullySpace could pick up on: “You ate six hamburgers!” On its own, hamburger doesn’t flash cyber-bullying—the word is neutral. “But the relationship between hamburger and six isn’t neutral,” Lieberman argued. BullySpace can parse that relationship. To an overweight kid, the message “You ate six hamburgers!” could easily be cruel. In other situations, it could be said with an admiring tone. BullySpace might be able to tell the difference based on context (perhaps by evaluating personal information that social-media users share) and could flag the comment for a human to look at.

BullySpace also relies on stereotypes. For example, to code for anti-gay taunts, Lieberman included in his knowledge base the fact that “Put on a wig and lipstick and be who you really are” is more likely to be an insult if directed at a boy. BullySpace understands that lipstick is more often used by girls; it also recognizes more than 200 other assertions based on stereotypes about gender and sexuality. Lieberman isn’t endorsing the stereotypes, of course: he’s harnessing them to make BullySpace smarter. Running data sets from the YouTube and Formspring posts through his algorithm, he found that BullySpace caught most of the insults flagged by human testers—about 80 percent. It missed the most indirect taunting, but from Lieberman’s point of view, that’s okay. At the moment, there’s nothing effective in place on the major social networks that screens for bullying before it occurs; a program that flags four out of five abusive posts would be a major advance.

Lieberman is most interested in catching the egregious instances of bullying and conflict that go destructively viral. So another of the tools he has created is a kind of air-traffic-control program for social-networking sites, with a dashboard that could show administrators where in the network an episode of bullying is turning into a pileup, with many users adding to a stream of comments—à la Let’s Start Drama. “Sites like Facebook and Formspring aren’t interested in every little incident, but they do care about the pileups,” Lieberman told me. “For example, the week before prom, every year, you can see a spike in bullying against LGBT kids. With our tool, you can analyze how that spreads—you can make an epidemiological map. And then the social-network site can target its limited resources. They can also trace the outbreak back to its source.” Lieberman’s dashboard could similarly track the escalation of an assault on one kid to the mounting threat of a gang war. That kind of data could be highly useful to schools and community groups as well as the sites themselves. (Lieberman is leery of seeing his program used in such a way that it would release the kids’ names beyond the social networks to real-world authorities, though plenty of teenagers have social-media profiles that are public or semipublic—meaning their behavior is as well.)

I know some principals and guidance counselors who would pay for this kind of information. The question is what to do with it. Lieberman doesn’t believe in being heavy-handed. “With spam, okay, you write the program to just automatically delete it,” he said. “But with bullying, we’re talking about free speech. We don’t want to censor kids, or ban them from a site.”

More effective, Lieberman thinks, are what he calls “ladders of reflection” (a term he borrowed from the philosopher Donald Schön). Think about the kid who posted “Because he’s a fag! ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing]!!!” What if, when he pushed the button to submit, a box popped up saying “Waiting 60 seconds to post,” next to another box that read “I don’t want to post” and offered a big X to click on? Or what if the message read “That sounds harsh! Are you sure you want to send that?” Or what if it simply reminded the poster that his comment was about to go to thousands of people?

Although Lieberman has had exploratory conversations about his idea with a few sites, none has yet deployed it. He has a separate project going with MTV, related to its Web and phone app called Over the Line?, which hosts user-submitted stories about questionable behavior, like sexting, and responses to those stories. Lieberman’s lab designed an algorithm that sorts the stories and then helps posters find others like them. The idea is that the kids posting will take comfort in having company, and in reading responses to other people’s similar struggles.

Lieberman would like to test how his algorithm could connect kids caught up in cyber-bullying with guidance targeted to their particular situation. Instead of generic “tell an adult” advice, he’d like the victims of online pummeling to see alerts from social-networking sites designed like the keyword-specific ads Google sells on Gmail—except they would say things like “Wow! That sounds nasty! Click here for help.” Clicking would take the victims to a page that’s tailored to the problem they’re having—the more specific, the better. For example, a girl who is being taunted for posting a suggestive photo (or for refusing to) could read a synthesis of the research on sexual harassment, so she could better understand what it is, and learn about strategies for stopping it. Or a site could direct a kid who is being harassed about his sexuality to resources for starting a Gay-Straight Alliance at his school, since research suggests those groups act as a buffer against bullying and intimidation based on gender and sexuality. With the right support, a site could even use Lieberman’s program to offer kids the option of an IM chat with an adult. (Facebook already provides this kind of specific response when a suicidal post is reported. In those instances, the site sends an e-mail to the poster offering the chance to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or chat online with one of its experts.)

Lieberman would like to build this content and then determine its effectiveness by asking kids for their feedback. He isn’t selling his algorithms or his services. As a university professor, he applies for grants, and then hopes companies like MTV will become sponsors. He’s trying to work with companies rather than criticize them. “I don’t think they’re trying to reflexively avoid responsibility,” he told me. “They are conscious of the scale. Anything that involves individual action on their part, multiplied by the number of complaints they get, just isn’t feasible for them. And it is a challenging problem. That’s where technology could help a little bit. My position is that technology can’t solve bullying. This is a people problem. But technology can make a difference, either for the negative or the positive. And we’re behind in paying attention to how to make the social-network universe a better place, from a technological standpoint.”

Internal findings at Facebook suggest that Lieberman’s light touch could indeed do some good. During my visit to Silicon Valley, I learned that the site had moved from wholesale banishment of rule-breakers toward a calibrated combination of warnings and “temporary crippling of the user experience,” as one employee put it. After all, if you’re banished, you can sign up again with a newly created e-mail address under an assumed name. And you might just get angry rather than absorb the message of deterrence. Instead, Facebook is experimenting with threats and temporary punishments. For example, the Hate and Harassment Team can punish a user for setting up a group to encourage bullying, by barring that person from setting up any other group pages for a month or two. (If the account associated with the offensive group uses a made-up name, then the site’s only leverage is to remove the group.) According to an in-house study, 94 percent of users whose content prompted a report had never been reported to the site before. As Dave Willner, the content-policy manager, put it when he told me about the study: “The rate of recidivism is very low.”

He explained, in his appealingly blunt way, “What we have over you is that your Facebook profile is of value to you. It’s a hostage situation.” This didn’t surprise me. In the course of my reporting, I’d been asking middle-school and high-school students whether they’d rather be suspended from school or from Facebook, and most of them picked school.

The hacker group Anonymous isn’t the first place most parents would want their bullied kids to turn. Launched a decade ago, Anonymous is best known for its vigilante opposition to Internet censorship. The group has defaced or shut down the Web sites of the Syrian Ministry of Defense, the Vatican, the FBI, and the CIA. Its slogan, to the extent a loosely affiliated bunch of hackers with no official leadership can be said to have one, is “When your government shuts down the Internet, shut down your government.” Anonymous has also wreaked financial havoc by attacking MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal after they froze payments to the accounts of WikiLeaks, the site started by Julian Assange to publish government secrets.

Since Anonymous is anarchic, the people who answer its call (and use its trademark Guy Fawkes mask in their online photos) speak for themselves rather than represent the group, and protest in all kinds of ways. Some, reportedly, have not been kind to kids. There was the case, for example, of a 15-year-old named McKay Hatch, who started a No Cussing Club in South Pasadena, California. When the concept took off in other cities, a group referring to itself as Anonymous launched a countercampaign, No Cussing Sucks, and posted Hatch’s name, photo, and contact information across the Web; he got 22,000 e‑mails over two weeks.

But other people in Anonymous have a Robin Hood bent, and this fall, they rode to the rescue of a 12-year-old girl who’d come in for a torrent of hate on Twitter. Her error was to follow the feed of a 17-year-old boy she didn’t know and then stop following him when he posted remarks she found rude. The boy took offense and, with three friends, went after her. The boys threatened to “gang bang” her, and one even told her to kill herself. “I’m gonna take today’s anger and channel it into talking shit to this 12 year old girl,” one wrote. “Blow up [her Twitter handle] till she deletes her twitter,” another one added. The girl lived far from the boys, so she wasn’t in physical danger, but she was disturbed enough to seek help online. “I have been told to kill myself alot its scary to think people in the world want you to die :( ,” she wrote to another Twitter user who asked me to call her Katherine. “He has deleted some of them he was saying things like do you have a rope? and didnt the bleach work?”

Her pleas reached Katherine in the wake of the suicide of a 15-year-old Canadian girl named Amanda Todd. Before Amanda died, she posted a video of herself on YouTube, in which she silently told her story using note cards she’d written on. Amanda said that a man she’d met online had persuaded her to send him a topless photo, then stalked her and released the photo, causing her misery at school. The video is raw and disturbing, and it moved Katherine and a member of Anonymous with the screen name Ash. “It made me choke up,” Ash told me. When Katherine discovered that people were still sending the compromising photo of Amanda around online, she and Ash teamed up to help organize a drive to stop them and report offending users to Twitter, which removes pornographic content appearing on its site.

As Katherine and Ash came across other examples of bullying, like rape jokes and suicide taunts, they found that “Twitter will suspend accounts even if they are not in violation of Twitter rules when simply 1000s of people mass report an account as spam,” Katherine explained to me in an e‑mail. A Twitter spokesperson said this was possible (though he added that if spam reports turn out to be false, most accounts soon go back online). Twitter bans direct and specific threats, and it can block IP addresses to prevent users whose accounts are deleted from easily starting new ones. But the site doesn’t have an explicit rule against harassment and intimidation like Facebook does.

While monitoring Twitter for other bullying, Katherine found the 12-year-old girl. When Katherine told Ash, he uncovered the boys’ real names and figured out that they were high-schoolers in Abilene, Texas. Then he pieced together screenshots of their nasty tweets, along with their names and information about the schools they attended, and released it all in a public outing (called a “dox”). “I am sick of seeing people who think they can get away with breaking someone’s confidence and planting seeds of self-hate into someone’s head,” he wrote to them in the dox. “What gives you the fucking right to attack someone to such a breaking point? If you are vile enough to do so and stupid enough to do so on a public forum, such as a social website, then you should know this … We will find you and we will highlight your despicable behaviour for all to see.”

“I informed them that the damage had been done and there was no going back,” he explained to me. “They understood this to be an act by Anonymous when they were then messaged in the hundreds.” At first the boys railed against Ash on Twitter, and one played down his involvement, denying that he had ever threatened to rape the girl. But after a while, two of the boys began sending remorseful messages. “For two solid days, every time we logged on, we had another apology from them,” Ash said. “You hear a lot of lies and fake apologies, and these guys seemed quite sincere.” Katherine thought the boys hadn’t understood what impact their tweets would have on the girl receiving them—they hadn’t thought of her as a real person. “They were actually shocked,” she said. “I’m sure they didn’t mean to actually rape a little girl. But she was scared. When they started to understand that, we started talking to them about anti-bullying initiatives they could bring to their schools.”

I tried contacting the four boys to ask what they made of their encounter with Anonymous, and I heard back from one of them. He said that at first, he thought the girl’s account was fake; then he assumed she wasn’t upset, because she didn’t block the messages he and the other boys were sending. Then Ash stepped in. “When i found out she was hurt by it i had felt horrible,” wrote to me in an e‑mail. “I honestly don’t want to put anyone down. i just like to laugh and it was horrible to know just how hurt she was.” He also wrote, “It was shocking to see how big [Anonymous was] and what they do.”

Ash also e-mailed his catalog of the boys’ tweets to their principals and superintendents. I called the school officials and reached Joey Light, the superintendent for one of the districts in Abilene. He said that when Anonymous contacted him, “to be truthful, I didn’t know what it was. At first the whole thing seemed sketchy.” Along with the e-mails from Ash, Light got an anonymous phone call from a local number urging him to take action against the boys. Light turned over the materials Ash had gathered to the police officer stationed at the district’s high school, who established that one of the boys had been a student there.

The officer investigated, and determined that the boy hadn’t done anything to cause problems at school. That meant Light couldn’t punish him, he said. “I realize bullying takes a lot of forms, but our student couldn’t have harmed this girl physically in any way,” he continued. “If you can’t show a disruption at school, the courts tell us, that’s none of our business.” Still, Light told me he that he felt appreciative of Anonymous for intervening. “I don’t have the technical expertise or the time to keep track of every kid on Facebook or Twitter or whatever,” the superintendent said. “It was unusual, sure, but we would have never done anything if they hadn’t notified us.”

I talked with Ash and Katherine over Skype about a week after their Texas operation. I wanted to know how they’d conceived of the action they’d taken. Were they dispensing rough justice to one batch of heartless kids? Or were they trying to address cyber-bullying more broadly, and if so, how?

Ash and Katherine said they’d seen lots of abuse of teenagers on social-networking sites, and most of the time, no adult seemed to know about it or intervene. They didn’t blame the kids’ parents for being clueless, but once they spotted danger, as they thought they had in this case, they couldn’t bear to just stand by. “It sounds harsh to say we’re teaching people a lesson, but they need to realize there are consequences for their actions,” Ash said.

He and Katherine don’t have professional experience working with teenagers, and I’m sure there are educators and parents who’d see them as suspect rather than helpful. But reading through the hate-filled tweets, I couldn’t help thinking that justice Anonymous-style is better than no justice at all. In their own way, Ash and Katherine were stepping into the same breach that Henry Lieberman is trying to fill. And while sites like Facebook and Twitter are still working out ways to address harassment comprehensively, I find myself agreeing with Ash that “someone needs to teach these kids to be mindful, and anyone doing that is a good thing.”

For Ash and Katherine, this has been the beginning of #OpAntiBully, an operation that has a Twitter account providing resource lists and links to abuse-report forms. Depending on the case, Ash says, between 50 and 1,000 people—some of whom are part of Anonymous and some of whom are outside recruits—can come together to report an abusive user, or bombard him with angry tweets, or offer support to a target. “It’s much more refined now,” he told me over e‑mail. “Certain people know the targets, and everyone contacts each other via DMs [direct messages].”

In a better online world, it wouldn’t be up to Anonymous hackers to swoop in on behalf of vulnerable teenagers. But social networks still present tricky terrain for young people, with traps that other kids spring for them. My own view is that, as parents, we should demand more from these sites, by holding them accountable for enforcing their own rules. After all, collectively, we have consumer power here—along with our kids, we’re the site’s customers. And as Henry Lieberman’s work at MIT demonstrates, it is feasible to take stronger action against cyber-bullying. If Facebook and Twitter don’t like his solution, surely they have the resources to come up with a few more of their own.

What is Cyber-Bullying, exactly?

"Cyber-bullying" is when a child, preteen or teen is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child, preteen or teen using the Internet, interactive and digital technologies or mobile phones. It has to have a minor on both sides, or at least have been instigated by a minor against another minor. Once adults become involved, it is plain and simple cyber-harassment or cyberstalking. Adult cyber-harassment or cyberstalking is NEVER called cyber-bullying.

It isn't when adult are trying to lure children into offline meetings, that is called sexual exploitation or luring by a sexual predator. But sometimes when a minor starts a cyber-bullying campaign it involves sexual predators who are intrigued by the sexual harassment or even ads posted by the cyber-bullying offering up the victim for sex.

The methods used are limited only by the child's imagination and access to technology. And the cyberbully one moment may become the victim the next. The kids often change roles, going from victim to bully and back again. Children have killed each other and committed suicide after having been involved in a cyber-bullying incident.

Cyber-bullying is usually not a one time communication, unless it involves a death threat or a credible threat of serious bodily harm. Kids usually know it when they see it, while parents may be more worried about the lewd language used by the kids than the hurtful effect of rude and embarrassing posts.

Cyber-bullying may rise to the level of a misdemeanor cyber-harassment charge, or if the child is young enough may result in the charge of juvenile delinquency. Most of the time the cyber-bullying does not go that far, although parents often try and pursue criminal charges. It typically can result in a child losing their ISP or IM accounts as a terms of service violation. And in some cases, if hacking or password and identity theft is involved, can be a serious criminal matter under state and federal law.

Just like in the story above, when schools try and get involved by disciplining the student for cyber-bullying actions that took place off-campus and outside of school hours, they are often sued for exceeding their authority and violating the student's free speech right. They also, often lose. Schools can be very effective brokers in working with the parents to stop and remedy cyber-bullying situations. They can also educate the students on cyber-ethics and the law. If schools are creative, they can sometimes avoid the claim that their actions exceeded their legal authority for off-campus cyber-bullying actions. We recommend that a provision is added to the school's acceptable use policy reserving the right to discipline the student for actions taken off-campus if they are intended to have an effect on a student or they adversely affect the safety and well-being of student while in school. This makes it a contractual, not a constitutional, issue.

What happened to golden rule? That "treat everyone the way that you would want to be treated," or "if you don't have anything nice to say, you don't say anything at all."  What happened to common decency? But honestly, the way we change the world is by changing ourselves.  It starts with one. It starts with you.  Of course, big celebrities like Donald Trump, for example, who are always attacking other people via social media, aren't setting the best example. So its time for someone to start the trend. Will it start with you?  Share this with just one person to help get the message out there. Start a revolution. #AntiBullying

I'm Not Really A Control Freak, But Can I Show You How To Do That?

The term "control freak" is obviously not a clinical one, but it has meaning nonetheless because the term so clearly defines a problem: Men and women who have a high need for control can often be too extreme, giving rise to the notion that these individuals are abnormal or "freakish."

What kind of disorder might this type of person have? Control seekers are often obsessive-compulsive, angry (either overt or passive-aggressive), phobic, or even mood-disordered. These people need control because, without it, they fear things would spiral out of control and their lives would fall apart.

How can you spot a high-control person? You can spot these types in every walk of life, in settings from home to work to social outings. Do high-control people think of themselves as control freaks? Because these individuals need a high level of control, they also need to control their image, and so while they will usually acknowledge that they need a lot of control in situations, they will reject the "freak" part of the label—the association that there is something wrong with them or that they need too much control. In fact, many high-control men and women will often justify their need for control in the following ways: "I have to be this way to do as much as I do"; "People need people like me because so many people are actually incompetent"; "Things would fall apart without me."

Needing a high level of control in situations is often not psychologically healthy because so much in life is beyond our control. If you need total control even though you and everyone else knows that it is impossible to achieve, then you are going to have more anxiety because of the bar you have set for yourself.

There’s just one perfect line that completely defines a control freak. “If you want to do it right, do it yourself!” Do you live by that line? Are you convinced that the only way to achieve happiness or do a good job is by doing it yourself? This could say two things about you. One, you’re surrounded by incompetent idiots. Or two, you’re a control freak. Now the control freak exists within us all, and shows up now and then. But that doesn’t mean being called a control freak is something to feel flattered about! The controlling side in you could affect all aspects of your life, be it your love life, your workspace, friends and just about every other relationship. And almost always, it’ll hurt you more than any good it does to you.

Who is a Control Freak?

A control freak, without trying to sound more redundant than I already have been, is a person who wants to be in a position of control all the time. They want to be aware of everything that’s going on around them, and they want to have control over it in some way or the other. The control freak isn’t easy to recognize yourself, because it’s very well camouflaged by another personality trait, perfectionism.

Many people who assume they’re perfectionists may actually be control freaks, especially when they have an insuppressible urge to control others. Control freaks may believe they’re perfectionists who are really good at what they do, and they may even convince themselves that they’re controlling only because they’re the only one capable of bearing the burden. 

The Stressed Side of a Control Freak

The control freak in us can take over our lives for different reasons. At times, a bad childhood where you felt helpless all the time could force you to become a control freak to control your surroundings, and at other times, your overconfidence and know-it-all attitude too could lead to the same consequences.

The worst part about being a control freak is the annoying tendency to overlook that behavior within us. Control freaks never know they’re control freaks. Instead, they assume they’re generously helpful and concerned about others, and constantly try to help others achieve their full potential by correcting them and keeping an eye on them all the time.

The more helpful the control freak in you thinks you are, the more annoying you could get. Or at other times, the people around you could also take advantage of your overbearing behavior to shirk their own responsibilities and dump it on you!

The Craving to Have Things Your Way

The inner control mechanism is our mind’s way of keeping us safe. If you are completely aware of everything around you, then nothing can surprise you, scare you or screw you.

The controlling boyfriend who thinks he needs to take control of his girlfriend’s life, the mother who thinks she needs to micromanage her kids every second of every day because they may get into trouble, or the wife who thinks the husband can’t do anything right are all perfect examples of control freaks in real life.

A control freak is always bothered by how others do something, especially if others aren’t doing it the same way the control freak does. And they constantly try to change others around them so other people can follow their methods and ways of life.

Being a control freak is an easy way to stop yourself from evolving or changing, and trying to change the whole world around you just because it’s easy to manipulate others or make them change to match your wants and expectations.

Control Freak Self Diagnosis

It sucks to be a control freak, because it always leaves you frustrated and annoyed, and it annoys and stifles everyone around you too. But it’s easy to change once you see the signs and correct yourself.

1. Correcting people when they're wrong
People with a high need for control often feel the need to correct others when they're wrong. They correct someone due to an irrational argument; they correct spelling or pronunciation; they correct details of what happened in the past; they correct bad manners; or they correct people when they do something wrong or inappropriate. It's important to understand, though, that underneath the motivation to correct others is the belief that they are usually—or always—right.

2. Always trying to win the argument or have the last word
High-control men and women are difficult to have relationships with because they like to set the rules—and subsequently enforce them. They act superior to others, and are determined to show everyone that they are the most practical, logical, and intelligent one in any crowd.

3. Refusal to admit when they're wrong
Hands down, one of the traits that most annoys friends, romantic partners and colleagues is the refusal on the part of high-control men and women to admit when they are wrong. It could be the smallest, simplest issue, but high-control people don't care—they just want to make sure they don't admit they were wrong. Their thinking is distorted to the point that they believe others may use their admitting they were wrong against them, or will perceive them as incompetent or foolish because of one simple error. As a rule, these individuals present all-or-nothing, black-or-white thinking; dealing with anything in between is uncomfortable for them.

4. Judging or criticizing others
Some of the most judgmental individuals you will ever meet are men and women with a high need for control. They are highly principled, with opinions on everything from how people should hold their fork to...how people should live their entire lives. These men and women have an answer for everything, and they come across as sanctimonious or hypocritical to those who know them well.

5. Driving with rage
People with a high need for control often get very frustrated while driving. They believe they are the only ones who know how to drive correctly. They often put other drivers down, make nasty faces at some, or even curse or issue profanities when someone on the road does something that bothers them. Yet the most common problem with high-control men and women on the road is their own impatience. They get annoyed because drivers go too slow or too fast. They treat pedestrians as an interference getting in the way of their accomplishing their goals. Again, in the mind of these individuals, it's all about them and they don't spend time trying to imagine what anyone else thinks or feels in the same situation.

The takeaway
High-control men and women, the people we call "control freaks," engage in a series of behaviors that frustrate and cause resentment in others. These individuals operate the way they do because they believe that they need to in order to meet their needs and accomplish their goals. If you see yourself in some of these high-control behaviors, take a step back and ask yourself whether you are exhausted from always trying to control everything. If you see someone you love in these behaviors, it's time to have a chat about what bothers you, so that your resentments don't get worse, jeopardizing the future of the relationship. If you point out to a high-control man or woman that you have a problem with them, give them a few concrete examples of what they do that bothers you—and give them time to work on changing.

So what if you're not the control freak, but your loved one, best friend, significant other, relative, etc is? What now? Keep reading, let's find out!

Control Freak Management

We all know someone who is a “control freak.” He or she can’t seem to stop giving unsolicited advice or tell you what to do, and how to do it. At first, you might actually get along, but soon you realize that the attitude of “listen to me, I know better!” seems to permeate the majority of their interactions, and will ultimately end up pushing people away. Control freaks feel compelled to orchestrate and manipulate people and situations to make sure everything goes “their way,” and even if though their intentions might be benign, it can cause a lot of pain. 

It might be easy to confuse control freaks with narcissists, and while there can be some overlap here, not all control freaks are also narcissists. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is considered a form of mental illness that at least 6.3% of the population experiences which can be highly toxic and is often un-treatable by intervention or therapy. While being a ‘control freak’ is not usually considered a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, psychologists tend to diagnose very extreme cases of it as a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

If the controller in your life is a casual relationship or friendship, your best bet is to slowly back away. Controllers have no interest in developing healthy, mature relationships. They just want their way, however they can get it, and will wear you out in the process. Once you’re out of the picture, they’ll seek out their next victim and you’ll be long forgotten.

If you work with a controller or have a family member who is one, and the option of moving to a small tropical island is off the table, here are a few tips that may help keep you sane.

Set Boundaries

Yes, No and F*ck You. Be clear in your communication and your actions. Don’t succumb to pandering and manipulation, some of the controller’s favorites tricks. Be confident and clear with the controller and don’t back down. Any sign of weakness will encourage them to persist.

Don’t Respond to Escalating Behavior

Once the controller realizes they are losing their grip over you, they may employ pressuring behavior. They may stop talking to you, become moody, pout, stop having sex with you, won’t return your phone calls, ignore you in meetings and so on.

Your best bet is to not react or to withdraw in a quiet way. Try to not to escalate your emotions, this only plays into the drama for them.

Don’t Let Them Define You

Look to your friends, family or co-workers for support during this time. The controller does not define you and will do their best to diminish your self worth during this process. Letting go of any power they have over you will only enhance your life, and the empty space they leave can be filled with someone who matters.

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As adults the same need to control is now a form of self-protection. Lacking control is now perceived as increasing the risk of exposing inner weaknesses and increasing anxiety. In order to prevent these threats controls on people and surroundings are imposed. For example, objects must be organized in certain ways for maximum efficiency and effectiveness, and they must be put back in a particular place once used. They may be reluctant delegators on the basis that jobs will only be done correctly if they do it themselves. Control issues are as common, perhaps more so, in their personal lives as they monitor costs, maintain a fastidiously clean home, and freely dispense advice as to how others should live their lives. It is also fairly common to find that controllers have relationships or partnerships with people of low self-esteem or victim mentalities.

Control freaks tend to niggle and pester and it can be quite irritating. If you can, try to acknowledge the opinions and advice of the person but make it equally clear that this is something you are doing in your way. It’s a lot more difficult if the controller is your boss and you may have to make a decision about how much of this you can ultimately put up with.

Lastly, look to yourself. It’s a common thing for people who feel out of control to begin exerting control. You may find you are micromanaging things and people around you in ways that help to empower you but actually begin to disempower others.

Self Expression : Do You Express Yourself?

Children have a natural ability to live “out there,” fully self-expressed. They’re not yet tainted by the heaviness of life, having to do with worrying about what other people think, living up to societal pressures, and fear of retribution. So, consequently, you hear kids saying refreshing things like, 

All they understand is to tell the naked truth. What a free way to live! Of course, we’re not talking about the kind of truth that intentionally hurts people’s feelings. We’re talking about telling people how we feel in a kind way, and not leaving anything important to the well-being of our relationships unsaid. Speaking your truth by saying what’s really on your mind is one way to live more fully self-expressed.

So What is Self-Expression?

Self-expression is a display of individuality whether it’s through words, clothing, hairstyle, or art forms such as writing and drawing. Being self-expressed means that people will see your spirit and true character; they will see the totality of who you are. And sharing of one’s “self” fully is the ultimate in generosity and is vital for peace, happiness and fulfillment.

Sometimes we are not sure how to access creativity or inspiration, or we know what we want to say or do, but are unsure of how to express ourselves, or feel ill-equipped in our expression of something.

Here are ways to become more fully self-expressed:

Speak Your Truth in the Moment

Did you ever look back on a conversation you had and fantasize about talking to that person in a more authentic way than you did? Perhaps it was someone who mistreated you and instead of telling them how you felt about it, you walked away feeling dis-empowered and wishing you had stood up for yourself. For some of us, speaking our truth, in the moment, may be more difficult because of fear of confrontation and lack of confidence, but not speaking our truth can have damaging effects on self-esteem and even health.

Start noticing where you may be holding back and when an opportunity comes to speak truthfully (with love and kindness), take it on as a challenge and speak up. With practice, you’ll gain more courage and having difficult conversations will come easier. But if you're having a few setbacks because this doesn't seem so simple here are a few tips on how to start speaking your truths.

1. Tune in. - Make time to listen to your deepest needs. Journal. Speak voice notes to yourself. Reverence and honor of yourself and your process are important as you grow into deep understanding of your truth. Your body knows when you are giving it time. Make space.

2. Establish trust with yourself.  - You’re going to realize that you are walking a path. That while you may be in process, you will have different thoughts and feelings. It is a process of REVELATION. Memories, perhaps, you didn’t know you had, will come to the surface. Trust this process.

3. Know and care for all the parts of yourself.  - A coworker was telling me about her thoughts about her dream weekend and it was turning into a battle in her head.

One voice said, “Get it together!” while another wanted her to, “Slow down, please.”

You’re not alone there. We all have different parts of ourselves that have needs and wants for our life and livelihood. It’s normal. It’s like a Board of Directors of You, Inc. You must do the work to know who is sitting on your Board of Directors, because they are making decisions for you.

4. Get seen.  - Let me be clear, that this is not a recipe list. You don’t need to follow these steps in order. The fastest way to know your truth, to know that you are NOT crazy, is to be seen. Have others, in a safe space, see what is true for you, see your wrestle, and bear witness to your life. This is essential for human life and for love and for happiness, and it’s the foundation upon which SoulSpeak was created.

5. Find a partner in this journey that can support you (not a lover!)  - A therapist. A coach. A healer of some sort that can actually support you in big ways on this journey. Having a strong mirror and someone that can hold you AND push you as you grow which is essential for big growth and for CLEARLY claiming the life that you so desire.

6. Start now.  - Even if your voice shakes. Even if you have to say words and then you change them, because that, my sweet and fierce woman, is what truth telling is about. Sometimes it changes for you. Speaking your truth means that you are true to what is TRUE for you in this moment, in this moment, and now in this moment. It is okay, if you change your mind. You can say yes. You can say no. You can decide to change. It is okay. But you must practice to know what is true for you.

Widely Define Yourself

“People often say that this person or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates,” said Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. When we think about ourselves, we tend to think in a certain way about our skills, strengths and talents. We narrowly define ourselves, meaning we live life from a certain way of thinking and being, which limits our experiences. We can re-create ourselves at anytime and choose to define ourselves in other ways. Explore new ways of thinking and being, and you may discover that you have talents and passions you never knew existed. (More on this below)

Engage in Creative Techniques

We can help birth ideas and create new possibilities for our life with creative techniques. Through these techniques, we expand our creative aptitude and can potentially achieve a longstanding desire from writing a screenplay to becoming a website designer to making wedding cakes, for example. Some creative techniques to try include: writing daily about anything that’s on your mind, keeping an idea book that you can carry with you, using mind maps for creative problem-solving, brainstorming, and creating vision boards.

Acquire Self Knowledge – Know Who You Are

Many of us rarely, if ever, take time out from our harried schedules to become an observer of our own life and who we are being. We get so bogged down in daily activities and obligations that days, months, and years fly by. Take time to step back from your life and see whether you are truly happy, fulfilled, using your talents, and pursuing your passions. You can even hire a life coach to help you with self-exploration to gain knowledge that can open up new possibilities for you.

Pursue Wants and Passions Voraciously

Do you feel like something of yourself is not getting through to the outside world? Are you putting your wants and passions on a backburner? This is easy to do with all of our daily responsibilities, but unfulfilled human potential is a tragedy. Once you have identified who you are and what your passions are, not to pursue them can cause serious regret. Begin now by wholeheartedly committing to your wants and passions. You’ll need to set time aside and not let anything get in the way. Dr. Wayne Dyer so eloquently says, “Don’t die with the music still in you. Listen to your intuitive inner voice and find what passion stirs your soul.”

Develop a Keen Sense of Reality

Living in reality can be tough, but if we want to become more fully self-expressed we must face and do something about the situations that are not working for us. For example, if we are in meaningless jobs, unsatisfying relationships, or not fulfilling our potential, it’s time to honor our truth. Look at your life and what areas you are not happy with and then work to make positive change. Have faith and trust that things will work out for the better even though, initially, you may be uncomfortable. We have a divine right to be happy and fulfilled and, if we are not, then we have the choice to change.

How do people define themselves?

Some people use their job description as a self-description.

"I am the head of sales operations for a software company."

Some even use their relationships or other affiliations.

"I am _____’s boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband."
"I am a member of _____."

Others use their belief system.

"I am an atheist."
"I am a minimalist."
"I am a libertarian."

Defining yourself is a highly personal process, and no method of defining yourself is “wrong.” You must decide what method of self-description works best for you. There are, however, some problems with the previously mentioned methods of self-description.

Defining yourself by your job title

"Hi. My name is John. I am a sales operations coordinator for a software company."

Too often, we fall into the trap of using our job description as our self-description. What you do is not who you are. They are 2 separate things. Certainly, who you are influences what you do and how you do it. However, who you are as an individual is determined by the values you embrace, not by what you do. Financial or occupational success is irrelevant without a sense of who you are and what is truly important.

While your job description may be an effective way to introduce yourself at professional networking conferences, it is a largely ineffective way to introduce yourself in everyday situations. Yes, people learn a little bit about you, but your job description is only one part of who you are. If you rely on it too heavily for your self-description, you will sound one-dimensional which is not one anyone wants, especially your new acquaintance.

Remember that you get one chance to make a great first impression. Whether you like it or not, that impression will form the basis of the relationship that you form with the other person. Make it count.

Defining yourself by your relationships

"Hi. My name is John. I am in a relationship with/friends with/a member of _____."

Relationships are an important part of life, but it important to make a distinction between your relationships and you. Remember, you are not your relationships. We have all seen examples of people who use their relationships, romantic or otherwise, to define themselves. Yes, it is okay to introduce yourself as someone’s significant other or speak highly of your family and friends; however, you must maintain your sense of self. If you allow a relationship to define you and that relationship ends for whatever reason, you lose your identity. Truthfully, if you allowed a relationship to define you, then you had no identity anyways.

Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Relationships work in a similar way. It is the mark of a strong character to maintain your sense of self.

Defining yourself by your belief system

"Hi. My name is John. I am an atheist, libertarian, and minimalist."

Belief systems, or philosophies, are a third way to define yourself. Every belief system contains a set of values. When you define yourself using a belief system, you express your personal values. People subscribe to belief systems that support their existing values. That is why, for example, there are so many denominations in Christianity. Someone did not like the way that someone else interpreted the Bible (which is interpreted differently by everyone), so they made their own club. 

When a person finds that a belief system no longer reflects their core values, they must make a decision: modify their core values or find a new belief system. Most people choose the latter.

The problem with defining yourself is no matter what method of self-definition you choose, they are all subject to misinterpretation. Everyone has biases, and those biases will reflect the way a person interprets your self-description.

For example, I describe myself as an atheist because I do not believe in the existence of God (or gods). I also describe myself as an atheist because many people, especially religious people, do not know the true definition of “agnostic.”

Calling myself an atheist, however, introduced a new set of problems. Now, instead of people mistakenly thinking that I am one of those “spiritual but not religious” people, people now assume that I worship the devil. (I do not believe in the devil either.) My point is that the way you define yourself will be interpreted differently by everyone. Be prepared to elaborate on your self-description and clarify points of confusion.

How should you define yourself?

Think of defining yourself like a 30-second pitch. In business, 30-second pitches are used to introduce either yourself–or your business–in an effective, efficient manner. You want to use that same idea to introduce yourself in the other areas of life.

With a 30-second pitch, you want to answer two questions:

• Who are you?
• Why should I care?

It sounds harsh, but no one cares about you, not at first anyways. You need to make them care about you, and you accomplish this with the way you define yourself.

Self Reflecting For The Editor

My name is Cassie Taylor. I'm dependable, opinionated, and guarded. I wear what is comfortable because I feel that being comfortable for me is way more appealing than being uncomfortable for someone else. I feel successful when I complete something that I say I will. I feel happy when I help others and I feel important when people come to me with questions. I rarely wear make-up because i don't feel the need to impress other people with things as materialistic and fascist as looks. I have strange hobbies, in comparison to the rest of the world, but they make me happy, and that doesn't bother me. I have many bright and colorful tattoos that I do not hide because I got them for me, not for anybody else. What people see about me is that I'm honest, I don't sugarcoat how I feel or what I think, and I'm not afraid to tell someone about it. I don't talk about myself, but I'll talk about just about anything else. I challenge people because I think differently and I'm not considered a typical "girly girl". But what they learn about me is that along with my lack of face paint and sincere honesty, comes a humor that comforts people with an easy, warm smile. 

I'm not going to try to tell you to feel this way or say this in your ideal self expression. The key to expressing yourself in your way is has to be YOUR way. No matter how the rest of the world perceives you. You be you.  Full self-expression means to take a leap of faith when necessary, live life to the fullest, make the choices that honor our wants and desires, and not settle for anything less than what we deserve.