Get ready for a thread.

One of the privileges of therapeutic work is being welcomed into the inner life and sacred story of another human being. Yet, when you engage the story-work with someone who is diagnosably narcissistic, (in much the same way as it works with an addict) 1

you enter through armored walls of certainty protecting cherished securities built on unstable truths. Folks like this don't simply "change their minds." There is a need for a radical, inner re-orientation, a re-Storying process that is destabilizing, that provokes resistance, 2
that requires a long and painful wilderness of deconstruction and re-imagination. It took Saul three years in a desert to become Paul, to be re-Storied from fundamentalism to the Jesus-way.

This same dynamic characterizes collective narcissism. 3
When groups of people orient themselves around a particular person/ideology that meets deep needs for security, it's not surprising that they'll embrace factually in-credible things. Terrorist groups are groups of *believers.* 4
From the inside, it's unimaginable to believe anything else. And when threatened, the inner alarms sound with fury, the walls are re-armored, and the inner sense of threat is translated into a fight-response.

Groups like this will always be with us. But... 5
it's especially troubling for a follower of Jesus, like me, when the so-called alternative facts of the cause are wrapped in Christian lingo for the sake of a collectively narcissistic church-militant, conquering in the sign of a cross-draped-in-red-white-and-blue, 6
crusading against the infidels who don't share their constructed reality, conflating Cross and flag in a idolatrous amalgamation.

These kinds of groups were frightening to us when they flew planes into the Twin Towers. They ought to be just as frightening ... 7
when they ascend the Capitol steps wrapped in nationalistic garb.

In the end, these are groups that come and go throughout periods of history, who fizzle out ultimately because they've embraced a smaller story, a story unworthy to be called a Gospel (or good-news!) Story. 8
These cheap fundamentalisms can't offer the deep security, the ultimate hope, the radical belonging of the one called the way, the truth, and the life. My hope is that we'll grow weary of the church-militant with its false power and patriot peddlers... 9
...opening our hearts to a larger story of Love featuring the wide-open arms of one who doesn't demand your allegiance but invites your surrender.

Grace and peace, friends. (end)

More from Life

1/“What would need to be true for you to….X”

Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?

A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:


2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to

- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal

3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:

Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.

Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.

4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?

To get clarity.

You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.

It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.

5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”

Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.

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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.