“Your husband’s corpse is currently in an advanced stage of decomposition. His personality has been completely annihilated. Remember how he sobbed on his deathbed about how afraid he was to die?” (Reminding a person of a bad thing they don’t want to think about.)
I got away with a mild version of that one—A friend’s mother had just died, and I said “This is a world where people die”, and it went over well. However, my friend had been doing meditation seriously for a while.
“Just thought it might be interesting for you to know that women tend to do about 10% worse on this test than men. Anyway, you may turn your papers over now—good luck!” (Self-fulfilling prophesies.)
I actually got hit with a version of that—right before I started college there was an assembly where they handed out papers with correlations between SATS, high school average, and success in college. I had a bad combination with my SATS much better than my GPA. I can remember thinking “Then I might as well give up.”
That wasn’t a sensible thought, but it wasn’t sensible for them to give out those papers without saying something like “and here’s counselling” or “high SAT/low GPA means you need to develop better work habits” or some such.
“If he dresses effeminately like that, he’s going to get bullied.”
Aside from the issues you’ve raised, it also implies that there’s nothing to be done, not even martial arts school.
I got away with a mild version of that one—A friend’s mother had just died, and I said “This is a world where people die”, and it went over well. However, my friend had been doing meditation seriously for a while.
I actually got hit with a version of that—right before I started college there was an assembly where they handed out papers with correlations between SATS, high school average, and success in college. I had a bad combination with my SATS much better than my GPA. I can remember thinking “Then I might as well give up.”
That wasn’t a sensible thought, but it wasn’t sensible for them to give out those papers without saying something like “and here’s counselling” or “high SAT/low GPA means you need to develop better work habits” or some such.
Aside from the issues you’ve raised, it also implies that there’s nothing to be done, not even martial arts school.