passages-bryant-mcgill-spent-change-posture-instead

# Bryant McGill has spent decades writing from the... > Bryant McGill has spent decades writing from the vantage of a systems thinker about human potential, relationships, trauma, manipulation, freedom, power, violence, and the strange ways damaged people spread their damage into the lives of everyone around them. As an international bestselling author whose writings on relationships have reached tens of millions of readers, he has spent a great deal of time telling people how to heal, forgive, grow, transcend, communicate, let go, and become something better. _Chimping Out_ begins where that literature ends, at the point where the reader has forgiven everyone, communicated flawlessly, set every boundary the workbook recommended, and been eaten anyway. It begins with the possibility that beneath our affirmations, spiritual vocabularies, therapeutic language, expensive educations, social etiquette and declarations of enlightenment, **we are still primates negotiating status, territory, mating, belonging, resources, fear, coalition, dominance, submission, betrayal, exclusion, retaliation and survival**, and that the animal doing the negotiating has never once read the workbook. The manifesting shelf, the frequency shelf, the shelf that teaches you to think positively until the person hurting you becomes reasonable, is where most of this book's readers arrive from, and the book treats that shelf as a specimen: the appeasement literature of a frightened social mammal, sold to the powerless because the powerful have never needed it. {{The self-help industry is the sound an animal makes when it cannot change its environment and has decided to change its posture instead.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Bryant McGill has spent decades writing from the vantage of a systems thinker about human potential, relationships, trauma, manipulation, freedom, power, violence, and the strange ways damaged people spread their damage into the lives of everyone around them. As an international bestselling author whose writings on relationships have reached tens of millions of readers, he has spent a great deal of time telling people how to heal, forgive, grow, transcend, communicate, let go, and become something better. Chimping Out begins where that literature ends, at the point where the reader has forgiven everyone, communicated flawlessly, set every boundary the workbook recommended, and been eaten anyway. It begins with the possibility that beneath our affirmations, spiritual vocabularies, therapeutic language, expensive educations, social etiquette and declarations of enlightenment, we are still primates negotiating status, territory, mating, belonging, resources, fear, coalition, dominance, submission, betrayal, exclusion, retaliation and survival, and that the animal doing the negotiating has never once read the workbook. The manifesting shelf, the frequency shelf, the shelf that teaches you to think positively until the person hurting you becomes reasonable, is where most of this book's readers arrive from, and the book treats that shelf as a specimen: the appeasement literature of a frightened social mammal, sold to the powerless because the powerful have never needed it. The self-help industry is the sound an animal makes when it cannot change its environment and has decided to change its posture instead.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-bryant-mcgill-spent-change-posture-instead ```