The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

particularly weak and vulnerable tend to adopt an attitude toward life
that narrows what they experience so that they can reduce the
possibility of unexpected events. This negative, narrowing attitude
often has its origins in early childhood. Some children have little
comfort or support in facing a frightening world. They develop various
psychological strategies to constrict what they have to see and
experience. They build up elaborate defenses to keep out other
viewpoints. They become increasingly self-absorbed. In most
situations they come to expect bad things to happen, and their goals in

---

life revolve around anticipating and neutralizing bad experiences to
better control them. As they get older, this attitude becomes more
entrenched and narrower, making any kind of psychological growth
nearly impossible.
These attitudes have a self-sabotaging dynamic. Such people make
others feel the same negative emotion that dominates their attitude,
which helps confirm them in their beliefs about people. They do not
see the role that their own actions play, how they often are the
instigators of the negative response. They only see people persecuting
them, or bad luck overwhelming them. By pushing people away, they
make it doubly hard to have any success in life, and in their isolation
their attitude gets worse. They are caught in a vicious cycle.
The following are the five most common forms of the constricted
attitude. Negative emotions have a binding power—a person who is
angry is more prone to also feel suspicion, deep insecurities,
resentment, et cetera. And so we often find combinations of these
various negative attitudes, each one feeding and accentuating the
other. Your goal is to recognize the various signs of such attitudes that
exist in you in latent and weakened forms, and to root them out; to see
how they operate in a stronger version in other people, better
understanding their perspective on life; and to learn how to handle
people with such attitudes.