Or perhaps a marathon runner wants to learn to overcome the muscle fatigue she feels during a long run. Dr. Handel would teach this person "disattention," which means training the brain not to attend to, or simply to ignore, certain stimuli (although this technique is not appropriate for all situations, since pain may signal the need for medical attention).

It is a bleak message. What a family has to say to its children is: "You'll never make it into this world alive. If alive, then deformed." A mother's loving attention creates and destroys; a father's loving disattention creates and destroys.