[jacksonkmarley]

Well the first example in the article was about the author completing her PhD, and it mentioned productivity and making use of talents, and seemed to be talking about fear of success, so I read it as a (strange) extension of that.

If it was meant to be about more personal relationship type stuff the author could have discussed that explicitly. Maybe the piece needed an extra paragraph to explain better what the link was.

[luckyandroid]

Yeah I think their analogies are a bit mixed, but the general idea of ‘learned reaction’ is still there, even if the examples the author used didn’t mesh well together.