Destructive Behavior Quotes

I was more addicted to self destruction then to the drugs themselves ... something very romantic about it

The problem with alienating, self-destructive behavior is people get it into their heads it’s a cry for help. It wasn’t.

Cheaters are cowards that are tempted to chase the fantasy of what could be… instead of courageously addressing their own self-destructive behavior and cultivating what is.

What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question.

I know what it is to want something that could destroy you.

When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.

Hatred. Something almost as physical as walls, pianos, or nurses. She could almost touch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of masks, of appropriate behavior. Veronika wanted to spend her remaining two or three days of life behaving as inappropriately as she could.

Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.

Unspeakable feelings need to find expression in words. However... verbalization of very intense feelings may be a difficult task.

Abstaining from sex, hitting the books, and wearing loose-fitting clothes are common ways that girls try to molt their "slutty" image. But more often their shame leads them to self-destructive behavior. They become willing to do things that they wouldn't have dreamed of doing before they were scandalized because they now feel they have so little to offer. Some girls do drugs or drink to excess in an attempt to blot away their stigma. Others become depressed and anorexic. And others think so little of themselves that they date boys who insult or beat them.

The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing. To prove their point — and to capitalize on their self-destructive and destructive behavior — smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and insanity acquitees are suing tobacco companies, liquor companies, gambling casinos, and physicians.

That's the problem with reality, that's the fallacy of therapy: It assumes that you will have a series of revelations, or even just one little one, and that these various truths will come to you and will change your life completely. It assumes that insight alone is a transformative force. But the truth is, it doesn't work that way. In real life, every day you might come to some new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behavior, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you're going to keep on doing the same old things. You'll still be the same person. You'll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because you emotional tie to them is so strong that the stupid things you are really the only things you've got that keep you centered and connected. They are the only things about you that you you.

Negativity is totally unnatural. It is a psychic pollutant, and there is a deep link between the poisoning and destruction of nature and the vast negativity that has accumulated in the collective human psyche. No other life-form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life-form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it. Have you ever seen an unhappy flower or a stressed oak tree? Have you some across a depressed dolphin, a frog that has a problem with self-esteem, a cat that cannot relax, or a bird that carries hatred and resentment? The only animals that may occasionally experience something akin to negativity or show signs of neurotic behavior are those that live in close contact with humans and so link into the humans mind and its insanity.

The glorification of hatred is predicated on a foundation of fear-induced ignorance venomous to haters and those they believe they hate.

It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.

Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.

Self-destructive behaviors do not exist because there is a force within us that tries to hasten our return to an inorganic state; they exist because they provide short-term relief from pain that threatens to become intolerable.

Secrets are the enablers of antisocial, immoral and destructive behavior.

Casual acquaintances, co-workers, or neighbors are less likely to witness the borderline’s sudden shifts in mood, self-destructive behavior, paranoid distortions, and obsessive ruminations.

Desperate and dammed persons share an affinity for flirting with danger; an infectious case of erotic morbidity fetters them to self-destruction.

My birth sign is Scorpio and they eat themselves up and burn themselves out. I swing between happiness and misery. I am part prude and part nonconformist. I say what I think and I don’t pretend, and I am prepared to accept the consequences of my actions.

If you aren't destroying your enemies, it's because you have been conquered and assimilated, you do not even have an idea of who your enemies are. You have been brainwashed into believing you are your own enemy, and you are set against yourself. The enemy is laughing at you as you tear yourself to pieces. That is the most effective warfare an enemy can launch on his foes: confounding them.

Shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive behavior than the cure. Guilt and empathy are the emotions that lead us to question how our actions affect other people, and both of these are severely diminished by the presence of shame.

If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?

To achieve and maintain the relationships we need, we must stop choosing to coerce, force, compel, punish, reward, manipulate, boss, motivate, criticize, blame, complain, nag, badger, rank, rate, and withdraw. We must replace these destructive behaviors with choosing to care, listen, support, negotiate, encourage, love, befriend, trust, accept, welcome, and esteem.

What really bugs Henry about Barry, he supposes, is Barry’s complacency. His inner assurance that there is no need to change his self-destructive behavior, let alone search for its roots.

Dysfunctional emotional matching is seen in behaviors such as acting amused at destructive sarcasm, acting loving when someone is punishing, and acting forgiving when someone is repetitively hurtful. I

Direct lies, small lies, huge lies, and lies of omission… these are all self-serving and sources of self-destruction.

Good wins in the end because evil is a self-destructive, cannibalistic force that Inevitably engorges upon itself.

The atomic bomb was created with the destruction of men in mind

. I was often surprised by the dispassionate way patients’ symptoms were discussed and by how much time was spent on trying to manage their suicidal thoughts and self-destructive behaviors, rather than on understanding the possible causes of their despair and helplessness. I was also struck by how little attention was paid to their accomplishments and aspirations; whom they cared for, loved, or hated; what motivated and engaged them, what kept them stuck, and what made them feel at peace—the ecology of their lives.

With knowledge accumulated from dozens of expeditions and hundreds of dives and countless encounters with sharks of many kinds came the realization that I could never write Jaws today. I could never demonize an animal, especially not an animal that is much older and much more successful in its habitat than man is, has been, or ever will be, an animal that is vitally necessary for the balance of nature in the sea, and an animal that we may—if we don’t change our destructive behaviors—extinguish from the face of the earth.

Destructive behavior—or simply behavior that constantly annoys your spouse to the point of desperation—is not right, and there will always be a serious consequence for it in your marriage and personal life. But every attempt you make to rid yourself of that behavior and do what’s right will bring reward. Today, ask God to help break any bad habits that you or your spouse may have.

Self-destruction is an art; cursed are the exponents.

There are many pointless deaths, but there can never be a needless suicide.

Whether adult children of toxic parents were beaten when little or left alone too much, sexually abused or treated like fools, overprotected or overburdened by guilt, they almost all suffer surprisingly similar symptoms: damaged self-esteem, leading to self-destructive behavior. In one way or another, they almost all feel worthless, unlovable, and inadequate.

Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

When you start replacing facts with feelings, you disturb the equilibrium between right and wrong, confusing them as one and the same while encouraging more destructive behavior. As a stigma is erased, a behavior becomes more prevalent.

I have broken every rule I ever set for myself. And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life.

She could understand and analyze and predict the exact outcome of her crazy, self-destructive behavior and then go ahead and do it anyway.

When we apologize for something we’ve done, make amends, or change a behavior that doesn’t align with our values, guilt—not shame—is most often the driving force. We feel guilty when we hold up something we’ve done or failed to do against our values and find they don’t match up. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but one that’s helpful. The psychological discomfort, something similar to cognitive dissonance, is what motivates meaningful change. Guilt is just as powerful as shame, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive. In fact, in my research I found that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we can change and do better.

Urgency addiction is a self-destructive behavior that temporarily fills the void created by unmet needs. And instead of meeting these needs, the tools and approaches of time management often feed the addiction. They keep us focused on daily prioritization of the urgent.

Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum. —Darwi Odrade

Personal disillusionment accompanied by self-pity and self-loathing are the Achilles’ heel of modern humankind, representing the weakness of the human spirit.

When faced with choosing between attributing their pain to “being crazy” and having had abusive parents, clients will choose “crazy” most of the time. Dora, a 38-year-old, was profoundly abused by multiple family perpetrators and has grappled with cutting and eating disordered behaviors for most of her life. She poignantly echoed this dilemma in her therapy: I hate it when we talk about my family as “dysfunctional” or “abusive.” Think about what you are asking me to accept—that my parents didn't love me, care about me, or protect me. If I have to choose between "being abused" or "being sick and crazy," it's less painful to see myself as nuts than to imagine my parents as evil.

Some of us are born rebellious. Reading the story of Zelda Fitzgerald by Nancy Milford, I identified with her mutinous spirit. I remember passing shopwindows with my mother and asking why people didn’t just kick them in. She explained that there were unspoken rules of social behavior, and that’s the way we coexist as people. I felt instantly confined by the notion that we are born into a world where everything was mapped out by those before us. I struggled to suppress destructive impulses and worked instead on creative ones. Still, the small rule-hating self within me did not die.

Keep a journal of disappointments, failures, and self-destructive actions. It’s important to write this down because these are the kinds of things your self-serving bias will want to forget or minimize.

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive

The line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people’s litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction.

Each suicidal drama occurs in the mind of a unique individual.

When people feel like they are a part of a team, they are more likely to act in ways that benefit everyone, and less likely to engage in destructive behavior.

So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it.

Children learn bullying behavior from adults, but no one talks about this transfer of destructive behavior.

It is possible to gain control over our most anxious thoughts and self-destructive behavior through mindfulness practice and meditative experiences.

An emotionally destructive marriage is one where one’s personhood, dignity, and freedom of choice is regularly denied, criticized, or crushed. This can be done through words, behaviors, economics, attitudes, and misusing the Scriptures.

The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage.

It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people’s behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.

Narcissists do show a lack of concern for others, but they are equally insensitive to their own true needs. Often their behavior is self-destructive. Moreover, when we speak of narcissists’ “self” love, we need to make a distinction. Narcissism denotes an investment in one’s image as opposed to one’s self. Narcissists love their image, not their real self. They have a poor sense of self; they are not self-directed. Instead, their activities are directed toward the enhancement of their image, often at the expense of the self.

Boys’ aggressiveness is increasingly being treated as a medical problem, particularly in schools, a trend that has led to the diagnosing and medicating of boys whose problem may really be that they have been traumatized and influenced by exposure to violence and abuse at home. Treating these boys as though they have a chemical problem not only overlooks the distress they are in but also reinforces their belief that they are “out of control” or “sick,” rather than helping them to recognize that they are making bad choices based on destructive values. I have sometimes heard adults telling girls that they should be flattered by boys’ invasive or aggressive behavior “because it means they really like you,” an approach that prepares both boys and girls to confuse love with abuse and socializes girls to feel helpless.

As a strongman becomes more and more destructive, followers’ loyalty only increases. Having begun to treat their perceived enemies badly, they need to believe their victims deserve it. Turning against the leader who inspired such behavior would mean admitting they had been wrong and that they, not their enemies, are evil. This, they cannot do.

There are only that many kidnapping and murder attempts a child can endure before developing serious issues and self-destructive behaviors. We wouldn’t want her to grow up and, say, go to grad school.

So, if you feel pure anger inside because of your past, that is a good thing. Welcome it. Far better to feel it than to have it express itself in destructive behavior like addictions or obsessive thinking. Those are perverted forms of expression. The first step in therapeutic healing is to address the anger in pure form as the energy-in-motion that it is. Do not be afraid of the power of your anger. “If you let anger speak through your body, at some point it will be released and you will find deep grief

I had been reacting destructively to similar sensations for as long as I could remember. So why am I still doing it? I wondered. I didn’t need destructive behavior to neutralize my anxiety any more than I needed floaties to keep from drowning in a pool. I just need to learn how to fucking swim, I thought.

But we can’t enable bad behavior in ourselves and others and call it love. We can’t tolerate destructive patterns and call it love. And we can’t pride ourselves on being loyal and longsuffering in our relationships when it’s really perpetuating violations of what God says love is.

Psychological despotism, whether enlightened or not, is gross misuse of psychology. The main purpose of psychology is to acquire insight into, and mastery of, oneself. Not for nothing were what we now call the behavioral sciences originally called the moral sciences and “Know thyself” their main precept. To use psychology to control, dominate, and manipulate others is self-destructive abuse of knowledge. It is also a particularly repugnant form of tyranny.

All are at war with the one who wars against self.

Avoid enablers. These are people who make it easy for you to perform your self-destructive behavior. People you go on a smoking break with. People who encourage you to take risks. Your partner, if he or she encourages you to be lazy or feeds you too much food. Try to enlist these people in your reform efforts, and if you can’t, put some distance between you.

Why do I rail only against the things that help me, and never against my habit towards self-destruction?

The worrying thing is that he was well aware of his slide, but didn't seem to want — or be able — to do anything to help it.

Women must hold men accountable for their behavior. Women do men no favors in terms of their growth as responsible, caring human beings if women allow men to abuse us. It is not genuine love that causes women to put up with men's destructive behavior; it is the fear-induced love produced by Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome hurts men's development as well as women's.

This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself

From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself. From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.

HUMAN BILL OF RIGHTS [GUIDELINES FOR FAIRNESS AND INTIMACY] I have the right to be treated with respect. I have the right to say no. I have the right to make mistakes. I have the right to reject unsolicited advice or feedback. I have the right to negotiate for change. I have the right to change my mind or my plans. I have a right to change my circumstances or course of action. I have the right to have my own feelings, beliefs, opinions, preferences, etc. I have the right to protest sarcasm, destructive criticism, or unfair treatment. I have a right to feel angry and to express it non-abusively. I have a right to refuse to take responsibility for anyone else’s problems. I have a right to refuse to take responsibility for anyone’s bad behavior. I have a right to feel ambivalent and to occasionally be inconsistent. I have a right to play, waste time and not always be productive. I have a right to occasionally be childlike and immature. I have a right to complain about life’s unfairness and injustices. I have a right to occasionally be irrational in safe ways. I have a right to seek healthy and mutually supportive relationships. I have a right to ask friends for a modicum of help and emotional support. I have a right to complain and verbally ventilate in moderation. I have a right to grow, evolve and prosper.

BPD sufferers experience emotions far more intensely than the rest of the population.  In many senses, this is no bad thing but the lack of control of these emotions is where BPD patients risk self-harm, destructive behaviors and problematic relationship issues with others.

Ninety-six per cent of juvenile prostitutes are fugitives from abusive domestic situations; 66 per cent began working before they turned 16. (Prostitution is their only perceived means of survival.) Millions of children work as prostitutes around the world. A third are male. One study revealed that over 50 per cent of prostitutes are the children of alcoholics or substance abusers, and 90 per cent are deflowered through incest or rape. Ninety-one per cent of prostitutes do not speak of the abuse. (The truth of life is told through the language of behavior.) Abused children suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, guilt, self-destructive impulses, suspicion, fear. Seventy-five per cent of prostitutes attempt suicide. (Imagine their scrapbook of memories.)

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus. The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities." Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perception of basic orgonotic functioning by means of rigid armoring; in the schizophrenic, on the other hand, the armoring practically breaks down and thus the biosystem is flooded with deep experiences from the biophysical core with which it cannot cope." The "deep experiences" to which Reich refers are the pleasurable streaming sensations associated with intense excitation that is mainly sexual in nature. The schizophrenic cannot cope with these sensations because his body is too contracted to tolerate the charge. Unable to "block" the excitation or reduce it as a neurotic can, and unable to "stand" the charge, the schizophrenic is literally "driven crazy." But the neurotic does not escape so easily either. He avoids insanity by blocking the excitation, that is, by reducing it to a point where there is no danger of explosion, or bursting. In effect the neurotic undergoes a psychological castration. However, the potential for explosive release is still present in his body, although it is rigidly guarded as if it were a bomb. The neurotic is on guard against himself, terrified to let go of his defenses and allow his feelings free expression. Having become, as Reich calls him, "homo normalis," having bartered his freedom and ecstasy for the security of being "well adjusted," he sees the alternative as "crazy." And in a sense he is right. Without going "crazy," without becoming "mad," so mad that he could kill, it is impossible to give up the defenses that protect him in the same way that a mental institution protects its inmates from self-destruction and the destruction of others.

Whatever problem the other person has, codependency involves a habitual system of thinking, feeling, and behaving toward ourselves and others that can cause us pain. Codependent behaviors or habits are self-destructive. We frequently react to people who are destroying themselves; we

What, then, can we conclude about the moral value of Metallica's music? In light of our discussion, it is decidedly mixed. Insofar as it has the potential to arouse negative emotions that lead to destructive behavior, it is morally damaging. Insofar as it helps purge us of destructive emotions, it is morally beneficial. And, insofar as it engages our imaginative empathy and gets us to think more clearly and deeply about controversial issues, it is morally edifying. So, while Metallica is unquestionably a monster of a rock band, it is far from obvious that they are some kind of monster.

There is a lot of research to suggest that we feel better overall as we are progressing toward our goals; we have a sense of purposeful involvement, we give ourselves mental pats on the back for being so good and industrious, our self-esteem is enhanced, and our general life satisfaction is raised.

The real problem for others is when narcissistic features, especially a sense of entitlement and a lack of empathy, shade into antisocial and destructive behaviors. When this happens, the pattern might be described as aggressive or malignant narcissism, which is difficult to distinguish from psychopathy.

Our brains are subject to either sudden or gradual decline with age, to self-destructive addictive behaviors, to depression and anxiety disorders, and to many other limitations, not to mention potentially catastrophic lapses of judgment.

Shame is not a compass for moral behavior. It’s much more likely to drive destructive, hurtful, immoral, and self-aggrandizing behavior than it is to heal it. Why? Because where shame exists, empathy is almost always absent. That’s what makes shame dangerous. The opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. The behavior that many of us find so egregious today is more about people being empathyless, not shameless.

The trick, as with all the behavioral possibilities of complex systems, is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors—and, where possible, to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.

Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space. There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime—love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.

You are hardwired for the pleasure of God. And this works for marriage. Imagine sole sourcing your pleasure receptors to be conditioned habitually to find satisfaction in one person. You build deep-seated emotional, spiritual even biological connection to that one person — this is what you are designed for. Do not build deviant behaviors that cause destruction. Porn is like crack. We can lie to ourselves about it – that we can casually dabble around with it. If you think you are not addicted, try going three weeks without it. You

The incest victim's need for self-punishment often leads her into self-abusive behaviors like alcoholism, drug abuse, or prostitution.

Neuroscientists know now that bad habits have a physical existence in the structure of the brain; they become the default circuits when we are faced with temptation.

When people tried to find peace in a gun lead, Destruction made its way with sign 'infinity ahead.

The lessons we learn from our parents are profound, but the lessons we learn from our children are even greater.

We look to the past not to find excuses for reprehensible behavior but because narrative holds the key to unlocking destructive patterns and implementing all future change.

We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today.

Alcoholism, as a disease that ravages the mind and body, often becomes intertwined with domestic violence, heightening its destructive impact.

We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying. Researchers don’t find shame correlated with positive outcomes at all—there are no data to support that shame is a helpful compass for good behavior. In fact, shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to be the solution.

The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn’t experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice—not Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children—but Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill.” I do. I’ve been on antidepressants for the last twelve to fifteen years of my life, and to a lesser degree but with the same effect they had for my father, they have given me a life I would not have been able to maintain without them. They work. I return to Earth, home and my family. The worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns. I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.

Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively.

It seems like the value you attribute to something, more than its inherent value, influences your expectations, and your expectations, to a great extent, influence the life you live.

You are not your partner. His issues are not your issues. His behavior is not your behavior. His destructiveness does not prove that anything is wrong with you. You are separate people.

A person who finds grace never lacks the courage to endure, remain resolute in principles and action in the face of an easy collapse into anger, insanity, and self-destruction when living in an increasing chaotic world filled with armed conflict, terrorism, and cultural discord.

A person caught in a neurotic state, in some respects may well be compared to a man bewitched. Forced to a very low level of behavior, people suffering from a neurosis is capable of acting jarring and so destructive to themselves and to others, with basic or instinctive motivations.

Unfortunately, even as we try to submerge our pain deep down inside, it finds a way to bubble up: Through addiction. Through anxiety. Through eating disorders. Through insomnia. Through all the different PTSD symptoms and self-destructive behaviors that assault survivors experience for years on end. These incidents may last minutes or hours, but their impact lasts a lifetime.

Feeling threatened can easily lead to feelings of anger and hostility and from there to outright aggressive behavior, driven by deep instincts to protect your position and maintain your sense of things being under control. When things do feel “under control,” we might feel content for a moment. But when they go out of control again, or even seem to be getting out of control, our deepest insecurities can erupt. At such times we might even act in ways that are self-destructive and hurtful to others. And we will feel anything but content and at peace within ourselves.

Dan felt sure that inner-child stuff was brought into service to excuse a lot of selfish and destructive behavior (what Casey liked to call the Gotta-Have-It-Now Syndrome), but he also had no doubt that grown men and women held every stage of their development somewhere in their brains—not just the inner child, but the inner infant, the inner teenager, and the inner young adult.

Time and again, I have asked myself why therapy works for some people while others remain the prisoners of their symptoms despite years of analysis or therapeutic care. In each and every case I examined, I was able to establish that when people found the kind of therapeutic care and companionship that enabled them to discover their own story and give free expression to their indignation at their parents’ behavior, they were able to liberate themselves from the maltreated child’s destructive attachment. As adults they were able to take their lives into their own hands and did not need to hate their parents. The opposite was the case with people whose therapists enjoined them to forgive and forget, actually believing that such forgiveness could have a salutary, curative effect. They remained trapped in the position of small children who believe they love their parents but in fact allow themselves to be controlled all their lives by the internalized parents and ultimately develop some kind of illness that leads to premature death. Such dependency actively fosters the hatred that, though repressed, remains active, and it drives them to direct their aggression at innocent people. We only hate as long as we feel totally powerless. I

Avoid triggers. If you’re an alcoholic, stay out of bars. If you’re a depressed or impulsive shopper, don’t go shopping. When you have to, go in with a list, rush in, and rush out. If you watch too much television, don’t sit in your favorite chair. In fact, move it (or the TV) to another room.

A destructive or creative state of psychological madness must trace itself to a source. By finding the source of their misery, a person might be able to corral the crazy desire prematurely to terminate their existence. An old saying suggests that self-hatred is the central cause of all self-destructive actions. Self-hate might consist of anger that we harbor towards other people who maltreated us. Repressed anger and pent-up hostility that we retain against other people that has no viable direct escape hatch can reflect and turn inward against ourselves. Perhaps we regret that we allowed other people to demean us, or rue that we lacked a protective level of self-esteem to begin with.

Malcolm’s reply was immediate: “What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There’s no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told—and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question.

Small societies are particularly vulnerable to disruption of key lifelines, such as trading relations, or to large perturbations like wars or natural disasters. Larger societies, with more diverse and extensive resources, can rush aid to disaster victims. But the complexity that brings resilience may also impede adaptation and change, producing social inertia that maintains collectively destructive behavior. Consequently, large societies have difficulty adapting to slow change and remain vulnerable to problems that eat away their foundation, such as soil erosion. In contrast, small systems are adaptable to shifting baselines but are acutely vulnerable to large perturbations. But unlike the first farmer-hunter-gatherers who could move around when their soil was used up, a global civilization cannot.

Imagine if organized religion organized billions of people and trillions of dollars to tackle the challenges that our economic and political systems are afraid or unwilling to tackle—a planet ravaged by unsustainable human behavior and an out-of-control consumptive economy, the growing gap between the rich minority and the poor majority, and the proliferation of weapons of all kinds—including weapons of mass destruction. “Wow,” people frequently say when I propose these possibilities. “If they did that, I might become religious again.” Some quickly add, “But I won’t hold my breath. It’ll never happen.

Covert narcissists are likable to the outside world; they appear to be giving, humble, and kind. It is usually only the person who gets to know them intimately who sees the destructive traits. The rest of the world sees the façade, the “nice guy.” Many therapists don’t see through the mask and indeed are often impressed with how kind and aware the CN is. CNs seem to intensify their behavior around middle age; they rarely change because narcissists blame others and they usually don’t think they have a problem.

If you’re still not convinced, watch what you say, because I’ve been in therapy since I was five. My mother started me at such a young age because I was really angry at my dad, and it was coming out in the form of night terrors. Therapy literally changed my life, and I’ve been in it pretty much ever since. Because of my years on the couch, I’ve gotten to know my dark side, and I’ve learned how to keep it in check. At this point my self-destructive behaviors are like old enemies that I’ve done battle with again and again—I know all the angles, all the moves I need to dodge them and prevent them from fucking up my life.

one important thing to keep in mind about BPD is that it comes with a lot of extra baggage. That is, many people with BPD have other problems and may meet criteria for other diagnoses. For instance, many people with BPD suffer from depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and/or drug and alcohol problems. People with BPD are also at risk for suicide attempts, self-harm, and other self-destructive behaviors.

She’s already a bunch of stressors stacked in a trench coat. There are only that many kidnapping and murder attempts a child can endure before developing serious issues and self-destructive behaviors. We wouldn’t want her to grow up and, say, got to grad school.” “Don’t worry,” Misery reassures me, “every day I drill into her that we’ll be disappointed in anything but a Djing career.” “You’re such a good role model.

Attempts to stop smoking or give up any sort of self-destructive addictive behavior such as drugs, alcohol, hypersexuality, overeating, or overworking, often fail because it is very difficult to give up a means of self-regulation even when it is unhealthy until it can be replaced with a better form of self-regulation.

Many people are caught in a knot of self-destructive behavior and are unable to see it or appreciate how they themselves have tied it. Each believes the problems lie somewhere “out there,” surrounding them but beyond them, rooted in external circumstances. They also believe that the solutions to their problems are “out there” too—the right man, the perfect woman, a more appreciative boss, a more interesting job, the right diet.

Here is a short form list of what is happening to your life: 1. You are practicing hate. 2. You are practicing violent abuse toward your parents and to your own family. 3. The way you treat your parents causes them physical and emotional pain. 4. The way you treat your parents causes them to develop mental diseases such as PTSD, depression, obsessive thoughts, low self esteem, aggressive and self destructive behavior, distrust of entering relationships, isolation, anxiety, panic attacks and obsessive thought of suicide. 5. The way you treat your parents causes them to develop physical illnesses such as chronic toxic stress which leads to inflammation of body organs which leads to heart attacks, arthritis, and irritable bowel syndrome. 6. The way you treat your parents produces feelings of abandonment and ostracism which is experience as physical pain on a

People often attempt to compensate for this loss of hope by comforting themselves with “consolation prizes”: easy but self-destructive habits like too much TV, too much junk food, too much shopping, not enough exercise, endless video games. And sometimes they distract themselves with riskier behavior: alcohol and drugs, debt,

I suspect there are lots of women who want to become prostitutes. Some see themselves as valued commodities and figure they ought to sell while the price is high. Others feel that sex has no intrinsic meaning in and of itself but allows individuals to feel the reality of their own bodies. A few women despise their existence and the insignificance of their meager lives and want to affirm themselves by controlling sex much as a man would. Then there are those who are actuated by violent, self-destructive behavior. And finally we have those want to offer comfort. I suppose there are any number of women who find the meaning of their existence in similar ways.

Perhaps the best antidote and preventive for burnout is the feeling of solid connection with the people in our lives. When we can share our frustrations with family and friends, our burden is eased and we can get new perspectives.

for days or even weeks. It isn’t rare to find destructive, even criminal behavior. There’s such a big change, in fact, that two or three hundred years ago people with temporal lobe disorders were often considered to be possessed by

for days or even weeks. It isn’t rare to find destructive, even criminal behavior. There’s such a big change, in fact, that two or three hundred years ago people with temporal lobe disorders were often considered to be possessed by a

In the course of therapy, we often witness clients’ capacities to report abuse stories with intellectualized, detached demeanors. And they are quick to add disclaimers that minimize their experiences such as “It wasn’t so bad,” “I probably deserved it anyway,” “I know my parents did the best they could,” “It didn’t have any negative effect on me,” or “That was a long time ago, and it can’t be relevant to my life now.” Many clients expend tremendous amounts of energy disavowing traumatic or abusive histories, believing that revisiting old feelings and thoughts will keep them stuck or are irrelevant to who they are today.

We are taught that men are the key to happiness and fulfillment. We fear that without heterosexual marriage and childbearing we cannot become people who matter or “real” adults. It is this nexus of desire and fear that is the breeding ground for self-destructive behavior like dieting. Rather than being taught that you deserve love simply because you are a person, you are taught that love is something people must earn through particular socially sanctioned methods. For many women, that method is weight control.

The seeds of our own destruction are often sown at birth or in childhood. We are too busy acquiring knowledge and living life to notice their presence. It is for our biographers, if we are of sufficient importance to have any, to highlight them to a post-mortem audience.

In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).

I believe this movement will prevail. I don’t mean it will defeat, conquer, or create harm to someone else. Quite the opposite. I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense. I mean that the thinking that informs the movement’s goals will reign. It will soon suffuse most institutions, but before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior. Some say it is too late, but people never change when they are comfortable. Helen Keller threw aside the gnawing fears of chronic bad news when she declared, “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!” In such a time, history is suspended and thus unfinished. It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives. My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but cooperation must be on the planet’s terms. The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and reimagine the world from the bottom up, based on the first principles if justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different. We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize out social and ecological fabric. It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers. “We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is more harmful resides within is, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, as history of violence and greed. There is not question that the environmental movement is most critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is actually the other way around; the only way we are going to put out this fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus. Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally. What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name.

we have a plastic brain that changes in response to our experience. It bears repeating: The brain doesn’t tell us what to do; it is part of a system in which our life experience teaches our brain what to do. So you can practice mindfulness, will power, overcoming procrastination, and other healthy new skills with the confidence that you are changing your brain. Each day’s practice does some good, and if you slip and fall off your diet or exercise program or mindfulness practice, all that you have learned before is not undone; it’s still there in your brain waiting for you to get back in the saddle.

When you feel the need to escape your problems, to escape from this world, don't make the mistake of resorting to suicide Don't do it! You will hear the empty advice of many scholars in the matter of life and death, who will tell you, "just do it" there is nothing after this, you will only extinguish the light that surrounds you and become part of nothingness itself, so when you hear these words remember this brief review of suicide: When you leave this body after committing one of the worst acts of cowardice that a human being can carry out, you turn off the light, the sound and the sense of reality, you become nothing waiting for the programmers of this game to pick you up from the darkness, subtly erase your memories and enable your return and I emphasize the word subtle because sometimes the intelligence behind this maneuver or automated mechanism is wrong and send human beings wrongly reset to such an extent, that when they fall to earth and are born again, they begin to experience memories of previous lives, in many cases they perceive themselves of the opposite sex, and science attributes this unexplainable phenomenon to genetic and hormonal factors, but you and I know better! And we quickly identified this trigger as a glitch in the Matrix. Then we said! That a higher intelligence or more advanced civilization throws you back into this game for the purpose of experimenting, growing and developing as an advanced consciousness and due to your toxic and destructive behavior you come back again but in another body and another life, but you are still you, then you will carry with you that mark of suicide and cowardice, until you learn not to leave this experience without having learned the lesson of life, without having experienced and surprised by death naturally or by design of destiny. About this first experience you will find very little material associated with this event on the internet, it seems that the public is more reserved, because they perceive themselves and call themselves "awakened" And that is because the system has total control over the algorithm of fame and fortune even over life and death. Now, according to religion and childish fears, which are part of the system's business to keep you asleep, eyes glued to the cellular device all day, it says the following: If you commit this act of sin, you turn off light, sound and sense of reality, and from that moment you begin to experience pain, fear and suffering on alarming scales, and that means they will come for you, a couple of demons and take you to the center of the earth where the weeping and gnashing of teeth is forever, and in that hell tormented by demons you will spend eternity. About this last experience we will find hundreds of millions of people who claim to have escaped from there! And let me tell you that all were captivated by the same deity, one of dubious origin, that feeds on prayers and energetic events, because it is not of our nature, because it knows very well that we are beings of energy, then this deity or empire of darkness receives from the system its food and the system receives from them power, to rule, to administer, to control, to control, to kill, to exclude, to inhibit, to classify, to imprison, to silence, to infect, to contaminate, to depersonalize. So now that you know the two sides of the same coin, which one will your intelligence lean towards! You decide... Heads or tails? From the book Avatars, the system's masterpiece.

Get up with the alarm, shower, get dressed, and have breakfast. Without much effort, you’ve already put yourself in a good position for the rest of the day. If you have to struggle to get out of bed and decide every single day about showering and breakfast and what to wear, you’ve put yourself in a depleted state before the day has really started. The person who’s taking care of herself without thinking about it, getting to work on time without procrastinating, has much more will power left in reserve when important decisions come up. This is why people with high self-control consistently report less stress in their lives; they use their will power to take care of business semiautomatically, so they have fewer crises and calamities. When there is a real crisis, they have plenty of discipline left in reserve.

One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.

Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important. It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have. What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others.

We were born with hearts that require constant, unconditional love, and Jesus is the only Person who accepts us regardless of our behavior. However, if we do not allow Christ to satisfy our longing, then Satan will quickly promote destructive substitutes, especially sexual excitement. He wants to make us dependent upon anything other than Jesus.

I didn’t understand that the human brain has evolved to function empathically, or that the stress of living without natural access to feeling is believed to be one of the causes of compulsive acts of violence and destructive behavior. All I knew was that I liked doing things that made me feel something, to feel anything. It was better than nothing.

Without a healthy attachment to God, we’re more likely to fall prey to destructive thinking and behaviors.

The point is... people who are unhappy with their station in life and don't change it end up developing all sorts of self destructive habits. I'm telling you this as a friend.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons. Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish. In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans.

The government regulates them, or chooses not to, approves or blocks their mergers and acquisitions, and sets their tax policies (often turning a blind eye to the billions parked in offshore tax havens). This is why tech companies, like the rest of corporate America, inundate Washington with lobbyists and quietly pour hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions into the political system. Now they’re gaining the wherewithal to fine-tune our political behavior—and with it the shape of American government—just by tweaking their algorithms.

One of the things I'd learned in the past few years of getting my shit on track and not allowing myself to self-destruct was that kids who grew up in chaotic homes were often highly sensitive to the smallest shifts in tone, behavior, energy. They learned how to protect themselves by picking up on subtle changes that often led to bad situations. They knew the pattern.

In the novel Fight Club, the character Jack’s apartment is blown up. All of his possessions—“every stick of furniture,” which he pathetically loved—were lost. Later it turns out that Jack blew it up himself. He had multiple personalities, and “Tyler Durden” orchestrated the explosion to shock Jack from the sad stupor he was afraid to do anything about. The result was a journey into an entirely different and rather dark part of his life. In Greek mythology, characters often experience katabasis—or “a going down.” They’re forced to retreat, they experience a depression, or in some cases literally descend into the underworld. When they emerge, it’s with heightened knowledge and understanding. Today, we’d call that hell—and on occasion we all spend some time there. We surround ourselves with bullshit. With distractions. With lies about what makes us happy and what’s important. We become people we shouldn’t become and engage in destructive, awful behaviors. This unhealthy and ego-derived state hardens and becomes almost permanent. Until katabasis forces us to face it. Duris dura franguntur. Hard things are broken by hard things. The bigger the ego the harder the fall. It would be nice if it didn’t have to be that way. If we could nicely be nudged to correct our ways, if a quiet admonishment was what it took to shoo away illusions, if we could manage to circumvent ego on our own. But it is just not so. The Reverend William A. Sutton observed some 120 years ago that “we cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations.” How much better it would be to spare ourselves these experiences, but sometimes it’s the only way the blind can be made to see.

Here’s the crux of the matter. Oil and gas companies do the kind of risky, capital-intensive work that the average Joe, the average mom-and-pop business, even the average country, doesn’t do for itself. In so doing, they can make a spectacular pile of money, but they can also make a tremendous amount of mess. And ruin. And even catastrophic, polluting apocalypse, when they really put their shoulder into it. But they are also big enough and hold enough sway that even big powerful governments tend to defer to them when it comes to how to best police their behavior.

DID may be underdiagnosed. The image derived from classic textbooks of a florid, dramatic disorder with overt switching characterizes about 5% of the DID clinical population. The more typical presentation is of a covert disorder with dissociative symptoms embedded among affective, anxiety, pseudo-psychotic, dyscontrol, and self-destructive symptoms, and others (Loewenstein, 1991). The typical DID patient averages 6 to 12 years in the mental health system, receiving an average of 3 to 4 prior diagnoses. DID is often found in cases that were labeled as "treatment failures" because the patient did not respond to typical treatments for mood, anxiety, psychotic, somatoform, substance abuse, and eating disorders, among others. Rapid mood shifts (within minutes or hours), impulsivity, self-destructiveness, and/or apparent hallucinations lead to misdiagnosis of cyclic mood disorders (e.g., bipolar disorder) or psychotic disorders (e.g., schizophrenia).

Emotional abuse poisons a relationship and infuses it it with hostility, contempt, and hatred. No matter how much a couple once loved each other, once emotional abuse becomes a consistent aspect of the relationship, that love is overshadowed by fear, anger, guilt, and shame. Whether it is one or both partners who are being emotionally abusive, the relationship becomes increasingly more toxic as time goes by. In this polluted environment it is difficult for love not only to grow but to survive. At the very least, emotional abuse causes both the abuser and the victim to lose sight of any redeeming qualitites his or her partner once had. The more a partner is allowed to degrade, criticize, or dominate her partner, the less she will respect her partner. And the more a partner is emotionally abused, the more he will slowly build up an intense hatred towards his abuser. The disrespect and hatred each partner begins to feel leads to more and more emotional abuse and to each partner justifying inappropriate, even destructive, behavior. Over time, anger can build up on the part of both abuser and victim, and emotional abuse can turn to physical violence.

Because of media portrayals, clinicians may believe that dissociative identity disorder presents with dramatic, florid alternate identities with obvious state transitions (switching). These florid presentations occur in only about 5% of patients with dissociative identity disorder.(20) How ever, the vast majority of these patients have subtle presentations characterized by a mixture of dissociative and PTSD symptoms embedded with other symptoms, such as post-traumatic depression, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating disorders, and self-destructive and impulsive behaviors.(2,10)

Along with many other professionals, I’ve come to the conclusion that shame is much more likely to lead to destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to be the solution. Again, it is human nature to want to feel worthy of love and belonging. When we experience shame, we feel disconnected and desperate for worthiness. Full of shame or the fear of shame, we are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors and to attack or shame others. In fact, shame is related to violence, aggression, depression, addiction, eating disorders, and bullying. Children who use more shame self-talk (I am bad) versus guilt self-talk (I did something bad) struggle mightily with issues of self-worth and self-loathing. Using shame to parent teaches children that they are not inherently worthy of love.

People believe they lack will power, but will power is not something you either have or don’t, like blue eyes. Instead, it’s a skill, like tennis or typing. You have to train your nervous system as you would train your muscles and reflexes. You have to take yourself to the psychic gym—but with the certainty that each time you practice an alternative behavior, you’ve made it easier to do next time.

Phil talked openly about his current life, but he closed up when I asked him about his early years. With some gentle probing, he told me that what he remembered most vividly about his childhood was his father’s constant teasing. The jokes were always at Phil’s expense and he often felt humiliated. When the rest of the family laughed, he felt all the more isolated. It was bad enough being teased, but sometimes he really scared me when he’d say things like: “This boy can’t be a son of ours, look at that face. I’ll bet they switched babies on us in the hospital. Why don’t we take him back and swap him for the right one.” I was only six, and I really thought I was going to get dropped off at the hospital. One day, I finally said to him, “Dad, why are you always picking on me?” He said, “I’m not picking on you. I’m just joking around. Can’t you see that?” Phil, like any young child, couldn’t distinguish the truth from a joke, a threat from a tease. Positive humor is one of our most valuable tools for strengthening family bonds. But humor that belittles can be extremely damaging within the family. Children take sarcasm and humorous exaggeration at face value. They are not worldly enough to understand that a parent is joking when he says something like, “We’re going to have to send you to preschool in China.” Instead, the child may have nightmares about being abandoned in some frightening, distant land. We have all been guilty of making jokes at someone else’s expense. Most of the time, such jokes can be relatively harmless. But, as in other forms of toxic parenting, it is the frequency, the cruelty, and the source of these jokes that make them abusive. Children believe and internalize what their parents say about them. It is sadistic and destructive for a parent to make repetitive jokes at the expense of a vulnerable child. Phil was constantly being humiliated and picked on. When he made an attempt to confront his father’s behavior, he was accused of being inadequate because he “couldn’t take a joke.” Phil had nowhere to go with all these feelings. As Phil described his feelings, I could see that he was still embarrassed—as if he believed that his complaints were silly.

Authorities usually invite and support detrimental conduct in insidious ways that minimize personal responsibility for what is happening. Moreover, the intended purpose of sanctioned destructiveness is usually disguised so that neither issuers nor perpetrators regard their actions as censurable. When reprehensible practices are publicized, they are officially dismissed as only isolated incidents arising through misunderstanding of what had, in fact, been authorized. Efforts are made to limit any blame to subordinates, who are portrayed as misguided or overzealous. Investigators who go searching for "smoking guns" display naivete about the surreptitious manner in which culpable behavior is sanctioned and executed. Generally one finds mazy devices of nonresponsibility rather than smoking guns.

Learning to give and receive freely requires a long, laborious process of re-educating our minds, which have been conditioned by thousands of years of struggle for survival.16 The violent entry of divine revelation and the Gospel into the world is like an evolutionary ferment, intended to make our psychology “evolve” toward an attitude of free giving and free receiving—the attitude of the Kingdom because it is the attitude of love. This is a process of divinization, whose final goal is to love as God loves: “You must be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”17 And this divinization, this becoming God-like, means becoming human in the truest sense! It is a marvelous, liberating evolution: but we can only enter into the new way of being through the destruction of many of our natural behaviors, a sort of death-agony.

Achievement and competence. People fall prey to addiction more readily when they lack positive motivation to achieve or work. Children need to learn that accomplishment is important and within their reach, not solely for material rewards, but because people should make positive contributions to the world and other people and because it is satisfying to make such contributions and to mobilize one’s skills effectively. Participating with children in constructive activity, like reading, building, or gardening—and encouraging independent activity whenever feasible—are strong precursors to achievement and competence. Consciousness and self-awareness. Addiction is the result of accumulated self-destructive behavior that people ignore, just as unconscious acceptance of any negative syndrome ingrains that habit in people’s lives.

Dr Maturin had many of the virtues required in a medical man... yet he had some faults, and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of inquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru.

Good behavior is often a means of keeping God at bay. Obedience and obligation can erect as much a barrier to life with God as lawless rebellion and wanton destruction. Duty and debauchery have more in common than we might expect. Selfishness and self-righteousness just might be twins separated at birth. Both good and evil hang from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; the problem is that they are on the wrong tree.

And so, he knows. He wants, he needs, to do the immoral, irresponsible thing. He wants to let this boy court his own destruction. He wants to commit that cruelty. Or (kinder, gentler version) he doesn't want to reconfirm his allegiance to the realm of the sensible, all the good people who take responsibility, who go to the right and necessary parties, who sell art made of two-by-fours and carpet remnants. He wants, for at least a little while, to live in that other, darker world - Blake's London, Courbet's Paris; raucous, unsanitary places where good behavior was the province of decent, ordinary people who produced no works of genius.

Mature adults find ways to free themselves from exploding off irregular behavior. I try to change from being critical of the difficult person to feeling sorry for him. Isn’t it sad that someone you care about is limiting, possibly destroying, relationships by behavior that causes chaos? How awful to be so insecure, so cocksure, so caught in compulsive behaviors, so unwilling to change destructive patterns that a person stands as alone as an island, rather than joining hands in an alliance. Pity the person who drives others away by feigned illness, clinging dependency, fears, or efforts to control. Feeling sorrow instead of hurt turns angry fists into compassionate hands.

All peoples think they are forever," he growled softly. "They do not believe they will ever not be. The Sinnissippi were that way. They did not think they would be eradicated. But that is what happened. Your people, Nest, believe this of themselves. They will survive forever, they think. Nothing can destroy them, can wipe them so completely from the earth and from history that all that will remain is their name and not even that will be known with certainty. They have such faith in their invulnerability. Yet already their destruction begins. It comes upon them gradually, in little ways. Bit by bit their belief in themselves erodes. A growing cynicism pervades their lives. Small acts of kindness and charity are abandoned as pointless and somehow indicative of weakness. Little failures of behavior lead to bigger ones. It is not enough to ignore the discourtesies of others; discourtesies must be repaid in kind. Men are intolerant and judgmental . They are without grace. If one man proclaims that God has spoken to him, another quickly proclaims that his God is false. If the homeless cannot find shelter, then surely they are to blame for their condition. If the poor do not have jobs, then surely it is because they will not work. If sickness strikes down those whose lifestyle differs from our own, then surely they have brought it on themselves. Look at your people, Nest Freemark. They abandon their old. They shun their sick. They cast off their children. They decry any who are different. They commit acts of unfaithfulness, betrayal, and depravity every day. They foster lies that undermine beliefs. Each small darkness breeds another. Each small incident of anger, bitterness, pettiness, and greed breeds others. A sense of futility consumes them. They feel helpless to effect even the smallest change. Their madness is of their own making, and yet they are powerless against it because they refuse to acknowledge its source. They are at war with themselves, but they do not begin to understand the nature of the battle being fought." -pages 96-97

Remember all the work you've done to draw boundaries was not about controlling someone else's behavior. It's about paying attention ad being hones about how someone's poor behavior and lack of responsibility is possibly controlling you. And when people close to us are acting out of control, that's when we run the greater risk of lacking self-control. When a relationship shifts from being difficult to being destructive, it's the right time to consider a goodbye.

It was just heteronormative bullshit, a societal compulsion to thrust independent and perfectly happy individuals together in a socially accepted way, so they could become vulnerable before ultimately growing too familiar with each other’s flaws and engaging in destructive behavior that would result in the heart of at least one party being crushed. Behavior such as, for example, shagging their neighbor and blaming it on their girlfriend’s supposed inattentiveness.

I AM NOT SO INTELLIGENT The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions. Besides, I believe that I need my emotions to formulate my ideas and get the energy to execute them. I am just intelligent enough to understand that I have a predisposition to be fooled by randomness—and to accept the fact that I am rather emotional. I am dominated by my emotions—but as an aesthete, I am happy about that fact. I am just like every single character whom I ridiculed in this book. Not only that, but I may be even worse than them because there may be a negative correlation between beliefs and behavior (recall Popper the man). The difference between me and those I ridicule is that I try to be aware of it. No matter how long I study and try to understand probability, my emotions will respond to a different set of calculations, those that my unintelligent genes want me to handle. If my brain can tell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot. Such unintelligent behavior does not just cover probability and randomness. I do not think I am reasonable enough to avoid getting angry when a discourteous driver blows his horn at me for being one nanosecond late after a traffic light turns green. I am fully aware that such anger is self-destructive and offers no benefit, and that if I were to develop anger for every idiot around me doing something of the sort, I would be long dead. These small daily emotions are not rational. But we need them to function properly. We are designed to respond to hostility with hostility. I have enough enemies to add some spice to my life, but I sometimes wish I had a few more (I rarely go to the movies and need the entertainment). Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.

Women have complained, justly, about the behavior of “macho” men. But despite their he-man pretensions and their captivation by masculine heroes of sports, war, and the Old West, most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs — they mutter, “Thank God it’s Friday” and “Pretty good for Monday”— but they do as they are told. They are more compliant than most housewives have been. Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness. They have accepted almost without protest, and often with relief, their dispossession of any usable property and, with that, their loss of economic independence and their consequent subordination to bosses. They have submitted to the destruction of the household economy and thus of the household, to the loss of home employment and self-employment, to the disintegration of their families and communities, to the desecration and pillage of their country, and they have continued abjectly to believe, obey, and vote for the people who have most eagerly abetted this ruin and who have most profited from it. These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they do whatever they are told.

and only much later, when Mascha wanted a child, did I realize that love is a deadly poison, a vice, a vice that one wants to see shared, & that if one of the two involved is smitten, the other is often no more than a passive participant, or vixxtim, or possessed. And Moravagine was possessed. Love is masochistic. These cries & complaints, these sweet alarms. this anguished state of lovers, this suspense, this latent pain that is just below the surface, almost unexpressed, these thousand & one anxieties over the loved one's absence, this feeling of time rushing by, this touchiness, these fits of temper, these long daydreams, this childish fickleness of behavior, this moral torture where vanity & self-esteem, or perhaps honor, upbringing & modesty are at stake, these highs & lows in the nervous tone, these leaps of imagination, this fetishism, this cruel precision of senses, whipping & probing, the collapse, the prostration, the abdication, the self-abasement, the perpetual loss & recovery of one's personality, these stammered words & phrases, these pet-names, this intimacy, these hesitations in physical contact, these epileptic tremors, these successive & even more frequent relapses, this more & more turbulent & stormy passion with its ravages progressing to the point of complete inhibition & annihilation of the soul, the debility of the senses, the exhaustion of the marrow, the erasure of the brain & even the desiccation of the heart, this yearning for ruin, for destruction, for mutilation, this need of effusiveness, of adoration, of mysticism, this insatiability which expresses itself in hyper-irritability of the of mucus membranes, in errant taste, in vasomotor or peripheral disorders, & which conjures up jealousy & vengeance, crimes, prevarications & treacheries, this idolatry, this incurable melancholy, this apathy, this profound moral misery, this definitive & harrowing doubt, this despair--are not all these stigmata the very symptoms of love in which we can first diagnose, then trace with a sure hand, the clinical curve of masochism?

Many people are shocked when I say that the incest victims I’ve worked with are usually the healthiest members of their families. After all, the victim usually has the symptoms—self-blame, depression, destructive behaviors, sexual problems, suicide attempts, substance abuse—while the rest of the family often seems outwardly healthy. But despite this, it is usually the victim who ultimately has the clearest vision of the truth. She was forced to sacrifice herself to cover up the craziness and the stress in the family system. All her life she was the bearer of the family secret. She lived with tremendous emotional pain in order to protect the myth of the good family. But because of all this pain and conflict, the victim is usually the first to seek help. Her parents, on the other hand, will almost always refuse to let go of their denials and defenses. They refuse to deal with reality. With treatment, most victims are able to reclaim their dignity and their power. Recognizing a problem and seeking help is a sign not only of health but of courage.

Because the victims are “only children,” their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years’ time these children will be adult who will feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children. They may consciously fight with vigor against cruelty in the world yet carry within themselves an experience of cruelty that they may unconsciously inflict on others. As long as it remains hidden behind their idealized picture of a happy childhood, they will have not awareness of it and will therefore be unable to avoid passing it on. It is absolutely urgent that people become aware of the degree to which this disrespect of children is persistently transmitted from one generation to the next, perpetuating destructive behavior. Someone who slaps or hits another adult or knowingly insults her is aware of hurting her. Even if he doesn’t know why he is doing this, he has some sense of what he is doing. But how often were our parents, and we ourselves toward our own children, unconscious of how painfully, deeply, and abidingly they and we injured a child’s tender, budding self?

Eating disorders are a silent form of destruction: a destruction of vitality and the hope for a meaningful existence. They create the illusion of time stopping. Past, present, and future collapse: the insidious negative self-talk is too loud, and/ or the aftermath of trauma too pervasive and/or the affects too overwhelming. The body itself becomes the theater of war (McDougall, 1989) wherein the feelings, memories, longings, and stories that have led to the symptoms feel so dangerous that they are dissociated from the behaviors themselves.

If you genuinely care about someone, you won’t let them ruin themselves. It’s as simple as that. Don’t use your ‘supportive friend’ excuse to justify your ignorance. If someone in your life is living a self-destructive lifestyle, don’t encourage them. Don’t stand on the sidelines and watch. Do something. Tell them they’re worth more than that. That they’re bigger than what they’re facing. Tell them there are better ways to heal. Better ways to grow. Tell them they can be friends with better people.Tell them there’s no escape from reality but it only gets better if you face it. Tell them they’re killing themselves slowly by intaking drugs. Tell them you love them and don’t want them to get hurt. Tell them that you care. Do. Everything. You. Can. Because even if they may not listen, at least you’ll know you tried.

Getting better is even more important. It consists of clients’ (1) feeling better; (2) continuing to feel better; (3) experiencing fewer disturbing symptoms (e.g., depressing and needlessly inhibiting themselves); (4) making their distressing seldom recur; (5) knowing how to reduce it when they partly cause it; (6) using this knowledge effectively; (7) being less likely to disturb themselves when new adversities occur in their lives; (8) accepting the challenge of making themselves minimally undisturbing, even when unusually aversive events occur.

...the vast majority of these [dissociative identity disorder] patients have subtle presentations characterized by a mixture of dissociative and PTSD symptoms embedded with other symptoms, such as posttraumatic depression, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating disorders, and self-destructive and impulsive behaviors.2,10 A history of multiple treatment providers, hospitalizations, and good medication trials, many of which result in only partial or no benefit, is often an indicator of dissociative identity disorder or another form of complex PTSD.

Isaiah 5:8–10. The oracle in Micah has a close parallel in the poetic oracle of Isaiah 5:8–10. This poetic segment also begins with “Ah” (“woe”), anticipating big trouble to come because of destructive social behavior. The indictment is against those who “join house to house” and “field to field,” exactly the language of the commandment and of the Micah oracle. The process consists of buying up the land of small peasant farmers in order to develop large estates. The vulnerable peasants are then removed from their land and denied a livelihood, and now coveters can bask in their newly secured isolated self-indulgence. The prophetic judgment pertains to such rural displacement; in our time, the same crisis might refer to urban gentrification that dislocates the poor and the vulnerable. The poetry traces the destruction, by acquisitiveness, of a viable neighborly infrastructure.

If you imagine complex, challenging possibilities, your brain will adapt to them. Much like a tiger trapped in a zoo exhibits repetitive displacement behavior, if you cage your imagination within the bars of the dull and neurotic, which often portray one’s fears more than they do an empirical “truth,” then your brain will adapt to these imagined meanings, too. Like the sad tiger pacing back and forth within its puny cage, your brain too will ruminate cyclically upon destructive meanings, and in doing so make them more significant than they might need to be. This present perceptual meaning becomes part of your future history of meanings, together with the meaning (and re-meanings) of past events, thus shaping your future perception. If you don’t want to let received contexts limit possibility, then you need to walk in the darkest forest of all—the one in your own skull—and face down the fear of ideas that challenge.

Failure to act in a crisis is tantamount to accepting a dreadful outcome. I must try to save myself before a rash personal act stubs me out reminiscent of a sucked dry cigarette. I lack a disciplined mind to engage in rigorous study. I am an accidental psychologist, an unreliable philosopher, an unscrupulous self-ethnographer, a crackpot cultural anthropologist, an untrustworthy historian, and a deceitful reporter whom surrounded himself with a facade of untruths, delusions, and illusions. I need to gather personal willpower and attempt my level best to tackle my greatest obstacle – a personal penchant to parley with self-destructive behavior. I seek to penetrate the barriers of constructed falsehoods and reveal the brutal truth of why my soul is so tarnished, engage in many acts of contrition, and atone for a wasteful life. My goal is to construct a living philosophy that will sustain me through all stages of life. I shall use whatever resources are available to me including an intuitive belief in free will to design a self-rescue plan. I must obliterate all vestiges of narcissistic and selfish persona by slaying the ego and dissolving a grotesque sense of self that is preoccupied with the past and fearful of the future.

In addition to these physical problems, sexually transmitted diseases are rampant among the homosexual population. 75% of homosexual men carry one or more sexually transmitted diseases, wholly apart from AIDS. These include all sorts of non-viral infections like gonorrhea, syphilis, bacterial infections, and parasites. Also common among homosexuals are viral infections like herpes and hepatitis B (which afflicts 65% of homosexual men), both of which are incurable, as well as hepatitis A and anal warts, which afflict 40% of homosexual men. And I haven’t even included AIDS. Perhaps the most shocking and frightening statistic is that, leaving aside those who die from AIDS, the life expectancy for a homosexual male is about 45 years of age. That compares to a life expectancy of around 70 for men in general. If you include those who die of AIDS, which now infects 30% of homosexual men, the life expectancy drops to 39 years of age. So I think a very good case can be made out on the basis of generally accepted moral principles that homosexual behavior is wrong. It is horribly self-destructive and injurious to another person. Thus, wholly apart from the Bible’s prohibition, there are sound, sensible reasons to regard homosexual activity as wrong.

It’s such a cliché, sweet peas, but it’s true: you must set boundaries. Fucked up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgments, punishments or betrayals. They are a purely peaceable thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors. Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself. In a perfect world, our parents model healthy personal boundaries for us. In your worlds, you must model them for your parents—for whom boundaries have either never been in place or have gone gravely askew. Emotionally healthy people sometimes behave badly. They lose their tempers, say things they either shouldn’t have said or could have said better, and occasionally allow their hurt or fear or anger to compel them to act in inappropriate, unkind, or overall jackass ways. They eventually acknowledge this and make amends. They are imperfect, but essentially capable of discerning which of their behaviors are destructive and unreasonable and they attempt to change them, even if they don’t wholly succeed. That’s called being human.

Ex-gay leaders had a narrative that explained stories like Kevin’s: that’s what happens when you choose to give in to your flesh, they would say. The gay lifestyle is full of drugs and binge sex with strangers. They never said people like Kevin were driven to destructive behaviors because of shame-based cycles of repression and religious prohibition. No, people like Kevin who embraced the lifestyle embodied the ethics and ideals of the LGBTQ community. Ex-gay leaders denied the existence of a loving, committed same-sex relationship. According to leaders in my community, true love was only possible among heterosexual Christians.

Baseball also has statistical rigor. Its gurus have an immense data set at hand, almost all of it directly related to the performance of players in the game. Moreover, their data is highly relevant to the outcomes they are trying to predict. This may sound obvious, but as we’ll see throughout this book, the folks building WMDs routinely lack data for the behaviors they’re most interested in. So they substitute stand-in data, or proxies. They draw statistical correlations between a person’s zip code or language patterns and her potential to pay back a loan or handle a job. These correlations are discriminatory, and some of them are illegal.

But speaking of decisions and choices, I want to turn to a question that baffles so many of us. Why is it that people who are victims of trauma are so often drawn to abusive relationships? Let me broaden the question, because it is so important in understanding not just abuse but all behavior. The key point is that all of us tend to gravitate to the familiar, even when the familiar is unhealthy or destructive. We are drawn to what we were raised with. As I’ve said before, when we are young and our brain is beginning to make sense of our experiences, it creates our ‘working model’ of the world. The brain organizes around the tone and tension of our first experiences. So if, early on, you have safe, nurturing care, you think that people are essentially good….But if a child experienced chaos, threat, or trauma, your brain organizes according to a view that the world is not safe and people cannot be trusted. Think about James. He didn’t feel ‘safe’ when he was close to people. Intimacy made him feel threatened. Here is the confusing part: James felt most comfortable when the world was in line with his worldview. Being rejected or treated poorly validated this view. The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged….Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar.

No matter how flat or sad his or her affect appears, the suicidally depressed adolescent is desperately trying to contain feelings of anger, rage, hatred, and violence. The suicide or the attempt represents the final self-destructive display of this rage. Where previously the rage may have been expressed in anti-social behaviors or directed at parents, school (the "system"), or a girl/boyfriend, now it has been turned inward. Not surprisingly, the suicide rate is much higher among runaways, teens in jail, and juvenile delinquents. Don't fear this anger! Allow the adolescent to express it; mobilize the anger rather than permitting it to remain festering inside, growing increasingly poisonous.

Once she believes his version of the relationship—that he is "good" and she is "bad," that he is "right" and she is "wrong," that her deficiencies are the cause of his blow-ups, and that he is acting this way only because he is trying to help her become a better person—she has stepped into a dangerous twilight zone of distorted perceptions. Accepting his version of reality means she must give up hers. It's Alice in Wonderland time. She may still know that she is being mistreated, but she invents "good reasons" to explain it away. What makes this transition so destructive to her is that she actually has begun to help him to abuse her. She suspends her own good judgement, joins him in his persecution of her, and finds explanations to justify his behavior.

The danger of tolerating any hurtful behavior is that it can all too quickly become the norm. If we allow ourselves to "get away" with anything we know to be destructive - such as slapping a child or partner in the face - without taking responsibility for the gravity of what we have done, we are that much more likely to minimize the offense: "I may have overreacted, but she's got to learn not to set me off like that." . . . "because the partner is perceived as the cause of the violence, the perpetrator feels justified in using it." Once the actions are justified, they are more likely to be repeated. It is also important to remember that, in most relationships, both parties engage in some form of the abuses listed above. Angry remarks or mildly aggressive actions - insulting someone's intelligence, throwing a plate of food against the wall - can both provoke and be used to justify retaliatory actions that may be more dangerous, like pushing and shoving someone down the stairs. On the other hand, one sort of abuse does not necessarily lead to another. Rather, whether or not the violence escalates depends on the person committing it.

Every morning I wake up to have the same hope, that mankind had survived its own greed, its own desire to self-destruct, its own monopoly to destroy the environment regardless of the consequences, its own religious and ideological dogma that kept it in turmoil since inception….I listen to the morning news to find out that nothing had changed, and realize more certainly that we are living on a barrowed time, and sometime in the future, if we wake up there will be fewer and fewer of us who will wonder but never learn what went wrong….this is human history, keep repeating itself in destruction, greed and chaos, at the best of times it is organized chaos….and at the worst of time it is mayhem, all to serve the few….who leaves crumbs for us to continue the cycle…

Inanna was the only Mesopotamian deity whose character so prominently included contradictions... In her actions, Inanna exhibits both benevolent light and threatening dark. Her violence and destructiveness go beyond the boundaries of tolerable human behavior. She carries light and dark to their extremes. Inanna's immense popularity in antiquity must be related in part to the fact that she could reflect not only the best in human nature, but she could also exhibit what is abhorrent, unpleasant, dirty, sinful, terrifying, abnormal, perverse, obsessive, murderous, mad and violent. Inanna is a mirror of what Jung called ¨the abysmal contracictions of human nature.¨ She shows us our oppositions in sharp relief. She is a divine manifestation of the ultimate conjunction of opposites, displaying for humankind its contradictory nature.

An important viewpoint in classifying games is this: Is the sum of all payments received by all players (at the end of the game) always zero; or is this not the case? If it is zero, then one can say that the players pay only to each other, and that no production or destruction of goods is involved. All games which are actually played for entertainment are of this type. But the economically significant schemes are most essentially not such. There the sum of all payments, the total social product, will in general not be zero, and not even constant. I.e., it will depend on the behavior of the players—the participants in the social economy. This distinction was already mentioned in 4.2.1., particularly in footnote 2, p. 34. We shall call games of the first-mentioned type zero-sum games, and those of the latter type non-zero-sum games.

Yet already their destruction begins. It comes upon them gradually, in little ways. Bit by bit their belief in themselves erodes. A growing cynicism pervades their lives. Small acts of kindness and charity are abandoned as pointless and somehow indicative of weakness. Little failures of behavior lead to bigger ones. It is not enough to ignore the discourtesies of others; discourtesies must be repaid in kind. Men are intolerant and judgmental. They are without grace. If one man proclaims that God has spoken to him, another quickly proclaims that his God is false. If the homeless cannot find shelter, then surely they are to blame for their condition. If the poor do not have jobs, then surely it is because they will not work. If sickness strikes down those whose lifestyle differs from our own, then surely they have brought it on themselves.

Eton and Oxford set a certain stamp upon a man’s mind, just as a Jesuit College does. It can hardly be said that Eton and Oxford have a conscious purpose, but they have a purpose which is none the less strong and effective for not being formulated. In almost all who have been through them they produce a worship of “good form,” which is as destructive to life and thought as the medieval Church. “Good form” is quite compatiblewith a superficial open-mindedness, a readiness to hear all sides, and a certain urbanity towards opponents. But it is not compatible with fundamental open-mindedness, or with any inward readiness to give weight to the other side. Its essence is the assumption that what is most important is a certain kind of behavior, a behavior which minimizes friction between equals and delicately impresses inferiors with a conviction of their own crudity.

The more I know the human being, the more I cling to animal nature. Mention poem 2013 Since its beginnings, the human being has been a complex and enigmatic being, capable of great achievements and feats, and at the same time, of the most cruel and vile acts. There is no doubt that our species is one of the most evolved and sophisticated of the planet, but at what cost? What is behind our apparent superiority? When we observe human behavior, we can see that it hides a mixture of animal instincts and rational thoughts. Although human beings take pride in our ability for critical thinking and reflection, We are also emotional, impulsive and visceral beings. And it is precisely this duality that makes us so different from animals. that cohabit this planet with us. It is often difficult for us to understand the nature of animals, because we cannot access their internal world. However, what we can say is that animals are transparent beings, His actions are always a consequence of his instincts, not from premeditated thoughts or complex emotions. For animals, living is following their instinct, something that allows them to act quickly and effectively in situations of danger or threat. Animals are beings in balance with their environment, They don't feel the need to constantly change, nor to think beyond the here and now. On the other hand, we have human beings, beings capable of conceiving abstract thoughts, create works of art, invent technologies and, at the same time, of destroying the environment, oppressing other human beings and commit acts of extreme cruelty. The human being is a complex, contradictory being, capable of loving and hating, forgiving and punishing, healing and destroying. We are creatures of light and darkness, in a constant search for balance between both parties. But what is behind our duality as human beings? Why are we capable of the worst acts of destruction and cruelty? If we look back at the history of humanity, we can see that our genetic patterns are impregnated of violence, war and resentment. History has been a constant parade of wars and conflicts, each one more brutal than the last. This being the only way in which many cultures they have found to impose their ideas or consolidate power. It is precisely here that the idea is born that the creators of humanity They have intoxicated us with the yoke of evil. Who are these forgers? They are the same societies, cultures, religions, policies, which have used violence, war and resentment as a tool to impose their desires and ideals on others. This is the curse that we have dragged like chains since long ago, that of a genetic pattern that drags us towards violence and war. It is true that, as human beings, we can choose our own paths, our own decisions, and not fall into the trap of cruelty and evil. However, it is also true that we carry within us an ancestral burden that is difficult to overcome. What will the most advanced civilizations in the universe think of us? Will we be violent and hateful beings for them? Or will we be beings like animals, in balance with our environment? The answer is not easy, since it remains an unknown. if we are able to overcome our animal instincts and embrace only the best of our humanity. The key to this lies in becoming aware of our own duality, to recognize that we carry both light and darkness within us, and make a real effort to choose the best of ourselves, instead of letting ourselves be carried away by our internal evil.

Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind. Their frustration makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them dominant again. A strongman downplays the real conditions that have created their problems and tells them that the only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power. Such leaders undermine existing power structures, and as they collapse, people previously apathetic about politics turn into activists, not necessarily expecting a better life, but seeing themselves as heroes reclaiming the country. Leaders don’t try to persuade people to support real solutions, but instead reinforce their followers’ fantasy self-image and organize them into a mass movement. Once people internalize their leader’s propaganda, it doesn’t matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because it has become central to their identity. As a strongman becomes more and more destructive, followers’ loyalty only increases. Having begun to treat their perceived enemies badly, they need to believe their victims deserve it. Turning against the leader who inspired such behavior would mean admitting they had been wrong and that they, not their enemies, are evil. This, they cannot do.

We have no obligation to endure or enable certain types of certain toxic relationships. The Christian ethic muddies these waters because we attach the concept of long-suffering to these damaging connections. We prioritize proximity over health, neglecting good boundaries and adopting a Savior role for which we are ill-equipped. Who else we'll deal with her?, we say. Meanwhile, neither of you moves towards spiritual growth. She continues toxic patterns and you spiral in frustration, resentment and fatigue. Come near, dear one, and listen. You are not responsible for the spiritual health of everyone around you. Nor must you weather the recalcitrant behavior of others. It is neither kind nor gracious to enable. We do no favors for an unhealthy friend by silently enduring forever. Watching someone create chaos without accountability is not noble. You won't answer for the destructive habits of an unsafe person. You have a limited amount of time and energy and must steward it well. There is a time to stay the course and a time to walk away. There's a tipping point when the effort becomes useless, exhausting beyond measure. You can't pour antidote into poison forever and expect it to transform into something safe, something healthy. In some cases, poison is poison and the only sane response is to quit drinking it. This requires honest self evaluation, wise counselors, the close leadership of the Holy Spirit, and a sober assessment of reality. Ask, is the juice worth the squeeze here. And, sometimes, it is. You might discover signs of possibility through the efforts, or there may be necessary work left and it's too soon to assess. But when an endless amount of blood, sweat and tears leaves a relationship unhealthy, when there is virtually no redemption, when red flags are frantically waved for too long, sometimes the healthiest response is to walk away. When we are locked in a toxic relationship, spiritual pollution can murder everything tender and Christ-like in us. And a watching world doesn't always witness those private kill shots. Unhealthy relationships can destroy our hope, optimism, gentleness. We can lose our heart and lose our way while pouring endless energy into an abyss that has no bottom. There is a time to put redemption in the hands of God and walk away before destroying your spirit with futile diligence.

The human race has the capacity to render itself extinct unless alternatives are found to the patterns of intraspecific warfare that have dominated civilized history. Ours has long been a predatory species. Living, for humans, depends upon the ability to kill as clearly as it does for lions or wolves. But lions and wolves, like almost all predatory species, normally limit their killing to prey animals, and they are equipped with elaborate ritual precautions to prevent the destruction of their own kind. Humans appear to be unique among predators in their enthusiasm to destroy members of their own species. Perhaps this unusual behavior can be attributed to some genetic deficiency which may lead humans ultimately to join the rest of nature's failures in the biological graveyard of extinction. Or perhaps our willingness to kill ourselves, like so many of our other problems, is something we have devised by misusing our enlarged brains.

In my experience, the basis of almost all psychological problems is an unsatisfactory relation to one's urge to individuality. And the healing process often involves an acceptance of what is commonly called selfish, power-seeking or autoerotic. The majority of patients in psychotherapy need to learn how to be more effectively selfsh and more effective in the use of their own personal power; they need to accept responsibility for the fact of being centers of power and effectiveness. So-called selfish or egocentric behavior which expresses itself in demands made on others is not effective conscious self-centeredness or conscious individuality. We demand from others only what we fail to give ourselves. If we have insufficient self-love or self-prestige, our need expresses itself unconsciously by coercive tactics toward others. And often the coercion occurs under the guise of virtue, love, or altruism. Such unconscious selfishness is ineffectual and destructive to oneself and others. It fails to achieve its purpose because it is blind, without awareness of itself. What is required is not the extirpation of selfishness, which is impossible but rather that it be wedded to consciousness and thus becomes effective. All the facts of biology and psychology teach us that every individual unit of life is self-centered to the core. The only varying factor is the degree of consciousness which accompanies that fact.

The only thing secretive about secret societies is the fear that the arrogant inside these groups have of sharing the little they know, because they often don't even understand their own books and struggle with little. Their real fear is that someone may come along, understand everything better and faster than they do and before they can, and then, by default, lead them to exclusion by ignorance. On the other hand, their fear blinds them from knowing more and identifying those who can take them to a higher level, the same individuals that they clame to be waiting for and that only appear every couple of hundred years or thousand. This paradox is what leads their groups to extinction by self-imposed destructive behavior or to practices that are in complete contradiction towards what their founder or founders intended. As a matter of fact, the more this reality manifests before our eyes, the easier it is to find quotes in books written by founders of such groups in complete contradiction with what you hear everyone inside these groups speaking. What I’m really saying here is that Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Scientology, and many other groups out there, have long lost their entitlement to ownership of their own name, and as much as Christianity is today more in tune to an evil God than a benevolent one. Their real intention, even if manifested mostly at a subconscious level, is to keep away anyone that contradicts what they want to see, rather than what they should be seeing. Ironically, they are doing exactly what was done unto them by the Inquisition, the Nazis, the Egyptians, and any other group that once opposed them. They are their own enemy. And when their Jesus comes, they neglect him, ridicule him, ignore him and even conspire against him. They are the greatest shame of their own ancestors. They are the poison they fear. They are the real enemy of their own group.

If you want to know why the human primate behaves the way it does, I can easily explain: 1. human life span 2. human physiology at each stage of life="hormones" 3. our current state of evolution (still primitive in many ways). Humans are the only species on earth aware of their own deaths. They aren't here for long so they are very concerned with the quality of their lives more so than the quality of the lives that will come after them. It is our life spans that trap us, make us truly incapable of long-term decisions which would require sacrifice we as a species are not willing to make. Hormones: at each life stage, we are influenced heavily by hormones-raging levels in the young male or not, descending in the middle aged man or woman. Hormones also influence our behavior. Lastly, we are not out of the oven yet as far as evolution goes, still prone to settle our differences through primitive means--greed and violence. Here is a thought question for you-how would things differ if the average human could expect to live 200 years instead of 70+-?

Before I got serious about being healthy, I gave in to my urge for bread, especially freshly made bread dripping in butter. Yet when I fell in love with my brain, I realized I love being healthy, having energy and cognitive clarity, and being able to get into the same size jeans I wore in high school much more than the momentary pleasure of unhealthy food. The new benefits were so much better than the old ones. I now see free bread as a “weapon of mass destruction,” and I feel badly when I give in to a behavior that does not serve my health.

People exercise the freedom to present themselves from a vast array of precepts. The modern human mind can engage in reflective thought and selectively determine how to organize the elements of perception. We can consciously elect to depart from stereotypical behavior and transcend the heretofore-established biological behavioral preferences. People can elect to hold prejudices or not, can make rational or irrational decisions to engage in war or not, and can take deliberate steps to arrest destruction of the ecosystem or not. Holding ourselves in check by placing a brake upon the human propensity to strike out in instinctual behavior is a distinct human quality. Restraint from instant gratification of strong impulses represents a unique human behavior trait. By intentionally refraining from committing an instinctual action, humankind asserts its sovereignty from its biological constitution. Unbound from the limitations of its biological nature, a person can employ the mind to devise alternative behavioral choices and the results of numerous behavioral choices culminate to provide a person with a sophisticated definition of the self.

If complex behavior such as addiction is a chronic and relapsing brain disease (and it is complex, because it involves not just taking the addictive substance, but finding it), no one should be surprised if addicts awaited their salvation by means of a magic bullet. To imply that there is or could be such a magic bullet is, in effect, to compound the problem for addicts; for, already given to much self-deception, it is just what they want to hear so that they can continue their self-destruction with a clear conscience and that self-righteousness that comes nowadays with the awareness of being a victim – the victim of a chronic, relapsing brain disease, as revealed by brain scans. Those who tend them, of course, also need them to be victims. This is not just a matter of financial interest: seeing victims everywhere you look is the zeitgeist, it is what gives people license to behave as they like while feeling virtuous. Virtue is not manifested in one’s behavior, always so difficult and tedious to control, but in one’s attitude toward victims. This view of virtue is both sentimental and unfeeling, cloying and brutal: for it implies that those who are not victims are not worthy of our sympathy or understanding, only of our denunciation.

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

We suffer many dire consequences when we are unwilling to feel. The price of emotional repression is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves many of us depressed and taciturn. Perpetually enervated, more and more of us sink into the apathy and ennui of the “seen that - been there - done that” syndrome. When this occurs, we forfeit our destiny of growing into the vitally expressive and life-celebratory beings we were born to be. Our war on feelings forces our emotions to turn against us. Much of our unnecessary suffering is caused by the ghosts of our murdered emotions wafting into consciousness and haunting us as hurtful thinking. Denied emotions taint our thoughts with fearful worry, dour self-doubt, and angry self-criticism. We also risk “acting out” our emotions unconsciously when we are unwilling to feel them. Sarcasm, criticality, habitual lateness, and “forgotten” commitments are common unconscious expressions of anger. Ironically, these passive-aggressive behaviors leave us in even greater emotional pain because they cause others to distrust and dislike us. The epidemics of overeating, over-medicating, and overworking that plague America are also rooted in our mass retreat from feeling. When we are feeling-phobic, we are compelled to distract ourselves from our emotions with mood-altering substances, workaholism or constant busyness. Many of us, as Anne Wilson Schaef points out in When Society Becomes An Addict, are addicted to at least one self-destructive substance or process.

[I]t's a con, at children's expense. When self-esteem advocates tell us to flatter the young about their views, in reality they ask adults to abandon the difficult task of disciplining them. Emphasizing that adults must 'express unconditional positive regard and acceptance for children' effectively destroys the inter-generational duty of passing on knowledge, setting boundaries for behavior and the broader task of socialization. It is not good for children and can mean adults indulging even the most destructive aspects of young people's behavior. In 2013, a self-harming pupil at Unsted Park School in Godalming, Surrey was given a disposable safety razor to slash himself with, supervised by a teacher. A spokeswoman from selfharm.co.uk justified this irresponsible collapse of adult judgement using the mantras of pupil voice and self-esteem: 'The best way to help is to listen without judging, accept that the recovery process may take a while and avoid "taking away" the self-harm' because 'self-harm can be about control, so it's important that the young person in the center feels in control of the steps taken to help them'. That's an extreme case but it touches on how focusing on the schoolchild's self-esteem can create the impression that the world should circle around pupils' desires. This in turn puts pressure on adults to tip-toe around young people's sensitivities and to accede to their opinions. Combined with student voice orthodoxies, this can lead to the peculiar diktat that teachers express respect for pupils' views, however childish or even poisonous.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'If you're so smart, why ain't You rich? ' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child's hand-glued to a lollipop stick and, flying from the cash register. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German prisons ceases to be a mystery. Every other army in history, prosperous or not, has attempted to clothe even its lowliest soldiers so as to make them impressive to themselves and others as stylish experts in drinking and copulation and looting and sudden death. The American Army, however, sends its enlisted men out to fight and die in a modified business suit quite evidently made for another man, a sterilized but unpressed gift from a nose-holding charity which passes out clothing to drunks in the slums. When a dashingly-clad officer addresses such a frumpishly dressed bum, he scolds him, as an officer in an army must. But the officer's contempt is not, as in 'other armies, avuncular theatricality. It is a genuine expression of hatred for the poor, who have no one to blame for their misery but themselves. A prison administrator dealing with captured American enlisted men for the first time should be warned: Expect no brotherly love, even between brothers. There will be no cohesion between the individuals. Each will be a sulky child who often wishes he were dead.

All of us have Dragons from the Past influencing our present feelings and actions.”[1] Unless you recognize and tame them, and consciously calm and protect your amygdala from overfiring, these dragons will haunt your unconscious mind and drive emotional pain for the rest of your life. What blows from an ember, or a small action of another, can turn into a destructive fire of anxiety and rage. After learning from Dr. May, I started using this concept with my patients, including Jimmy. Over time I identified 13 Dragons from the Past, including their origins, triggers that make them overpowering, and how they cause us to react. All of us have more than one Dragon from the Past driving our behavior, and they are always interacting with the Dragons from the Past of others, causing both internal and external battles—a modern-day Game of Thrones. All of us have primary and secondary dragons driving our behavior. Primary ones are present most of the time, while secondary ones come out during times of stress, such as the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020. You’ll learn which ones apply to you. (You can also take the Hidden Dragons quiz at KnowYourDragons.com.)

What, then, is addiction? In the words of a consensus statement by addiction experts in 2001, addiction is a “chronic neurobiological disease… characterized by behaviors that include one or more of the following: impaired control over drug use, compulsive use, continued use despite harm, and craving.” The key features of substance addiction are the use of drugs or alcohol despite negative consequences, and relapse. I’ve heard some people shrug off their addictive tendencies by saying, for example, “I can’t be an alcoholic. I don’t drink that much…” or “I only drink at certain times.” The issue is not the quantity or even the frequency, but the impact. “An addict continues to use a drug when evidence strongly demonstrates the drug is doing significant harm…. If users show the pattern of preoccupation and compulsive use repeatedly over time with relapse, addiction can be identified.” Helpful as such definitions are, we have to take a broader view to understand addiction fully. There is a fundamental addiction process that can express itself in many ways, through many different habits. The use of substances like heroin, cocaine, nicotine and alcohol are only the most obvious examples, the most laden with the risk of physiological and medical consequences. Many behavioural, nonsubstance addictions can also be highly destructive to physical health, psychological balance, and personal and social relationships. Addiction is any repeated behaviour, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others. Addiction involves: 1. compulsive engagement with the behaviour, a preoccupation with it; 2. impaired control over the behaviour; 3. persistence or relapse, despite evidence of harm; and 4. dissatisfaction, irritability or intense craving when the object — be it a drug, activity or other goal — is not immediately available. Compulsion, impaired control, persistence, irritability, relapse and craving — these are the hallmarks of addiction — any addiction. Not all harmful compulsions are addictions, though: an obsessive-compulsive, for example, also has impaired control and persists in a ritualized and psychologically debilitating behaviour such as, say, repeated hand washing. The difference is that he has no craving for it and, unlike the addict, he gets no kick out of his compulsion. How does the addict know she has impaired control? Because she doesn’t stop the behaviour in spite of its ill effects. She makes promises to herself or others to quit, but despite pain, peril and promises, she keeps relapsing. There are exceptions, of course. Some addicts never recognize the harm their behaviours cause and never form resolutions to end them. They stay in denial and rationalization. Others openly accept the risk, resolving to live and die “my way.

Although Dyatlov, Shift Foreman Akimov, and Senior Reactor Control Engineer Toptunov had violated some operating regulations, they were ignorant of the deadly failing of the RBMK-1000 that meant that insertion of the control rods, instead of shutting down the reactor at the end of the test, could initiate a runaway chain reaction. Every one of the investigators behind the report now agreed that the fatal power surge that destroyed the reactor had begun with the entry of the rods into its core. ‘Thus the Chrnobyl accident comes within the standard pattern of most severe accidents in the world. It begins with an accumulation of small breaches of the regulations. … These produce a set of undesirable properties and occurrences that, when taken separately, do not seem to be particularly dangerous, but finally an initiating event occurs that, in this particular case, was the subjective actions of the personnel that allowed the potentially destructive and dangerous qualities of the reactor to be released.’ IAEA experts revealed at last the true magnitude of the technical cover-up surrounding the causes of the disaster: the long history of previous RBMK accidents, the dangerous design of the reactor, its instability, and the way its operators had been misled about its behavior. In dense scientific detail, it described the inherent problems of the positive void coefficient and the fatal consequences of the control rod ‘tip’ effect. (pp. 347-348)

Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.

Now, with all seven of these chakras revolving in the right direction with no blockages whatsoever, your kundalini would not be able to help itself from rising into that state of bliss, which it perceives above. Ultimately then, as one gets ready for kundalini awakening, the goal is to help those chakras clear, open, and align. Kundalini will respond with the greatest ease of motion accomplished and will demonstrate how well it knows what to do. As you begin to work through these chakras blockages or energetic reversals, you may find that those struggles look something like this. Blockages for the root chakra may look like low energy, general fear, persistent exhaustion, identity crisis, feeling isolated from the environment, eating disorders, general lack or erratic appetite, blatant materialism, difficulty saving money, or overall constant health problems. For the sacral chakra, blockages or reversals may look like lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, low or no motivation, low or no sexual appetite, feelings of insignificance, feelings of being unloved, feelings of being unaccepted, feelings of being outcasted, inability to care for oneself or persistent and recurrent problems of relationship with one's intimate partners. Blockages may look like identity crises or deficits for the solar plexus chakra, low self-esteem, low or no self-esteem, digestive problems, food intolerance, poor motivation, persistent weakness, constant nausea, anxiety disorders, liver disorder or disease, repeated illnesses, loss of core strength, lack of overall energy, recurrent depression with little relief, feelings of betrayal, For the chakra of the heart, reversals and blockages may seem like the inability to love oneself or others, the inability to put others first, the inability to put oneself first, the inability to overcome a problem ex, constant grudges, confidence issues, social anxiety or intense shyness, the failure to express emotions in a healthy way, problems of commitment, constant procrastination, intense anxiety For the throat chakra, blockages might seem like oversharing, inability to speak truthfully, failure to communicate with others, severe laryngitis, sore throats, respiratory or airway constraints, asthma, anemia, excessive exhaustion, inability to find the right words, paralyzing fear of confusion, nervousness in public situations, sometimes extreme dizziness, physical submissiveness, verba. For the third eye chakra, blockages or reversals might seem like a lack of direction in life, increasingly intense feelings of boredom or stagnation, migraines, insomnia, eye or vision problems, depression, high blood pressure, inability to remember one's dreams, constant and jarring flashbacks, closed-mindedness, fear, history of mental disorders, and history of addiction. For the crown chakra, blockages may look like feelings of envy, extreme sadness, need for superiority over others, self-destructive behaviors, history of addiction, generally harmful habits, dissociations from the physical plane, inability to make even the easiest decisions, persistent exhaustion, terrible migraines, hair loss, anemia, cerebral confusion, poor mental control, lack of intellect.

You have to eat the shit," he repeated over and over during one of our first sessions. He had the tone and zeal of a boxing trainer. "Shit tastes good!" "What does that even mean?" I chuckled. "Don't laugh," he said sternly. Marshall told me that my job wasn't to cook food. It wasn't about looking at numbers or commanding people, either. My company would live or die based on my capacity to eat shit and like it. "I am going to watch you eat as many bowls of shit as our time will allow," he said. We had plenty of time. Eating shit meant listening. Eating shit meant acknowledging my errors and shortcomings. Eating shit meant facing confrontations that made me uncomfortable. Eating shit meant putting my cell phone away when someone was talking to me. Eating shit meant not fleeing. Eating shit meant being grateful. Eating shit meant controlling myself when people fell short of expectations. Eating shit meant putting others before myself. This last detail was important. With Dr. Eliot, I got away with describing my MO as self-destructive--my managerial tendencies were harmful, but only to me. Now, according to Marshall, I was using that assessment as cover for my poor behavior. In my mind, all the people who had left Momofuku were leaving me. When they failed at their jobs, they were betraying me. Marshall pointed out the ugly truth that this belied. I believed that the people at Momofuku were there to serve me. I had always wielded my dedication to Momofuku with great arrogance. Friendships could crumble, hearts could break, cooks could fall to their knees and cry: all collateral damage in the noble pursuit of bringing good food to more people. I believed that I was Momofuku and that everything I did was for Momofuku. Therefore, whatever was good for me was good for Momofuku.