Are You Tired of Being A Vicitim?

Raging Bully

I remember while growing up in the 60′s that I was a constant target of bullying. I was small and just wanted to be a kid like everyone else, but there were always those people who had to try to control and victimize. It was not something that I wanted, but the day I became frustrated enough about being bullied and decided that I was not going to be pushed anymore, that was the day that I began to quit being a victim. Unfortunately, that was not the last bully that I faced, I have discovered that they are there everywhere that you go. The tragedy is that people in the workplace, in families, churches, and social relationships are being bullied everyday: they have accepted that as a way of life that they feel no escape from. The best thing that you can arm yourself with is not a gun or knife, not even a body-guard, but with understanding about the behaviors of bullies and how people are trapped into victimization.

They Are Abusers

The violence (not only physical) committed by a serial bully is almost entirely psychological, for psychological violence leaves no scars and no physical evidence. Most commonly, the violence takes the form of verbal abuse and emotional abuse including trivial nit-picking criticism, constant fault-finding combined with simultaneous refusal to recognize, value, acknowledge and praise. Manipulation, isolation and exclusion are other favorite tactics, as is feigning victim-hood or persecution, especially when held accountable.

They Are Controllers

The objectives of serial bullies are Power, Control, Domination and Subjugation.  These are achieved by a number of means including emotional dis-empowerment, stimulating excessive levels of fear, shame, embarrassment and guilt, manipulation (especially of emotions and perception), ritual humiliation, and constant denial. When you live with someone who is constantly denying what they said or did a day ago, or an hour ago, or even a minute ago, it drives you crazy. When the symptoms of injury to health start to become apparent, the bully will tell others you have a “mental health problem” and try to make you feel guilt about your response. However, you may be mad, but this is not mad-insane, this is mad angry.

Control is a common indicator of the serial bully.  Control of finances, control of movements, control over choice of friends, control of the right to work, control over what to think, and so on is the central motivation of bullies. Consequently,  all efforts to control are designed to dis-empower the victim and empower the bully.

They Are Dividers

A favorite tactic of the bully in the family is to set people against each other. The benefits to the bully are that:

• The bully gains a great deal of gratification (a perverse form of satisfaction) from encouraging and provoking argument, quarreling and hostility, and then from watching others engage in adversarial interaction and destructive conflict.
• The ensuing conflict ensures that people’s attention is distracted and diverted away from the cause of the conflict.

Bullies within the family, especially female bullies, are masters (mistresses) of manipulation and are fond of manipulating people through their emotions (e.g. guilt) and through their beliefs, attitudes and perceptions. Bullies see any form of vulnerability as an opportunity for manipulation, and are especially prone to exploiting those who are most emotionally needy. Elderly relatives, those with infirmity, illness, those with the greatest vulnerability, or those who are emotionally needy or behaviorally immature family members are likely to be favorite targets for exploitation.

The family bully encourages and manipulates family members and others to lie, act dishonorably and dishonestly, withhold information, spread misinformation, and to punish the target for alleged infractions, i.e., the family members become the bully’s unwitting (and sometimes witting) instruments of harassment.

They Are Manipulators

Bullies are adept at distorting peoples’ perceptions with intent to engender a negative view of their target in the minds of family members, neighbors, friends and people in positions of leadership and authority; this is achieved through undermining, the creation of doubts and suspicions, and the sharing of false concerns, etc. This intentional poisoning of people’s minds is difficult to counter; however, explaining the game in a calm articulate manner helps people to see through the mask of deceit and to understand how and why they are being used as pawns.

They Are Deceivers Who Want To Be Your Confidant

The bully may try to establish an exclusive relationship (based on apparent trust and confidence) with one family member, such that, they (the bully) are seen as the sole reliable source of information. This may be achieved by portraying the target (and certain other family members) as irresponsible, unstable, undependable, uncaring, unreliable, and untrustworthy.  Perhaps by the constant highlighting, using distortion and fabrication, reminders of alleged failures, breaches of trust, and lack of reliability, etc. This process is reinforced by inclusion of the occasional piece of juicy gossip about the target’s alleged misdemeanors or untrustworthiness in respect of relationships and communication with people. Mostly, this is psychological projection of the bullies failures and inadequecies.

The objective is to manipulate the family member’s perceptions and create a dependency, so that the family member comes to rely exclusively on the bully and see, the bully, as the sole source of reliable information whilst distrusting everyone else. Any person who is capable of exposing and breaking the dependency is targeted with venom and will find their name blackened at every opportunity.

They Are Attention Seekers and You Are Their Audience

When close to being outwitted and exposed, the bully feigns victim hood and turns the focus on themselves.  This is another example of manipulating people through their emotion by invoking guilt, i.e., sympathy, feeling sorry, etc. Female serial bullies are especially partial to making themselves the center of attention by claiming to be the injured party whilst portraying their target as the villain of the alleged event. When the target tries to explain the game, they are immediately labeled “paranoid”.   Therefore, attention-seeking behavior is common with emotionally immature people trying to control others to feed their low sense of self worth by controlling their audience.

They Are Easy To Spot, but Usually Missed

The serial bully is easy to spot once you know what you are looking for: a Jekyll and Hyde nature, compulsive lying, manipulation (of emotions, perceptions, beliefs, etc), unpredictability, deception, denial, arrogance, narcissism, attention-seeking, etc., whilst always charming and plausible, especially when impressionable witnesses are present.

Serial bullies can be male or female –the main difference is that female bullies are more devious, more manipulative, more cunning, more sly, more psychological, more subtle, leave less evidence and will often bully with a smile. Female bullies will often manipulate a male into committing their violence for them. Male bullies tend to be less subtle, have a tendency towards physical aggression, and are generally less clever than female bullies.

The best response to a bully is to avoid conflict if you can, but arm yourself with information and then you can take your life back and quit living like a victim.

Related articles

• How To Get Rid of a Bully or Psychopath! (zendialogue.wordpress.com)
• Workplace bullying costs companies billions, wrecks victims’ health (smartsign.com)
• BULLYING HAS LONG-LASTING PSYCHOLOGICAL REPERCUSSIONS: DO something about it -punish the bully for a change! (euzicasa.wordpress.com)
• Bullying Harms Not Only Victims But Bullies Too (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• How to Prevent Kids Bullying (traintoread.com)
• Think about This: Can we really stop bullying? (tolerantpeople.com)
• Sharing respectfully: the fight against cyberbullying (smartsign.com)
• Freshman Speaks Out About Her Suicide Attempt; Blames Bullying (fox2now.com)
• Bullied Boy Dies (fox2now.com)
• A Word Gone Wrong (301d.wordpress.com)

Accused of Being a Borderline? When is it Personal and When is it Professional?

Published by the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM-IV-TR provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders.

While visiting on an out of state journey, I went outside on the back porch to talk while dinner was cooking.  As we sat in the sun and began to talk, a rather strange twist in the conversation occurred.  The conversation changed from generalities to a story about one of the people inside the house who had Borderline Personality Disorder.  As a listened, I was curious and perplexed about why a person I hardly knew was telling me about something so personal and so personally damaging to the other person.  The story was filled with vignettes and illustrations that created an illusion about erratic behavior to support the claims being made.  The accused person was described as such a difficult person to cope with, controlling, manipulative, passive aggressive and frustrating to deal with.  It all sounded very bizarre and out of character for this to be happening on the back porch.  As a result, this seemed even stranger as it went on to me because the two people bareley knew each other and had spent very little time together.

What I observed during the conversation was a person who was very convincing, impassioned, and had some reason to feel deeply enough to say these things to a perfect stranger, but I wondered what the real purpose in this conversation was?  As I listened, the personal feelings of the person telling the story unfolded through private and very personal details of experiences, but this missing link was why me and why now?  What really struck me as strange about the story was the there was little firsthand observation, just a lot of hearsay information from others people’s experiences spun into a conclusion.  Pondering the question of why, it seems that this conversation was an intentional to influence my perspective to match a reality created in the mind of someone who had a goal in mind.  Therefore, why this was happening was not abundantly clear at the moment, but I was determined to understand more about the actual issue beneath the words, accusations, and characterizations in this conversation.  Consequently, I suspected that there was more to the story that I needed to know to understand how to respond.  What was apparent was that there was a perception about the meaning of the frustration with relationship problems.  As a result, the problem had been labeled as Borderline Personality Disorder.  As the conversation proceeded, what I learned was that more than one person believed the label of Borderline Personality Disorder, which surprised me greatly.  Evidently, in the conversations between my new acquaintance and other family members they had apparently accepted opinion, as fact, without ever questioning the veracity, reasons, and justification for this accusation.  This seemed strange because, the person labeled BPD was a highly venerated and loved person.  It made me wonder how intelligent people suddenly accept such a report based without reasonable causes.

On the other hand, the person telling the story expressed honest concern and a personal frustration with personal interpretations of problems experienced.  While the story was expressed with such impassioned and convincing explanations, there seemed to be something more that looked like a personal agenda.  Apparently, the conclusion made was based upon a feeling of adequate knowledge about counseling practices and that symptoms described were consistent with Borderline Personality Disorder.  In fact, the person telling the story said, “It is Borderline”, referring to the person’s personal assessment.  The confusion came when I was listening and it seemed as if everything that was said might be a reasonable explanation.  However, there was nothing concrete to base the opinion upon except their personal speculation.

What I heard was a strong feeling of frustration that was labeled without a professional diagnosis   from someone personally involved being influenced by their own state of mind, personal issues, and a some need to discredit another person with innocuous charges.  Apparently, in the situation described there were some behavior anomalies not understood clearly and people who did not have the maturity or patience to think through reasonably.  As a result, family members talked about this freely amongst themselves and the person labeled, had a life-altering label hung over their head by people unwilling to engage in a healthy discussion with the person directly.  Therefore, the innuendo,  accusation, and labeling resulted in an unfounded characterization of the individual by people who had no expertise, no diagnostics, or professional advice. Consequently, impatience, intolerance, and difficulty with life experience resulted in people who were critical and unwilling to try to understand better so they just accepted an irrational opinion.

I walked away from the experience wondering how people who are constantly telling each other how much they love each other in public could behave in such a coercive way toward someone they publicly embraced in private.  My immediate observation was personal confusion because I did not see what I was being told as being real.  On the other hand, what I witnessed was systemic behaviors that demonstrated unhealthy ways of managing life.  In addition, what I saw people ready to easily dismiss a person by labeling them with an easy tag to explain away, invalidate, criticize, and destroy individual credibility on the altar of self-interest and selfish behavior.  Therefore, when self-interest disables people from being capable of understanding life events that might require them to think or reserve diagnosis for someone qualified what behaviors actually were indicating, the low road of self-interest chosen.  Reasonable people do sometimes do unreasonable things, but this made me wonder why the people involved in this story did not talk to the person individually and suggest a visit to a practitioner to gain better understanding?

An important question that I left the discussion with is what should be done when it appears a family member has unusual or strange behaviors that may be interpreted as Borderline Personality Disorder.  Obviously, the place to begin is not to make spurious, unfounded, or unprofessional accusations because others do odd things that irritate us personally.  What I learned from this situation was that the storyteller told me more information about their personal issues than they did about the other person.  Indeed, it is easy to project personal frustration about life on someone else, when we are overtaxed and feeling anxiety because life experiences do not meet our personal expectations.  In fact, what we usually dislike in others is what we most dislike about ourselves.  When things like this happen, something to consider is that transference may be at work and we are vicariously trying to resolve something that is out of kilter in our own life through fault finding in others.  It is a way of unconsciously saying there is something in my own life that I need fixed. So, when we suspect that Borderline Personality is an issue in someone that is a part of our lives what should be done?

A place to begin is to keep your suspicions to yourself and rely on professionals trained to diagnose, licensed to treat, and not personally involved.  This will provide quantitative data based information that correlates with evidence based-theory to inform.  Persons who are personally or emotionally involved with people who may have mental health issues should never take upon themselves to diagnose.  When casual inference or accusations are made, there is the danger of damaging a person or triggering a “acting in” incident that permanently damages a person or that can be fatal.  Information presently understood about Borderline Personality Disorder is that diagnosis is not a simple process, even from seasoned psychiatrists’ or therapists, because BPD is grouped within a cluster of personality disorders that are very similar in some ways.  For many Borderlines, a common misdiagnosis Borderline Personality Disorder occurs by associating symptoms of the BPD with Bi-Polar disorder.  Therefore, diagnosis requires in depth studies of symptoms and behaviors to determine whether they are a personality disorder or a metal heath condition that mimics symptoms that can be easily confused.  Therefore, diagnosing should not be performed by curious or interested parties, but should be left to people who are capable, ethical, and professional.  An important point to address is that people with mental health disorders, mood swings, or a family systems dysfunction are not bad people, they simply people who simply have a need for help in areas of deficiency in ways to improve health and functionality.  Also, consider this that personality disorders are not a personal flaw, but they are personality disorders.  Personality disorders have biological roots and demonstrate unique cognitive-behavioral patterns that devastate families, relationships, and life outcome; especially in family systems that label, minimize, criticize, and do not exercise patience and will not take time to understand.  Another important issue is that personality disorders are not a sign of weakness, it is not simply a reaction to a stressful time or event, it is a pattern of thinking, relating, and behaving that demonstrates symptomatic behaviors consistent with the particular disorder.  As a result, for those who seek treatment it is not uncommon for a therapist to see a patient for an extended period of time before making a formal diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder.  As a result, care should be exercised in labeling or diagnosing individuals without expertise.  When there is a personal involvement with the individual and we think they are having significant problems, diagnosis should be done by professionals who can offer objective observations.

The  DSM IV list the criteria for the most common presentation of  symptomatic patterns associated with a scientific criteria established through research about disorders.  Therefore the criteria establish a pattern to build a scientific metric to rate the level of the disorder for developing a treatment plan that is focused upon the individual and the level of the disorder. Therefore diagnosis of people should be done by professionals who use scientific data, research, and diagnostic criteria to assign a diagnostic code and create a plan for treatment. When there is a question, the appropriate response is to keep your opinions to yourself and seek the help of medical-psychological professionals who are equipped to provide healthy solutions.

People with Mental Health issues Can be Hazardous to Your own Mental Health and Functionality in Life.

Another reason for seeking a mental health professionals assistance is when we suspect there is a real problem that needs more than what we can give.  The truth is that no one lives in a vacuum and mental health has a systemic effect upon those whose lives intersect in relationships, family, or work.  Certainly, other people’s problems and behaviors do affect us in an organic ways within a social or family system.  A good example is that living in a family where there is ongoing, unmanaged, or untreated mental health problems makes you feel shame, like you are crazy, or trapped in a never ending cycle.  The example given in this article effectively damaged a family relationship because irresponsible and uninformed responses were acted upon with no concern for the effect and no responsibility was taken for the actions. The truth that stands out is that when people do not live and respond in healthy functional ways there is a systemic effect.  When we live with people with personality disorders or serious mental health issues, every individual is being affected by the process of what is happening every time live intersects.  Having an awareness of what is occurring does impact lived experience by disabling functionality that is essential to maintaining balanced, congenial ways of relating.  As a result, the storyteller and the collaboration others who made foolish and irresponsible comments without consideration resulted in a permanently damaged relationship matrix that severed ability for a functional way of engaging in healthy relationships.  The lesson that I walked away from the conversation with is that people need to think about the effect of irresponsible statements  before make assumptions about other people that can damage their lives. In addition, people who claim to understand mental health issues should be willing to take responsibility for their actions in an ethical way, should willing to acknowledge mistakes that cause damage to others, and not simply act as if the event never happened.

The fact is that Borderline Personalities do create havoc and make life very difficult.  If you have ever questioned someone’s behavior or mental health, then maybe you should consult a professional.  Maybe you are wondering if you are living or working with a person who may be a Narcissistic or a Borderline Personality; then here is some helpful advice from Dr Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD  who is qualified to speak about the disorder.

If you are convinced that a person you love has Borderline or Narcissistic personality traits, how does it affect you?

Censoring your thoughts and feelings.  You edit it yourself because you’re afraid of her reactions. Swallowing the lump in your throat and your hurt and anger is easier than dealing with another fight or hurt feelings.  In fact, you may have stuffed your own emotions for so long that you no longer know what you think or feel.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

Everything is your fault.  You’re blamed for everything that goes wrong in the relationship and in general, even if it has no basis in reality.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

Constant criticism.  She criticizes nearly everything you do and nothing is ever good enough. No matter how hard you try, there’s no pleasing her or, if you do, it’s few and far between.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

Control freak.  She engages in manipulative behaviors, even lying, in an effort to control you. (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde.  One moment she’s kind and loving; the next she’s flipping out on you.  She becomes so vicious, you wonder if she’s the same person.  The first time it happens, you write it off.  Now, it’s a regular pattern of behavior that induces feelings of depression, anxiety, helplessness, and/or despair within you.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

Invalidation–Your feelings don’t count.  Your needs and feelings, if you’re brave enough to express them, are ignored, ridiculed, minimized and/or dismissed. You’re told that you’re too demanding, that there’s something wrong with you and that you need to be in therapy. You’re denied the right to your feelings.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD although; BPDs are slightly more capable of empathy than NPDs).

Confusion–Questioning your own sanity.  You’ve begun to wonder if you’re crazy because she puts down your point of view and/or denies things she says or does.  If you actually confide these things to a friend or family member, they don’t believe you because she usually behaves herself around other people.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

Distorted reality “But I didn’t say that.  I didn’t do that.”  Sure you did. Well, you did in her highly distorted version of reality.  Her accusations run the gamut from infidelity to cruelty to being un-supportive (even when you’re the one paying all the bills) to repressing her and holding her back.  It’s usually bull, which leaves you feeling defensive and misunderstood.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

Isolating yourself from friends and family.  You distance yourself from your loved ones and colleagues because of her erratic behavior, moodiness and instability.  You make excuses for her inexcusable behaviors to others in an effort to convince yourself that it’s normal.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

Walking on landmines.  One misstep and you could set her off. Some people refer to this as “walking on eggshells,” but eggs emit only a dull crunch when you step on them. Setting off a landmine is a far more descriptive simile.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

All good or all bad–splitting She places you on a pedestal only to knock it out from under your feet.  You’re the greatest thing since sliced bread one minute and the next minute, you’re the devil incarnate.  (This is a BPD trait).

Absence of boundaries.  Borderlines and Narcissists make the rules; they break the rules and they change the rules at will.  Just when you think you’ve figured out how to give her what she wants, she changes her expectations and demands without warning.  This sets you up for failure in no-win situations, leaving you feeling helpless and trapped.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

Emotional Abuse–You’re a loser, but don’t leave me. “You’re a jerk. You’re a creep.  You’re a bastard.  I love you.  Don’t leave me.”  When you finally reach the point where you just can’t take it anymore, the tears, bargaining and threats begin.  She insists she really does love you. She can’t live without you.  She promises to change.  She promises it will get better, but things never change and they never get better.

Passive Aggressive Manipulation. When that doesn’t work, she blames you and anything and anyone else she can think of, never once taking responsibility for her own behaviors. She may even resort to threats.  She threatens that you’ll never see the kids again.  Or she threatens to bad mouth you to your friends and family.  Then you are an emotional hostage.  (This is a trait of both BPD and NPD).

http://shrink4men.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/relationships-with-borderline-narcissistic-personality-women/

Related Articles

• Helping Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (psychcentral.com)
• Who’s Afraid of BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder)? (psychologytoday.com)
• Bipolar Disorder vs. Borderline Personality Disorder (everydayhealth.com)
• What I’m reading, two books re: BPD (cyndamoore.wordpress.com)
• An end to narcissistic personality disorder in DSM-5? (psychologytoday.com)
• Borderline personality disorder – All Information (umm.edu)
• Self-Help Techniques for Borderline Personality Disorder (brighthub.com)
• Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder (everydayhealth.com)
• Recent Media Coverage of Borderline Personality Disorder (psychologytoday.com)
• Narcissism in High-Functioning Individuals – Big Ego or Severe Disorder? (brainblogger.com)
• Insight into Treatments for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (brighthub.com)
• Living with a Person who has Narcissistic Personality Disorder (brighthub.com)
• Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Children (brighthub.com)
• The Borderline Chameleon: Changing Identities, Changing Diagnoses (psychologytoday.com)
• Do family members of people with borderline disorder have enough compassion? (psychologytoday.com)
• Borderlines I [wish I would] Have Known (psychologytoday.com)
• Defining Borderline Personality in DSM-V: Does the Shoe Fit? (psychologytoday.com)
• Can Children have Borderline Personaility Disorders? (brighthub.com)
• Books for Borderline Personality Disorder (brighthub.com)
• Borderline Personality Disorder: Creating a Safe Zone (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• Deception and the Borderline Personality What Could have Been? (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• Understanding Narcissistic Personality Disorder (brighthub.com)

Finding Balance in Unbalanced Relationships: A Discussion about Conflicting Emotions.

Think about relationships that you have with significant people in your life, what is the first word that comes to mind when you think of the people involved?  Is the word a reaction to how you feel about relationship or a descriptor of how interaction occurs between people?  Something to consider is whether others, in your world of relationships, would see your relationships in the same way that your mental image picture them.  If we are honest at this point, the reality is that everyone has problems at certain times in relationships and all families experience a certain level of malfunction at times.  One of the reasons is that we are feeling/emotive people and, at times,  our feelings distort perception of things occurring which results responses to perception that are charged with emotion and misinformation.  The result is reaction, unreasonable behaviors, conflict, and relationships that are fracture by misinformation, feelings out of control, and inappropriate responses.

It is difficult to use sound reasoning when events are charged with distorted emotional thoughts. 

Consider this question: Is it reasonable to believe someone who tells you that they love you, while at the same time that person in hateful, vindictive, and spiteful ways at the same time.  Obviously, behavior that is inconsistent with what a person tells to you is a strong indicator that something is out of sync in the relationship.  Unbalanced relationships are plagued with behavioral cues that tells the informed observer that this behavior indicates that relationships are unbalanced and lack appropriate boundaries.  This is especially true when there is love espoused, while at the same time the person is demonstrating toxic, damaging, or abusive behaviors toward the person who is the object of their love-hate relationship.  Many instances of this can be seen among  couples who engage in extra-marital affairs, i.e., this is a commonly demonstrated behavior.  The conundrum is that there is a professed love professed for the spouse, while a toxic behavior occurs toward the spouse, as well as, the overall relationship.  I think that everyone would agree that this constitutes an unhealthy and unbalanced relationship.  The idea that a person can love one person and at the same time  engage in a clandestine relationship suggests that there is a conflict of how emotions are understood and what love really means within a relationship.  Consequently, the person who confesses love and fails to demonstrate values consistent with love is action on a faulty presumption of how love is characterized between two people in a relationship.   Another way of understanding the unbalanced conflict of rational thinking about love is in filial relationships.  A question comes to the surface here: Can I love someone while secretly harboring resentment toward them, holding on to unforgiveness while at the same time, acting out passive- aggressive anger toward a friend or relative?  Quite often, people communicate that they are angry without ever saying it. What it reveals is an unhealthy pattern of relating to other when emotional conflicts occur.  It is abundantly clear is that relationships do get unbalanced, but if individuals want to have reasonable ways in life to manage the conflicting emotions felt and and potential for unhealthy patterns of relating; it means having healthy boundaries and effective ways to manage the unmanageable problem of unbalanced emotional responses must become a priority.

Crisis should bring people together and not keep them apart.

During changes in life stages and the unexpected stressors that are a part of life change many feelings come to the surface and individuals are often exposed to the possibility of facing conflicting emotions.  While struggling with what to do and managing unbalanced relationship issues that result from very normal life issues, people are face with real life choices that are at times very difficult.  For example, many who have lost a loved one deal with emptiness, grief over the loss, as well as feelings of isolation, which bring to the surface unrealized emotional expectations for themselves and others  For others, the season of change brings issues to the surface, which has been placed, on hold in the file of unresolved issues and unanswered questions.  Others are facing reassignment from military duty, the effects of the economy, loss of jobs– homes, which bring to the surface the emotional pain that people are experiencing because of the conditions of life  being experienced.

An emotional crisis is an opportunity to add positive value and resolution to relationships.

I remember a story that my dad used to tell about two brothers who had become angry at one another early on in life and had avoided each other, through most of life—both being unwilling to take a step toward reconciliation.  As the story goes, one of the brothers became deathly ill, was placed in the hospital—the other brother went to see him and because of the grave nature of the illness and the possibility of the brother dying, they agreed to bury the hatchet.  After talking and renewing the relationship, it was time to leave.  The brother who was sick, the patient in the hospital, said to departing brother; “by the way, if I live the feud is still on.” Unfortunately, many people cannot break away from the self-defeating behavior that creates a no win situation and feeds off of the feud, the conflict, and an inability to ever reconcile life in a healthy way.

Balancing relationships is about making the right choices for you.

The lived experience for many people is one fueled by conflicts that are unresolved and in fact, may never be solved.  Divorce, broken families, a family member in prison, poverty, child abuse, homelessness, and sickness are all deeply felt issues –the source of painful experiences that are a source for emotional conflict during the seasons of life.  At a time in life when conflicting emotions are magnified by natural events, it is  a perfect time for imbalance to erupt or a time to balance something that feels out of balance by making a choice to act on the felt experience of hopelessness. If we can wrap our head around the fact that even though life is very difficult that there is still hope to balance unbalanced relationships and embrace life with a hope that elevates life and those around us.  I do not know what you are experiencing in life, but if we can focus our thoughts Christ, who is our hope ; then  the peace that He can bring to life can bring balance to seems so out of balance in our experience of life.  Unfortunately, many people’s attention will focus around unbalanced relationships, what has been lost, or what is wrong with others and life.  Fortunately, hope for balance in the midst of conflict is possible through trusting in Savior who is larger than life and greater than problems.  When Christ comes to our life, it is not to abandon us in the moment of conflict or to magnify our failures; it is a happens to magnify the power of Christ to  bring freedom from a life without a balanced hope in the experiences of life. A relationship with Christ is a reminder that He gives us the opportunity, motive, and place to a be peacemaker.

Indeed, people can have the language right, the ritual right, but the reality is that our audio needs to match our video.  However, the crisis that we experience is what reveals who we are going to trust when life gets out of kilter.  An important thing to consider is whether our relationship with Christ is having an impact on the way we handle unbalanced relationships and experiences.   Is what we are saying –experiencing on the inside having a significant impact upon the lived experience of life?  It is good sometimes to just be confessional and stop denying what we feel because pushing down emotions, conflicts, and unresolved pain only pushes issues to the surface when stress is placed upon life.  The act of denying the reality of an internal condition guarantees an undesirable future prospect of artificial existence that will be characterized by the appearance of functionality.  Unfortunately, life will be expressed and may look good on the outside, but the inner dialogue of pain, frustration, and unbalanced emotions will influence life and relationships.

Exercising your options to make good choices starts with individual choice.

What is a person to do about the conflicting emotions and unbalanced relationships in life?  First, understand that there is only one person that you can change—the person that you see in the mirror each day.  Next, realize that it is not your responsibility to fix other people, change them, and you are not responsible for what others do or life they create.  Also, recognize that much of what people feel about disappointments in life stems from faulty expectations and misplaced trust.  Then, allowing people the grace to be who they are and work it out individually, releases others into God’s care to be who they are while still loving them– even though you may not agree.  Accepting others disappointing acts is not ratifying what has been done in a passive form of acceptance, it is allowing others to be free to choose what they do– placing responsibility for behaviors on the person making the choice.  Finally,say it, “I am not responsible, and it is not my fault”.

Is it possible to love someone and hate what they do, be in love with one person and maintain loyalty and admiration for others?  The answer depends upon you and how life is balanced within boundaries to manage the unmanageable things in life.  Remember, we are not responsible for what others choose to do and it is not our fault.  One of the sources of balance comes in how a person thinks about life.  For linear, black and white, everything fits in the box—literal, concrete thinkers, this will not compute because it requires thinking about life outside  of the box:  “most of the time your brain is involved in just one of three activities: distraction, reaction, or following well-worn pattern” (Tim Hurson). In the Bible it says, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he”.  Are you following a well-worn pattern in life or are you interested in balancing how you feel about your relationships in life:  Change your thoughts and change your life.

Related articles

• A Mature View Of Conflict in Relationships (motivatedtobeme.wordpress.com)
• The Human Factor: Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Humanized Perception in Moral Decision Making (plosone.org)
• Emotional Awareness (anamcgary.wordpress.com)
• 10 Relationship Behaviors of the Happiest Couples (psychologytoday.com)
• Maintaining a Healthy Relationship (richardaliosada.wordpress.com)
• Managing conflict at work: Taming your own emotions (budtoboss.wordpress.com)
• Getting in tune with my emotions (ask.metafilter.com)
• Unbalanced? (collisionrevolutional.wordpress.com)

Happiness: Guilt, Criticism, and Projection

Happiness: Guilt, Criticism, and Projection

An interesting thing that I have noticed about people who feel guilty is that they are not very happy and that they invest a huge amount of energy trying to hide– cover up painful or guilty experiences from being known.  Quite often, all of the efforts to hide something– not apparent on the surface has the opposite effect.  In stead of covering up guilt, it is like wearing a badge that says, “I am guilty”.  It does not take a psychologist to figure out that a person who engages in constant criticism of others is a demonstrating a behavior cue that points to unresolved guilt.  Often, the person who is constantly calling attention, implying, suggesting others weaknesses or faults may be shining a light upon something that obviously is wrong and unresolved in the accuser.

Good Guilt v. Bad Guilt

Developmentally, guilt is an emotional warning sign that most people learn during normal childhood social development.  Guilt’s purpose is to let us know when we have done something wrong—to keep life balanced.  Good guilt operates to help us develop a better understanding about bad choice and danger in our personal behavior.  Therefore healthy expressions of guilt prompts a person examine and to re-examine behavior to prevent making the same mistake twice.  Indeed, an examination of the pathology of unresolved guilt reveals negative perceptions of what others do that triggers distorted schemas, paralyzing emotions, and distorted reactions connected to a distorted sense of self that acts like a mirror reflecting what is not seen by others and known by the accuser.  Unfortunately, misunderstood and unresolved guilt leads to depression, anxiety, and frustration that is projected on someone else rather than becoming a positive force toward change or improvement.  Guilt is normally a negative focus coming from a perception of self that moralizes what others are doing and says, “I am a bad person.  I cannot bear myself.  I am unworthy.”

 

Internalized Guilt brings Externalized Behavior

Often I have said that “the things that we notice and hate about others and that we criticize so passionately, is connected to what we hate about ourselves.  Carl Jung said, “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness’s of other people” Unfortunately, the guilt ridden accuser does not understand that criticism is a window into their own darkness.  Often, behavior is hidden so well beneath misdirected concern shared as a concern with confidants, family, friends that infers perceived wrongdoing.  What is really happening is that the guilty accuser uses inference to project their own secretive guilty behaviors on their mirror.  Unfortunately, many of the things that people feel so deeply and are so offensive –we speak so loudly, passionately, so convincingly about point back to self-perception embedded within the neurotic guilt.  Indeed, the ability of guilt to subconsciously influence how perceptions, beliefs, and beliefs about what is seen should not be underestimated, nor ignored.  For instance, in a perfect world of a developing infant, doing, something “bad” is equivalent to murdering all that is good.  As the child develops with a lived-experience of shame, performance based acceptance, and guilt ridden feelings, the inability to dispel the gnawing sense of guilt results in the child owning misunderstood feelings about guilt and he/she enters an “adult– normal society.”  In the adult world, the normal is distorted by the abnormal thinking from development filtered by a perception of life that skewed by feelings of guilt, low self-esteem, and projection.  What happens: the guilt that has been internalized, misunderstood, and unresolved is externalized in projecting behavior toward others when something is seen that feels like the internalized guilt. Then, undigested guilt triggers the guilt-projection system that regurgitates what feels like concern, looks like righteousness, demonstrating rescuing behavior upon others, while calling attention to what is hidden beneath the surface– unresolved guilt that wants to be discovered.

Psychological ProjectionCriticism and Conversations with Guilty People

When I listen to people’s conversations, it sounds like there is something not being said, but is implied.  Quite often it is what is not being said that is more important than what is being said.  For instance, when person helps someone with a situation and someone else gives the pretense of being helpful and recurrent suggestions come up about another person’s faults or problems or even a constant disdain for a particular act, at is the real issue in the conversation?  On the one hand, it may be a person who simply is genuinely concerned, but on the other hand it may be a semantically expressed language cue it that says the person talking is struggling with and projecting internalized guilt.   It makes me wonder if the concerned person really feels guilty about their own internal struggle or particular behavior that no one knows about.   While serving as a pastor, I have had those who felt duty bound to inform me about how certain people are living and taking advantage of their leadership positions and using others.  What is common to all of these conversations is that they are people who represent themselves as crusaders of right, justice, and truth is that they are guilt-ridden people who try to guilt others into conformity and want someone to take up their cause.  Personally, I think about this activity as the subtle work of Satan who is guilty and accuses others of what he is guilty of.  In the book of Revelation Satan is depicted as the one who slanders the innocent and in reality is the one who is guilty.  Therefore, a critical question about this kind of accusation and speculation is motivation.  At this point, a question important to ask is what lies beneath suspicion and why this behavior is happening at this moment?  It may be that there is really a problem that needs to be addressed, but what is the real problem? Consequently, the essential question is why do some people see things that are really not there and act on beliefs that have no substance, evidence, or possess any real real desire to help?  One answer may be that some people have a need to rescue others from what they believe is “bad behavior” because there is strongly embedded guilt that says how bad a person actually feels about self and is motivating criticism, i.e., –the person sees their own failure in the acts of others.  The effort to direct attention to someone else may simply be transference:  an effort to vicariously fix something that feels very wrong in their own life by self incriminating projection of guilt on others. … Neurotic Guilt.

Why does one person believe they are doing right by making someone else guilty– warning, judging, evaluating, devaluing, and invalidating the other persons?

The Voice of Guilt is Saying What?

When a person engages in this kind of destructive inference, crusading to gain support from others, what is the core issue in the accusation? According to Sigmund Freud, it may be projection, which is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else.  Projection is one of the defense mechanisms identified by Freud that is used when someone feels threatened or feels afraid of their own impulses–, so the accuser attributes these impulses to someone else.  What is apparent among people, who make it their life’s mission to constantly criticize without sound reasoning and responsible approaches to relationships with others, is that the critic has an unresolved problem.  It is guilt– the feeling– that comes to the surface when something witnessed in others –a trigger activates  recognition of a feeling associated with a past behavior — “a been there done that experience.”  An important revelation  about constant accusing  is that recurring critical activity may be an open confession of unresolved feelings of guilt and self-esteem issues that are being attributed to someone else.

The Blame Game and What is Really Being Said

Throughout the history of the human race it is well documented that people have been struggling with guilt while denying responsibility.  The Bible records the story of creation when, Adam and Eve sinned; then, made leaves to cover up while knowing what they had done wrong.  Obviously, they did not want to take responsibility for what had happened. Therefore, the response of Eve was to pass the blame on, “it is the serpent that caused the evil act. “  The response of Adam was that it is the woman that you gave me Lord.  Guilt makes people project cover up because they are ashamed and understand that something is wrong and needs fixed.  Guilt makes people accuse because drawing attention to others behavior deflects attention away from the self –the guilty party.  Also, the fear of being exposed motivates people to project judgment for wrong doing upon someone else. Projecting guilt and packaging it in  criticism is a way of verbalizing how deeply perceptions of right and wrong— good and bad affects feelings of personal well being and personal security of the acuser.    Something to think about is that as long as attention is focused on what is wrong, what is being hidden, energy cannot be focused upon what is possible or what can make life effective, nor can you be happy.   Chaplain Murrill 04/27/2012

Related articles

• PRUDEN: It’s Romney vs. guilt and gilt (washingtontimes.com)
• The Abuse Of Forgiveness (Part Two) (therelentlesspursuit.com)
• Displaced polar bears, misplaced guilt (chicagoreader.com)
• 6 Signs You Are Suffering From Guilt And Probably Don’t Know It (forbes.com)
• The Good, the Bad, and the Guilty: Anticipating Feelings of Guilt Predicts Ethical Behavior (psychologicalscience.org)
• The good, the bad, and the guilty: Anticipating feelings of guilt predicts ethical behavior (eurekalert.org)
• Struggling with Guilt (ptl2010.com)
• WHAT CAN I DO WITH MY GUILT? – R.C. Sproul (2011) (baldreformer.wordpress.com)
• Shame and Guilt: Masters of Disguise (lizawrites.wordpress.com)
• A Very Important Question – Whose Shame are you Carrying Part 1? (secondchancetolive.wordpress.com)

Emotional Abuse–Invalidation, Scars Left Behind

I have heard it said that the greatest fear that a child has while growing up is the fear of abandonment and rejection—that they will be left alone.  Abandonment alone is a subject that there is a plethora of research written about and its association with mental health disorders, as well as, social and identity issues.  If it is true that a developing child has an identity crisis occurring already– questioning how he/she fits into a social construct or asking how and where he/she fits into family—the world; then how does emotional, psychological, and physical abuse effect a child developing social identity?

The impact of abandonment, isolation, invalidation, and rejection brings a feeling that surfaces unexplainable and perplexing behaviors and contributes to an attachment pattern that is secure or insecure—reactive or maladaptive.  Quite often, when we see children or adults that demonstrate perplexing behaviors — that we may not understand, there is something not seen. Unseen forces are at work creating a ricocheting pattern of emotional responses– events in life that bring a wave of peculiar behaviors that affect every area of life now and everything happening in the future. While some people may believe that their actions are independent and well thought out, the truth is that what is happening in life is inextricably connected to the experience of attachment and the concurrent developmental process.

Attachment and development are important to understand in how children develop, but when a child is subjected to factors that negatively affect normal progression, such as emotional abuse, healthy and normal development is altered.  The impact of the environment upon a child are well noted in studies, but when there are multiple themes of abandonment, rejection, and invalidation; it is an unnatural occurrence that changes the outcome of development.  A problem that many people are faced with is a lack of understanding about how episodes or solitary events are related to behaviors and events in life.  A simplistic way this can be illustrated is that life is an organic event where everything has an effect in a systemic way upon development.  As a result, the emotional quotient of all of the things that happen throughout life have an unrealized connection to how the lived experience of a child unfolds into adult life.

What happens to children when adults do not take time to think about how their behavior affects children?  One week in the life of a child can have an effect for the rest of life.   I listened to the story about a father who goes out of town and a family friend coming to visit and  taking the unattended mother and the kids for a ride, it seemed innocent enough at the time.  However, what seemed like an innocent event from child’s perspective, quickly turned into adults behaving badly. In addition to children being caught in the middle of an event beyond their capacity to understand clearly.  It seemed an innocent event until the father came back after being away and the child shares the latest news. However, what happened afterward the conversation was not innocent.  What followed was a anger, a mother being abused in an angry and violent dispute over what happened.  Unfortunately, there are many times like this when the bad behavior of adults places children in a situation that they are not capable of understanding.  The result is a child whose innocence is scarred by witnessing abusive behavior and a feeling of responsibility that arrests and inhibits normal development and social identity that can echo down through life experience.  When a child is forced to take responsibility for the bad behavior of adults, the child does not know what to do or how to rationalize the experience, which results in fear.  What adults do not understand is that when children are exposed to experiences like this, they are faced with another adult crisis: the child feels guilt, has to live in secrecy, and is forced to cover up for the parents acting out their problems. Obviously,  events have an effect upon everyone involved, but what message is conveyed to the child and how does this affect relationships and the child’s development of future behaviors?

The answer is very complicated, but what happens throughout life and connects to everything else in life.  Individuals always have a reason for acting as they do, behaving as they do and while it may not be clear to us at the movement, all behaviors are a product of systems at work..  One of the problems with behavioral issues is that a casual examination of what a person does—just seeing behavior– does not provide clear answers to why something is happening.  For most people, unless they are in a crisis or unless it serves a personal need,  time will not be taken to ask why,  the behavior is judged on the merit of what is seen and branded with a label like “good ‘or “bad” behavior.

What seemed like a fun day for a child turned into a lifetime of problems in relationships?  After, telling what happened and  seeing the mother’s pain, the father’s anger, and trying to avoid and manawillge conflict—the interpretation of the child is that somehow this is his fault.  For a child who is not mature enough to make sense of what happened, the result is emotionally damaging be cause the event is internalized with guilt, fear, and a feeling of responsibility for things that adults are doing without considering what effect is being placed upon the child.  The child sees this a a personal failure and interprets the event and interprets this from “if should” reasoning.  If I had done this, it would not have happened—I should have kept this a secret.  Children think in terms of “black and white” concrete operational thinking (Jean Piaget).  In simple terms, it means the child felt responsibility for what happened in the family on that day and accepted ownership for the emotional consequences of what happened.  What a horrible thing for a child to have to own—responsibility, guilt, inferiority, shame, and rejection because adults did not think beyond their immediate needs and chose not to act responsibly.  For a child, events like this are emotionally damaging and leave scars of the developing child which lead to a reflection of self and others that continues throughout life until they are understood.

While adults may not understand the effect of what they do or why act in certain ways, everything that happens in life is related to perception in the lived-experience of a developing child.  Adult issues with depression, self-esteem, identity issues, relationships, perfectionism, as well as numerous other issues are related to attachment, socialization, and development as a child.  A problem is that many people do not figure these things out until life is turned upside down and life falls apart.  The importance of this cannot be understated for the developing child.  A child is faced with enormous pressures upon life and when something goes wrong and development is scarred by emotional abuse, the child gets a life sentence.   Erick Erickson said that developing children faces a social identity crisis in every period of growth that will have an impact upon how a child feels about self, acceptance in social settings, and the ways the child will interact with his world.  Consequently, the developing child needs a clear sense of who they are and how they fit in the world, where they belong, as well as, being equipped to develop the necessary skills to engaged with life in a healthy way.

When children witness traumatic events, how will abnormal events affect development and impact the child’s ability to manage a complex adult issue of sex, marital fidelity, and emotional or physical abuse?  The answer is clear, there is nothing that could prepare a child to understand or r manage these conditions: because it is an unnatural development.  The scars created by intentional or unintentional emotional abuse predicts what will come in the future —a lifetime of guilt, perfectionism, feeling rejected, and emotionally abandoned.

What Can Be Learned From The Aftermath?

This story calls attention to the importance of what happens in childhood development, the cognitive map that is formed, and behavioral cues that indicate that something has happened that needs to be understood.  In addition, when some people look at life diagnostically, they are looking for someone to blame for their pain, behaviors, or life experience.  Blame, unforgiveness, and anger are not an effective approach, they only deepen the effect of abuse and does not bring solutions contribute to an effective life.  For those desiring an healthy life, what will be of importance is not someone to blame, but understanding why behaviors occur as they do.

Obviously, many individuals cannot find the destination to healthy living, i.e., taking the appropriate steps toward changing life without an understanding of the core problems of childhood experiences.  Thinking about the past is painful at times and you may not want to air all of your dirty laundry in public, but the fact remains that connecting events from childhood events, pain rejection, or abandonment, draws a picture that puts events, feelings, and behavior in a context to be understood.

Be Careful About Casting Your Pearls Before The Swine.

One of the problems with adult behavior is that when we share with others, not capable of understanding, a common experience is that invalidation, criticism, and more misunderstanding occurs.  As a result, because we do not like that feeling, then we hide, deny, and cover up what is felt and deepen the pain in the act of denial. Unfortunately, you cannot hide from yourself for long and when you shove your feelings down for so long, they come out in health, relationship, and life problems.  The problem creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that will predict how relationships will occur.  Many times the problems of the past will perpetuate the very thing that is hated the most and we desire to change.  When you are willing to accept responsibility for yourself and understand where the negative programming from abuse originates, change is possible.  When the days of awakening comes the abused can realize that today is good day to start acting instead of reacting to life.  Life will never be perfect, but life will be what you make it today, so enjoy the opportunity that you have in your hand today. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning” (Albert Einstein).

Related articles

• Explaining Media’s Effects (education.com)
• Helping Children Survive Divorce: The Myth of the Tough Boy (psychologytoday.com)
• Six Warning Signs That Your Child is Being Bullied (education.com)
• Urgent cases neglected as carers only have time for emergencies (alisonsgypt.wordpress.com)
• Starving The Monster (socyberty.com)
• How Empathic Parenting is the Antithesis of Narcissism (psychologytoday.com)
• Benefits Of Utilizing Children Therapy Programs In Periods Of Chaos (jaysdad.com)
• Circle of Violence: The Need for Fathers (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Social and Emotional Development (enfamil.com)
• Are Emotional Abuse and Neglect Trauma? (gypsy116.wordpress.com)
• Emotional Abuse – Invalidation, Scars Left Behind (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• The Rights and Worth of a Child (tsnra.wordpress.com)
• The Family Dynamics of Severe Child Abuse (psychologytoday.com)
• Changes in behavior can signal anxiety, depression in children (troyrecord.com)
• The Family Dynamics of Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (psychologytoday.com)
• You: MENTAL HEALTH: Children’s misbehavior a learning experience – Rapid City Journal (rapidcityjournal.com)
• I Think My Child Is A Bully – What Should I Do? (education.com)
• Dating Violence Common Among Teens (education.com)
• RCASA Saturday with Case Management: Why would an adult sexual abuse a child? (rcasa.wordpress.com)
• HOW TO PREVENT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE | Domestic Violence Kills (womensphilanthropy.typepad.com)
• What is EMOTIONAL Abuse? (Part 3) (acoarecovery.wordpress.com)
• What is EMOTIONAL Abuse? (Part 1) (acoarecovery.wordpress.com)
• The Parental Community Needs to Realize Verbal Abuse HURTS (happilyblended.com)
• Books/Resources re: family violence (ask.metafilter.com)
• Have you ever felt “Happy and Content”? (jyhedgehog.wordpress.com)
• Social and Emotional Development (enfamil.com)
• Strand of Pearls, Memoir on Surviving Child Abuse and Adult Addiction, May Well Serve As a Solution to a Recent Article in the NY Times (prweb.com)
• Violence Against Children (socyberty.com)

Hope as the Pathway and Agency for Success in Any Venture

Hope is What We Express About Life That is a Bridge To The Future

The ability to express hope through challenging circumstances is an essential element to create success in the ventures of life.  Expressing hope is the act of building a bridge that over circumstances–opposition paving a way to desirable outcome in the future.  Almost everyone is concerned about effectiveness– how to find success in life that creates the momentum to get where we want to arrive. many available studies support the assumption that hope is a key component that distinguishes how well an individual navigates through challenges. Therefore, the influence of hope upon life can be measured in qualitative terms that relate to physical health, higher academic functioning, interpersonal functioning, athletic performance, psychosocial adjustment, capacity for self-regulation, and superior ability to face and overcome obstacles.  On the other hand a lack of hope can be connected to individuals being easily confused by obstacles, avoidant, ineffectiveness and the absence of  heartiness through life challenges. When factors are considered about why some people succeed and why others do not, there may be many factors contributing to success, but the single mitigating factor that empowers success– even when other deficiencies exist– is the presence of hope.

An effort to define hope might provide some insight about what it is, what it does, and how it is expressed. Some common definitions of hope are to wish for something with expectation of its fulfillment, or to have confidence; trust, to look forward to with confidence or expectation. In life, we hope that our children will be successful, the sun will shine, and that everything will always work out. The theological virtue defined as the desire and search for a future good, difficult but not impossible to attain with God‘s help.  The idea of hope in general terms is an expectation that motivates life in the present with a belief that the future hold possibility that can be achieved.   Hope is a way of expressing life that builds a bridge to the future.

In the Christian approach to hope a Biblical definition of hope is “confident expectation.”  Hope is a firm assurance regarding things that are unclear and unknown (Romans 8:24-25; Hebrews 11:1,7).  Christians believe that hope in the present and in the future is a confident expectation that is based in essential beliefs about God and His oversight, involvement, and control over what happens in life.  For Christians, who understand the basis of their beliefs,  hope is an essential ingredient in the life expressed upward toward God and outward toward goals (Proverbs 23:18) . In times of distress, when faced with despair and loss, there are situations where life loses its essential meaning  and zest (Lamentations 3:18, Job 7:6). When faced with death and times when  there is no apparent hope (Isaiah 38:18, Job 17:15), Christian hope supplies a way of organizing belief into confident expectation that those who put their hope in God will receive assistance(Psalm 28:7).  Therefore, Christians believe, and will not be perplexed, put to shame in their hope (Isaiah 49:23), and will be vindicated as they place hopeful expectation in God.  As a result,  hope and belief is a general attitude of confidence in God’s protection– help (Jeremiah 29:11).  Therefore, hope frees Christians from fear and anxiety (Psalm 46:2-3).  Christian hope is based upon beliefs and assumptions about, God, good and evil, life, eternity and life in the present.  Hope provides momentum to live with expectation that God is guiding what is happening to a positive outcome.

One issue of interest is how hope energizes and infuses life with momentum to move ahead. Hope provides a clear way that can reduce the power of obstacles to disable supplying an attitude that enables reaching forward with a belief that success is attainable.  As a result, attention is drawn to how hope can be increased in how an individual approaches life.  Is there a road to happiness and a set point that can be achieved that happiness can be measured, believed to be normative as a maxim?  An equally important issue to understand is that a state of happiness is a subjective condition.  If someone asked you to describe happiness what would the story contain for you?

Research has shown that automatic assumptions of happiness are often incorrect.  Often hope and happiness are associated with feeling good about what is occurring.  In fact, what is true is that people who feel good in certain circumstances, like winning the lottery, actually become unhappy, dissatisfied and loose hope in life.  Carl Maslow illustrated that people feel a better sense of well-being when they have basic survival needs met rather than monetary gain.  Lifestyle always rises to the level of income and beyond and what happens is that possessions or positions in life do not seem to bring happiness and hope.  People get on the hedonistic treadmill trying to find happiness and gain hope but, “the abundance of life is not in the things we possess” (Jesus).  Often people assume that happiness and having hope is a result of what happens to people in life.  However, it is not what happens to people; it’s how they construct and interpret those events, it is how you mindfully experience those events.

A key to hope, a road to happiness is emotional well-being.  People who have hope in life and experience emotional well being are people who are virtually engaged in life– grounded in meaning and purpose in life.  To be happy, to have hope means being fully involved with every detail of life.  A life driven by purpose, calling, a sense of belonging and fitting where you are is critical to feeling positive about what is taking place in existence.  When people are fully engaged in life with a sense of fitting, belonging– owning a place in life– engaging in positive relationships, then attention redirects our energy away from negatives which are destructive, limiting, defeating activity that drain vitality from life.  You may have heard the expression, “time flies when you are having fun.”  Another way to understand this is a state of grace, a “flow state.”  The experience of flow happens when you are able to be completely caught up in what you are doing and time flies.

Meeting the challenges of life with hope increases the flow of life that sets an expectation that sees a life that has possibilities, even when faced with extreme opposition.  What occurs in the hope transaction is that alternative routes to reach outcome are discovered, then implemented through pathways thinking.  “Pathways thinking” means that when the first route you try is blocked, you can produce alternative routes to get to a destination by thinking flexibly and are able to change course as needed. A challenge faced when attempting to cultivate an increased hope is to how to cultivate thinking patterns that connect to alternatives rather than boxed in solutions. A principle  of hope is that hope is a learned experience as well as a motivational feeling experienced, which indicates that hope both a phenomenon and a mindset.

Hope is embraced as a principle in thinking when hope has agency.  “Agency thinking”  is thinking with efficacious belief, a sense,  that the desired goal can be reached.  Borrowing from a Biblical principle in Hebrews 11:1; “faith” in Christian thinking is stirred by reciting, vividly recalling successful ventures of faith in the past.  The “evidence of things hoped for”  is in the record of those who have the story of success presented in a history of belief.  Individuals who spend their time reciting their failures or being reminded constantly of failure are not likely to accomplish much.  However, when there is a sense of agency and belief is cultivated through celebrating success and failure jointly (on the road to success), then high hope can be instilled that enables accomplishment.

One thing that is for sure in life is that there are always people who can convincingly tell you why you cannot succeed. However when you want to succeed, a bridge to the future must be constructed with faith, hope, and belief and it needs to begin today, without delay.

Related articles

• Bitterness is a Poison that You Wish Someone Else Would Drink and Die (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• Happiness: Success and aWell-Lived Life (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• What does it mean to be a Christian? (johnestorge.com)
• undercovernun:”Christians need to approach unbelievers in a way that is comfortable to them (the… (contrararian.tumblr.com)
• Do You Have the Courage to Succeed? (innovativeperformanceandpedagogy.wordpress.com)
• It’s All A Matter Of Hope (gratuitousaffirmations.wordpress.com)
• What hope is and what it’s not (simplywalking.wordpress.com)
• Sprinkle Some Salt (ptl2010.wordpress.com)
• Christian Reaction to bin Laden’s Death (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)
• Vain hope (hopeforallmin.wordpress.com)
• God’s Attributes (helpedbygrace.wordpress.com)
• The Presence Of Spiritual Thirst (samuelatgilgal.wordpress.com)
• Hoping For the Best (beingrebekah.com)
• Christianity Does Not Care About The Truth (new.exchristian.net)

Bitterness: Drinking Poison and Wishing Someone Else Dies

What happens to a person when they are exposed to continual invalidation, while feeling the pain of rejection, isolation and then made to believe that what they are feeling is  not important enough to be heard?

If you have not had that experience, you will not understand what I am talking about.   After serving others for most of my life in pastoral ministry and having the unfortunate experience of having Thyroid cancer, being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and subsequently, losing a wife to Cancer; I felt invalidated by life, the church, and everyone that I had given my life to serve.  My experience was that when I was transparent enough to share with the church, the deacons, and leaders that I was very sick,  I was pressured out of my  position by a group of religious haters. If it sounds like unresolved anger that needs expressed, let me assure you that I was angry and had good reason to be angry with people that I had invested in and who were only interested in what they wanted, while I felt so sick.  I am here to tell you from  an experience of wishing certain (unnamed) people would eat crap and die that bitterness is a counterproductive emotion and only hurts the person who is bitter.

So, I moved away and in my new location, I do not have the constant reminder that comes from seeing the people who  talk about expressing love, acceptance and mercy, but give judgment, pain, and isolation.  If that sounds serious, it is, the Bible says, “to shun the very appearance of evil” and they were acting evil so I obeyed the command and made a clean break.  As a recovering church and ministry junkie, I know now that I lived inside a religious life that only offered redemption as a concept and not as a practice.  Personally, I felt like I was  victimized by religious do gooders when, in fact, the problem was I had a distorted perception of reality.  I somehow thought Christians would be Christians when called upon. However, this belief could not have been further from the truth– people always act in their best interest and out of their own need justifying what they do.  The problem is that religious types do not want to admit that and believe that their actions are always spiritual.

Unfortunately, the assumption is not true and the result is misunderstanding, about the character of human behavior.  When a person has false expectations about people and life, then that individual ends up disillusioned and disappointed by the false ideas believed.  Disillusionment leads to failure in life, bitterness about experiences and alienation from the church.  What experience has taught me is that the church is ill-equipped at helping people who have problems. What the church is good at is creating emotional invalids, people who cannot think for themselves, and creating conformity.  The best organization in the world is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, but it is made up of people who are a part of an organizational system that has no fail-safe approach for people who experience problems outside of the box.  What is a person to do when all that is right goes wrong leaving you in a pile ruins, then in one fell swoop everything is lost, hope is gone, and you’re left alone?

I remember when I sat in the hospice with Linda who was dying with colon cancer and thinking– remembering about how many times that I had been there with other families who had a family member dying.  I remember asking myself, “Where are those people that I served and where is the church, the pastor, the family now?  Death is one of those solitary experiences that you have to go through alone, but it is a time that no one should be alone.  If you want to invalidate someone, leave them alone when they get older and when they are dying.  I remember very clearly the isolation and loneliness of those moments.  I had just had a TIA, my sugar was out of control, my wife dying of cancer and life was ebbing away.  I sat there and waited hoping that someone would come.  I called and talked on the phone with my mother-in law who had told her dying daughter that she had received a word from God that she was going to be healed, repeatedly telling her that she did not have enough faith—she invalidated her in her dying moments in the name of a religious mysticism. Further invalidation came when she called and told me that I should take her out of Hospice because that was where people went to die– we did not have enough faith.  I understand that it was her fear of the reality of death, the children’s inability to deal with their mother’s death that explained the confusing behavior.  Meanwhile, I sat there day in and day out– around the clock wondering when someone would come.  People trickled through occasionally, sporadically– but no one really came who stayed, who invested, who made a difference.  It was not until the last week that Linda lived that her mother, dad, and brother finally came.  On the phone I had to tell her mom, if you do not come, you may never see her alive again– then she came.  How can a person ever get over that and get on with life?  What I discovered through this process is that I had faulty notions about people that made me believe that if they were really Christians they would show love, if they were family, they would show respect, if he was a pastor, he would show care, but it did not happen and I was disappointed.

What I discovered is that, generally, people are the same inside and outside the church.  The difference is that people inside the church have one set of answers about life and people who are outside the church have another set of answers.  People do act according to their personal interests, needs, and beliefs.  I believed that, somehow, people would act as I thought that I used to– go sit, pray, or give support.  The result, for me, was I got disappointed.  The point is that I thought they should, would– show interest and it made me angry, and not for myself, but that people could show such a lack of interest or could not feel a need to inconvenience themselves for someone who had cared about them throughout life.  At the end of the day, the anger that I feel has not gone away about injustice, but I have learned to manage what I felt, experienced, and is a reality. The unfortunate thing is that when such emotionally charged memories become a part of existence that it changes life forever.  I will probably never get over what has happened, but living with bitterness is no more an option that living false beliefs and expectations about people.

Related Articles

• Easter: Spiritual Life and Invalidation at the Cross (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• A dying church (geneveith.com)
• Unforgiveness is Like Spiritual Poison (uniquesingles.wordpress.com)
• Hospice Care for Pancreatic Cancer Patients (everydayhealth.com)
• A New Way of Thinking About Church: Part 3 (stjohnscathedral.ca)
• What Are Your Expectations As You Go To Church Today? (pastorpaulvbsblog.blogspot.com)
• Bill Hicks (palehorsenovel.wordpress.com)
• A nasty root: bitterness! (mrsknack.wordpress.com)
• Avoid Bitterness Like the Plague (revivalandreformation.wordpress.com)
• The Salon Writer Who Fell in Love with Joel Osteen’s Megachurch (owenstrachan.com)
• I Wouldn’t Want Her For My (Or My Loved Ones’) Chaplain, Either (thelightheartedcalvinist.com)
• What people say before they die (religion.blogs.cnn.com)
• Overheard on CNN.com: Last words (news.blogs.cnn.com)
• The 10th Commandment (steveprestegard.com)
• Why Should A Christian Go To Church? (inspire85.wordpress.com)
• Click a Blessing Today – Don’t be the dead cat (ptl2010.com)
• Don’t Go It Alone by Mark D. Roberts (trinityspeaks.wordpress.com)
• The Tricky Nature of Loving Beyond Measure (stephenlbaxter.wordpress.com)
• Bitterness: Weeding out the Poisonous Root. (pastormikesays.wordpress.com)
• Poison (definingmydash.wordpress.com)
• Playing the Victim? (pstcardenasblog.wordpress.com)
• Like Drinking Poison (thewritelife2.wordpress.com)
• Bitterness: A Silent Marriage Killer (covenantfamilyaffairs.wordpress.com)
• Church Personalities (kountrykinges.wordpress.com)
• Do We Really Understand Forgiveness? (joeycoons.wordpress.com)
• How Can I Love the Church? (apologus.wordpress.com)
• The Root of Bitterness- by Pastor Mike Castanares (mynewbeginningschurch.wordpress.com)
• No Revenge (devog.wordpress.com)
• No Revenge (achristianmeditation.wordpress.com)
• So, Why Do People Really Go To Church? (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• Threatened with Resurrection (therevandtheboys.wordpress.com)
• The Healing Power of Forgiveness (refusingtopanic.wordpress.com)
• Strangling Roots of Bitterness – Part 3 of 3 (pocketrippingmoments.wordpress.com)
• “Am I Dying…?” (livingthekingdom.wordpress.com)

Storms: Choices, Consequences, and Contentment

Connecting Choices to Outcome

Do the choices that are made every day have anything to do with how things work out in life?  Taking  a walk around the neighborhood after a tornado; then taking a drive through the city, what I saw from the storm reminded me that consequences always follow what occurs in life.  I am mindful of how much people take for granted  peace, happiness, and good times in life and how often that we forget that everything in life has consequences –good or bad.  Obviously,  some consequences are not because of the choices that we make in life, they are the result of nature, other people’s actions, or something that we do not understand about the seasons of life.  The fact remains that there are consequences for everything that happens in life.

Outcome and Escapist Thinking

A problem with problems is that we do not like the outcome because the consequences make life difficult to experience.  One of the most common responses to negative experiences  is to try  escaping consequences, deny the impact of our behavior and choices on others, and escape the reality of what those choices bring to life experience.  I am reminded from working in the prison system  that quite often we have inmates come to the chapel and  make a choice to become a Christian and to begin to pursue a spiritual life.  Instead of entering into a process of discipline and developing a responsible faith and transformation,  a common response after becoming a believer is for inmates to begin  seeking prayer and guidance about how to appeal their sentence to get out of prison.  A problem with this thinking is because they do not like the results of their choices, present circumstances, and the absence of a gratifying life.  Instead of accepting circumstances of being in prison as a result of bad choices, anti-social behavior, and hurt and pain for others; they believe that a spiritual relationship entitles them to an immediate change of circumstances.  What is not clearly understood is that having a relationship with God does not mean that circumstances will be removed for a lifetime of choices that are made. When people go to prison it is because they are convicted of a crime –a consequence of a bad choice.  Something that stands out here is that many times there is a mystical, magical thinking about what forgiveness brings in a person’s life that needs to be demythologized.  Forgiveness does not mean that we are not responsible for what has happened and it does not mean that consequences will disappear because we have found faith through God.

Memories and Traumatic Experience

In cognitive psychology theory, the importance of memory is correlated to the way experiences are organized and stored in the information management system within the brain.  The impact of experience upon memories and schemas are  realized through understanding memory encoding, which is the way traumatic or painful experience codes a memory and actually change the construction of brain tissue.  Episodic memories are the most powerful memories that people have and are connected to responses given through the lived-experience of life.  When painful events, invalidation, hurt, or trauma occurs beliefs, relationships, and memories are forever changed –life changing consequences attached to actions that classify memories with specific triggers.  However, it is not that simple when choices that are very painful are attached to the way the brain organizes information, memories, and painful emotions.  For some people, people they just want to say, I am sorry and hope that it will be forgotten because they wish for immediate release and change the painful circumstances choices have created.  However, it is not that simple when there is deeply ingrained hurt and trauma.  When choices are made, words are said, and actions are taken; we may not realize that when one word, one act occurs, it can be life changing. Indeed, how another person experiences our choices are related to how they experience and processes our chosen behavior.

Choices, Prayer, and Outcome

Memories embedded in the psyche, are connected to an internal perception process,  schema that is a part of the biological and physical makeup of the brain.  It is not just a emotional response; it is how an individuals brain and mind organize events, which and regulates how we think, feel and triggers how we behave when episodic memories are activated. Indeed, choices have consequences upon how life will be experienced, encoded, and remembered.   Unfortunately, outcome is not given enough consideration when people decide on a course of action or use irresponsible words, actions, and behaviors.

What needs to be emphasized  and understood is that when there is a painful experience, painful invalidating words, and abusive behavior that destroys trust and boundaries that the consequences of what has happened cannot simply be wished away, prayed away, or ignored.  The important and neglected truth is that  there are some things that are a part of life –like problems, storms, aging, death, and seasons of life that are very difficult to face.  What needs to be  understood is that we must learn to live with consequences and realize that some things will never change and do not go away no matter how spiritual one becomes.  Our prayers might be better focused upon asking for Grace that provides sufficient strength to live within the circumstances in the place our choices have taken us  to live.

Contentment through Spiritual Growth

The apostle Paul said,  ” I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, [therewith] to be content” (Philippians 4:11).   This is not an attitude of hopelessness and/or  surrender to circumstances, but an affirmation of faith that states that whatever circumstances that are faced, contentment can be found in a Savior who is sufficient in the whatever circumstances life may bring.  The fact is that anyone can trust God when everything is always going right.  The question is can you trust God in your circumstances to be sufficient –to provide efficient grace to live through the storms of life?

Related Articles

• Happiness: Living on the Street called Choice (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• Storms Rampage Through The South (gingerssnap.wordpress.com)
• My life is lived in permanent marker (tammyrowlandcoaching.wordpress.com)
• The Difficulty in Making Better Choices (or: What We’re Each Up Against – What’s Worst in Ourself (courageandchoice.wordpress.com)
• Truth and Its Consequences (psychologytoday.com)
• Evaluating the fitness consequences of signalling… (behavecology.wordpress.com)
• The Consequences… (goldenbible.wordpress.com)
• ‘Prison Break’ star not free from pain of actions (today.msnbc.msn.com)
• 7 Tips On How to Make Choices (mediumsworld.wordpress.com)
• California bill to rid prisons of smuggled cell phones shelved over costs (textually.org)
• Emotional Control: Strategies we use for regulating our emotions (psychologyinaction.org)
• Storms: Choices, Consequences, and Contentment (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• Prayer and Praise (marybolick.wordpress.com)
• Choices are scary (belindaaaa.wordpress.com)
• In The Midst of the Storm (uplaces.wordpress.com)
• Joy of Being: Complete Acceptance and The Sanctioned Reactions (thehindu.com)
• Trusting God with the “What ifs” (womanofthevine.wordpress.com)
• Making Memory May Mean Modeling and Remodeling (News and Features) (dana.org)
• Spice up Your Prayer Life (cofchristdailybread.wordpress.com)
• Beyond Memory (lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com)
• Every behavior and every thought has a consequence (toddlohenry.com)
• Episodic Memory (thinkingbookworm.typepad.com)
• The Power of Consequences (inspiredbyfamilymag.com)
• Episodic Memory (thinkingbookworm.typepad.com)
• Can we squeeze some wisdom into the economy? (thegodguy.wordpress.com)
• Right Or Wrong, It Is Still Your Choice (jameseberts.com)
• 10 Life Laws (velindapeyton.com)
• #89. Consider The Consequences. (notsoniceadvice.com)
• Psychology Soup: Freudian, Skinnerian, Jungian, With A Dash Of Nietzschean On The Side (inprocessofknowing.wordpress.com)
• Living In Balance (springwolf.net)
• Encoding: Deciding on a Memory Cue (dscottlyttle.wordpress.com)
• Facing our daemons (yilmazalimoglu.com)
• Do we choose who we want to be? (newlifeparties.com)
• Gospel-Centered Spiritual Formation: A Little Background (timmybrister.com)
• Life is fair (adventuresofsquirrel.wordpress.com)
• Y! Big Story: What the brain tells us – YAHOO! (news.yahoo.com)
• Choice (velindapeyton.com)
• Remembering What we are Told (frted.wordpress.com)
• Fear (positivelyjohn.wordpress.com)
• “I Surrender” (articlesbyrobinduncan.wordpress.com)
• Alcoholism’s short-term effects on memory functioning are harmful (eurekalert.org)
• Astonishing Renewal (cindylinzer.wordpress.com)
• Forgiveness is a process (celestealluvial.wordpress.com)
• The Partial Bliss of Ignorance (getrealchristianity.wordpress.com)
• The Necessity of Disillusionment (tgrule.com)
• Sometimes The Lesson Is The Lesson (the-point-is-this.com)
• The Inner Lives of Animals (3quarksdaily.com)
• Egalitarian behavior and the insula. (mindblog.dericbownds.net)
• Ouch…I needed that! (rodandrose.com)
• When We Get Mature (alfisyahriyani.wordpress.com)
• 6 Types of Motivation Explained (lifehack.org)
• How does PTSD allow the Mind to Twist Realiy? (ptsdawayout.com)
• Feeling scatterbrained? That’s probably because you are! (psychologytoday.com)
• The difficult art of choosing right from wrong (paradoxicalwisdom.wordpress.com)
• The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience (creativitypost.com)
• What about them? (tdotc.wordpress.com)
• Top Eight Facts About Conservatism Six (socyberty.com)

Spirituality in a Postmodern Age: The Decline of the West and Spirituality.

Adam and Eve Expelled From Garden

Postmodernism: — a state of mind in a particular period of history affecting every area of western culture

Postmodernism is a term that has gained popularity in scholarly writing as well as casual conversations. Thomas Guarino (1996) says, “It’s a “movement” that has inspired raging debates about ‘the cult theory’ across the arts and sciences” (p. 654) My intention in this paper about postmodernism is not to solve the debate, but to understand the influence that state of mind held has upon contemporary beliefs about spirituality.

What Does Research say About Postmodernism?
A description given by Daniel J. Adams (1997) says, “The postmodern era can best be understood in terms of four major characteristics: the decline of the West, the legitimation crisis, the intellectual marketplace, and the process of deconstruction” (Toward a theological understanding of postmodernism).

What Adams perspective demonstrates is a fundamental shift in thinking that began in a demonstrable period of time and is associated with significant phenomenon in Western Culture characterized with the period of decline.
His analysis of Western Decline draws attention to point of view that is fundamental to an evolution of spiritual meaning that has correlates to historical-cultural development. Adams (1997) says, “the legitimation crisis, identified with metanarrative show [what] is now being seriously called into question” (2). Unlimited development and capitalistic in American ideology versus environmental pollution, limited resources, concerns about nuclear proliferation—use of energy, environmental threats, third world poverty, and the goals of the NAFTA have deligitimated what had characterized capitalism and the success of the West. Postmodern thinking is characterized by a shift in state of mind about core beliefs that are delegitimized in an essential devaluation of past matters of importance.

Adams, draws attention to another significant development correlated to Western Decline the, “metanarrative of Judeo-Christian sexual ethic” (p. 2)  characterizing American culture.  His perspective identifies the shift of views about sexuality chastity, homosexuality, marriage, divorce, and traditional view of marriage as another deconstructed normative value in culture. With Judeo-Christian ethics disempowered from authoritative acceptance, norms from the past are replaced with a plurality of views with no central source of knowledge or universally held value to describe a way of life experience in America. Deligitimation in postmodern life of the Judeo Christian ethic demonstrates changing beliefs about marriage, sexual behavior, and accepted norms indicate a shifting emphasis upon past.

A perspective about the impact of postmodernism upon Christian thought is offered by David Couchman (2002) who describes how mind set has been affected: “if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump out immediately, but if you put it in cold water and heat it slowly, you can boil it alive because it does not realize what is happening. … We think we know what is going on, while the culture in which we are immersed is slowly killing us without our realizing it” (Couchman, 2002, p. p. 74).

References
Adams, D. L. (1997). Toward a theological understanding of postmodernism. Retrieved March 30, 2011, from Crosscurrents: http://crosscurrents.orh/adams.html

Couchman, D. (2002). Facing the challenge of our times equipping christians to respond biblically and effectively to postmodernism. Evangel , 20 (3), pp. 74-78 retrieved from EBSCOhost March 09, 2011.

Guarino, T. (1996). Postmodernity and five fundamental theological issues [electronic version]. Theological Studies , 57 (4), Retrieved from EBSCOhost March 30,2011.

Related Articles

• Our Postmodern Selves Paralleling Our Postmodern Stories. (ericmrwebb.wordpress.com)
• How postmodern is this? (adliterate.com)
• Postmodernism? London’s V&A museum attempts a definition (guardian.co.uk)
• The Origins of Postmodernitis (pajamasmedia.com)
• Another book (marionmclaren.wordpress.com)
• Spirituality: Identifying shaping forces in perception – what is shaping beliefs in the 21st Century? (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• Is it Possible? (denimdevotion.wordpress.com)
• John Backman: What’s the Rush? A Response to Our Culture’s Crazy Pace (huffingtonpost.com)
• Lausanne, postmodernism and the emerging church (khanya.wordpress.com)
• Cosmopolitan (noggs.typepad.com)
• Class Notes: March 7-18, 2011 (fgupta.wordpress.com)
• What is the difference between positivism or postmodernism (wiki.answers.com)

Borderline Personality Disorder: Hidden Within The Family System

The Borderline Triad

Family life that includes interaction with a borderline personality has the potential of creating a domino effect triggering toxic behaviors and relationship problems having the potential to disrupt, shatter or destroy social and family relationships.  However friends and onlookers who do not understand, mysteriously ignore what is happening and the behavior goes unrecognized for years, with people, never questioning what is happening in daily interaction.  A difficulty with this type of behavioral disorder is understanding that that, “Borderline personality disorder is a serious mental disorder with a characteristic pervasive pattern of instability in affect regulation, impulse control, interpersonal relationships, and self-image effect” (Lieb K., 2004, p. 453).

Further misunderstanding  is magnified when there is not a distinguishable way to understand why behavior occurs or what it means.   Unfortunately, families that borderline personalities are part of have relationship patterns that are characterized by toxic patterns of interaction that result in abusive and  enabling behavior, thus disabling functionality with the individual as well as the extended family.  Therefore, when families fail to recognize what these behaviors, patterns of relating develop naturally to adapt and manage what is misunderstood in ways that may not be beneficial.

The problem that is not understood contains a fundamental failure to construct healthy ways of living and relating effectively.  Consequently, a relational mythology constructed paints a picture of perceived functionality; thereby establishing a group expectation that seems normal, but is it really?

The adaptive behavioral effects are cloaked by denial of the existing reality that something is wrong.  The outcome demonstrates an inability to experience functional intimacy; thereby hiding the problem that is beneath the unusual behavior occurring.  As a result, there is a life where secrecy, emotional abuse, codependency, and bullying behaviors are major themes accompanying the daily interaction within family life.  Consequently, is the rule attached to a distorted self-concept.  What results is a feeling of dis-empowerment fueled by belief that this can never change resulting in relating through acquiescing to dysfunctional patterns erroneously felt to represent a safety zone to experience life.

Family Systems

All families develop coping strategies for managing relationships, but often times those ways are not the best approach to address the central issues within a family system.  It is a plausible reality that the family members inside the system do not understand clearly what is happening and are confused or in denial. Therefore, not being able to see the problem clearly results in a distorted sense of reality and skewed expectations of life.  As a result, family rituals, expectations, phenomenology and internalized mores’ create demands for participating in family life, which contribute to social reinforcement of problematic behaviors.  Therefore, enabling acceptance of anomalies that otherwise would be considered unacceptable.  Indeed, everyone likes to believe that they are objective and that they are not contributing to destructive patterns of relating, that in effect are damaging, and many times destroying relationships. However, the question that participants in the system need to ask is what role is going to be played; will it be the enabler, the excuser, or the examiner? The person  who decides to be a rescuer participates in the destructive behaviors excusing and then enabling by refusing to acknowledge there is something that is not right. Unfortunately, it is thinking and believing that helping means fighting to keep everything  the same.

Motivators and Influences

One essential problem that is fundamental to misunderstanding BPD is that most people do not know any more about personality disorders than we do about cancer.  When I think back upon my own experience with cancer and my wife who died from cancer; I often wonder why this went undiagnosed and untreated, while we were seeing doctors who should have understood.  Also, knowing what I know now, why did we not pay closer attention to clear indications that there was a problem and do something about the cancer.  The problem was that it was diagnosed too late for her to recover and the end result was that the cancer that was hidden destroyed her life. What might have been avoided, if we had taken time to think, brought an unimaginable reality and destruction of everything that was loved and hoped for in life.  Borderline personality, for some people, is eating away at what creates and sustains healthy relationships and because it is not recognized or easily diagnosed as a result, it is misunderstood. Unfortunately, the unimaginable destruction is becoming a reality the longer the disease is ignored.

Genetic Influence

A problem existing  within  mental disorders is establishing what the relationship is between symptoms and the etiology of biological problems.  Historically, an  ongoing debate focuses upon the question of origin or cause.  Can mental illnesses be inherited or is personality disorder caused by a negative impact of life events, trauma, stress, or other related symptoms?  A source providing clarity is medical history connected to of the family of origin. Research performed about genetic factors of mental health indicates that, “There are several lines of evidence from family studies supporting a possible genetic association of borderline personality and affective disorders” (MacKinnon, 2006, p. 6). As a result, family medical history, mental health histories , and relationship history create a link to what is happening.

When anomalies in behavior occurs what can be made of the connection between biology and behavior?  An assumption might be made that the borderline is angry or acting out. This  is a  behavior cue that something is seriously wrong and very puzzling–especially when family and acquaintances treat the behavior as unimportant.  One response to what happened is in how the genetic-biological history of the person is organized. In general, science connects the conditions in the family history and suggests a link between the behavior that causes someone, who gives every indication that they are apparently honest and intelligent in other ways to engage in impulsive and reckless behavior without thought of consequences.

What causes emotional dysregulation to occur when there is a perceived, intense feeling of abandonment, rejection, or loss of control?  It may be that what is hidden by a casual look at circumstances may be better understood through looking at genetic predisposition indicating what motivates a person who looks like an upright individual to suddenly rationalize extreme behavior, while totally disregarding the autonomy of other  family members.  It is perplexing at the very least to understand why BPD individuals act as they do.  Consequently to sum it up, when there is a strong history that suggests mental health disease demonstrates significant patterns through family history, genetics, and systemic behaviors; there may be sound reasons to conclude that there is an identifiable systemic pattern for the behavior being elicited by the ongoing emotional dysregulation.

Unfortunately, denial and a fundamental lack of understanding creates a state of denial that promotes a false sense of security that life is under control.  However, the great danger is that when behaviors suggest BPD and it is ignored, families convince themselves that it is not happening and live with constant confusion and disillusionment. A good question to ask is whether creating a mythology and magical thinking can negate the serious effect of what is really happening?  A philosophers question about perception says: ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound”?   The moral is the quote reminds us to think about what may be happening around us that is actually happening, but we just are not aware of what is happening because we are not there to hear.  The fact is that what is not heard or understood is often hidden in the secrecy of a  family system where denial provides a false sense of security that creates a artificial safe zone where the noise of behavior is not being heard by those around the Borderline, but that does not mean BPD behaviors are not happening in the context of life.

References

Lieb K., Z. M. (2004). Borderline personality disorder. The Lancet , 364, 453-61, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(04)16770-6.

MacKinnon, D. F. (2006). Affective instability as rapid cycling: Theoretical and clinical implications for borderline personality and bipolar spectrum disorders. Bipolar Disorders , 8 (1), 1-14. doi:10.1111/j.1399-5618.2006.00283.x.

Related Articles

• Borderline Personality Disorder: Creating a Safe Zone (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder (everydayhealth.com)
• New Help For Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) (fyiliving.com)
• Insight into the Diagnostic Criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (brighthub.com)
• Deception and the Borderline Personality What Could have Been? (organizationalchangesolutions.wordpress.com)
• The Cutting Truth of Borderline Personality Disorder (fyiliving.com)
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder (brighthub.com)
• What is Borderline Personality Disorder? (brighthub.com)
• Understanding Anger: A Symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder (brighthub.com)
• Difference Between Bipolar and Borderline Personality Disorder (everydayhealth.com)
• Bipolar Disorder vs. Borderline Personality Disorder (everydayhealth.com)
• Happy Second Edition, Stop Walking on Eggshells! (psychologytoday.com)
• Q & A: What is Borderline Personality Disorder? (fyiliving.com)
• New study shows clinician attitudes about BPD (and borderline patients) differ by experience and type of clinician (psychologytoday.com)
• Simon Baron-Cohen, Empathy, and the Atrocities in Afghanistan (neurocritic.blogspot.com)
• A Self-Described “Strange Girl” Talks About Borderline Disorder and Dialectical Therapy (psychologytoday.com)
• “Strange Girl” Memoirist Talks About Dialectical Behavior Therapy (psychologytoday.com)
• Ashley Smith’s family challenges coroner’s decision to ignore videos (theglobeandmail.com)
• Spotlight on Immature Personality Disorder (brighthub.com)
• The empathy spectrum (robinmizell.wordpress.com)
• Health Psychology Journal Apa | Health News (carehealthnews.com)
• Income Loss Linked to Risk of Mental Disorders (news.yahoo.com)
• Income Loss Linked to Risk of Mental Disorders (nlm.nih.gov)
• Jade S.’s BPD Story (ontheborderlineblog.wordpress.com)
• How do I live with Borderline Personality Disorder? (showard76.wordpress.com)
• How Do I Live with Borderline Personality Disorder? By Sharon (risablairlovitz.wordpress.com)
• Share your dual diagnosis here! (pediatricbipolarawareness.wordpress.com)
• Which celebrities have Borderline Personality Disorder? (showard76.wordpress.com)
• What is borderline personality disorder? (zocdoc.com)
• How Can I Treat Both Bipolar and Borderline Personality? (everydayhealth.com)
• Recognizing Borderline Personality Disorder in Children (authorjaenwirefly.wordpress.com)
• Borderline Personality Disorder? Who, me?? (bipolarandiknowit.wordpress.com)
• Seroquel and borderline personality disorder (oscarva61850754.typepad.com)
• Histrionic Personality Disorder? (psychologyandchristianity.wordpress.com)
• causes borderline personality disorder (phillipkerr3.typepad.com)
• Recognizing Borderline Personality Disorder in Children (theplacesthatscareyou.wordpress.com)
• Download Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder ebook (baqancta.typepad.com)
• Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder e-book downloads (yhokdri.typepad.com)
• Borderline PD and bipolar type 2 ? – Psychology and Mental Health … (psychforums.com)
• Borderline personality therapy is scarce, costly (thestar.com)