VictimBehavior

How To Spot A Codependent

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 19:20:00 +0000

OR how to discover that you're codependent, a checklist

A) codependents want chronic maladies, they want to have to "treat" a condition, they won't think in terms of curing a problem.. they may not be consciously aware of this but IF a medical "condition" went away.. they'd be lonely.. they're unaware that, on a sub conscious level that they

Actually LIKE having a medical condition.. because they view that "condition" as making them eligible for sympathy

A healthy person considers wanting sympathy as a weakness.. something to avoid, revulsion

Sympathy gives a codependent an orgasm.. gives them a hard on.. if the codependent is also a sexual deviant ( S and M ) it LITERALLY gives them a hard on

B) more to come, will add to this when I get off work, it's time to make the donuts to keep the lights on

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Why Codependents Refuse To Change

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 02:44:00 +0000

Most of the folks I've counseled wanted someone to help them "commiserate"
aka "make me feel better" about being effed up

Almost ZERO have actually made the decision to do what ever it takes to heal

Even health "professionals" want to think in terms of "treatment"

none of them really think in terms of CURE THIS MO-FO once and for all

One counselee I have is quick to resent when others "do something" real or imagined "to them"

Rather than "get pissed" over this,

how about getting pissed over paying someone else's bill?
and all of the payments you make ONLY go towards interest, the principal NEVER decreases

All of your codependency comes from your parents asking YOU to carry THEIR SHAME

the bill isn't even yours to pay.. yet your entire life you're attempting to do debt service on someone else's shame

and all of your "payments" are interest only

You're never, EVER going to pay that bill

it isn't even YOUR BILL TO PAY

you do NOT owe that

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Manipulation Causes Victim Based Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 13:50:00 +0000

Why would anyone choose to be a Victim?

what is attractive about being a victim?

That's easy.. it's unconscious, you don't "set out" to be a victim.. but unconsciously you LOVE IT.

Codependents like being victims... not from any conscious deliberate choice but due to parenting abuse.. they've come to view sympathy as a narcotic.

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Passive-Aggressive Predators - Snide Comments

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 07:03:00 +0000

If you USE passive aggressive behavior, you're probably ( conveniently ) unaware of it

If you NOTICE passive aggressive behavior used ON YOU.. you're likely to get pissed off.

Often, because codependents are unaware of what functional emotional boundaries are.. this can be the first indication to a codependent or the inkling that something is wrong and ought to be corrected.

according to Psychology Today:

Passive-aggressive actions can range from the relatively mild, such as making excuses for not following through, to the very serious, such as sabotaging someone’s well-being and success - https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/communication-success/201508/10-signs-passive-aggressive-relationship

For Example.. there's no way to respond to a question like this, without you looking like an asshole:

"So when did you stop beating your wife?"

There's a reason some people use this tactic.. they're playing a game of "one up-man-ship"

they "appear" to be "friendly" but they're really, subtly maneuvering to place themselves in a "one up" situation in the "pecking order"

I use the term "pecking order" because of Family Systems Theory

this is the first of a series of posts on Passive-Aggressive behavior... stay tuned

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Quitting Smoking Is a Bitch

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 03:00:00 +0000

I've been a cigarette smoker since 1973, that's 44 years

it's a bitch

withdrawal, anxiety, and mostly... addiction substitution

I guess this makes my 24th attempt to be smoke free

In the previous 23 attempts over the past 30 odd years, when I quit one thing, I'd do more of some other related self destructive behavior

This attempt is made during my 60th year above ground on this planet

nicotine patches help the most.. walking 6000 steps a day helps a LOT as well

use of an ecig seems to be the best thing to do when the patches just don't seem to be enough

I keep telling myself: ad addict does not know how or is not comfortable "treating themselves with respect"

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Describe Codependency Through Movies -Ben Stiller in Mystery Men

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 06:54:00 +0000

When someone is codependent or "does codependent behavior" they're usually the last one to know.
Having said that no one is ALL Codependent or NON Codependent, it's always a mix. People with damaged sense of self worth (regardless of the source of that "damage") can be said to "exhibit Codependent Behaviors".. that's not the same thing as identifying ones self as "YOUR CODEPENDENT... and I'm not

Now if YOU'RE codependent, typically you're not likely to be aware of it, to those that love you, interact with you, people you have an impact on.. .they're the ones who're likely to:
notice
complain about you
be affected by you
and because of that... those people are like canaries were to miners... they are your alarm

But us codependents tend to want to organize our beliefs around all or nothing. We tend to overlook the fact that no one is 100% codependent all of the time. That's a function of one of the root behaviors of codependency is we identify ourselves as our affliction

Healthy people can call themselves "I'm David"
Codependent people identify themselves as "I'm depressed"

So if you or someone you love you suspect might be codependent, you could look to characters portrayed in recent movies to get an idea of what types of behaviors are "codependent"

In the movie Mystery Men, Ben Stiller portrays a superhero, a failed superhero, or a superhero wanna be.. his character is "Furious"

The codependent parts of this "Furious" character are that this character likes to think of himself as a "ticking time bomb"... "don't make me hurt you" or "walk on egg shells around me cuz if you dare *set me off* I can't be held responsible for my actions"

Codependents want to live in a world where someone else "did something to me" and somehow that justifies them to have to get even.

Codependents believe they're "DUE" a "special dispensation"

more later

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Bad Behavior Of History Channel Stars

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 08:29:00 +0000

I just had to say this... the History Channel is one of my favorite TV shows.

On several of it's popular series, they depict tough jobs performed by tough men (and women) in tough situations:

Ice Road Truckers for example.

Some of the "bosses" in these shows just have lousy boundaries.

They use the excuse of the difficulty of their jobs as an excuse to berate, belittle and bully employees in their charge.

More coming...

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Why You Cant See Your Behavior As Victim Behavior

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 07:10:00 +0000

Victim Behavior is from non functional boundaries.

Boundaries can only be seen when you interact with someone else.
If you are the party allowing your boundaries to be "over stepped" you have the possibility of being aware of a boundary problem. (that doesn't mean you will automatically be aware of it)
If you are the party getting the "bigger half", often you cant see what the problem is... for you, there is no problem.

Identifying a behavior pattern is useful and necessary but more often than not does not automatically lead to correcting the problem.

If you've been practicing a repetitive pattern of victim behavior, you discover you don't like the results you're getting, take steps to improve your situation... most of you will, unfortunately... miss it

sounds unbelievable

You will miss it like you miss an old friend

Part of you is comfortable with the pattern of you allowing yourself to be screwed over

Most of you reading this will refuse to believe it

A huge percentage of people who win the lottery, end up broke, end up actually wishing it had never happened to them.

100% of them would say the same thing you just said about missing your victim behavior

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Please contact a licensed professional in your area
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Little Girl's Reatached Hand, Attitude Alters Reality

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:58:00 +0000

So you think you've got problems?

Codependents cling to their victim behavior as if it was an old friend

.. if you suddenly were not a victim anymore, if the fates suddenly stopped conspiring against you.

... you no longer had an external force to blame for your less than fortunate circumstances.

Codependents who "get better", more often than not unconsciously "Miss" their victim role, as if it was a long lost friend who you were so comfortable with you can't imagine living in a world without "Him" or "It"

Attitude can alter, effect, improve, cause stuff to change way, way, WAY beyond what most of us are willing to assign a value to.

The little girl in this story has a positive attitude that could make the the economy rebound.

Watch this incredible story and adjust your attitude to a fraction of hers and I'm of the opinion what ever is dragging you down (what ever the circumstances) will "get better"

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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Please contact a licensed professional in your area
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Placebos, Reality and Perception

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:05:00 +0000

The Placebo Effect

by Harriet Hall, MD

Jane D. was a regular visitor to our ER, usually showing up late at night demanding an injection of the narcotic Demerol, the only thing that worked for her severe headaches. One night the staff psychiatrist had the nurse give her an injection of saline instead. It worked!

He told Jane she had responded to a placebo, discussed the implications, and thought he’d helped her understand that her problem was psychological. But as he was leaving the room, Jane asked, “Can I get that new medicine again next time instead of the Demerol? It really worked great!”

What’s going on here? What is the placebo effect and how does it work?

(note: This is where I differ from the shortsighted doctor...now watch him squirm and try to justify the Cartesian Billard Ball Universe that says "If we can't measure it, then it must not be "Real")

The term “placebo effect” is unfortunate; it leads to misunderstandings. Placebos themselves don’t have any effect.

They are inert: that’s what placebo means. The word placebo comes from the Latin for “I please.” You can think of it as the opposite of “I benefit.”

What we really mean by “the placebo effect” is not some mysterious effect from giving an inert treatment, but the complex web of psychosocial effects surrounding medical treatment. Those effects occur with effective treatments too, not just with inert treatments.

Mark Crislip, MD, thinks the placebo effect is a myth. “I think that the placebo effect with pain is a mild example of cognitive behavioral therapy; the pain stays the same, it is the emotional response that is altered

( and the problem with this is? Oh I get it, you can't right a prescription for an 'emotional state that is altered'... translation? You can't get paid unless you write a prescription?)

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… Ain’t no such thing as a placebo effect, only a change in perception.” He’s correct in saying that the placebo effect does nothing to change the pain signals in the nerves. But most people think the change in perception is the placebo effect and is worth pursuing.

The good doctor's problem is that there ISN'T any reality.. there is ONLY perception.
Time does not exist (Einstein proved that over 100 years ago, and no one want's to look at what is right before their eyes)

There is a big difference between pain and suffering. A woman’s labor pains hurt, but with a joyful end in sight she may not suffer as much as a man who has milder pain sensations but is worried that his injured leg may need to be amputated. Some people say that morphine doesn’t relieve pain so much as make you not care about it. The experience of pain and the meaning of pain for the patient matter as much as the strength of the pain stimulus. If the placebo effect can do anything to divert the patient’s attention or help him reframe the meaning of his pain, his altered perception can reduce his experience of suffering.

Beecher Says Placebos Are Powerful

In 1955, Dr. Henry Beecher published a seminal paper entitled “The Powerful Placebo” in the Journal of the American Medical Association.² He reviewed studies that compared an active treatment to a placebo, and found that on average 35% of patients improved with the placebo. So any study that doesn’t have a placebo group for comparison is likely to give a false positive result. The placebo-controlled trial is now one of the cornerstones of medical science. It’s not enough to show that Miracle-mycin works; we have to show that it works better than a dummy pill that looks like Miracle-mycin but only contains sugar.

Beecher’s paper has been widely cited as evidence that 35% of patients respond to placebos, but that’s not really what it showed. He wasn’t measuring the placebo effect in isolation — he was actually measuring a combination of the placebo effect, the natural course of disease, and other factors. The patients who apparently responded to placebo included patients who showed improvement for other reasons. Reasons like spontaneous improvement, fluctuation of symptoms, regression to the mean, answers of politeness, experimental subordination, conditioned answers, misjudgment, etc.

Hrobjartsson Says Placebos Are Powerless

To tease out how much of that 35% should be attributable to placebo, we need to know how many patients might have reported improvement without any treatment. In 2001 two Danish researchers, Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Peter Gotzsche, published a paper entitled “Is the Placebo Powerless?” in the New England Journal of Medicine.³ They reviewed studies that included a no-treatment group, and they compared the improvement with placebos to the improvement with no treatment. They “found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects.”

For studies with a binary outcome (improved versus not improved) there was no significant difference between the placebo and no treatment groups. For studies with continuous outcomes, there was some apparent effect of placebo; but not so for objective outcomes that could be measured by someone else, such as blood pressure, but only for subjective outcomes that depended on self-reports, such as pain. They weren’t even sure about that, however, because the effect was greater in smaller trials, indicating possible bias.

But Placebos Do Work, Don’t They?

It’s hard to reconcile a study like this with what we know about placebos from experiences like the case of Jane D. They do seem to work, and they seem to work very dramatically at times.

In a study of pain after dental surgery, patients were given either intravenous morphine or a saline placebo. If they were told that the saline was a powerful new painkiller, they got just as much relief as the patients who received morphine. In another study, all patients were given morphine for post-op pain, but only half were told they were getting it. The patients who didn’t know they were getting it only experienced half as much pain relief. In a study of acupuncture for post-op dental pain, there was no difference between the “real” acupuncture and placebo “sham” acupuncture groups, but when they asked patients which group they thought they were in, they discovered that those who believed they were in the “real” group reported significantly more pain relief than those who believed they were in the “sham” group — regardless of which group they were actually in!

We not only know placebos “work,” we know there is a hierarchy of effectiveness:

Placebo surgery works better than placebo injections
Placebo injections work better than placebo pills
Sham acupuncture treatment works better than a placebo pill
Capsules work better than tablets
Big pills work better than small
The more doses a day, the better
The more expensive, the better
The color of the pill makes a difference
Telling the patient, “This will relieve your pain” works better than saying “This might help.”

Again I must interject... there ISN'T any reality, there is ONLY perception, why do you think it works better if you tell the patient, “This will relieve your pain” works better than saying “This might help.”

In one study patients were given the same aspirin in either a brand name bottle or an unlabelled bottle; it worked better if it was labeled as a brand they recognized. Our pharmacy used to stock two different brands of allergy pills that were made in the same factory and were identical except that one was green and the other was blue. When a patient said it wasn’t working any more, we’d switch him to the other brand and it would start working again.

Along with placebo effects, there are nocebo (“I harm”) effects. People getting inert treatments often report new symptoms. A friend of mine stopped taking her homeopathic sleep remedy because she thought it was causing side effects. (Homeopathy is the ultimate placebo because its remedies usually contain nothing but water.) In the Women’s Health Initiative study of postmenopausal hormone treatment, when the treatment was stopped, 63% of the women taking hormones reported withdrawal symptoms, but so did 40% of the women taking a placebo. If we tell patients a treatment may cause nausea, they are far more likely to report nausea than if we don’t mention that possibility.

The placebo effect is mainly subjective. Placebos don’t work on patients who are asleep or unconscious. You have to know you’re being treated. Placebos don’t keep women from getting pregnant. They don’t cure cancer, heal broken bones, or do anything you can measure objectively. They work for more elusive complaints like headache, depression, itching, shortness of breath, tension, indigestion, and other symptoms that require us to accept the patient’s self-report of what he is experiencing.

That doesn’t imply that those symptoms are not real. Some misguided doctors have tried to use placebo response as a test to diagnose whether a patient is really sick or not. That test doesn’t work, and even if it did it would be unethical.

Some researchers believe that placebos can have objective effects. When doctors painted warts with an inert dye and told patients the wart would disappear when the color wore off, the warts disappeared. Patients with newly implanted pacemakers improved even before the pacemakers were turned on. Asthmatics’ airways dilated when they were told they were getting a bronchodilator. Colitis patients treated with placebo not only reported feeling better but actually had less inflammation of the intestines visible on sigmoidoscopy. Patients with ulcers healed faster when given two placebo pills instead of one.

Harvard University medical researcher Herbert Benson believes that the placebo effect yields clinical improvement for 60–90% of diseases, including angina, asthma, herpes simplex, and ulcers. Studies that have not been replicated have suggested that the placebo effect can influence things like swelling, movement disorders, temperature, pulse, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and exercise tolerance.

So far the evidence for objective placebo effects is weak. Another hypothesis is that the placebo effect is only subjective, but that these subjective effects can indirectly lead to objectively measurable effects. For example, if you are in pain and the placebo effect decreases your perception of that pain, you might expect your pulse and blood pressure to drop. If you are asthmatic and are wheezing, any psychological factor that reduces your anxiety level or helps you relax might indirectly ease your breathing symptoms and even allow your constricted bronchi to dilate. In this view, the placebo effect doesn’t really cause objective effects, it allows you to have a different experience of your symptoms and it is that different experience that indirectly affects your physiology. Semantic quibbling, perhaps.

Placebo surgery is another controversial subject. Forty years ago, a young Seattle cardiologist named Leonard Cobb conducted a unique trial of a procedure then commonly used for angina, in which doctors made small incisions in the chest and tied knots in two arteries to try to increase blood flow to the heart. It was a popular technique — 90% of patients reported that it helped — but when Cobb compared it with placebo surgery in which he made incisions but did not tie off the arteries, the sham operations proved just as successful. The procedure, known as internal mammary ligation, was soon abandoned.⁴

In a more recent study, sham arthroscopic surgery was compared to real arthroscopic surgery for knee osteoarthritis. The patients who had only a skin incision got just as good results. One patient who was told he had the sham procedure still refers to it as the surgery that cured him.

Some people question whether studies like these really show that surgery has a placebo effect. Maybe the surgery was unnecessary and patients would have improved anyway.

How Could It Work?

If the placebo effect is real, what might the mechanism be? We can’t just write it off as delusions of hyper-suggestible patients. There’s evidence that several things might be going on. The main hypotheses are: expectancy, motivation, conditioning, and endogenous opiates.

Expectancy is an established psychological phenomenon. It even affects vision: we are more likely to see what we expect to see. Wine tastes better if the price is higher. Kids like fast food better if it comes in a McDonald’s wrapper. If we expect to feel pain we are more likely to feel pain. If we are told to expect a strong painkiller, we’re more likely to get pain relief.
Motivation, the need or desire to improve health or get relief, has been shown to contribute independently to the placebo response. Patients who are strongly motivated to get well are more compliant and follow health advice more conscientiously. And patients who are more compliant about taking their placebo pills regularly get a stronger placebo response.
Conditioning is what Pavlov did to his dogs. People learn to associate pills and medical treatments with relief of symptoms. The body even learns physiologic responses: dogs salivate when injected with morphine; after they become conditioned, injecting a placebo makes them salivate, although not as much.
Endogenous opiates are pain-relieving chemicals produced in the brain that mimic the effects of opium-like drugs (morphine, etc.). There is some evidence that when patients respond to placebos, their brains produce more of these chemicals. Imaging studies have shown activation of opioid receptors in the brain when people are told that a placebo is a painkiller. And there is evidence that giving a drug that blocks the effect of narcotics can also block the placebo effect.

Dopamine levels increased in the brains of Parkinson’s patients after taking a placebo; and patients who said they felt better released higher levels of dopamine. In another brain imaging study, researchers had patients play a game and estimate their chances of winning. The same reward areas in the brain lit up in subjects who thought they would win as in patients who were most convinced that the placebo painkiller would work. Another study of patients who preferred either Coca Cola or Pepsi found that brand information was processed in a different part of the brain than taste from blind taste tests. We may be seeing clues about how the brain handles anticipation, expectation, optimism, previous experience, or who knows what. There may be genetic differences or differences in dopamine receptor responsiveness. Brain imaging is a blunt tool, and it’s too soon to know what these studies mean, but it’s a promising avenue of research.

Can Animals Respond to Placebos?

Believers in homeopathy and acupuncture tell us that animals respond to those treatments and animals can’t respond to placebos, so that must mean those treatments are effective. But the veterinary literature accepts the reality of placebo response in animals, and there are plausible explanations:

They can develop a learned physiologic response to a drug and then respond similarly when a placebo is substituted.
They respond to attention and care from humans.
Human owners can experience the placebo effect for their pets by perceiving a response where there really is none.
Since animals can’t talk, we have to interpret an animal’s behavior as indicating relief of pain; this may not always be accurate.

What About Ethics?

Some people don’t even want to know whether a treatment is a placebo or not. If they feel better, that’s all that matters to them. In Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine, R. Barker Bausell argues that the primary benefit of alternative therapies is a placebo effect, often enhanced by ritual and impressive pseudoscientific jargon.

If we can give patients a placebo and relieve their pain, what’s wrong with that? If a little white lie benefits the patient, why not lie? The answer is that it’s unethical for doctors to lie to patients or prescribe ineffective treatments, and because deception undermines the doctor-patient relationship in the long run. Also, as Bob Carroll of The Skeptic’s Dictionary points out, “the placebo can be an open door to quackery.”⁵

Based on Carroll’s website (skepdic.com), the Dictionary is the definitive short-answer debunking of nearly every thing skeptical. A must for every bookshelf. ORDER the book

In a recent study in Denmark, 48% of doctors reported prescribing a placebo at least 10 times in the last year, including antibiotics for viral infections and vitamins for fatigue. Specialists and hospital-based physicians were less likely to prescribe them. A 2004 study of physicians in Israel found that 60% reported using placebos for reasons like “fending off” requests for unjustified medications or calming a patient.

What if doctors were honest? If they told patients a treatment was a placebo, would that destroy the placebo effect? Maybe not. After clinical trials, patients who were told they’d been taking the placebo have asked if they could keep taking it. In one study patients were told one pill was inert and would only serve as a “dose extender” (i.e., a placebo that would allow a lower dose of the effective pill); patients accepted it and were able to lower their dose. What if a doctor tells a patient a treatment is not supported by any scientific evidence but some people believe it has helped them? Placebos raise ethical dilemmas on which doctors do not agree.

In a recent court case, the proponents of a particular form of quackery known as Q-rays admitted their device was bogus, but argued that since the placebo effect was effective they were justified in selling it. The court disagreed.

Is there any ethical way doctors can use the placebo effect to help their patients? Yes, of course. They already do. The placebo effect is an integral part of every doctor-patient interaction. Good doctors have always gained their patients’ trust and given them hope and reassurance.

What’s effective is not the placebo, but the meaning of the treatment. We enter into a human relationship with a caring person who offers to help us. We may be given a token of that caring in the form of a prescription. We may have a conditioned response to expect improvement because we have been helped in the past. We get a story, a narrative that explains why we feel sick and what we can do to get better. We get hope, support, human warmth, touch. All these factors might lead to an actual physiological response in which our pulse rate drops, we relax, our stress hormones decrease, and other changes facilitate healing, or at least comfort. One study supposedly showed that patients recovered faster if their window looked out on trees rather than a brick wall; even if they didn’t recover faster, wasn’t it nice to give them a view? Even if we can’t document a quantifiable effect on patient outcome, the quality of life is important.

Effective treatments have placebo effects too. A substantial percentage of the effects from antidepressants may be placebo effects. Morphine works even better if your doctor tells you it’s strong.

We can’t isolate placebo effect from conventional medicine — it gets us thinking the wrong way. As the neurologist Robert Burton says, “Even given our advanced state of medical knowledge, much of routine medical care — from treating backaches to the common cold — relies primarily upon reassurance and hope, not disease- specific treatments … we need to reconsider how to facilitate the placebo effect with minimal risk and cost, and without deception.”⁶

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Spiritual Practice vs. Spiritual Growth

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:55:00 +0000

Is your spiritual growth creating the results you want?

I'm not talking about enlightenment. I'm talking about growth in other life areas. We are, after all, whole beings. Expansion in one area of our lives must be reflected in all other life areas.

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It's not unreasonable to expect spiritual growth to create a greater level of fulfillment, more financial abundance, more satisfaction within relationships, and a greater sense of health and well-being. I'll go even further than that. If the rest of our lives are not showing expansion, then we're not really growing spiritually.

What we may be doing instead is simply practicing.

Meditation, prayer, journaling, fasting or doing yoga are called spiritual "practices" for a reason. Have you ever wondered what we are practicing for? These activities are not the main event -- they are just how we "practice." These activities allow us to "practice" new states of Being so that we may then apply them to the rest of our lives. Taken into the rest of our lives, these new states of Being will create new action, and new results. That's the point of spiritual practice. We are, after all, here to express ourselves as Divine Beings. We're here to create the lives we want, to be Creators of our human experience.

It's easy being Buddha- or Christ-like when we're sitting on a meditation pillow. It's not so easy when we try to take this state of Being out into the world, into our relationships, our work, our parenting, or dinner with our in-laws.

It can be so difficult taking that we don't even try. We relegate our spiritual growth to the realm of the spiritual "practice." We become all about our time on the meditation pillow or the yoga mat. We seek out environments in which it's easy to be oh-so-spiritual. We ignore the fact that we are hardly able to pay the bills, or are miserable in our relationship, or feel exhausted all the time. We are, after all, able to escape into bliss on our meditation pillow every day.

In the meantime, the more we connect to our Higher Selves, the higher our vibration rates, the more obviously any energetic misalignments will manifest themselves. Our life circumstances may actually deteriorate as we increase our spiritual "practice" if we just keep doing what we've always done. This, in turn, may send us running back to the comfort and safe haven of our spiritual "practice" instead of addressing the underlying issues that are calling out to be resolved. Spirituality becomes escapism.

Is your spiritual growth creating the results you want in the rest of your life? Or is your spirituality just an abstract, a theory, a "practice?" Are you ready to take your spiritual "practice" into the main event of life? Are you ready to translate your spirituality into new action and new results that are the fullest expression of your Being?

It's time to make ourselves, as spiritual Beings, manifest in every way we choose.

Andrea Hess is an Intuitive Consultant and author of "Unlock Your Intuition: How to Accurately and Reliably Access Your Most Valuable Resource." For more information on her book, her readings, or to read more of her work on her blog, please visit http://www.EmpoweredSoul.com

Contact the Author
Andrea Hess

Andrea@EmpoweredSoul.com
More Details about results of spiritual practice here.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

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Temper tantrum

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 02:22:00 +0000

We have a dog, the dog is kind of neurotic...

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For two years he was the baby of the household. Now he's not. I have a grandbaby (I'm the live in baby sitter), the dog's behavior has changed in way that illustrates non functional boundaries like no other metaphor I can think of.

I've not posted to this blog as often as I used to because my professional life as a Search Engine Copy writer has taken off. The holidays added to my lack of time to devote to this series of blogs I author.

I just had to post this because it's so difficult to describe what bad boundaries are both to someone who has them and even more difficult for people with good boundaries to fathom.

For starters, there isn't such a thing as *bad* boundaries, it's not a cut n dry thing. Just like an gasoline powered engine's spark plug gap is not X amount or it wont work. A spark plug gap is between a given range, closer to too wide and the spark weakens, too close together and the spark is too hot.

A car can run as long as the gap is "within specs".

The dog... I'm digressing.

OK, the dog is NOT jealous of the newborn in the house. The dog is not aggressive, nor is it vindictive, the dog loves the baby, the dog seems to instinctively know that the baby is family.

The dog patiently allows the baby to smack him, pull his ears, the dog is very delicate in it's dealings with the baby (had to get that out of the way)

When I walk the dog however... well, the dog is more "needy" than he used to be.

The dog (my daughters family doesn't want names, not even the dogs name, so in this blog his name is "the dog") behavior is extra childish.

it's as if he's saying: "I deserve special consideration due to my decreased standing in the pecking order"

He misbehaves more, he gets himself off the leash a lot more than he used to.

It's like he's saying to us: "You'd misbehave too if you lost face like me"

kinda reminds me of hearing old timers say: "You'd drink too if you had a wife like mine"

Victim behavior is what you get from less than functional boundaries.

Boundaries are where you end and another person begins.

I'm gonna have to elaborate more after I change my grand babies diaper
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year if I don't hear from you until then

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Overcoming your Soft Addictions

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 09:38:00 +0000

The holidays are wearing me out, and I'm a grandfather now, a full time grandfather... that's why I've not posted to this blog (or these series of blogs) in over a month.

At least I can say the posts from last month were good.

It's between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I've got a lot to be Thankful for this year.

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I've heard the phrase: "Grateful Alcoholic" in regards to someone recovered from addiction and had a "spiritual awakening". I "sorta" understood in theory how an addict could say that, but since I was a love addict chasing someone who was going to cheat no matter who they were with (I learned to not take it personally, she was an 'equal opportunity cheater'), the thought of being grateful for living in abject misery (depression bordering on suicidal)... I thought it was bullshit.

Now that's not true, I *KNEW* others could pull that off, Mother Teresa types, but not in the real world where I lived:)

This created within me something NLP calls MetaShame, that is before you were fucked up and unaware, a kind of ignorant bliss, now you find out the *source* of your shame, and you know damn well you aren't going to be able to do shit about that one.

So now you're ashamed of BEING ashamed, catch 22 doesn't even come close to describing this pile of shit.

This is like 'quiting smoking' or you're not really clean and sober.

Substituting addictions? get real, you can quit heroin, crack, alcohol, but quit cigarettes?

Not gonna happen

Fast forward me to today... I love my granddaughter. I love the fact that I AM extended family now, I never had extended family... it's beyond cool.

I was 'bonding' with my son in law, he knows I've had my ups and downs with addictions... he told me something that Blew me Away!

and it was true actually, after I had a chance to ponder it:

He's glad I fucked up back then, he's glad I did exactly what I did, warts and all.

Embarrassing as some of it was for me in the 1990's, he's Grateful to God that everything happened EXACTLY the way it did.

He's not happy I suffered, not happy I was in pain, but and this is THE but.

If everything hadn't happened exactly the way it did, there would be no daughter for him to fall in love with, and no granddaughter to be the apple of both our eyes.

One of the things that I learned from 'bonding' is that he has respect for me that I didn't have, he saw through the addictive lying, rationalizing, the shit that I passed off as " eccentricities " ( House is really an asshole, he's not cool, he's a controlling self absorbed asshole, and I wish I wasn't so much like him)

So.. in retrospect, it wasn't such a bitter pill to swallow after all.

Damn near forgot the thrust of this post was to pitch a book that taught me useful stuff:

Overcoming your Soft Addictions

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Victim Behavior is codependent behavior

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 06:03:00 +0000

Victim behavior is learned.

So what!

What are you going to do NOW?

"80% of success is WHY to, not how to" Tony Robbins

"The purpose of having boundaries is to protect and take care of ourselves. We need to be able to tell other people when they are acting in ways that are not acceptable to us. A first step is starting to know that we have a right to protect and defend ourselves. That we have not only the right, but the duty to take responsibility for how we allow others to treat us."

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This is a Great Book for working with Boundaries within your family. What is said here about 'Natural & Logical Consequences' is particularly useful. My heartfelt thanks go out to the middle school counselor that told me about this book 22 years ago, it's called S.T.E.P. or

Systematic Training for Effective Parenting

Basically, if you can't implement Natural and Logical Consequences as described in this book, that is a dead giveaway that you don't have healthy, functional boundaries.

"Setting boundaries is not a more sophisticated way of manipulation - although some people will say they are setting boundaries, when in fact they are attempting to manipulate. The difference between setting a boundary in a healthy way and manipulating is: When we set a boundary we let go of the outcome."

From the book: "Beyond Codependency" by Melody Beattie
"Setting boundaries is about learning to take care of ourselves, no matter what happens, where we go, or who we're with.

Boundaries emerge from deep decisions about what we believe we deserve and don't deserve.

Boundaries emerge from belief that what we want and need, like and dislike, is important.

Boundaries emerge from a deeper sense of our personal rights, especially the right we have to take care of ourselves and to be ourselves.

Boundaries emerge as we learn to value, trust, and listen to ourselves.

The goal of having and setting boundaries isn't to build thick walls around ourselves. The purpose is to gain enough security and sense of self to get close to others without the threat of losing ourselves, smothering them, trespassing, or being invaded. Boundaries are the key to loving relationships.

When we have a sense of self, we'll be able to experience closeness and intimacy. We'll be able to love and to be loved.

Intimacy, play, and creativity require loss of control. Only when we have boundaries and know we can trust ourselves to enforce them and take care of ourselves, will we be able to let go enough to SOAR. These same activities help develop a sense of self, for it is through LOVE, PLAY, and CREATIVITY that we begin to understand who we are and become reassured we can trust ourselves. Having boundaries means having a self strong, NURTURED, HEALTHY and CONFIDENT enough to LET GO--and come back again INTACT."

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Beyond-Codependency/Melody-Beattie/e/9780894865831/?itm=1&afsrc=1&lkid=J27117615&pubid=K144142&byo=1

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

People dont want to get better?

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:05:00 +0000

My mother is an L.C.S.W. (Licenced Clinical Social Worker), she's retired now.

She worked for the State of Louisiana and had a private practice.

She gave up her private practice... in disgust!

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Why?

Almost everyone she counseled... couples mostly... wanted to:

Pay her to make it look like they were doing something about their problems

Use the counseling to 'make the other partner wrong'

Didn't really want to make anything better

Were completely UNAWARE that they had any 'hidden agenda'

the last line there is related to the previous post in this blog.

http://victimbehavior.blogspot.com/2008/10/approach-avoidance-psychological.html

Ever wonder why people buy exercise bikes and leave em in the back room gathering dust?

They want to LOOK like their concerned about X, Y or Z

But unconsciously they don't really want to 'fix' x, y or z.

Unconsciously we actually would be lonely if our dysfunctions and neurosis left us.

We're so accustomed to the paradigm of dysfunction, paradigm where we suck and everyone else is allowed to succeed.

What our family of origin's premise was is this:

You aren't LOVED unless X
You're supposed to go out and find a mate that replays the script your parents had when you were growing up...

and you're supposed to pretend that you aren't aware of this...you're supposed to act, think, walk, talk, smell, eat and sweat as if your criteria for choosing a mate is actually YOUR decision.

Bullshit

quit reliving your parents fucked up ness and ... you'll have to wait for another post for that

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Approach Avoidance/ Psychological Reversal

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:03:00 +0000

Simply put:

Psychological Reversal is where you want X, and your insides want Y.

of course this is an oversimplification but that’s it in a nut shell.

Now here’s the kicker: the part of you that wants Y, he’s a LOT bigger than you are.

From Crack Cocaine Addiction Recovery

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Now this is gonna sound like the movie, “Cybil”, like we have multiple personalites… but it’s generally accepted that we have a subconscious, and that we have both analytical, logical left brains and intuitive, non rational right brains.

We're All a little schizophrenic

Left Brain is:

logical

analytical

pragmatic

linear representational

Right Brain is:

symbolic representational

intuitive

NON rational

emotional

When you're viewing life through your left brain ONLY, you're valuing it's perspective and ignoring your right brain's perspective.

When you're viewing life through your right brain's perspective, there are options available to you that were unavailable in the other mode, you're 'thinking outside the box'.

Before you read this, you weren't even aware that you viewed life through a perspective at all!

A *Life View Perspective* can be seen as a "Premise", a Built in Unconscious Premise.

Most of us (in the western world view)hold our right brain's perspective in contempt.

Right Brain is a 'red headed step child', not to be taken seriously...

"The only thing right brain can think up is superstitious, shaman, Hari Krishna, hocus pocus" is the unspoken premise the entire Western World View is based upon since Newton and Descartes

Approach Avoidance

The way this relationship works out is like a piece of machinery’s governor, some trucks have governors that prevent them from accelerating past 63 mph.

Most of us are totally unaware of this internal Governor, Tony Robbins called it an internal thermostat.

In his model, when we get in need of something, when we want something, when a situation comes up that’s unacceptable to us, the thermostat kicks in… we have energy available to heat things up…

What’s not obvious is that it also works in reverse!

Once you exceed your internal self image’s limit…
The thermostat kicks in again… and cools things down.

we F*** up, screw up, are late for an important appointment, all of a sudden anything and everything that could cause us to lose focus, is mysteriously more important…
fancy that!

Self Sabotage

"Somethings gotta be wrong because everythings goin to damn Good"

Irresponsibility IS codependency

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Installing new behavior

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:20:00 +0000

Semantics.

What you call something, the context you 'hold' a concept, determines what the parameters of what you believe is possible and not possible.

This is part and parcel of the underpinnings of the science of N.L.P.

What exactly IS N.L.P?

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Neuro Linguistic Programming

NLP was begun in the mid-seventies by a linguist (Grinder) and a mathematician (Bandler) who had strong interests in (a) successful people, (b) psychology, (c) language and (d) computer programming. It is a difficult to define NLP because those who started it and those involved in it use such vague and ambiguous language that NLP means different things to different people.

NLP is also used for individual psychotherapy for problems as diverse as phobias and schizophrenia. NLP also aims at transforming corporations, showing them how to achieve their maximum potential and achieve great success.

NLP claims to help people change by teaching them to program their brains. We were given brains, we are told, but no instruction manual. NLP offers you a user-manual for the brain. The brain-manual seems to be a metaphor for NLP training, which is sometimes referred to as "software for the brain."

What I'm getting at here is that Victim Behavior is learned, not permanent, and the words we say to ourselves reinforce that behavior consistently.

And our behavior is determined by pre suppositions, unconscious beliefs, that we adopted without being aware that we define what is and what isn't possbile for us.

What IS behavior?

According to Pia Melody, reknown author who influenced much of my thinking, Our Behavior is:

What we do

What we don't do

what we're willing to do

what we're NOT willing to do

Why is that significant?

Most of us, most of the time walk around in a pre suppostition.

We're not even aware of any such pre-supposition... that doesn't mean it's not there.

Look up at the sky (hopefully it's day time or I'm gonna look foolish)

Is it blue?

Ya sure about that?

If the sky is blue, if that's the presupposition you're working with, the concept that you accept without wondering or pondering if it really IS true or NOT...

Then, how bout when it's dark?

If the sky was so blue, why aren't the stars blue? or the planets???

Let's see now, if we were looking thru yellow colored sun glasses and we looked up at a Red Light, what, exactly, would we see?

Red?

OR Green ?????

the sky isn't really blue, it only looks that way when the sun is warming the air, heating up the atmosphere and exciting certain molecules...

We have the PERCEPTION that the sky is blue

so tell me...

If we had an erroneous perception, and that perception was woven into our presuppostion...
and we didn't even know, (or were aware of) we had a pre-supposition...

Might we find it useful to discover that pre-suppositions are changeable?

In N.L.P. or Neuro Linguistic Programming, we learn that we have presuppositions that govern/ limit/ define the limits of what we're capable of, what we're willing to expend time, effort and energy on.

so... if you're a crack addict and you're walking around with the unconscious presupposition that addictions are just something we're gonna have to live with, the presuppositition that OTHERS, somebody can quit smoking crack, but I'm not likley to be one of them... what would that do to your willingness to expend:

time

effort

energy

towards?

And the irony of it is that you didn't even know you HAD any presuppostitions.

How can you install a new behavior when you didn't even know behaviors were installed in the first place?

More coming

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Poor Me Syndrome and what you can do about it.

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:25:00 +0000

Poor Me Syndrome, and what you can do about it

What does Victim Behavior look like?
...the opposite of healthy boundaries, that's what

A victim has their
Internal Boundaries backwards

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Below are some lists of victim behavior characteristics, see if you recognize any of these patterns.

I personally struggled with the problem of what to do about Victim Behavior for a long time before I came upon this extremely useful web page from Dr, James J. Messina, on the topic of:

"Overcoming the Role of Victim and Martyr" at his
Tools for Coping Series site.

For years I felt terrible because I could clearly see parts of my pain was victim behavior based- Dr Messina's site zeroed me in on the difference between a Martyr and a Victim. I was more martyr than victim with respect to a failed long term relationship.

Definition of victim behavior reprinted with Dr Messina's permission:

Victims often:

-Lack the knowledge that they are being taken advantage of by others.

-Are so used to a certain way of being treated that they don't recognize it as unhealthy for them.

-Lack healthy self-esteem or self-concepts.

-Have little belief in themselves.

-Come from high-stress families where their rights were never respected; therefore, they lack the competencies, skills, and abilities to stand up for their rights.

-Lack information about assertive behavior and have no experience in using assertive behavior.

-Lack of ``others'' in their lives who can point out alternative healthy solutions to their problems.

-Are timid, scared, and suspicious of help being offered to them.

-Are skeptical about someone really wanting to help them.

Victims often hold to some of the following irrational beliefs in their lives:

-You must be nice to everyone, even if they are not nice to you.

-Life is supposed to be filled with unhappiness and uncertainty.

-The small guy never wins.

-This is the way things are supposed to be.

-There are winners and losers in all transactions between people.

-My role in life is to be a loser.

-Most people are basically selfish, mean, self-centered and disrespectful.

-You should never complain.

-Take it like a "man" (woman)!

-Be silent with your feelings

Victims often do not stand up for their rights because they suffer from the irrational fear of:

-disapproval

-rejection

-conflict

-taking a risk

-the unknown

-change

-confrontation

-being overwhelmed emotionally and physically

-loss of self-respect

-making a mistake.

The following is a list of common characteristics of Adult Children of Alcoholics.

These characteristics were developed by Dr Janet G. Woititz. You may not feel that each one applies to you, but I found that most of them fit my personality or lifestyle in some way, especially the first one.

Adult Children (short for A.C.O.A.)

...guess at what normal is

...have difficulty following a project through from beginning to end

...lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth

...have difficulty having fun

...have difficulty with intimate relationships

...overreact to changes over which they have no control

...constantly seek approval and affirmation

...feel that they are different from other people

...are either super responsible or super irresponsible

...judge themselves without mercy

...take themselves very seriously

...tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious thought to alternative behaviors or possible consequences. This impulsivity leads to confusion, self loathing, and loss of control of their environment. As a result, they spend tremendous amounts of time cleaning up the mess.

Of course this is not the final and inclusive list of characteristics, but it gives you a good idea where some of your so called 'personality flaws' or problems in relationships may be coming from.

==========
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Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

God's Eye View- the subject object relation

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:11:00 +0000

God's Eye View

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I took E.S.T. in August 1979, There I was exposed to the idea that God is nowhere...
we are 'here' by virtue of us not being anywhere else,
God is no where because he's Everywhere.

This is a lot more than just semantics.

I'm a codependent.
I'm an incest survivor.
I'm an addict.

I came to that conclusion from reading and listening to
John Bradshaw's work. Bradshaw bases much of his work on
Family Systems Theory.

One of the tenants of Bradshaw's work is that as codependents, we're
"Other-centered"
we identify ourselves from others, not from ourselves.

Up till now you thought you were the voice inside your head
That voice is your Ego

You are much more than an Ego

It is: Logical, Analytical, Pragmatic and virtually useless to heal

“Up till now you thought you were the voice in the back of
your head”

“You actually thought that was you”

“What you are, in reality, is a space for events to occur in"

Ahh "The denigration of the ego"… and why at least the temporary subjugation of the ego would be a good idea.

http://codependentboundaries.blogspot.com/2008/08/whats-wrong-with-reason-rationality.html

hmm, it seems in my vigor to explain our ego construct’s (and it is a construct, of our own creation) limitations…

I forgot to express that busting our ego from Sargent back to private was supposed to be temporary. (I wrote a book where I described our Ego as a non com (non commissioned officer- a "Sargent" that runs the show internally)

my bad…

Our ego IS useful, without it, I feel we’d be like the character Dustin Hoffman played in Rain Man. OK, so Raymond was an autistic savant, sue me… you get the picture.

John Bradshaw, who shaped most of my theology/psychology says that “in order to give up the ego, we’ve gotta have a healthy one, first!”

Our ego (construct) is not broken

It got us here didn’t it?
It kept a roof over our head, kept us from losing our jobs, we still have (most of us) have all our fingers and toes???

Our Ego is without a doubt, probably the most useful tool at our disposal.

If you ask it, however, it wants to think it’s the ONLY tool at our disposal… as a matter of fact, our ego also thinks it IS us (and right now it’s wondering who the hell you think you are implying that some other part of you might be present, let alone in charge???)

It’s simply not the best tool to have at the wheel full time, if the only tool in your tool box is a hammer, all of your problems tend to look like nails.

Our ego is HALF of our management.
It just doesn’t know it.

Does your car have a stick shift?

A car’s clutch pedal is not deficient because it fails to be a gas pedal.

A gas pedal is not deficient because it fails to be a clutch pedal.

With the tool of Neuro Linguistic Programming ( NLP) we can take our minds out of gear, long enough to fiddle with the clutch and learn to work our logical, analytical left brain in harmony with our non linear, intuitive right brain… without slipping the clutch!

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Part of you is looking at you with contempt

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:31:00 +0000

Up till now you thought you were the voice inside your head
That voice is your Ego

You are much more than an Ego

Your Ego is in charge of "Doing"

Your 'greater self' (for lack of a better term) is in charge of "Being"

How does one "Be"?

You do nothing... constructively.

That's what you do when you meditate... you focus on nothing.
Your rational mind is going to go crazy over this concept, it sounds silly,
almost "hari krishna-ish"

Don't worry, your ego will get over it.

See this post on another of my recovery blogs:

http://codependentbounaries.blogspot.com/2008/08/whats-wrong-with-reason-rationality.html

Oh yeah, I'm going to have to make a post on how to meditate.

There is no 'wrong way' to meditate, however there are many ways to 'assist' you, for starters you have to know what you want to get out of meditating.

Tony Robbins says "Why to" is more important than "How to".

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Paradox, to give up the ego, you have to have a healthy one

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:25:00 +0000

Paradox, seemingly incompatible ideas:
There is a paradox in recovery theory and it's about the denigration of the ego, the giving up of the ego. "Virtually all the major spiritual traditions speak of the giving up of the ego...it seems that in order to give up the ego, you've got to have a healthy one FIRST" (paraphrased from John Bradshaw)

If you 'give up your ego' and you don't have a healthy one FIRST

- you might as well 'offer up' all your worldly possessions and become Hari Krishna, or climb a mountain in the Himalayas...how would you contribute to society that way?

What follows below seems contradictory, but both family systems theory AND what a sponsor might say are both good things to do!

Inner child work IS useful

...to help you get to the point where you forgive yourself

...and it IS true that at some point you're just gonna have to take responsibility for your actions.

Twelve Ways To Tell The Difference Between Your Sponsor And Your Therapist:

1) Your sponsor isn't all that interested in the "reasons" you drank.

2) Your therapist thinks your root problem is your lack of self-esteem, negative self-image, and your poor self-concept. Your sponsor thinks your problem is a 3-letter word w/no hyphens... YOU.

3) Your therapist wants you to pamper your "inner child." Your sponsor thinks it ought to be "Spanked" or "Taken out and Shot!"

4) Your sponsor thinks your inventory should be about you, not your parents!

5) Speaking of parents, your sponsor tells you not to confront them, but you apologize to them.

6) The only time your sponsor ever uses the word "closure" is before the word "mouth."

7) Your sponsor thinks "boundaries" are things You need to take or tear down, not build up.

8) Your therapist wants you to love yourself first; your sponsor wants you to love others first.

9) Your therapist prescribes care taking and medication; your sponsor prescribes prayer making and meditation.

10) Your sponsor thinks "Anger Management Skills" are numbered 1-2-3...12

11) Now that u haven't had a drink in six months, your therapist thinks you should make a list of your goals and objectives for the next five years, starting with finishing up that college degree.

Your sponsor thinks you should start today by cleaning the coffeepots and helping him or her carry a heavy box of literature to the jail.

12) Your sponsor won't lose his license to practice if he talks about God...

No site involving the 12 steps or relating to the 12 steps could be complete without a list of useful one liners that could be heard in a meeting.
Here's what I found useful:

About the 3rd step, let go and let God:

"Everything I ever let go of had claw marks all over it"

"I had an ego that would kill a lesser man"

Damn, this last one was me to a tee!

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Healing the Shame that Binds You

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:14:00 +0000

Healing the Shame that Binds You
by John Bradshaw

In an emotionally revealing way, Bradshaw shows us how
toxic shame is the core problem in our compulsions,
co-dependencies, addictions, and the drive to superachieve,
resulting in the breakdown in the family system and our
inability to go forward with our lives

Excerpts from the Book
"Healing the Shame that Binds You", by John Bradshaw":

Shame and Guilt

Toxic shame needs to be sharply distinguished from guilt
(guilt can be healthy or toxic). Healthy guilt is the
emotional core of our conscience. It is emotion which
results from behaving in a manner contrary to our beliefs
and values. Guilt presupposes internalized rules and
develops later than shame. According to Erikson, the third
stage of psychosocial development is the polar balance
between initiative and guilt. This stage begins after age
three. Guilt is developmentally more mature than shame.
Guilt does not reflect directly upon one's identity or
diminish one's sense of personal worth. It flows from an
integrated set of values.

(note to self, save the table that's supposed to go here and make a graphic
out of it so I can post it here... blogger won't do tables)

"SHAME AS THE SOURCE OF SPIRITUALITY"

Abraham Maslow, the pioneering Third Force Psychologist,
once wrote,

"The spiritual life is...part of the human essence. It is a
defining characteristic of human nature....without which
human nature is not full human nature"

From--"The Farther Reaches of Human Nature"

"What is spirituality? I believe it has to do with our
lifestyle. I believe that life is ever unfolding and
growing. So spirituality is about expansion and growth. It
is about love, truth, goodness, beauty, giving and caring.
Spirituality is about wholeness and completion.
Spirituality is our ultimate human need. It pushes us to
transcend ourselves, and to become grounded in the ultimate
source of reality. Most call that source God.

Our healthy shame is essential as the ground of our
spirituality. By signaling us of our essential limitations,
our healthy shame lets us know that we are not God. Our
healthy shame points us in the direction of some larger
meaning. It lets us know that there is something or someone
greater than ourselves. Our healthy shame is the
psychological ground of our humility."

ame is the psychological ground of our humility."

SHAME AS TOXIC
Scott Peck describes both neuroses and character disorders
as disorders of responsibility, Peck writes;

"The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person
with a character disorder not enough. When neurotics are in
conflict with the world, they automatically assume that
they are at fault. When those with character disorders are
in conflict with the world, they automatically assume the
world is at fault."

From his book--"The Road Less Traveled"

"All of us have a smattering of neurotic and character
disordered personality traits. The major problem in all of
our lives is to decide and clarify our responsibilities. To
truly be committed to a life of honesty, love and
discipline, we must be willing to commit ourselves to
reality. This commitment, according to Peck, 'requires the
willingness and the capacity to suffer continual
self-examination.' Such an ability requires a good
relationship with oneself. This is precisely what no
shame-based person has. In fact a toxically shamed person
has an adversarial relationship with him/herself. Toxic
shame--the shame that binds us--is the basis for both
neurotic and character disordered syndromes of behavior."

NEUROTIC SYNDROMES OF SHAME
"What is the shame that binds you? How did it get set up in
your life? What happens to healthy shame in the process?

Toxic shame, the shame that binds you, is experienced as
the all pervasive sense that I am flawed and defective as a
human being. Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that
signals our limits, it is a state of being, a core
identity. Toxic shame gives you a sense of worthlessness, a
sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic
shame is a rupture of the self with the self.

It is like internal bleeding. Exposure to oneself lies at
the heart of toxic shame. A shame based person will guard
against exposing his inner self to others, but more
significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to
himself.

Toxic shame is so excruciating because it is the painful
exposure of the believed failure of self to the self.
[selves to selves too we believe] In toxic shame the self
becomes an object that can't be trusted, one experiences
oneself [selves] as untrustworthy. Toxic shame is
experienced as inner torment, a sickness of the soul. If
I'm an object that can't be trusted, then I'm not in me.
Toxic shame is paradoxical and self-generating. There is
shame about shame. People will readily admit guilt, hurt or
fear before they will admit shame. Toxic shame is the
feeling of being isolated and alone in a complete sense. A
shame-based person is haunted by a sense of absence and
emptiness..."

"SHAME AS AN IDENTITY --INTERNALIZATION OF SHAME"

"Any human emotion can become internalized. When
internalized, an emotions stops functioning in the manner
of an emotion and becomes a characterological style. You
probably know of someone who could be labeled 'an angry
person', or someone you'd call a 'sad sack'. In both cases
the emotion has become the core of the person's character,
her identity. The person doesn't have anger or melancholy,
she is angry and melancholy.

In the case of shame, internalization involves at least
three processes:

1)Identification with unreliable and shame based models
2)The trauma of abandonment, and the binding of feelings,
needs and drives with shame
3)The interconnection of memory imprints which forms collages
of shame

Internalization is a gradual process and happens over a
period of time. Every human being has to contend with
certain aspects of this process. Internalization takes
place when all three processes are consistently
reinforced."

IDENTIFICATION WITH SHAME BASED MODELS

"Identification is one of our normal human processes. We
always have the need to identify. Identification gives one
a sense of security. By belonging to something larger than
ourselves, we feel security and protection of the larger
reality.

The need to identify with someone, to feel a part of
something, to belong somewhere, is one of our most basic
needs. With the exception of self-preservation, no other
striving is as compelling as this need, which begins with
our caregivers or significant others and extends to family,
peer group, culture, nation and world. It is seen in lesser
forms in our allegiance to a political party or our rooting
for a sports team.

This need to belong explains the loyal and often fanatic
adherence people display to a group...their group.

When children have shame based parents, they identify with
them. This is the first step in the child's internalizing
shame."

ABANDONMENT: THE LEGACY OF BROKEN MUTUALITY

Shame is internalized when one is abandoned.

Abandonmentis the precise term to describe how one loses one's
authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically.
Children cannot know who they are without reflective
mirrors. Mirroring is done by one's primary caretakers and
is crucial in the first years of life. Abandonment includes
the loss of mirroring. Parent who are shut down emotionally
(all shame based parents) cannot mirror and affirm their
child's emotions.

Since the earliest period of our life was preverbal,
everything depended on emotional interaction. Without
someone to reflect our emotions, we had no way of knowing
who we were. Mirroring remains important all our lives.
Think of the frustrating experience which most of us have
had, of talking to someone who is not looking at us. While
you are speaking, they are fidgeting around or reading
something. Our identity demands a significant other whose
eyes se us pretty much as we see ourselves.

In fact, Erik Erikson defines identity as interpersonal. He
writes:

'The sense of ego identity is the accrued confidence that
the inner sameness and continuity...are matched by the
sameness and continuity of one's meaning for others.'

From --"Childhood and Society"
Besides lack of mirroring, abandonment includes the following:

Neglect of developmental dependency needs
Abuse of any kind
Enmeshment into the covert or overt needs of the parents or
the family system needs"

FEELING NEED AND DRIVE SHAME BINDS

"The shame binding of feelings, needs and natural
instinctual drives, is a key factor in changing healthy
shame into toxic shame. To be *shame-bound* means that
whenever you feel any feeling, and need or any drive, you
immediately feel ashamed. The dynamic core of your human
life is grounded in your feelings, your needs and your
drives. When these are bound by shame, your are shamed to
the core."

THE INTERCONNECTION OF MEMORY IMPRINTS WHICH FORM COLLAGES OF SHAME

"As shaming experiences accrue and are defended against,
the images created by those experiences are recorded in a
person's memory bank. Because the victim has no time or
support to grieve the pain of the broken mutuality, his
emotions are repressed and the grief is unresolved. The
verbal (auditory) imprints remain in the memory as do the
visual images of the shaming scenes. As each new shaming
experience takes place, a new verbal imprint and visual
image attach to the already existing ones forming collages
of shaming memories.

Children also record their parent's actions at their worst.
When Mom and Dad, stepparent or whoever the caretaker, are
most out of control, they are the most threatening to the
child's survival. The child's survival alarm registers
these behaviors the most deeply. Any subsequent shame
experience which even vaguely resembles that past trauma
can easily trigger the words and scenes of said trauma.
What are then recorded are the new experience and the old.
Over time an accumulation of shame scenes are attached
together. Each new scene potentiates the old, sort of like
a snowball rolling down a hill, getting larger and larger
as it picks up snow. As the years go on, very little is
needed to trigger these collages of shame memories. A word,
a similar facial expression or scene, can set it off.
Sometimes an external stimulus is not even necessary. Just
going back to an old memory can trigger an enormously
painful experience. Shame as an emotion has now become
frozen and embedded into the core of the person's identity.
Shame is deeply internalized."

SHAME AS SELF-ALIENATION AND ISOLATION

"When one suffers from alienation, it means that one experiences
parts of one's self as alien to one's self.
For example, if you were never allowed to express anger in
your family, your anger becomes an alienated part of
yourself. You experience toxic shame when you feel angry.
This part of you must be disowned or severed. There is no
way to get rid of your emotional power of anger. Anger is
the self- preserving and self-protecting energy. Without
this energy you become a doormat and a people-pleaser. As
your feelings, needs and drives are bound by toxic shame,
more and more of you is alienated.

Finally, when shame has been completely internalized,
nothing about you is okay. You feel flawed and inferior;
you have a sense of being a failure. There is no way you
can share your inner self because you are an object of
contempt to yourself. When you are contemptible to
yourself, you are no longer in you. To feel shame is to
feel seen in an exposed and diminished way. When you're an
object to yourself, you turn your eyes inward, watching and
scrutinizing every minute detail of behavior. This internal
critical observation is excruciating. It generates a
tormenting self-consciousness which Kaufman describes as,
'creating a binding and paralyzing effect upon the self.'
This paralyzing internal monitoring causes withdrawal,
passivity and inaction.

The severed parts of self are projected in relationships.
They are often the basis of hatred and prejudice. The
severed parts of the self may be experienced as a split
personality or even multiple personalities. This happens
often with victims who have been through physical and
sexual violation.

To be severed and alienated within oneself also creates a
sense of unreality. One may have an all-pervasive sense of
never quite belonging, of being on the outside looking in.
The condition of inner alienation and isolation is also
pervaded by a low grade chronic depression. This has to do
with the sadness of losing one's authentic self. Perhaps
the deepest and most devastating aspect of neurotic shame
is the rejection of the self by the self."

SHAME AS FALSE SELF

"Because the exposure of self to self lies at the heart of
neurotic shame, escape from the self is necessary. The
escape from self is accomplished by creating a false self.
The false self is always more or less than human. The false
self may be a perfectionist or a slob, a family hero or a
family scapegoat. As the false self is formed, the
authentic self goes into hiding. Years later the layers of
defense and pretense are so intense that one loses all
awareness of who one really is.

It is crucial to see that the false self may be as polar
opposite as a superachieving perfectionist or an addict in
an alley. Both are driven to cover up their deep sense of
self- rupture, the hole in their soul. They may cover up in
ways that look polar opposite, but each is still driven by
neurotic shame. In fact, the most paradoxical aspect of
neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the
superachieved and the underachieved, the Star and the
Scapegoat, the 'Righteous' and the wretched, the powerful
and the pathetic."

SHAME AS CO-DEPENDENCY

"Much has been written about co-dependency. All agree that
it is about the loss of selfhood. Co-dependency is an
condition wherein one has no inner life. Happiness is on
the outside. Good feelings and self-validation lie on the
outside. They can never be generated from within. [until
one begins to recover] Pia Mellody's definition of
co-dependency is a 'state of dis-ease whereby the authentic
self is unknown or kept hidden, so that a sense of
self...of mattering... of esteem and connectedness to
others is distorted, creating pain and distorted
relationships.' There is no significant difference in that
definition and the way I have described internalized shame.
It is my belief that internalized shame is the essence of
co-dependency."

SHAME AS BORDERLINE PERSONALITY

"Kaufman sees many of the categories of emotional illness
which are defined as DSM III as rooted in neurotic shame.
It seems obvious that some of these types of disorders are
related to symptoms of shame. These include: dependent
personality, clinical depression, schizoid phenomena and
borderline personality. My own belief is that toxic shame
is a unifying concept for what is often a maze of
psychological definitions and distinctions. While I realize
that there is clinical and psychotheraputic value in the
kinds of detailed etiological distinctions offered by
accurate and precise conceptualizing. I also think some of
it is counterproductive.

My own study of James Masterson's work on borderline
personalities, as well as my experience with watching his
working films, convinces me that there is minimal
difference in the treatment of some toxically shame-based
people and his treatment of the Borderline Personality. I'm
convinced that Masterson's Borderline Personality is a
syndrome of neurotic shame. It is described as follows:

1)Self-Image disturbance
2)Difficulty identifying and expressing one's own individuated
thoughts, wishes and feelings and autonomously regulating
self-esteem
3)Difficulty with self-assertion
Borderline Adolescent to Functioning Adult: The Test of Time

SHAME AS HOPELESSNESS --THE SQUIRREL CAGE

"Toxic shame has the quality of being irremedial. If I am
flawed, defective and a mistake, then there is nothing that
can be done about me. Such a belief leads to impotence. How
can I change who I am? Toxic shame also has the quality of
circularity. Shame begets shame."

FUNCTIONAL AUTONOMY

"Once internalized, toxic shame is functionally autonomous,
which means that it can be triggered internally without any
attending stimulus. One can imagine a situation and feel
deep shame. One can be alone and trigger a shaming spiral
through internal self- talk. The more one experiences
shame, the more one is ashamed and the beat goes on.

It is this dead-end quality of shame that makes it so
hopeless. The possibility for repair seems foreclosed if
one is essentially flawed as a human being. Add to that the
self-generating quality of shame, and one can see the
devastating, soul-murdering power of neurotic shame.

The reader can begin to see how dramatic it was for me to
discover the dynamics of shame. By being aware of the
dynamics of shame, by naming it, we gain some power over
it."

"The excruciating loneliness fostered by toxic shame is
dehumanizing. As a person isolates more and more, he loses
the benefit of human feedback. He loses the mirroring eyes
of others. Erik Erikson has demonstrated clearly that
identity formation is always a social process. He defines
identity as 'an inner sense of sameness and continuity
which is matched by the mirroring eyes of at least one
significant other'. Remember, it was the contaminated
mirroring by our significant relationships that fostered
our toxic shame.

In order to be healed we must come out of isolation and
hiding. This means finding a group of significant others
that we are willing to trust. This is tough for shame-based
people.

Shame becomes toxic shame because of premature exposure. We
are exposed either unexpectedly or before we are ready to
be exposed. We feel helpless and powerless. No wonder then
that we fear the scrutinizing eyes of others. However the
only way out of toxic shame is to embrace the shame...we
must come out of hiding."

A Parable:
The Prisoner In The Dark Cave
There once was a man who was sentenced to die. He was
blindfolded and put in a pitch dark cave. The cave was 100
yards by 100 yards. He was told that there was a way out of
the cave, and if he could find it, he was a free man.

After a rock was secured at the entrance of the cave, the
prisoner was allowed to take his blindfold off and roam
freely in the darkness. He was to be fed only bread and
water for the first 30 days and nothing thereafter. The
bread and water were lowered from a small hole in the roof
at the south end of the cave. The ceiling was about 18 feet
high. The opening was about one foot in diameter. The
prisoner could see a faint light up above, but no light
came into the cave.

As the prisoner roamed and crawled around the cave, he
bumped into rocks. Some were rather large. He thought that
if he could build a mound of rocks and dirt that was high
enough, he could reach the opening and enlarge it enough to
crawl through and escape. Since he was 5'9", and his reach
was two feet, the mound had to be at least 10 feet high.

So the prisoner spent his waking hours picking up rocks and
digging up dirt. At the end of two weeks, he had built a
mound of about six feet. He thought that if he could
duplicate that in the next two weeks, he could make it
before his food ran out. But as he had already used most of
the rocks in the cave, he had to dig harder and harder. He
had to do the digging with his bare hands. After a month
had passed, the mound was nine and half feet high and he
could almost reach the opening if he jumped. He was almost
exhausted and extremely weak.

One day just as he thought he could touch the opening, he
fell. He was simply too weak to get up, and in two days he
died. His captors came to get his body. They rolled away
the huge rock that covered the entrance. As the light
flooded into the cave, it illuminated an opening in the
wall of the cave about three feet in circumference.

The opening was the opening to a tunnel which led to the
other side of the mountain. This was the passage to freedom
the prisoner had been told about. It was in the south wall
directly under the opening in the ceiling. All the prisoner
would have had to do was crawl about 200 feet and he would
have found freedom. He had so completely focused on the
opening of light that it never occurred to him to look for
freedom in the darkness. Liberation was there all the time
right next to the mound he was building, but it was in the
darkness.

From the book: Healing the Shame That Binds You

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services
If you live in Western Maryland dial 211

John Bradshaw- Right Brain Healing- the Jesus Nature

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:11:00 +0000

"I do not believe the call is to "Do What Jesus Did, the call is to Do What YOU Do. To be fully self actualized, like he (Jesus) was."

"This shocks pious minds"

"I started teaching this (when I got back to Houston from the seminary) and lo and behold I almost got run out of town"

".. No. I do believe in providence, it's just that too often I see people going to providence without realizing that we are created in the image of God. And to be creative is how we are most like Jesus"

Bradshaw repeats a quote about codependent self deprecation:

"For worms to harbor such thoughts, not for beings made in the image of God!"

Bradshaw on the topic of N.L.P and prayer:

"What I tell people in counseling is that if they have religious background, I tell them to use this... Frequently I ask people to 'go to a resource that they have within themselves', and they say they don't have one (that they trust), I tell em to get God the Father and include that in a reframing, include that in a collapse anchor. This is a resource that they can go to. And this is very powerful stuff."

Jesus said:

"Greater things that I did you'll do"

From Right Brain Healing- the Jesus Nature, an audio presentation by John Bradshaw

John Bradshaw

"A symbol participates in that which is reveals"

John Bradshaw from 'Right Brain Healing- the Jesus Nature"

Excerpts from some of Bradshaw's taped lectures and workshops:

Bradshaw on the topic of Shame- from "Healing the Shame that Binds You"

Bradshaw on the topic of Boundaries- from "Bradshaw on the Family"

John Bradshaw on the Topic of N.L.P from "Right Brain Healing- the Jesus Nature"
"... all theologies have a language system, all religions have a language system."

"... have you ever been to a Jungian center? Jung centers are like cults. You'd better have the language down if you want to get in on the Illuminati!"

"...so words are hypnotic...Language is a jailer, language is hypnotic. That's what we learned from the NLP stuff"

"...when you think a thought, it's in your body with the speed of light...any thought you think, it's going in your body. So every word is hypnotic, and the words we use are hypnotic"

"Remember John Grinder's story about Moshe Feldenkrais, (he) was working with a Schizophrenic and the woman (in the crowd) raised her hand and asked "(are you talking about) Schizophrenia organic?" and Feldenkrais said "What's it to ya?"

...and in essence what he meant by that is "if I tell you it's organic, then you'll stop working on her".

"That is if we decide it's organic, then we'll quit working on this patient and I'm having great results with her".

So you see the very fact of calling it organic is a stopper. And where ever we have language that is stopping us from our freedom and our creativity, we want to get rid of the language."

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Train yourself to accept self respect

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:29:00 +0000

As a codependent and/or an active addict (and even a "dry drunk" or inactive addict, one that stopped using but still does addictive behaviors)you probably have to:

Practice the art of self respect.

TRAIN yourself to allow you to (internally)have self respect.

I said on another of my recovery blogs that I'm doing a whole series of posts on the topic of self respect and/ or the lack of it. From the point of view of an addict and a codependent (which I believe all addicts are originally, you can't be one without also being the other)

In my post: "Respect doesn't come naturally for an addict"

http://repairmanual4selfdestructivebehavior.blogspot.com/2008/08/respect-doesnt-come-naturally-for.html

I wrote that respect is something you have to work at, what I left out is this:

"You can't give to others something you don't have"

If you do not respect yourself, you cannot respect others.

Codependents are said to, "when having a near death experience, someone else's life flashes before them", the idea being that codependents are so 'other centric' that the paradigm they live in starts with the premise that "OTHERS" are important and by implication, 'They' are not important.

When you (internally) do not have self respect, and you seemingly give others a type of respect, what you're really doing is patronizing them. You aren't genuinely offering another respect... you're paying them homage, as if you were the serf and they were the lord (if you wanna use medieval ideas to represent what I'm saying)

What's a person to do if they have little background in self respect?

What can you do if you're family of origin didn't teach you self respect?

Build it artifically, make one up.. that's right 'fake it till you make it'

If you think logically about this, you'll see that ALL ideas held internally aren't really 'real'.

What's that mean?

All sensory input is 'configured' mentally, you don't really "SEE" an apple, you see from your brain's visual cortex a "representation" of an apple... you also 'smell' the apple, you 'feel' the apple... but the concept of an apple, the one in your mind's eye isn't the apple... it's a constructed digitalized apple.

You actually "conjured up" an apple to mimic the 'real' apple, the apple that's external to you.

Therefore, you can, simply 'conjure up' self respect, as if a doctor treats a broken leg with a cast, to 'assist' it in healing...

you can treat your broken self respect with a cast... just practice 'faking' self respect, so you can get yourself used to the idea.

A 'dry run' if you will

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services

Blame, it's what Victims Do

noreply@blogger.com (David Bruce Jr) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:02:00 +0000

Blame, point your finger at the world and exclaim it's all Thier Fault.

That's what victims do... the opposite of take responsibility.

Broken, missing, dysfunctional boundaries are what makes a codepedent a codepedent.

==========
This article is for informational purposes only.
Please contact a licensed professional in your area
if you are in crisis or require mental health services