Negative Self-Comparisons, Combined With A Helpless Feeling, Are The Proximate Cause of Depression

Roadmap Note: The book is organized so that you can go directly from the overall summary in Chapter 1 to the get-to-work self-help procedures in Part III (Chapters 10 to 20), without pausing to read further about the nature of depression and its elements in Part II (Chapters 3 to 9). But if you have the patience to study a bit more before moving on the self-help procedures, it will be worth your while to first read through Part II, which expands greatly on Chapter 1. Or, you can come back and read the rest of Part II later. ***

When you are depressed you feel sad; this is the basic fact about the condition called "depression." The feeling of sadness is accompanied by the thought "I'm worthless." An attitude of "I'm helpless" is a precursor of the sadness, and the belief "I ought to be different than I am" usually helps keep the person locked into sadness. Our first task, then, is to understand sadness--to learn what causes sadness, what relieves sadness, and what prevents sadness.

The Importance of Negative Self-Comparisons

Attempts to distinguish `normal' from `abnormal' sadness have not proven useful. Apparently there is but a single sort of sad feeling; the pain is the same whether it follows upon the loss of a friend (a "normal" event) or, say, the keenly-felt loss of an honor which it was not reasonable for you to expect but which you had nevertheless set your heart on. This makes sense when we notice that one does not distinguish between the pain from a finger that got cut in an accident, and the pain of a self-inflicted cut on the finger. The contexts are very different, however, in the cases of the two sorts of loss mentioned above, and it is those contexts that distinguish between the depressed person and the person who suffers from a "normal" sadness.

We must know, then: Why does one person respond to a particular negative event in his/her life with short-lived sadness after which normal cheerful life reappears, whereas another responds to a similar event with persistent depression? And why does a trivial or almost nonexistent blemish in life trigger sadness in some people and not in others?

The answer in brief is as follows: Some people acquire from their personal histories: 1) a tendency to make frequent negative self-comparisons, and therefore a tendency to have a Rotten Mood Ratio; 2) a tendency to think one is helpless to change the events that enter into the Rotten Ratio; and 3) a tendency to insist that one's life should be better than it is.

Concerning the first of these elements, the tendency to make frequent negative self-comparisons: This does not mean quite the same as "thinking poorly of yourself" or "having low self- esteem." The differences will be explained later.

There are many possible interacting elements in the development of a propensity to make neg-comps (negative self- comparisons), conceivably including a genetic element, and the elements differ from person to person. Understanding this mechanism is a necessary forerunner to designing the appropriate cure as discussed in Part III. The neg-comp is the last link in the causal chain leading to sadness and depression, the "common pathway", in medical parlance. If we can remove or alter this link, we can relieve depression.

To repeat, the central element in your sadness and depression, and the key to your cure, is as follows: You feel sad when a) you compare your actual situation with some "benchmark" hypothetical situation, and the comparison appears negative; and b) you think you are helpless to do anything about it. This analysis may seem obvious to you after you reflect on it, and many great philosophers have touched on it. But this key idea has had little place in the psychological literature on depression, though the negative self-comparison is the key to understanding and treating depression.

The element of "negative thoughts" has been mentioned by just about every writer on depression through the ages, as has been the more specific set of negative thoughts that make up low self-evaluation. And controlled laboratory experiments have recently shown that depressed people remember fewer instances of being rewarded for successful performance than do non-depressed subjects, and remember more instances of being punished for unsuccessful performance. Depressed subjects also reward themselves less frequently when told to decide which responses were successful and which were not1.

Negative thoughts have not, however, been previously discussed in a systematic fashion as comprising comparison, as every evaluation is by nature a comparison. Nor has the interaction between the neg-comps and the sense of helplessness, which converts neg-comps into sadness and depression, been described elsewhere as it is here. It is the conceptualization of the negative thoughts as negative self-comparisons which opens up the wide variety of theoretical and curative approaches discussed here.

After you grasp this idea, you see its traces in many places. For example, notice the casual mention of self- comparisons in these remarks of Beck that "the repeated recognition of a gap between what a person expects and what he receives from an important interpersonal relationship, from his career, or from other activities, may topple him into a depression"2, and "The tendency to compare oneself with others further lowers self-esteem"3. But Beck does not center his analysis on the self-comparisons. It is the systematic development of this idea which provides the new thrust in Self- comparisons Analysis as offered here.

The State of Your Life As You Perceive It To Be

Your "actual" state is what you perceive it to be, of course, rather than what it "really" is. If you think you have failed an examination, even though you will later learn you passed it, then your perceived actual state is that you have failed the test. Of course there are many facets of your actual life that you can choose to focus upon, and the choice is very important. The accuracy of your assessment is important, too. But the actual state of your life usually is not the controlling element in depression. How you perceive your is not completely dictated by the actual state of affairs. Rather, you have considerable discretion as to how to perceive and assess the state of your life.

The Benchmark To Which You Compare Yourself

The "benchmark" situation to which you compare your actual situation may be of many sorts:

1. The benchmark situation may be one that you were accustomed to and liked, but which no longer exists. This is the case, for example, after the death of a loved one; the consequent grief-sadness arises from comparing the situation of bereavement with the benchmark situation of the loved one being alive.
2. The benchmark situation may be something that you expected to happen but that did not materialize, for example, a pregnancy you expected to yield a child but which ends in miscarriage, or the children you expected to raise but never were able to have.
3. The benchmark may be a hoped-for event, a hoped-for son after three daughters that turns out to be another daughter, or an essay that you hope will affect many people's lives for the good but that languishes unread in your bottom drawer.
4. The benchmark may be something you feel you are obligated to do but are not doing, for example, supporting your aged parents.
5. The benchmark may also be the achievement of a goal you aspired to and aimed at but failed to reach, for example, quitting smoking, or teaching a retarded child to read.

The expectations or demands of others may also enter into the benchmark situation with which you negatively compare your actual situation. And, of course, the benchmark state may contain more than one of these overlapping elements.

The best proof that sadness is caused by the unfavorable comparison of actual and benchmark situations is self-inspection of your thoughts. If you observe in your thinking, when you are sad, such a negative self-comparison along with a sense of helplessness about changing the situation, -- whether the sadness is part of a general depression or not--this should convince you of the key role of negative self-comparisons in causing depression.

The Role of Negative Self-Comparisons

Only the concept of negative self-comparisons makes sense of a person being bereft of life's good things yet happy anyway, or having everything a person could want but being miserable nevertheless.

The author of Ecclesiastes -- traditionally considered to be King Solomon -- tells us how useless and helpless he felt despite all his riches:

So I hated life, because the work that is wrought under the sun was grievous unto me; for all is [in vain] and a striving after wind (2-17, my language in brackets).

The sense of loss--which is often associated with the onset of depression--is a negative comparison between the way things were and the way they are now. The American poet John Greenleaf Whittier (in Maud Muller) caught the nature of loss as a comparison in these lines: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been!" Whittier makes it clear that sadness arises not just because of what actually happened, but also because of the counterfactual benchmark which "might have been."

Notice how, when we suffer from what we call "regret," we harp on the counterfactual benchmark--how an inch more to the side would have won the game which would have put the team into the playoffs which would have led to a championship, how but for one horse's nail the war was lost, how--if not for the slaughter by the Germans in World War II, or the Turks in World War I--the Jews and Armenians would be so much more numerous and their cultures would be strengthened, and so on.

The basis for understanding and dealing with depression, then, is the negative comparison between your actual and hypothetical benchmark situations that produces a bad mood, together with the conditions that lead you to make such comparisons frequently and acutely, and combined with the helpless feeling that makes the bad mood into a sad rather than angry mood; this is the set of circumstances constituting the deep and continued sadness that we call depression.

Why Do Negative Self-Comparisons Cause A Bad Mood?

But why do negative self-comparisons and a Rotten Ratio produce a bad mood?

There is a biological connection between negative self- comparisons and physically-induced pain. Psychological trauma such as a loss of a loved one induces some of the same bodily changes as does the pain from a migraine headache, say. When people refer to the death of a loved one as "painful", they are speaking about a biological reality and not just a metaphor. It is reasonable that more ordinary "losses" -- of status, income, career, and of a mother's attention or smile in the case of a child -- have the same sorts of effects, even if milder. And children learn that they lose love when they are bad, unsuccessful, and clumsy, as compared to when they are good, successful, and graceful. Hence negative self-comparisons indicating that one is "bad" in some way are likely to be coupled to the biological connections to loss and pain. It also makes sense that the human's need for love is connected to the infant's need for food and being nursed and held by its mother, the loss of which must be felt in the body.(4)

Indeed, research cited later shows a statistical link between the death of a parent and the propensity to be depressed, in both animals and humans. And much careful laboratory work shows that separation of adults and their young produces the signs of depression in dogs and monkeys(5). Hence lack of love hurts and makes one sad, just as lack of food makes one hungry.

Research shows chemical differences between depressed and undepressed persons. Similar chemical effects are found in animals which have learned that they are helpless to avoid painful shocks6. Taken as a whole, then, the evidence suggests that negative self-comparisons, together with a sense of helplessness, produce chemical effects linked to painful bodily sensations, all of which results in a sad mood.

A physically-caused pain may seem more "objective" than a negative self-comparison because the jab of a pin, say, is an absolute objective fact, and does not depend upon a relative comparison for you to have a painful perception of it. The bridge is that neg-comps are connected to pain through learning during your entire lifetime. You learn to be sad about a lost job or an examination failure; a person who has never seen an exam or a modern occupational society could not be made sad by those events. Learned knowledge of this sort always is relative, a matter of comparisons, rather than involving only one absolute physical stimulus.

All this represents therapeutic opportunity: It is because the causes of sadness and depression are largely learned that we can hope to remove the pain of depression by managing our minds properly. This is why we can conquer psychologically-induced pain with mental management more easily than we can banish the sensation of pain from arthritis or from freezing feet. With respect to a stimulus that we have learned to experience as painful--lack of professional success, for example--we can relearn a new meaning for it. That is, we can change the frame of reference, for example, by altering the comparison states that we choose as benchmarks. But it is impossible (except perhaps for a yogi) to change the frame of reference for physical pain so as to remove the pain, though one can certainly reduce the pain by quieting the mind with breathing techniques and other relaxation devices, and by teaching ourselves to take a detached view of the discomfort and pain.

To put the matter in different words: Pain and sadness which are associated with mental events can be prevented because the meaning of the mental events was originally learned; relearning can remove the pain. But the impact of physically- caused painful events depends much less on learning, and hence re-learning has less capacity to reduce or remove the pain.

The Nature of Comparisons

Comparison and evaluation of the present state of affairs relative to other states of affairs is fundamental in all planning and businesslike thinking. The relevant cost in a business decision is the "opportunity cost"-- that is, the cost of what else you might do rather instead of the opportunity being considered. Comparison is also part of judgments in all other endeavors. As the book's front note says: "Life is hard". But compared to what?

Indeed, comparison-making is central to all our information processing, scientific as well as personal:

Basic to scientific evidence (and to all knowledge-diagnostic processes including the retina of the eye) is the process of comparison of recording differences, or of contrast. Any appearance of absolute knowledge, or intrinsic knowledge about singular isolated objects, is found to be illusory upon analysis. Securing scientific evidence involves making at least one comparison.8

A classic remark illuminates the centrality of comparisons in understanding the world: A fish would be the last to discover the nature of water.

Just about every evaluation you make boils down to a comparison. "I'm tall" must be with reference to some group of people; a Japanese who would say "I'm tall" in Japan might not say that in the U. S. If you say "I'm good at tennis", the hearer will ask, "Whom do you play with, and whom do you beat?" in order to understand what you mean. Similarly, "I never do anything right" , or "I'm a terrible mother" is hardly meaningful without some standard of comparison.

The psychologist Helson put it this way: "[All judgments (not only judgments of magnitude) are relative." Without a standard of comparison, you cannot make judgments.8.1 [Harry Helson, Adaptation-Level Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 126]

An example of how one cannot communicate factual knowledge without making comparisons is my attempt in the Epilogue to describe to you the depth of my depression. It is only by comparing it to something else that you might understand from your own experience--time in jail, or having a tooth pulled--that I can give you any reasonable idea of how my depression felt. And communicating factual knowledge to oneself is not basically different from communicating with others; without comparisons you cannot communicate to yourself the information (true or false) that leads to sadness and eventually to depression.

The Old and New Views of Depression

Now the difference between this view of depression and that of traditional Freudian psychotherapy is clear: Traditional psychotherapists, from Freud on, believe that negative self- comparisons (or rather, what they call "low self-esteem") and sadness both are symptoms of the underlying causes, rather than the negative self-comparisons causing the sadness; their view is shown in Figure 1. Therefore, traditional psychotherapists believe that one cannot affect depression by directly altering the kinds of thoughts that are in one's consciousness, that is, by removing negative self-comparisons. Additionally, they believe that you are not likely to cure yourself or ameliorate your depression in any simple direct way by altering the contents of your thoughts and ways of thinking, because they believe that unconscious mental elements influence behavior. Rather, they believe that you can only remove the depression by reworking the events and memories in your early life that led you to have a propensity to be depressed.

Figure 1

In direct contrast is the cognitive viewpoint of this book as shown in Figure 2. Negative self-comparisons operate between the underlying causes and the pain, which (in the presence of a sense of being helpless) cause sadness. Therefore, if one can remove or reduce the negative self-comparisons, one can then cure or reduce the depression.

Note: The rest of this chapter is rather technical, and intended mainly for professionals. Laypersons may well skip to the next chapter. Professionals will find additional technical discussion in the Postscript for the Professional Reader at the end of the book.

Freud pointed in the right direction when he talked about people avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Nor was this purely a tautology in which what people chose to do is simply called pleasurable; painful events can be connected to chemical events within the body, as discussed in Chapter 2. This idea is helpful here because it helps us understand the relationship of a variety of mental illnesses to negative self-comparisons and the pain they cause.

Some of the possible responses to neg-comps and the consequent pain are as follows:

1) One can sometimes avoid pain by changing the real circumstances involved in the neg-comp; this is what the "normal", active, undepressed person does, and what the normal rat does who has not previously been subjected to shocks that it cannot escape(9). The absence of such purposive activity with respect to neg-comps because of a sense of helplessness to improve the situation is a crucial characteristic of sufferers from depression.

2) One can deal with the pain by getting angry, which tends to make you forget about the pain -- until after the rage subsides. Anger can also be useful in changing the circumstances. Anger arises in a situation where the person has not lost hope but feels frustrated in attempting to remove the source of the pain.

3) You can lie to yourself about the existing circumstances. Distortion of reality can avoid the pain of a neg-comp. But this can lead toward schizophrenia and paranoia.(10) A schizophrenic may fantasize that his actual state is different than it really is, and while believing that the fantasy is true the painful neg- comp is not in the person's mind. The irony of such distortion of reality to avoid the pain of a neg-comp is that the neg-comp itself may contain a distortion of reality; making the neg-comp more realistic would avoid the need for schizophrenic distortion of reality.(11)

4) Still another possible outcome is that the person assumes that he or she is helpless to do anything about it, and this produces sadness and eventually depression.

Other states of mind which are reactions to the psychological pain of neg-comps fit well with this view of depression.(12)

1) The person suffering from anxiety compares an anticipated and feared outcome with a benchmark counterfactual; anxiety differs from depression in its uncertainty about the outcome, and perhaps also about the extent to which the person feels helpless to control the outcome.(13) People who are mainly depressed often suffer from anxiety, too, just as people who suffer from anxiety also have symptoms of depression from time to time(14). This is explained by the fact that a person who is "down" reflects on a variety of neg-comps, some of which focus on the past and present whereas others focus on the future; those neg-comps pertaining to the future are not only uncertain, but may sometimes be altered, which accounts for the state of arousal that characterizes anxiety, in contrast to the sadness that characterizes depression.

Beck(15) differentiates the two conditions by saying that "In depression the patient takes his interpretation and predictions as facts. In anxiety they are simply possibilities". I add that in depression an interpretation or prediction -- the negative self-comparison -- may be taken as fact, whereas in anxiety it is not assured but is only a possibility, because of the depressed person's feeling of helplessness to change the situation.

2) Mania is the state in which the comparison between actual and benchmark states seems to be very large and positive, and often it is a state in which the person believes that she or he is able to control the situation. It is especially exciting because the person is not accustomed to positive comparisons. Mania is like the wildly-excited reaction of a poor kid who has never before been to a professional basketball game. In the face of an anticipated or actual positive comparison, a person who is not accustomed to making positive comparisons about his life tends to exaggerate its size and be more emotional about it than people who are accustomed to comparing themselves positively.

3) Dread refers to future events just as does anxiety, but in a state of dread the event is expected for sure, rather than being uncertain as in anxiety. One is anxious about whether one will miss the plane, but one dreads the moment when one finally gets there and has to perform an unpleasant task.

4) Apathy occurs when the person responds to the pain of neg-comps by giving up goals, so that there is no longer a neg- comp. But when this happens the joy and the spice go out of life. This may still be thought of as depression, and if so, it is a circumstance when depression occurs without sadness -- the only such circumstance that I know of.

The English psychiatrist John Bowlby observed a pattern in children aged 15 to 30 months of age who were separated from their mothers that fits with the relationships between types of responses to neg-comps outlined here. Bowlby labels the phases "Protest, Despair, and Detachment".

First the child "seeks to recapture [his mother] by the full exercise of his limited resources. He will often cry loudly, shake his cot, throw himself about...All his behavior suggests strong expectation that she will return."(16)

Then, "During the phase of despair...his behaviour suggests increasing hopelessness. The active physical movements diminish or come to an end...He is withdrawn and inactive, makes no demands on people in the environment, and appears to be in a state of deep mourning."(17)

Last, in the phase of detachment", there is a striking absence of the behaviour characteristic of the strong attachment normal at this age...he may seem hardly to know [his mother]...he may remain remote and apathetic...He seems to have lost all interest in her"(18) So the child eventually removes the painful neg-comps by removing the source of the pain from his thought.

5) Various positive feelings arise when the person is hopeful about improving the situation--changing the neg-comp into a more positive comparison -- and is actively striving to do so.

People we call "normal" find ways to deal with losses and the consequent neg-comps and pain in ways that keep them from prolonged sadness. Anger is a frequent response, and can be useful, partly because the anger-caused adrenaline produces a rush of good feeling. Perhaps any person will eventually be depressed if subjected to many very painful experiences, even if the person does not have a special propensity for depression; consider Job. And paraplegic accident victims judge themselves to be less happy than do normal uninjured people.(19) On the other hand, consider this exchange reported between Walter Mondale, who ran for president of the United States in 1984, and George McGovern, who ran in 1972: Mondale: " George, when does it stop hurting?" McGovern, "When it does, I'll let you know." But despite their painful experiences, neither McGovern nor Mondale seems to have fallen into prolonged depression because of the loss. And Beck asserts that survivors of painful experiences such as concentration camps are no more subject to later depression than are other persons.(20)

This book confines itself to depression, leaving these other topics for treatment elsewhere.

Let's close this chapter on an upbeat topic, love. Requited youthful romantic love fits nicely into this framework. A youth in love constantly has in mind two deliciously positive elements -- that he or she "possesses" the wonderful beloved (just the opposite of loss, which often figures in depression) and that messages from the beloved say that in the eyes of the beloved he or she is wonderful, the most desired person in the world. In the unromantic terms of the mood ratio this translates into numerators of the perceived actual self being very positive relative to a range of benchmark denominators that the youth compares him/herself to at that moment. And the love being returned -- indeed the greatest of successes -- makes the youth feel full of competence and power because the most desirable of all states -- having the love of the beloved -- is not only possible but is actually being realized. So there is a Rosy Ratio and just the opposite of helplessness and hopeless. No wonder it feels so good!

And of course it makes sense that unrequited love feels so bad. The youth is then in the position of not having the most desirable state of affairs one can imagine, and believing her/himself incapable of bringing about that state of affairs. And when one is rejected by the lover, one loses that most desirable state of affairs which the lover formerly had. The comparison is between the actuality of being without the beloved's love and the former state of having it. No wonder it is so painful to believe that it really is over and nothing one can do can bring back the love.

Summary

The basis for understanding and dealing with depressing the negative comparison between your actual and hypothetical benchmark situations that produces a bad mood, together with the conditions that lead you to make such comparisons frequently and acutely, and combined with the helpless feeling that makes the bad mood into a sad rather than angry mood; this is the set of circumstances constituting the deep and continued sadness that we call depression.

Negative self-comparisons and a Rotten Ratio produce a bad mood because there is a biological connection between negative self-comparisons and physically-induced pain. Psychological trauma such as a loss of a loved one induces some of the same bodily changes as does the pain from a migraine headache, say. When people refer to the death of a loved one as "painful", they are speaking about a biological reality and not just a metaphor. It is reasonable that more ordinary "losses" -- of status, income, career, and of a mother's attention or smile in the case of a child -- have the same sorts of effects, even if milder. And children learn that they lose love when they are bad, unsuccessful, and clumsy, as compared to when they are good, successful, and graceful. Hence negative self-comparisons indicating that one is "bad" in some way are likely to be coupled to the biological connections to loss and pain.

Because the causes of sadness and depression are largely learned, we can remove the pain of depression by managing our minds properly. With respect to a stimulus that we have learned to experience as painful--lack of professional success, for example--we can relearn a new meaning for it. That is, we can change the frame of reference, for example, by altering the comparison states that we choose as benchmarks.

Traditional psychotherapists, from Freud on, believe that negative self-comparisons (or rather, what they call "low self- esteem") and sadness both are symptoms of the underlying causes, rather than the negative self-comparisons causing the sadness. Therefore, traditional psychotherapists believe that one cannot affect depression by directly altering the kinds of thoughts that are in one's consciousness, that is, by removing negative self- comparisons. Additionally, they believe that you are not likely to cure yourself or ameliorate your depression in any simple direct way by altering the contents of your thoughts and ways of thinking, because they believe that unconscious mental elements influence behavior. Rather, they believe that you can only remove the depression by reworking the events and memories in your early life that led you to have a propensity to be depressed.

In direct contrast is the cognitive viewpoint. Negative self-comparisons operate between the underlying causes and the pain, which (in the presence of a sense of being helpless) cause sadness. Therefore, if one can remove or reduce the negative self-comparisons, one can then cure or reduce the depression.

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A Primer on Depression and Bipolar Disorder

There are other complicating factors.

(a) Physical illness: Sometimes suicide is the response to a terminal illness or a chronic condition that is very painful. I have lost a couple of good friends this way. From those limited data I can't help but believe that depression is implicated too, and that if the depression these individuals experienced because of their illness had been treated, they would have been able to go on, at least for a while longer.

A particularly tragic case touched our self-help group in 1992. One of our members was afflicted with both epilepsy and severe depression. The medication for his depression made the epilepsy worse; the medication for the epilepsy made his depression worse. He was caught, and the doctors weren't helping; worse, he couldn't afford to see a doctor anyway. He lived alone on Social Security, and had no family or friends.

One evening he described his situation and, in essence, gave positive answers to the questions listed above. If we had known then the significance of what he was telling us, we would have gotten him to a hospital. But we didn't. He killed himself the following week. We all felt bad, guilty, and responsible for a while. Then we resolved that we would inform ourselves so that the same tragedy would not occur again. We are ready.

(b) Old age: Age is a definite factor in suicide resulting from depression. A young or middle-aged person may be willing to tough it out even untreated because they figure the odds of recovery are on their side, and that they will have plenty of life after recovery (they always assume that the depression will go away completely). But an older person, again untreated, may feel that it's all over, that there's nothing worth living for at that point. Or he/she may have been through the depression mill one or more times earlier in their life, and can't face the prospect of going through it again (this was the case with the brilliant author Virginia Woolf).

(c) Young people: The suicide rate is also high during the late teens and early twenties. Many studies have been made to determine why the rate is so high in this group, and many books have been written on this subject. One fact that emerges is that the victims very frequently are caught up in crises resulting from adjustment problems related to romance, sex, pregnancy, conflicts with parents, and so on. However, there may well be a serious underlying biological depression as well, which, while not as obvious as the emotional conflicts, is nevertheless quite capable of being deadly. Thus for young people, both biological and psychological causative agents may be present, and both require expert care. In many cases this treatment can be very effective.

People considering suicide often examine their life in agonizingly minute detail. In doing so, they will recall many sides of their life long forgotten. Unfortunately, because they are in a very negative frame of mind because of acute depression, they will almost invariably discount what is "good'', and attach special importance to what is "bad''. Skilled psychiatric intervention can often play a beneficial role in by helping the victim to gain a more balanced, favorable, picture, and reminding him/her constantly of the bias induced by the biochemical imbalance in his/her brain. But sometimes none of this works, and the victim moves on a smaller and smaller orbit around the black hole called suicide. At some point he/she may become defensive about the desire to die, well before it reaches an actual decision to die.

There may result a "Mexican standoff'' with the victim resisting efforts to help him/her. A very succinct indication of the situation is provided when he/she asks (directly or implicitly) `` whose life is it, anyway?!'' The implication is that it is "my'' life to dispose of, so ``I'' can/will ``dispose of'' it as I please.

This is by any standard a deep question. It can be debated on many levels using many disciplines. At one point I engaged in this internal debate myself; fortunately I found a convincing answer to the question. The story I will tell below is true, but obviously it is only my answer to this very hard question.

As described in the Introduction, in early January 1986, I went home one afternoon to pull the trigger. But my wife had already removed the gun from the house, so my plan was thwarted. Being incapacitated to the point I could not immediately come up with another plan, I was stuck and I simply stumbled forward. Somewhere at the end of January or early February, my wife and I had lunch near campus, and in walking back to our offices we parted company on Springfield Avenue.

It was snowing moderately. I went along for a few steps, and on impulse turned around to look at her going away. As she moved further along her path, I watched her slowly disappear into the falling snow: first her white knit stocking cap, then then her light-colored trousers, and finally her dark parka; then ... gone! In an instant I felt a tremendous pang of loneliness, a tremendous sense of loss and emptiness as I found myself asking "What would happen to me if she were suddenly gone tomorrow? How could I stand it? How would I survive?'' I was stunned. And I stood there in the falling snow, not moving, attracting attention from passers-by for several moments. Then suddenly I heard the question in my mind "What would happen to her if you were suddenly gone tomorrow?" Suddenly I understood that same those terrible questions would be hers if I were to kill myself. I felt like I had been hit with both barrels of a shotgun, and I had to stand there a while figuring it out.

What I finally understood is that my life isn't really "mine''. It belongs to me, sure, but in the context of all the other lives it touches. And that when all the chips are down on the table, I don't have the moral/ethical right to destroy my life because of the impact that would have on all the people who know and love me. Some part of "their'' life is "attached to'', "dwells within'', mine. Killing myself would imply killing part of them! I could understand very clearly that I did not want any of the people I love killing themselves. By reciprocity I realized that they would say the same of me. And at that moment I decided I had to hang on as long as I absolutely could. It was the only acceptable path forward, despite the pain it would bring. Today, needless to say, I am very glad I came to that decision.

This is a story. It is not meant for the logician or the philosopher; it is meant for the heart more than the mind. I know it is not the only conclusion that could one could reach, and that many other things might be said. Nevertheless, it has had a very strong influence on how I have run my affairs ever since.

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ADHD symptoms do contribute to poor school performance. Classroom accommodations can be extremely helpful to children with ADHD.

ADD and ADHD are neurobiological disorders which affects approximately five to twelve percent of all children. Researchers believe that neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers of the brain, do not work properly causing symptoms of ADD or ADHD. Inattention and impulsivity, the two major characteristics of attention deficits, can make complying with parental requests and succeeding in school more difficult for these children. Symptoms of ADD and ADHD vary from mild to severe.

Approximately 50 percent of adults no longer experience major problems with symptoms of the condition. Some children with attention deficits do extremely well in school. However, for many others, underachievement in school is a hallmark characteristic of the condition.

Three major types of Attention Deficit Disorder have been identified:

• ADHD (predominately hyperactive-impulsive)
• ADHD inattentive (predominately inattentive without hyperactivity--schools call this ADD)
• ADHD, combined type (a combination of both hyperactivity and inattention).

Children who have ADHD tend to be very energetic, talkative, and outgoing. In contrast, children with ADD inattentive, previously called ADD without hyperactivity, tend to be lethargic, less likely to talk in class, and introverted. Although many children are diagnosed and treated in elementary school, some children, especially those with ADD inattentive or mild cases of ADHD, may not be diagnosed until high school or college.

Although they may be bright intellectually, many children with ADD or ADHD lag behind their peers developmentally by as much as 30 percent in certain areas, according to research by Dr. Russell Barkley. This translates into a delay of 4-6 years for teenagers. As a result they may seem immature or irresponsible. They are less likely to remember their chores or assignments complete their work independently, are more likely to say things or act impulsively before thinking, and the quality and amount of their work will fluctuate from day to day. Consequently, parents and teachers may need to provide more positive feedback, supervise school work more closely, give reminders of homework, and interact more frequently with each other to help the child cope with this disability.

Research has shown that medication can help most children with ADD and ADHD improve their performance at home and school. Medications commonly used to treat attention deficits such as Adderall, Concerta, Strattera, Ritalin or Dexedrine, help the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin work properly. Thus, when medication is effective, attention and concentration improve, more chores and school work are completed, compliance with adult requests increases, hyperactivity and impulsivity decrease, and negative behaviours decrease.

Frequently, ADD or ADHD may coexist with other major problems--learning disabilities (25-50%), sleep disturbances (50%), anxiety (37%), depression (28%), bipolar (12%), oppositional behaviour (59%) substance abuse (5-40%), or conduct disorder (22-43%)-which further complicates their treatment and school work.

The majority of children with ADD or ADHD will experience difficulty in school (90%). Common learning problems and their practical implications for home and school performance are described below. However, keep in mind that each child with an attention deficit is unique and may have some, but not all these problems.

1. Inattention and poor concentration: difficulty listening in class; may daydream; spaces out and misses lecture content or homework assignments; lack of attention to detail, makes careless mistakes in work, doesn't notice errors in grammar, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, or changes in signs (+,-) in math; difficulty staying on task and finishing school work; distractible, moves from one uncompleted task to another; lack of awareness of time and grades, may not know if passing or failing class.

2.Impulsivity: rushes through work; doesn't double check work; doesn't read directions; takes short cuts in written work especially math (does it in his head); difficulty delaying gratification, hates waiting.

3.Language Deficits: slow processing of information; reads, writes, and responds slowly; recalls facts slowly; more likely to occur in children with ADD inattentive. Three language-processing problems may be common among children with ADD or ADHD.

a)Listening and Reading Comprehension: becomes confused with lengthy verbal directions; loses main point, difficulty taking notes; difficulty following directions; may not "hear" or pick out homework assignments from a teacher's lecture; poor reading comprehension, can't remember what is read, must reread material.
b)Spoken Language (oral expression): talks a lot spontaneously (ADHD); talks less in response to questions where they must think and give organized, concise answer; avoids responding in class or gives rambling answers.
c)Written Language: slow reading and writing, takes longer to complete work, produces less written work; difficulty organizing essays; difficulty getting ideas out of head and on paper; written test answers or essays may be brief; responses to discussion questions may be brief.

4.Poor Organizational Skills: disorganized; loses homework; difficulty getting started on tasks; difficulty knowing what steps should be taken first; difficulty organizing thoughts, sequencing ideas, writing essays, and planning ahead.

1) Impaired Sense of Time: loses track of time, is often late: doesn't manage time well, doesn't anticipate how long task will take; doesn't plan ahead for future.

5.Poor Memory: difficulty memorizing material such as multiplication tables, math facts or formulas, spelling words, foreign languages, and/or history dates.

a) Math Computation: difficulty automatising basic math facts, such as multiplication tables, cannot rapidly recall basic math facts.
b) Forgetful: forgets chores or homework assignments, forgets to take books home; forgets to turn in completed assignments to teacher; forgets special assignments or make-up work.

6. Poor Fine Motor Coordination: handwriting is poor, small, difficult to read; writes slowly; avoids writing and homework because it is difficult; prefers to print rather than write cursive; produces less written work.

7.Weak Executive Functioning: Sometimes very bright students with attention deficits do poorly in school. One of Dr. Russell Barkley's latest research findings focus on the role weak executive functioning plays in school failure, (deficits in working memory, control of emotions and behaviour, internalizing language, problem-solving, and organization of materials and action plans). High IQ alone is not enough for students to succeed in school! For more details, read my next article about Executive Function.

Difficulties in school may be caused by a combination of several learning problems: a student may not take good notes in class because he can't pay attention, can't pick out main points, and/or his fine-motor coordination is poor. A student may not do well on a test because he reads, thinks, and writes slowly, has difficulty organizing his thoughts, and/or has difficulty memorizing and recalling the information. Identification of learning problems plus implementation of appropriate accommodations in the regular classroom are critical.Under IDEA and/or Section 504, in the USA and Disability and Special Education Needs Act in the UK children with ADD or ADHD whose ability to learn is adversely affected by the disorder are eligible for accommodations.

Common classroom accommodations which are extremely helpful to children with ADHD include:

• untimed tests
• use of calculator or computer
• modification of assignments (fewer math problems but still masters concepts)
• elimination of unnecessary writing--write answers only not questions
• reduced demands on limited working memory capacity
• written homework assignments given by teachers
• utilisation of note takers or guided lecture notes

Accommodations should be individualized and made to accommodate each child's specific learning problems.

Other factors related to ADHD may also influence the child's school work:

1.Restlessness or hyperactivity in younger children: Can't sit still in seat long enough to complete work.

2.Sleep Disturbances: Children may come to school feeling tired; may sleep in class. Many children with attention deficits (50%) have difficulty falling asleep at night and waking up each morning. Approximately half of them wake up tired even after a full night's sleep. Children may have battles with their parents before arriving at school. This suggests that there are problems with the neurotransmitter serotonin.

3.Medication Wears Off: With the advent of long-acting medications like Adderall XR, Concerta, and Strattera, problems with medication wearing off at school are less common. However, the effects of short-acting medications such as Ritalin or Dexedrine (regular tablets) wear off within three to four hours and children may begin having trouble paying attention around ten or eleven o'clock in the morning. Even the intermediate range medications (6-8 hours) like Ritalin SR, Dexedrine SR, Metadate ER, or Adderall may wear off by early afternoon. Class failure, irritability, or misbehaviour may be linked to times when medication has worn off.

4.Low Frustration Tolerance: Children with attention deficits may become frustrated more easily and "blow-up" or impulsively say things they don't mean, especially as their medication is wearing off. They may blurt out answers in class. Or they may be argumentative or impulsively talk back to a teacher. Transitions or changes in routine, such as when substitute teachers are present, are also difficult for them.

Since most children with ADD or ADHD are not as easily motivated by consequences (rewards and punishment) as other children, they may be more difficult to discipline and may repeat misbehaviour. Although they would like very much to make good grades on a test or at the end of the semester, these rewards (grades) may not occur quickly enough nor be strong enough to greatly influence their behaviour. Frequently, they start out each new school year with the best intentions, but cannot sustain their efforts. Positive feedback or rewards are effective but must be given immediately, must be important to the child, and must occur more frequently than for other children. Consequently, sending home daily or weekly reports regarding school work should help improve grades.

Typically their misbehaviour is not malicious but rather the result of their inattention, impulsivity, and/or failure to anticipate the consequences of their actions. As my friend and colleague Sherry Pruit explains in Teaching the Tiger, "Ready. Fire! And then, Aim...oops!!", may more accurately describe the behaviour of children with attention deficits. They may not think before they act or speak. They also have trouble controlling their emotions. If they think it, they often say or do it. If they feel it, they show it. Belatedly, and with remorse, they realise they should not have said or done certain things. Giving children choices regarding chores or homework, for example, at home, selecting their chore, determining which subject is first and establishing a starting time, will increase compliance, productivity, and reduce aggression (at school, selecting topics for essays or reports).

Youngsters with ADD or ADHD have many positive qualities and talents (high energy, outgoing charm, creativity, and figuring out new ways of doing things). Although these traits may be valued in the adult work world, they may cause difficulties for these students and his parents and teachers. Their high energy, if properly channelled, can be very productive. Although sometimes exasperating, they can also be extremely charming in their self-appointed role as class clown. Typically, children with ADD inattentive tend to be quieter and present few, if any, discipline problems. When they become adults, children with attention deficits can be very successful. Having parents and teachers who believe in a child is essential for success!!!

Excerpt from Chris A. Zeigler Dendy's books, Teaching Teenagers with ADD and ADHD, 2000. Revised from Appendix C, Teenagers With ADD, 1995.

Guidelines for talking to your teen about sex and the approach to take when discussing sex with your teen.

excerpt from: Teenagers! What Every Parent Has to Know

1. Forget the "big talk".
   A better way is "little by little". It could be a discussion sparked by something that's happened to a friend, a piece of television news or even the soaps! One of the most effective pieces of education on sex I have ever seen occurred during a showing of 'Friends'. Rachel tells Ross she is pregnant; he is utterly shocked. In fact, he is so shocked he says nothing for almost thirty seconds. Then he blurts out, "But we used a condom!" Rachel explains that condoms don't always work. Ross looks even more shocked and screams out, "They should say that on the box!"
2. Try to talk about sex without embarrassment.
   You want your teenagers to have a positive view of sex and, if possible, a healthy future sex life. Sensing that their parents are embarrassed to talk about it makes sex seem tacky.
3. Remember we are aiming for a conversation, not a diatribe.
   Sometimes, especially if we are angry or worried - perhaps when they are going out on a date - we feel the need to blurt it all out in one go. We're practically yelling advice at them as they walk hand in hand away from the house!
4. Don't worry if they seem to not be listening;
   This is an important subject to them and you'll almost certainly have more of their attention than it seems.
5. Don't be afraid to talk about what you believe.
   The former chief editor of one of the teenage magazines put it like this: "You really want to say 'these are my values; these are our family's values. This is what I hope you will do.' This is a very powerful message. Teens don't want to disappoint you."
6. Be careful about the way you talk about people who have different values to you.
   If you use derogatory language about celebrities or even friends of your teenager who have chosen a sexual lifestyle you don't agree with, she will remember. Perhaps one day she'll make a decision she knows you wouldn't approve of. The last thing you want her to feel is, "I couldn't tell my mother - she'd call me a slag."
7. Be sensitive to your teenager if they don't have a boy or girlfriend.
   It's easy to feel left on the shelf at thirteen, and the pressure to find somebody (anybody!) can be intense.

The above excerpt is taken from Rob Parsons' book Teenagers! What Every Parent Has to Know, published by Hodder and Stoughton.

teenage sex

There are many parents who believe that if they don't discuss sex with their children, then their kids won't engage in sexual behavior. That is simply a myth. Your children are being exposed to sex multiple times every day.

The change from child to adult is an especially dangerous time for adolescents in our society. From their earliest years, children watch television shows and movies that insist that "sex appeal" is a personal quality that people need to develop to the fullest. Teenagers are at risk -- not only from AIDS and STDs -- but from this sort of mass-market encouragement.

Sexual content is regularly marketed to younger children, pre-teens, and teens

and this affects young people's sexual activity and beliefs about sex. According to the fact sheet, Marketing Sex to Children, from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, children are bombarded with sexual content and messages:

• In 2003, 83% of the episodes of the top 20 shows among teen viewers contained some sexual content, including 20% with sexual intercourse.
• 42% of the songs on the top CDs in 2004 contained sexual content -- 19% included direct descriptions of sexual intercourse.
• On average, music videos contain 93 sexual situations per hour, including eleven "hard core" scenes depicting behaviors such as intercourse and oral sex.
• Girls who watched more than 14 hours of rap music videos per week were more likely to have multiple sex partners and to be diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease.
• Before parents raised an outcry, Abercrombie and Fitch marketed a line of thong underpants decorated with sexually provocative phrases such as "Wink Wink" and "Eye Candy" to 10-year-olds.
• Neilson estimates that 6.6 million children ages 2-11 and 7.3 million teens ages 12-17 watched Justin Timberlake rip open Janet Jackson's bodice during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.

TV, movies, and music are not the only influences -- the Internet provides teens with seemingly unlimited access to information on sex as well as a steady supply of people willing to talk about sex with them. Teens may feel safe because they can remain anonymous while looking for information on sex. Sexual predators know this and manipulate young people into online relationships and, later, set up a time and place to meet.

Teens don't need a sexual predator to introduce them to online pornography. It comes to them through porn spam on their e-mail or by inadvertently clicking on a link to a porn site. Through pornography, young people get a twisted view of what constitutes normal relationships. In fact, pornography is directly related to sexual abuse, rape, and sexual violence.

Just as sexual preferences are learned behavior, most or all sexual deviations are learned behaviors, with pornography having the power of conditioning into sexual deviancy. Pornography can be addictive, with the individual becoming desensitized to 'soft' porn and moving on to dangerous images of bondage, rape, sadomasochism, torture, group sex and violence.

At the very least, addiction to pornography destroys relationships by dehumanizing the individual and reducing the capacity to love. At worst, some addicts begin to act out their fantasies by victimizing others, including children and animals.

Teens also have their own cultural beliefs about what is normal sexual behavior. Although most teenage girls believe that sex equals love, other teens -- especially boys -- believe that sex is not the ultimate expression of the ultimate commitment, but a casual activity and minimize risks or serious consequences. That is, of course, what they see on TV. The infrequent portrayals of sexual risks such as disease and pregnancy trivialize the importance of sexual responsibility.

Other misconceptions include:

• all teens are having sex
• having sex makes you an adult
• something is wrong with an older teen (17-19) who is not having sex
• a girl can't get pregnant if she's menstruating
• a girl can't get pregnant if it's her first time
• you are a virgin as long as you don't have sexual intercourse -- oral sex doesn't count

Clearly, parents are in a tough spot. But there are some key ideas that help make sense of things.

Teenagers should learn the facts about human reproduction, contraception, and sexually transmitted diseases.

Of the over 60 million people who have been infected with HIV in the past 20 years, about half became infected between the ages of 15 and 24. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 25% of sexually active teenagers get a sexually transmitted disease (STD) every year, and 80% of infected teens don't even know they have an STD, passing the diseases along to unsuspecting partners. When it comes to AIDS, the data is even more chilling -- of the new HIV infections each year, about 50% occur in people under the age of 25.

Young people need to know that teens who are sexually active and do not consistently use contraceptives will usually become pregnant and have to face potentially life-altering decisions about resolving their pregnancy through abortion, adoption, or parenthood.

Health classes and sex education programs in the schools typically present information about the risks of sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy risk, and contraception. However, evidence shows that traditional sex education, as it has been offered in the United States, increases sexual knowledge, but has little or no effect on whether or not teens initiate sex or use contraception.

Parents, too, need to know important information, such as the younger the age of first sexual intercourse, the more likely that the sexual experience was coercive, and that forced sexual intercourse is related to long-lasting negative effects.

The following is all related to later onset of sexual intercourse:

• Having better educated parents
• Supportive family relationships
• Parental supervision
• Sexually abstinent friends
• Good school grades
• Attending church frequently

The challenge for any person is to make sense of facts in ways that are meaningful in life -- in ways that help them think and make wise choices. Schoolroom lessons leave much to be desired in this regard.

Commitments and values differ so widely in society that schools cannot be very thorough or consistent in their treatment of moral issues. According to a growing body of research, parents and religious beliefs are a potent one-two combination when it comes to influencing a teen's decisions about whether or not to have sex.

A study published in the Alan Guttmacher Institute's Family Planning Perspectives (Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health) showed that parents can best keep their teens from becoming sexually active by:

• maintaining a warm and loving relationship with their children
• letting teens know that they are expected to abstain from sex until marriage

Parents who are involved in their children's lives, and who confidently transmit their religious and moral values to their children, have the greatest success in preventing risky behavior.

For this reason, it is more important for teenagers to see real-life examples of people who understand and deal responsibly with their sexual natures.

Morals are not abstractions. Morals have to do with real-life commitments to people and things that have value. Parents and other influential adults (at school, at church, and in the community) need to show teenagers the difference between devotion and infatuation and help them make the distinction in their own hearts.

Teenagers need to understand that satisfying sexual relationships -- like other relationships -- require careful thought and wise action.

Are you wondering what "normal" sexual behavior is for children and teens?

It is important for parents to understand what is "normal" sexual behavior in children and teenagers, and which behaviors might signal that a child is a victim of sexual abuse, or acting in a sexually aggressive manner towards others.

Normal Range of Sexual Behavior

• Sexually explicit conversations with peers
• Obscenities and jokes within cultural norm
• Sexual innuendo, flirting and courtship
• Interest in erotica
• Solitary masturbation
• Hugging, kissing, holding hands
• Foreplay, (petting, making out, fondling) and mutual masturbation: Moral, social or familial rules may restrict, but these behaviors are not abnormal, developmentally harmful, or illegal when private, consensual, equal, and non-coercive.
• Monogamist intercourse: Stable monogamy is defined as a single sexual partner throughout adolescence. Serial monogamy indicates long-term (several months or years) involvement with a single partner which ends and is then followed by another

Yellow Flags

Although many of these are not necessarily outside the range of normal sexual behavior exhibited in teen peer groups, some evaluation and response is desirable in order to support healthy and responsible attitudes and behavior.

• Sexual preoccupation/anxiety (interfering in daily functioning)
• Pornographic interest
• Polygamist sexual intercourse/promiscuity-- indiscriminate sexual contact with more than one partner during the same period of time.
• Sexually aggressive themes/obscenities
• Sexual graffiti (especially chronic and impacting individuals)
• Embarrassment of others with sexual themes
• Violation of others' body space
• Pulling skirts up/pants down
• Single occurrence of peeping, exposing with known peers
• Mooning and obscene gestures

Red Flags

• Compulsive masturbation (especially chronic or public)
• Degradation/humiliation of self or others with sexual themes
• Attempting to expose others' genitals
• Chronic preoccupation with sexually aggressive pornography
• Sexually explicit conversation with significantly young children

Illegal Sexual Behaviors Defined by Law

• Obscene phone calls, voyeurism, frottage, exhibitionism, sexual harassment
• Touching genitals without permission (i.e. grabbing, goosing)
• Sexually explicit threats (verbal or written)
• Sexual contact with significant age difference (child sexual abuse)
• Forced sexual contact (sexual assault)
• Forced penetration (rape)
• Genital injury to others
• Sexual contact with animals (beastiality)

next: Coercion and Sexual Abuse of Teens

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
- Abraham Lincoln

Happiness and unhappiness are opposite sides of a judgement about your situation. If you judge your situation as bad for you, that's unhappiness. If you judge a situation as good for you, that's happiness.

The experience of happiness is one of those general terms we use to say, "I feel good emotionally." People use different terms to describe what feels good for them. For someone it might be excitement, passion, exhilaration, fulfillment, freedom, feeling fully alive with inspiration and joy. For another it might be more peaceful, content, capable, hopeful, satisfied, and comfortable feeling. Whatever you call it, it just feels darn good.

Our natural state of being is to be happy. When you remove all the uncomfortable emotions we humans can experience (and they are numerous), you're left with happiness. So it's easiest to define happiness by what it is not.

Happiness is what you feel when you're NOT feeling....

self doubt
depressed
hateful
fearful
worried
unsatisfied
bored
grief
shame
guilt
discontent
anxious
annoyed
angry
irritated
stressed
frustrated
upset
down
sad
envious
or
jealous.

Whew! That's a long list!

Pleasure vs. Happiness

Happiness is not pleasure although they can appear similar. Pleasure is enjoyment of an outside stimuli. You might find pleasure in buying a new car, or in going on vacation, or having friends over for dinner, or having sex, or....the list is long on what you might enjoy experiencing. Pleasure requires an external stimuli for you to experience it. Happiness does not. Happiness is a belief about yourself and the outside world. You can be doing something you normally experience as pleasurable but not be happy! Pleasure is born from the external world, happiness is born from the internal workings of our own minds.

next: Why Is Personal Happiness So Important?

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
- Abraham Lincoln

I have a theory. No, it's more like a dream. It's not a unique dream, many have dreamt it. It's the desire for the all those on this planet to be loving towards each other. For peace and tranquility among mankind. For a song, which if heard by distant planets, would sing out, "We Love."

My theory is about HOW I see this dream manifesting. And it all starts with you. It begins with personal responsibility for yourself.

Others have spoken of it. You see it drift through our culture in the form of songs and books. It's quiet and its subtle. You can hear it in a song by Michael Jackson..."if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and make a change....I'm starting with the man in the mirror".

There's a movement towards claiming ourselves. Claiming our thoughts, feelings and actions as our own. Of taking back the reins of ownership, responsibility, and consequential control that comes with ownership. We're starting to take that outstretched finger we've been pointing at every one else, and turning it back towards ourselves. Not in blame, but for answers.

We started with Freud thinking that our subconscious was responsible for our emotions and behavior.

Then we became the product of our childhood's, believing our past determines our future.

Astrology, birth sequence, genetics, you name it, we continued to search for the "reasons" we are the way we are. But in looking outside ourselves we are left feeling helpless. Victims to things outside our influence.

Hopelessness lives in the idea that who we are is somehow dependent and controlled by someone else or some outside circumstance. We start believing the best we could do was learn to cope and adapt. Taking the good with the bad, I think they call it.

The idea that we ourselves create who we are, can for many, be terrifying. We associate responsibility with guilt and blame. At first we want to turn away from this responsibility and the power suggested in that concept. The power over who you are. It can be overwhelming to some. But with that responsibility comes a freedom that no country can offer you and and no man can give you.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world.

As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others."

- Marianne Williamson, 1992, "A Return To Love"

With so many world concerns such as famine, poverty, cruelty, wars, etc., how can any thinking, caring individual give personal happiness any weight? Well here is my dream theory.

If everyone knew that they were responsible for themselves, knew that they always had choices, and started making their own happiness a priority, I believe we wouldn't have murders, rapes, wars, or other violent acts.

Why do I believe this? Because I believe at our very human foundation we are caring, giving, loving, and happy people. We come into this world happy. Violence and harm are simply consequences of individuals demonstrating their unhappiness. You know the feeling of joy. It's not hateful or fearful.

It starts with ourselves and spreads into our homes in the form of domestic violence, child abuse, addictions, and a general "dis-ease." And as groups of unhappy people get together, we call them gangs and criminals. And as more unhappy people get together, we call those wars.

Envision people being at peace and living their lives the way they've always dreamed. Feeling the fulfillment that comes from knowing who you are and pursuing what you desire most. Can you then envision them murdering, stealing, or raping? With happiness comes inner peace. Inner peace and violence are like oil and water.

What if we looked at ourselves as the accumulation of all the beliefs we've been exposed to and took on as our own. And what if we made a vow to rebuild ourselves with new, more useful beliefs? What belief system would you build? Would it be one that supported your desires and wants? Ones that encouraged and emphasized understanding, openness, happiness, acceptance, and love? If you could, would your personal happiness be a priority in your life?

I remember a story I heard about a father and his son. The father wanted to get some paperwork done before he took his son to the park. To keep his son occupied until he finished his work, he tore a picture of the world out of a magazine, and then tore it into little pieces. He told his son when he had finished putting the puzzle together, they would go to the park. Expecting this to take his son quite some time to accomplish, he was surprised when his son returned shortly thereafter with the completed puzzle. The father asked his son, "how were you able to finish the puzzle so quickly?" His son answered him saying "there's a picture of a man on the other side, and when I put the man together, the pieces of the world just fell into place."

So what can you do to make a difference?

Attend to your own. Become clear about who you really are. Uncover the enormous warehouse of beliefs you've acquired from other people and our culture and challenge those beliefs. Transform your self-doubt into acceptance, your self-pity into self-actualization, your anxiety into peace, your confusion into happiness, and your fears into love. I hope the information on this site will help you to accomplish just that.

A human society is a collection of it's individuals. It follows that a peaceful, happy, loving society can only be created if happiness is first in the mind of each individual that makes up that society. We'll transform from the "private happiness" of each individual, to the "public happiness" of our entire society.

Individual, personal happiness. One by one by one. It starts with you.

The dream is hopeful. I believe in the dream, and in you.

next: Happiness Is Everyone's Ultimate Goal

"The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own."

—Benjamin Disraeli

I recently found this quote and realized that it is a very profound formula for building healthy relationships.

A desire common to all people is to make a positive difference in the world. Who wouldn't want to leave a mark that benefits our fellow human beings and ensures that we are remembered for some good and wonderful accomplishment?

Sometimes we may have the mistaken idea that making sweeping, global changes is beyond our individual capabilities. We may not be able to see ourselves as a Ghandi, a Buddha, a Mother Teresa, or an Albert Schweitzer.

But we all, each us, can make a positive difference in the lives of the people in the next office, across the street, or in our homes. Sweeping, global changes are no more significant than simple acts of kindness, generosity, and unconditional love to the people who are closest to us.

As co-dependents, we may have retreated from giving away something so valuable. We may have been abused or mistreated or taken advantage of by those closest to us for doing so.

But we can also choose how we respond to the ill treatment we may have received. One response is to treat others like we want to be treated or desire to be treated. We can even treat ourselves as we want to be treated.

Regardless of our circumstances, there is someone in each of our lives who will appreciate and benefit from our treating them in such a special way. Find that person in your life. Share with them how wonderful, special, unique, and precious they are, just because they are alive. Appreciate someone in your life by loving them in a way they want to be loved.

Recovery is not just about fixing ourselves. It's about sharing ourselves and spreading good feelings around. Recovery is about helping others to help themselves. Recovery is about joining our hands and our hearts for a greater good and a better world. Recovery is about something bigger than ourselves, maybe even bigger than the world—giving away unconditional, positive, healthy love.

Thank you, God, for showing me how to make a difference in the everyday situations. Help me to be a messenger of love and good will to all around me. Help me to be the kind of loving, giving, and compassionate person I am looking for and appreciate in others.

next: Celebrate Yourself

You'll find, I think, that as you learn more about co-dependency, every person has some of the traits. Don't be too hard on yourself. Just remember that we are human beings. That we are, each one of us, extremely valuable just the way we are. That includes all our characteristics, regardless of how we might label them. Co-dependency is just a label, a way of defining how we, as humans, learn to cope with life, relationships, emotions, and events. Some of what we've learned can be unlearned. Some of what we've learned can be kept or expanded or changed to fit our particular situation or relationships.

The wonderful news is that YOU get to decide what you need to change, and YOU get to determine how and when. Recovery is all about self-examination, growth, experimentation, keeping what works for the moment, and moving ahead with life at your own pace. Be glad that you are learning about co-dependency now. I had to struggle for 33 years before I figured out what was going on in my relationships and how I was contributing to making my life so hard and miserable. I was too focused on the other person, rather than focusing on improving myself.

One of the traps we can fall into is letting others define our self-worth, define our meaning, or tell us how we ought to change our lives for the better. Often, we let those closest to us do this, when we should be doing this for ourselves. Sure, we can learn about ourselves from others, but remember that others tend to see us through their own filters. Often, we end up feeling like failures because we didn't live up to someone else's expectations of us.

But you can step outside all of that stuff and keep your sense of self-worth and value—that's the beautiful thing about recovery—you get to discover exactly who you are and what you want. You get to treat yourself the way you want to be treated and look for others who will treat you the way you know you deserve to be treated—with kindness, respect, patience, love, and encouragement. Those wonderful types of relationships are out there, waiting just for you.

One place to find these affirming relationships is at Co-dependents Anonymous meetings. Find someone who has been in the program for a long time. (Preferably someone with whom you would NOT be romantic—who may have serious relationship or co-dependent issues and may not be totally aware of them yet.)

Another good place, perhaps the best place, is to find a professional counselor who understands co-dependency and can be an empathic listener and affirmer in your life. Someone who will help you see yourself without judging you, and will help you grow through your issues and see yourself in new ways.

Above all, affirm yourself. Rejoice in who you are. Appreciate yourself as a unique, wonderful, expression of God. You are the most precious, special, and amazing you that ever was or ever will be. As Walt Whitman says, "celebrate yourself." Take good care of you and be as loving and tender with others as you can.

Thank you, God for affirming that it is OK for me to love myself and celebrate myself. Thank you for creating the unique human being that I am.

next: Messages of Love

Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List Part 13

1. The Formation of a Narcissist as a Reaction to His Narcissistic Parents
2. The Test of Archaic Chinese
3. Narcissism - The Individualist's Reaction
4. Somatizing Our Emotions
5. The "Love" of the Narcissist
6. Misogynism Once More ...

1. The Formation of a Narcissist as a Reaction to His Narcissistic Parents

I think that the reaction to a narcissistic parent can be either -----

ACCOMMODATION and ASSIMILATION

The child accommodates, idealizes, and internalizes the primary object successfully. This means that the "internal voice" we all have is a narcissistic voice and that the child tries to comply with its directives and with its explicit and perceived wishes. The child becomes a masterful provider of narcissistic supply, a perfect match to the parent's personality, an ideal source, an accommodating, understanding, and caring caterer to all the needs, whims, mood swings, and cycles of the narcissist, an endurer of devaluation and idealization with equanimity, a superb adapter to the narcissist's worldview, in short: the ultimate extension. This is what we came to call an "inverted narcissist". The child turned adult maintains these traits. He keeps looking for narcissists in order to feel whole, alive and wanted. He seeks to be treated by a narcissist narcissistically (what others would call abuse is to him or to her a homecoming). He feels dissatisfied, empty, and unloved if not by a narcissist.

Or

REJECTION

The child may react to the narcissism of the Primary Object with a peculiar type of rejection. He develops his own narcissistic personality, replete with grandiosity and lack of empathy - BUT his personality is antithetical to the personality of the narcissistic parent. If the parent were a somatic narcissist - the child is likely to be a cerebral one, if his father prided himself on his virtue - he will emphasize his vices, if his mother bragged about her frugality, he is bound to flaunt his wealth.

2. The Test of Archaic Chinese

Some people say that they prefer to live with narcissists, to cater to their needs and to succumb to their whims because this is the way they have been conditioned. It is only with narcissists that they feel alive, stimulated and excited. The world glows in Technicolor in the presence of a narcissist and decays to sepia colours in his absence.

I see nothing inherently "wrong" with that. The test is this: If a person were to constantly humiliate and abuse you verbally using Archaic Chinese - would you have felt humiliated and abused? Probably not. Some people have been conditioned by the narcissistic primary objects in their lives (parents or caregivers) to treat narcissistic abuse as Archaic Chinese, to turn a deaf ear. This technique is effective in that it allows the "inverted narcissist" (the narcissist's willing mate) to experience only the good aspects of life with a narcissist. There are good aspects to living with a narcissist, you know: his sparkling intelligence, the constant drama and excitement, his lack of intimacy and emotional attachment (some people prefer this). Every now and then the narcissist breaks into abusive Archaic Chinese, so what, who understands Archaic Chinese anyhow?

I have only one nagging doubt, though:

If so rewarding, why are inverted narcissists (the few that I met) so unhappy, so ego-dystonic, so in need of help (professional or other)? Aren't they victims who simply experience the Stockholm Syndrome (=identifying with the kidnapper rather than with the Police)?

3. Narcissism - The Individualist's Reaction

Narcissism could well be a reactive formation, a reaction to the assimilation of the individual in the masses, to the melting pots that many countries have become in an age of growing immigration and diminishing expectations. In the absence of the (imaginary) consolation of being part of a higher order (God, the State, the Party, the Nation) - people resort to themselves as a soothing source of reassurance of the meaningfulness of their life. And in a visual age (television, Internet), what could be better than watching oneself in the "mirror" that is others? Indeed, it is the age of images and reflections, perfectly suited to the narcissist. We each have our 15 minutes of existence experienced through the proxy of celebrity ("I felt suddenly alive!", "It was as though I was dreaming all my life!"). The narcissist believes his own superiority, having discovered the alchemist stone of "self-induced and self-generated celebrity".

4. Somatizing Our Emotions

We all tend to "somatize" our emotions. We try to prevent stress and bad emotions from "going to our head" by having a stiff ("blocked") neck. In Judaism one of the curses was : may the hand that committed this sin go dry (=paralysed). These are known as conversion reactions. Unable to face our emotions, acknowledge them, and cope with them - we let our body confront them and do the "talking" through selected organs. Headaches, rashes, paralysis, excruciating pains and even more complex medical syndromes (such as stigmata) - have all been known to originate psychogenically (a.k.a. psychosomatically). But this is precisely why a medical check-up is a MUST in the case of mental disorders - to rule out physiological causes.

Pain in the chest, for instance, is an integral part of the repertoire of panic attacks. Susan Sontag noted that each age has it own disease or medical condition as a METAPHOR. During the 19th century and the beginning of this one - it was tuberculosis, then cancer, then heart attacks, and now AIDS. People use these ailments to express their inner world - and still remain well within social and cultural norms. So, if I am mentally "sick" and I am scared to admit it (=to face the terrifying burden of my negative emotions) I will be inclined to choose a BODILY metaphor (=I will be inclined to get physically sick). Getting PHYSICALLY sick is socially acceptable. It is normative. There is no ridicule or disbelief involved.

So, people develop incurable tuberculosis, or feel pains in the chest, or grow phantom tumours. It is simply a way of saying: "there is something wrong with me. I am dizzily confused, my heart is broken, I don't feel I can stand on my own two legs".

But it goes both ways. Sometimes treating the physical symptoms alleviates the underlying mental problems. Mental and emotional problems are sometimes resolved by administering placebos (dummy medicines, like sugar pills), by "curing" an "incurable" "disease". This is the case with hypochondriacs of a certain kind. And, as we all know, REAL physical conditions might foster highly specific mental conditions which closely resemble their non-physiogenic equivalents.

This is what leads many psychiatrists to postulate that ALL mental problems are the result of chemical imbalances, whether in the brain or elsewhere. They discard the importance of talk therapy, or other human interactions, and prefer to rely SOLELY on psychopharmacology (medication). Admittedly, there aren't many such purists but the trend is clear and many previously "mental" disorders (like schizophrenia and depression) are now considered to belong predominantly to the domain of the more "physical" branches of medicine.

5. The "Love" of the Narcissist

Narcissists often call the way that they experience narcissistic supply - love. They tend to "emotionalize" situations and behaviours of themselves or of others by labeling them as emotions. This is similar to the way a birth blind person tries to grope with colours. The narcissist often insists that a source of narcissistic supply "loves" and "is loved" by him and, conversely, a source of negative supply "hates" him, is, to him, his "enemy", and so on.

6. Misogynism Once More ...

I am a conscious misogynist. I fear and loathe women and tend to ignore them to the best of my ability. To me they are a mixture of hunter and parasite.

Most male Narcissists are misogynists. After all, they are the warped creation of a woman. A woman gave birth to them and moulded them into what they are: dysfunctional, maladaptive, emotionally dead. They are angry at this woman and, by implication, mad at all women.

The narcissist's attitude to women is, naturally, complex and multi-layered along these four axes:

1. The Holy Whore
2. The Hunter Parasite
3. The Frustrating Object of Desire
4. Special and De-Specialing

The narcissist divides all women to saints on the one hand, and to whores on the other. He finds it difficult to have sex ("dirty", "forbidden", "punishable", "degrading") with feminine significant others (spouse, intimate girlfriend). To him, sex and intimacy are opposites rather than mutually enhancing propositions. Sex is reserved to "whores" (all other women in the world). This division provides for a resolution of his constant cognitive dissonance ("I want her but ..." "I don't need anyone but .."). It also legitimizes his sadistic urges (abstaining from sex is a major and recurrent narcissistic "penalty" inflicted on female "transgressors"). It also tallies well with the frequent idealization-devaluation cycles the narcissist goes through. The idealized females are sexless, the devalued ones - "worthy" of their degradation (sex) and the contempt that, inevitably, follows.

The narcissist believes firmly that women are out to "hunt" men and that this is almost a genetic predisposition. As a result, he feels threatened (as any prey would). This, of course, is an intellectualization of the real, absolutely opposite, state of things: the narcissist feels threatened by women and tries to justify this irrational fear by imbuing women with "objective" qualities which make them, indeed, ominous. This is a small detail in a larger canvass of "pathologizing" others as a means of controlling them. Once the prey is secured, goes the narcissistic fable, the woman assumes the role of a "body snatcher". She absconds with the narcissist's sperm, she generates an endless stream of demanding and nose dripping children, she financially bleeds the men in her life to cater to her needs and to the needs of her dependants. Put differently, she is a parasite, a leech, whose sole function is to suck dry every man she finds and Tarantula-like decapitate them once no longer useful. This, of course, is exactly what the narcissist does to people. Thus, his view of women is a projection.

Heterosexual narcissists desire women as any other red blooded male does (even more so due to the special symbolic nature of women in the narcissist's life - humbling a woman in acts of faintly sadomasochistic sex is a way of getting back at mother). But he is frustrated by his inability to meaningfully interact with them, by their apparent emotional depth and powers of psychological penetration (real or attributed), and by their sexuality. Their incessant demands for intimacy are perceived by him as a threat. He recoils instead of getting closer. The narcissist also despises and derides sex, as we said before. Thus, caught in a seemingly intractable repetition complex, in approach-avoidance cycles, the narcissist becomes furious at the source of his frustration. Some narcissists set out to do some frustrating of their own. They tease (passively or actively), frustrate, or pretend to be asexual and, in any case, they turn down, rather cruelly, any attempt by a woman to court them and to get closer.

Sadistically, they tremendously enjoy their ability to frustrate the desires, passions, and sexual wishes of women. It endows them with a feeling of omnipotence and with the pleasing experience of potent malevolence. Narcissists are regularly engaged in frustrating all women sexually - and in frustrating significant women in their lives both sexually and emotionally. Somatic narcissists simply use women as objects: use and discard. The emotional background is identical. While the cerebral narcissist punishes through abstention - the somatic narcissist penalizes through excess.

The narcissist's mother kept behaving as though the narcissist was and is not special (to her). The narcissist's whole life is a pathetic and pitiful effort to prove her wrong. The narcissist constantly seeks confirmation from others in his life that he IS special - in other words, that he IS. Women threaten this. Sex is "bestial" and "common". Nothing "special or unique" about sex. Women are perceived by the narcissist to be dragging him to their level, the level of the lowest common denominator of intimacy, sex, and human emotions. Everybody and anybody can feel, mate, and breed. There is nothing to set the narcissist apart and above others in these activities. And yet women seem to be interested ONLY in these pursuits. Thus, the narcissist emotionally believes that women are the continuation of his mother by other means and in different guises. They are only interested in reducing them to their level.

The narcissist hates women virulently, passionately, and uncompromisingly. His hate is primal, irrational, the progeny of mortal fear, and of sustained abuse. Granted, most narcissists learn how to suppress, disguise, even repress these untoward feelings. But their hatred does swing out of control and erupt from time to time. It is a terrifying, paralysing sight. It is the true narcissist.

next: Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List Part 14