When you find yourself in a tight spot

An addiction is not a sign of failure, or weakness, badness, or illness. Rather, it is a natural affiliation for a substance or actifity that satisfies a desire to feel good or not feel bad.

There is nothing wrong with that desire. People drink when they are bored, when they are stressed, and when they are excited.  These are times when the mind or soul is least able to be engaged productively.  It allows an artificial feeling of comfort in these times of mental disengagement or perhaps feelings of failure.  An addiction emerges when that state of mental disengagement comes too often, too deeply, or too easily.  Thus, it can be insufficient to just change or repress the behaviour while the feelings of disengagement keep coming.  So an alcoholic is no worse nor better than a herion addict, or a shopoholic, or sex addict, or gambler. They are repressing the same undesirable feeling to the same degree of intensity, only through different means.  Therefore, the real thrust should be in knowing how to be purposefully engaged mentally so the experience of mental disengagement is reduced naturally and rationally.

Therefore, before we try to remove a readily available distraction, shouldn’t we first seek a better way to  get to the underlying condition that so readily leads the person to reach for that distraction?

Is anger or aaggression the nature of bad, cruel, or evil people?  After all, the human tendency is to punish the aggressor, isn’t it?  And the natural managementis to learn to suppress or stifle it with medical or physical restraints, isn’t it?

Yet, anger and aggression are natural and automatic response of all life forms when threatened beyond a natural ability to respond.  In the human being, our intelligence and understanding are designed to surpass the natural physical strengths… to the level we have developed them.  When these are insufficient, anger and aggression, our natural physical reactions, can be triggered.  These are triggered more because the logical mental capabilities are insufficient than because of an established physical supremacy.  Even the physically strong will choose to use logic and understanding over aggressive reaction if those are available.  I suppose we are at the mercy of which we have chosen or been encouraged to build preferentially as the more we build the one the less we rely on the other.  Balance is not often achieved.

Thus the ideal solution is to build the mental strength to supersede reliance on the physical response.  Then the natural response of anger/aggression will be relegated to  the occasional situations where they are necessary and effective.  They are part of organic life.  They won’t go away, but if applied appropriately, they can be necessary and useful.

Burnout, stress, exhaustion are physical symptoms that can be quite devastating.  They are physical.  Yet they often seem mental.  There is a good explanation for that.  Mentally, we function on inputs from the body’s senses and past experiences.  These are processed by the brain to allow mental consideration.  When we are required or we choose to contemplate and solve conditions that are outside our comfort zones mentally, we may compensate by driving the body to exhaustion and even burnout attepting either to solve the challenge with insufficient insight or to accumulate more insight at a pace faster than we can acquire it.  We are exhausted by both the process and the attempts to manage through greater physical exertion.  This exhaustion, either in the biochemical or physiological function of the body as a whole, or of the neuronal pathways that bring information to the min can so stagnate mental function that we attribute the failure to occur there.  Just remember that the insufficiency of btreathing through a straw is not a lung problem; it is a problem of the pathway to the lung.

If you can look at the above summary, you will see that, whatever the urgency of the demand on us, at that time we are unable to apply ourselves intelligently to the problem.  That is okay.  The logical strategy for management is to first restore physical function, then know how to examine both our insight limitations and the demands of the situation.  In other words, we must release the urgency so we regain the strength to address our challenges, not with a repetition of the previous method, with an ability to reassess both conditions – ourselves and the object – rationally. It is a gratifying proposition when done with deeper understanding and logic.

Every human being is born weak and fragile, toally incapable of fending for ourselves no matter what is our background or legacy.  Every human being has a right to be enabled and allowed to build ourselves to the level we are able to grow… mentally, intellectually, existentially.  And we need the guidance, the discipline, and the opportunity to do so.  Opportunity is sometimes taken away when we are seen to be insecure, unsure, or afraid. Taking away opportunity from any other human being is an abuse, and the person suffering that indignity, the abused.

No one should be held that way by another human being, but it happens, not necessarily as the perpetration of abuse, but also as a defensive reaction from someone else who feels threatened or themselves imposed on.  The solution is not only to stop the imposition, but to build the personal strength of the abused.  This may not be because the abused is devoid of intelligence or capability.  It may also, and often, be because “we do not consider that we are able to manage independently, even when we are”. Thus, the solution is not always the provision of resources.  It may be that of helping the person to believe in the power of the resources they already have.

Fear, anxiety, insecurity can not only impede us from doing; it can cause severe existential pain.  Mood swings, depression, inability to get out (degrees of agoraphobia), and a serious halt in our emergence as a mature, self-assured, happy or contented person.  It can be the shackles on our progress no matter how much we may want to move forward.  What causes this?

Perhaps we can answer that by stating that it is not caused.  Rather it is a remnant.  Think of it.  Every baby comes into the world with fear, anxiety, insecurity.  We know and accept that and we protect the baby from the conditions that will evoke them.  Yet, it is the ability to confront these challenges that lets us feel comfortable in those we know.  It is the exposure and guidance and encouragement to move  progressively through those challenges that allows us to feel comfortable or capable when they arise.  You see?  The unknowns we have to face can become the knowns we are comfortable with… if we have been shown and encouraged to face them.  That builds self-esteem.  If that was not given or encouraged we can lack self-esteem because we do not kmnow what we feel we should know.

The solution? not to treat these feelings because they are real and natural.  It is to show you how to build self-esteem by catching up to the things you don’t know.  Only then can you believe in yourself and appreciate yourself because you know and know how to know.  THAT! is self-esteem.

Depression can be a severely devastating experience so it cannot be taken lightly.  Those who experience it want treatment urgently.  Those who treat it want to relieve their patients as quickly and as expeditiously as possible.  But that urgent undertaking is addressed at treating the emergence, the effect of depression.  These are the feelings of pain, loneliness, self-loathing, fear, etc. What, however, is the condition? What is the cause? Unless we can define and reach that, the emergence will come back repeatedly.  All we will have done is to temporarily subdue the symptoms.

Let us, therefore, examine and analyze the underlying condition that emerges with the severe symptoms of depression.  First, let’s define it.  Depression is a feeling of emptiness, a chasm in the reality of self, manifested as a complete shutdown of being, no matter how the symptoms emerge, that is what drives them. Yet, we can ask, how can a person feel so empty some of the time? What drains it? What fills it? The answer is that, in a person with depression, nothing does.  Nobody is ever completely empty.  Nobody can be completely full.  So there is a partial filling in the integrity and realization of self.  What we tend to do is compensate most of the time by inflating it using coping systems of one sort or another.    When that coping system is removed, lost, or exhausted, the partial emptiness hits with a bang… suddenly and harshly.  We are left feeling embarrassingly less than what we displayed and too physically weak to rebound.  The emptiness stays and even becomes more profound, unless we are able to restore the physical strength to engage the coping systems – with support, time, or medications.  And we resume the cycle again.

The real solution is to know self, know how to expand on that partial emptiness and build a steady, strong, self-generated sense of self.  It is to build mental strength through self-realization and self-actualization.

Perhaps the greatest if not the only responsibility we can have as human beings is to grow existentially in wisdom,. understanding, and the realization of ourselves as a cognitive, intelligent mind-force.  It is the only aspect of ourselves that is not readily observable.  Yet, it is the only aspect we have control over.  Though we sometimes believe that we have control over our bodies, that control is determined by our intelligence.  We can only manage as much as we understand.  The other observation is that we really do not have control no matter how much we understand.  We can only facilitate, not really manage.

We exrcise, not to manage, but to facilitate how it will grow. We treat an injury or infection with the same limitations.  The body starts life with all (or some) organ systems already functioning.  We really never improve on it.  We start life knowing nothing.  What we know now and how much we know, we put it there.  We build ourselves, not because we are weak or broken, but because we want to grow!  Yet, we get weak or broken if we do not focus on growth.  You can use these lessons to facilitate your own approach to growing, mentally.  It gives you a formula you may already be using or can start using.  By having a formula, however, you have real control, not just a reliance on determination or resolution on the fly.

A relationship is perhaps the most difficult challenge we have to face as human beings.  This is because we are initially attracted externally but we must interact internally.  We meet at the body or physical level, whether that is determined by appearance, connections, possessions, or established interests.  Then we attempt to relate by how we think, aspire, feel, respond, or display our intelligence.  People do not lose interest in a significant other because of a lost attraction but because of an inability to connect existentially.  In fact couples stay together even if one or other has been physically damaged or disfigured if there is an existential connection – in spirituality, feelings, intelligence, aspirations.

The challenge in relating lies in being able to understand, appreciate, respect, embrace what the other represents in that aspect of their existence that is the mind, the soul, the essence, the invisible, specific definition of who they are and what they wish to be.   Each person has to learn to see that in the other.  Sometimes it is worth knowing so that a mutually satisfying relationship can be nurtured.  Other times, it can reveal a determinant that can encourage a decision to leave.  We can and should learn to explore those personal traits and determinants so we can grow from each other or discover where such growth is unreachable.

Managing a family or a team is not a simple exercise.  A human being is not just a physical life force that can be trained like a robot or one of the lower animal species.  Each person is a self-directed individual.  Though we may have some measurable characteristics that may be determined by genes or familial traits, these are simply related to the body or some function of one of its organ systems.  Each person develops a personality or attitude that is determined by the way they are exposed to life, encouraged to develop their own insights and embrace the discipline to build and own those insights.  That is an evolution, not an inherited trait .

Therefore, to lead a team or family (especially evident during adolescence and beyond) is to first respect each person as the autonomous individual.  Then we must be able to recognize what that person is fearing, that is, what are the unknowns in that person’s experience that can be filled.  Then we show them  how to fill it.  We do not fill it but encourage each person to do it knowing that each person will need to do a different thing from the other.  It requires patience, a desire to know, and a respect, not for the knowledge or physical characteristics (age, training, genetic, social, or financial status), but for the desire to grow existentially, purposefully, and responsibly.

Grief is the experience of loss of something or someone that played an important part of your life, your personality, your self-image and self-esteem.  The loss leaves you with a hole in your state of being.  You may see it as a hole in the heart referring to your emotions, but it goes deeper, to your very being.  It can even destroy your raison d’être, reason for being.  Yet life, your life, must go on.  How do you do it?

We cannot return the lost item, lost relationship, or the life of another.  We can, however, show you how to rebuild your life independent of but still mindful to that past attachment.  First, we must show you why it is necessary and logical and purposeful to have as an objective the desire to know yourself and build yourself as a mind-force, an essence with a mandate to grow and expand yourself to the best you can be.  Then we show you how to use this loss or disconnection as a catalyst to initiate that objective.  We use the same logic to explain to you the similar objective of the other if that loss is another person.  We show you why a loss or disappointment is not a punishment of you or a collapse of your life but is an invitation for you to discover parts of you that may have been neglected while you had that attachment.