Emotional Vibrations Part 5 – Managing Your Social Environments

In Part 2 of this series of posts we took a look at Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; a pyramid shaped model explaining we have to satisfy our basic needs first before moving on up to meeting the higher level needs of Loving, Self-Esteem and Self-Actualisation Needs.

In Part 4 I began talking about the Self-Image as a moving picture we develop of ourselves in terms of Social Worth.  I think I explained we base this moving picture on our own observations of overall physical vibrational tone (our emotions); which itself is a product of how we are reacting to both our past and current social environments.

The part of our brain which does the observing, the Prefrontal Cortex, is not itself emotional – it acts as co-ordinator of all our sensory information.  It also performs the role of signal interpreter acting then as direction finder/goal setter.

Put simply it’s your ‘Control’ mechanism – but it can easily make mistakes.  In the case of those of us who have emotional disorders it has made the mistake of misinterpreting the signals and making the wrong decisions in what they’re telling us because there are other beliefs we have emotionally attached to.

The Biggest Decisions You’ll Ever Make

The most fundamental decisions you can start making are your social environment decisions.  You need to be willing to emotionally detach, partially detach, and re-attach, on the basis of which social connections cause you pain and which bring you and others mutual benefit.  Unless you are willing to do this you cannot achieve full emotional healing – ever - because you are not allowing you to be YOU.  This is a life-long process.

Of course I’m not talking here in terms of where the people you associate with are physically located – I’m talking about the types of people you associate with.

Your Self-Image is almost entirely based on the evidence you get from social acceptance/rejection feedback and so to manage your self-image effectively, both for your and everyone else’s benefit, you have to give yourself permission to leave, alter or explore alternative social connections when you’re in social pain.  You have to do a little accepting and rejecting of your own.  You not only have to do unto others as they do unto you – you have to do it at the earliest opportunity before they’ve even get to fully do it to you.

This is where intuition comes in.  Sometimes we can be over-intuitive; we can run from things before we’ve even had a proper look and got the facts.  That’s not my personal experience, however – 9 times out of 10 my intuition was spot on.

I became seriously ill with multiple emotional disorders because I refused to leave an environment  toxic to my emotional well-being for 13 years – my intuition was screaming at me through my emotions and I ignored it.  It took another 15 years, after I’d left the physical environment, before I finally detached from the people concerned.  I remained attached for as long as I did because I believed it was the ‘right thing to do’ and then detached fully when it became obvious it was no longer the right thing to do.  It became ‘obvious’ purely on the basis of unrelenting social rejection and my wish to develop a positive self-image.

Over the years I have learned to listen to my intuition rather than my ‘right thing to do’ thinking patterns and found myself getting happier and happier despite believing I ‘shouldn’t be really’ as a result.

Indirect Control

The Objective Mind – the mind full of models of ‘how things work’ – is the mind best suited to planning your social environments because your Subjective Mind makes decisions on the basis of old emotional attachments.  However, your Objective Mind needs to search the Subjective regarding such things as experiences you enjoyed and felt you grew as a result of; these are the places you need to go to more often in the future if you want to develop a long-term Positive Self-Image.  Your hobbies; your strengths; moments when others complimented you on a skill you weren’t aware of.

You have to manufacture a future for yourself that’s going to lead to ever-increasing stimulation of the positive social kind.  Put yourself in social environments that will guarantee a Positive Self-Image.

I’m going to have to stop writing now as I want to work on a book but below I’m going to leave you with three mindmaps to look at:

• a model of how the Self-Image develops


• Your Self-Image Enemies


• Your Self-Image Friends.

There’s a lot of information in these diagrams – if you want to ask a questions/discuss/comment please leave a comment in the comment box below!

Double clicking on any of these images will open them in a new window.

HOW THE SELF IMAGE DEVELOPS: (start at the little red arrow and follow the cycle from left to right)

The differences between a controlled and an uncontrolled self-image:

Your Self-Image Enemies:

Defeated by using your Self-Image Friends!:

Regards.

Carl

Emotional Vibrations Part 4– Managing Short-Term Situational Environments

You’re happily travelling along in life when a situation arises.

In this post we look at short term negative (or positive) situations in which your attention mechanism is stimulated by one or more triggering signals and you find yourself thinking, feeling and acting differently to how you planned your day (you did plan your day, didn’t you?).

Here are some situational examples:

• One of a group of sniggering youths attempts to nudge you off your pushbike as you pass them on your way to work


• a very attractive married friend invites you to have an affair


• a large sum of money comes into your possession


• Someone you’ve repeatedly helped with a personal issue tells everyone else they’re suspicious of your motives


• You’re offered a job at twice the pay but you’re torn because you love the job you already do


• There’s a note on the table from your partner – they’ve moved your mother-in-law in


• Bang! What the hell … ?


• You’re at a wedding party and for some reason a stranger keeps bringing you drinks


• You start a  new job in a Restaurant on Monday … in the afternoon the manager tells you to start half an hour earlier on Tuesday with no extra pay … on Tuesday he tells you he only employed you because he could see you were desperate … on Wednesday he tells you you’re self-employed and need to sort out your own Insurance and Tax contributions … on Thursday he shouts at you publicly because you threw away some mouldy potatoes …


• A once close relative who won the lottery 20 years ago and disappeared immediately afterwards, leaving you a note saying ‘goodbye’ without any explanation, unexpectedly turns up at the door and tells you they’re broke then asks if you’ll take them in …


• a group of managers you work under publicly celebrate your success but also start spreading malicious rumours about you because your successes are making them look bad in some way


• You’ve lived happily as a total celibate for 20 years but a new friend keeps offering you advice on dating with a view to helping you escape your apparent ‘lonely situation’.

Anything spark a memory?

Most Situations Can Be Typed



 

 

I’m not going to discuss each situational type or all of the example situations I’ve listed (although if you want to have a chat in the comments box that’d be good!).  In this post we’re focusing on how we’re affected by short-term situations where you haven’t yet identified your life as being the situation (we’ll be looking at those situational environments in a later post).   In regards to these short-term situations you can still remember the stages of:

• pre-situation (before)


• in-situation (during)


• post-situation (after)

and how you integrated or failed to integrate the overall affects into your learning; or you may find yourself currently in a situation and believe it will follow this pattern.

The question, when intending to return to a happier pre-situation vibrational state, is how you will work with your four main minds in dealing with the situation so you can achieve this.

Your Four Main Minds

 



 

You can use your four minds to respond to a situation as if:

• it were a mental model (Objective Mind) and/or


• it were either a physical threat or opportunity needing physical action (Subjective Mind) and/or


• it were a matter of social justice (Social Mind) and/or


• it no longer existed (Now Mind).

I’ve put the ‘and/or’ endings onto those three lines above because there’s a point at which, whenever a new situation presents itself, we hover between the minds before choosing which will most dominate our responses.

Any sensory signals entering conscious awareness about a new situation arising are sent to the Prefrontal Cortex (the PFC) – our brain’s conscious decision making area based just behind our forehead.  These signals are sent there by the Thalamus; our brain’s sensory signal router.

The Thalamus needs the PFC to make a decision about which of the four minds will deal with the fresh situation (when I say the ‘PFC’, by the way, just keep in mind the PFC is you).  Once the decision is consciously made by the PFC it is passed back to the Thalamus and if the PFC makes the same decision several times the Thalamus automatically learns to do this unconsciously; routing similar information in the same way without asking the PFC ever again unless the PFC deliberately intervenes in the process (for example, by agreeing to connect with previously unreleased feelings).

 

The Objective Mind

Think of a short-lived situation you once found yourself in but has now long gone.  Make sure it’s one you no longer feel emotional about.  Found one?

Now think about it in terms of:

• pre-situation


• in-situation


• post-situation.

This should be an emotionally ‘dry’ memory where the contents, including the people involved, are just facts to you now.  If they’re not, pick a different memory.  In regards to this old situation you learned to make a judgement of ‘this is how things work in life and I just have to accept it’ – and then you accepted it.  You must have accepted it, by the way, or you would still be emotional about it.

Done that?

This is the realm of the Objective Mind.

The Objective Mind makes management of a particular area of life look easy to those currently managing the same area with their Subjective Mind.  The reason organisations use mentoring, for example, is so a mentee’s subjective experiential process can be processed and transferred from Subjective to Objective Mind as quickly as possible with minimum trial and error experimentation.  Sometimes a mentee may never be able to make the transfer without a mentor’s help – the individual remains stuck in a subjective state - or suffers emotional burnout and gives up.

When in Objective Mind you are able to deal with ‘situations’ of a particular kind with a minimum of emotional response.  This means, in terms of your overall vibrational state, being more easily able to return to a state of happiness once the situation has been effectively dealt with.  You do not get caught up in the whole ‘story-mind’ of the situation (I’ll talk about the story-mind further down).

Let’s say, for example, you’re having trouble with your neighbours – who are abusive and threatening.  A person choosing to deal with this situation using the Subjective Mind might behave likewise in return; or lay awake for several nights worrying about ‘what’ll they do next?’ or ‘what if I snap?’.  You consider phoning the police but images of the police laughing at you and belittling you in front of your nasty neighbours fill your head.  ‘That would make things even worse!’ you decide.

Then one day another one of your neighbours intervenes and speaks to your nasty neighbours.  ‘I’ve been recording your behaviour towards my neighbour on a spreadsheet and I’ve been to the police with the evidence who tell me if I and my neighbour both give statements we’ve got a good case against you – and I’ve got some other witnesses who’ll give statements too’ – the good neighbour then recalls the dates and times of the incidents and even the content of what was said – with one particular remark being particularly threatening – so the nasty neighbours can tell they’re not bluffing.  ‘See if we care!  Call the police!’ say the nasty neighbours and they wander off.  ‘Oh no,’ you’re thinking; ‘it’s just made things worse!’.  Ten minutes later the nasty neighbours are at your front door apologising for the misunderstanding and promise they’ll never have another go at you as long as you don’t tell the ‘clever-dick next door’ who grassed to the police they’ve won.

I’ve actually used this approach in supporting some neighbours who were being abused and within 10 minutes of speaking to the individual causing the trouble they’d received an apology and no more trouble.

The Objective Mind stores and retrieves patterns to be later retrieved by the thinking minds; using them as models against which which new but similar situations can be compared and effective solutions more quickly put in place.  Our initial response to a situation may be Subjective – we feel we are being ‘subjected to’ an experience and ask ‘Why Me?’; but when we retrieve the previously learned pattern and apply it this allows us to look at the situation as if it were an external object and ask ‘Why Not Me?’ instead.

At the start of this post I gave a long list of possible ‘situations’ which you might initially react to with an intense emotional response.  Have the same situations occur repeatedly, however, and you eventually learn an automated pattern in dealing with them that becomes less Subjective and more Objective.

in Objective Mind we are accepting something.  In Subjective Mind we are not.

This does not mean to say that managing all situations with an accepting Objective approach is a good thing – ‘this is the way things are done here’ can be applied to good and evil behaviours alike.

The Subjective Mind

The Subjective Mind operates within your body; it is what we think of as the Unconscious and is the ‘survival mind’.

Think of a short-lived situation now long gone in real life but one you still feel slightly emotional about (and I do mean slightly).  Found one?

By the way, if you’re still emotional about a past situation and those emotions keep coming up into your Conscious and grabbing your attention it means you haven’t fully processed the entire memory yet and haven’t learned what needed to be learned from it (and stored the complete pattern in Objective memory for later use).  That doesn’t mean you should start pulling up every emotion-linked memory you can so you can learn and transfer the results to the Objective Mind – it just pays to stay aware of the overall affect of these various, as yet unprocessed, emotion-linked memories.  I’ve got plenty of such memories from way back in the past I don’t intend to re-visit – but you never know; I just might.  It’s a personal choice.

When managing a situation with your Subjective Mind your whole body is involved and produces ‘movement energy’ – you feel intensely compelled to move towards; away; retrieve; reject; protect; crouch; cringe; sneer; gag; faint; laugh; scream; swear (swear words are based in the emotional brain, not the thinking brain, by the way) and so on.  The Objective Mind finds itself being  gradually closed down for the duration of the emotional release by the Subjective.  If a decision is made by the individual to resist or block emotional release when alone this creates the potential for ‘projection’.

Projection occurs when we fail to discharge the excess emotional energy produced by the Subjective Mind in response to one or more situations.

One of the problems the Subjective Mind causes for us in our modern world is that intellectual issues, such as the bills coming through your door or your boss hinting your job is at risk, can trigger the same emotional reaction as you’d have to a predator’s suffocating bite on your neck.  Modern life is full of such triggers; producing one emotional stimulant after another.  At some point, if you are repeatedly stimulated and do not release the energy in a safe environment, you will find yourself ‘projecting’ your trapped responses at all and sundry in a bid to discharge the energy created by your emotional system.  This is a completely natural reaction, but it is also anti-social because that is exactly what projection is designed to do – change current society or push it away.  Any target you can even slightly associate with the initial triggering issue ‘gets it in the neck’ once you start projecting.

Recognising projection as a natural and normal reaction is an important step in healing it – but that does not mean you should therefore assume it’s harmless to do it.  Your responsibility is either to leave the environments (including people) causing you to project; negotiate a mutually acceptable solution with them so you stop reacting or accept you’ll be stimulated as long as you remain in that environment and find a way to discharge the energy in private so that projection does not occur when you’re around them.

Unless you are being held against your will ultimate responsibility for leaving is yours.

After a bout of uncontrolled projection those of us with an over-responsible social conscience usually now start regretting and self-rejecting our own emotional responses (I used to do this but no longer do).  Not managing your intense emotions appropriately – usually because we have not yet learned how to or do not even yet know there is a ‘how to’ – can lead to self-rejection of the emotional system itself.

Self-rejection of our emotions and the system creating them leads to the Subjective Mind reacting against itself; producing secondary emotional responses to fight what we see as our anti-social tendencies.   There are times, however, when the dominant nature of an active Subjective Mind is the only thing to get you out of a difficult situation. Without it you probably wouldn’t be alive and reading this so let’s not see it as a bad thing.    Deciding which of the minds should best deal with a situation is a matter of personal judgement.

Watching  all of this activity, making those judgements as to whether or not the way in which you deal with the various situations you encounter means you are a ‘good or bad person’, is the Social Mind.

The Social Mind

 



 

The Social Mind (or rather the Social Justice Mind) oversees and creates the belief-system framework operating your Objective and Subjective minds.

The reason humans have such a big brain is thought to be due to the need to survive and thrive in the multi-layered complexities of human relationships – social acceptance and bonding within a group is the single most important survival factor for an individual; even if it leads to the death of the individual!    This mind is centred in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC) at the front of your brain.  When you stop deliberately focusing on other things, for instance when you ‘relax’,  the MPFC automatically kicks into action.  You find yourself mentally festering on any unresolved interpersonal social issues; even though your intention may have been the opposite.  Your MPFC calculates:

• Emotional Valence – the intensities of your different positive and negative emotional values; current and predicted – we tend to react much more Subjectively when something emotionally highly valued comes under threat or is likely to change, even in a positive way – it’s in these areas we are also most susceptible to having ‘I would not cope if …’ thoughts


• 
  
  Cost/Benefit Analysis (risk management) – we compare what we expect/intend to get against what we expect/are willing to lose and ask if the loss is worth the gain; what is the cost of doing nothing likely to be?


• Cause and affect associations – how did the situation/threat/opportunity arise; what are my enemies/friends/acquaintances working towards?  This helps in deciding next actions


• Task Co-ordination – now I have decided my overall direction what do I need to do and when


• Differences in perspectives between you and someone else – do your current social contacts display incongruent body language; do they talk about you behind your back; do they say one thing but do another?

The MPFC kicks into overdrive when we notice the deal between ourselves and others is turning out not to be what we thought it was (when dealing with informal relationships we are working with what’s called the ‘psychological contract’).  At this point we start to question ‘is it me or is it them who’s breaking the contract?’ – or ‘was there ever an actual common contract we all understood or have I been fooling myself all this time?’ - we then start recalculating our next actions.

The Self-Image

The Self-Image is a sub-system of the Social Justice Mind.

If, when a negative situation presents itself, you immediately start asking ‘how did I cause this negative thing to happen to me?’ this indicates you have a negative Self-Image.  The same thing is true when a positive situation arises and you decide you don’t deserve it or think you’re not worthy of it.

And that’s what a Self-Image is – a self-viewpoint of personal social worth.  You didn’t deliberately choose to have a negative self-image if that’s what you’ve got – you’ve been marinated in it by your social experiences to date.  Once you fully tune in to what your self-image is and how it came about you can start deliberately redesigning it for your own happiness by living your life in such a way the evidence of your positive social worth is overwhelming.  Isn’t this what you’d like everyone else to do for themselves too?  Make sure you give the same right to yourself you’d give everyone else.

You cannot just repeat a few positive mantras or affirmations to magically produce the desired positive self-image – a poor self-image has usually been embedded deep in the Unconscious and is currently being managed using the emotions by the Subjective Mind.  Your judgement about the nature of your self-image is based on your long-term vibrational state; you look at how you ‘feel’ about yourself.  If you feel good you have a positive self-image, if you feel bad you don’t.  It’s that simple.  It’s also that difficult to change and if you have one or more emotional disorders transitioning may be a very slow process.

Social signal evidence, received from others to date, tells you whether or not your life is socially worthwhile.  Your social worth is decided by the types of people you directly socialise with most often, and to whose opinion you are most emotionally attached.  The self-image is a moving thing – you see yourself from the outside as if you were travelling through space and time as a particular ‘type of person’.  That type of person is either socially acceptable or unacceptable and your judgement about which of the two you are has been mostly influenced by those you allowed to access your Unconscious.

As a child I grew up with a father who never spoke to me (he would flick me around the ear to make me go away) and a mother who, when she left him, took to practising unarmed combat on me when she’d had too much to drink (my mother was ex-army).  That went on into my teens (one of the last episodes involved her taking me into a room, locking the door, and repeatedly punching me in the nose to force me to confess to a crime I didn’t commit).  At school I was subjected to a bullying campaign for several years by a bunch of thugs and when I got married my mother and then wife combined forces to make me feel useless as a parent and husband – my mother was angry I’d got married because her plan was for me to stay with her, go to work and give her my income.  My wife began brainwashing my son against me, then the following three children, and succeeded in destroying my relationships with them over a 28 year period.  Just before we finally split, after 13 years of marriage, my wife admitted she’d never regarded me as anything other than a useful sperm donor.  The marriage ended when I’d finally had enough of how I was being treated (she wanted 6 children and I refused to have any more and things just got worse from then on).  I concluded her intention had always been to be a ‘single parent’ but I’d just refused to give myself the right to acknowledge I’d been conned and leave.

Have a guess what my self-image was like back then.  Emotionally I reacted very strongly to it all and because I couldn’t accept my own emotional responses (I thought they were ‘bad’) I developed panic attacks, rage attacks, OCD and depression in my early twenties.  I’m going to write more about the Self-Image in another post.

Latest research tells us that, just to keep our Self-Image where it currently is, we need to be receiving positive social signals at least three to five times more often than negative evidence otherwise we will develop a poor self-image whether we want to or not.  This is because, by default, we are designed to pay attention to negative signals first.  Negative signals are the things that help keep us alive.  This default setting can be used against us by others wanting to manipulate us into giving them what they want, who later declare us as ‘socially unacceptable’ when we either don’t deliver what they want or do and they’ve no further use for us.

People who are naturally empathic – who have a tendency to ‘put themselves in other people’s shoes’ - are particularly susceptible to this kind of manipulation, particularly if not aware of how the Self-Image works and not willing to cut their emotional ties from the people they need to because those people are signalling continual social rejection at them.  Some of us even regard the sacrifice of a positive Self-Image as a necessity for meeting socially justifiable goals.  I used to think that way – but the belief that punishing ourselves will make us better people doesn’t work.

Your Current Self-Image and New Situations

A negative Self-Image automatically reduces your capacity for dealing effectively with new negative or positive situations because you can’t ‘see the join’.  You cannot consciously see the pre-situation; in-situation; post-situation pattern.  By the time the new situation arrives you have already been producing a long-term negative vibrational tone – feeling bad about yourself because you unconsciously regard yourself as socially worthless.  Even during those times you start to feel good there’s a question inside asking ‘do I deserve this?’.

There’s also an in-built tendency, when suffering with a negative Self-Image, to identify your core self with it.  For example a person angry at how they’ve been treated socially sees themselves as an ‘abnormally angry person with a chip on their shoulder’ and goes on to believe they deserve negative treatment from others.  A person who suffers years of bullying becomes an ‘abnormally anxious person’ who deserves to be treated as weak and stupid.

When a new negative situation, created by other people, starts triggering further negative emotional responses it just gets added to an already overloaded ‘negativity pot’.

But let’s say, like me, you release your negativity; undo the negative Self-Image (or what we might call our Social Worth Image) given to you by others and go on instead to develop a clearly visible history of evidence showing you have high social worth.  What kind of mind is it then dealing with the incoming signals of an approaching negative situation?

That would be the ‘Now Mind’.

The Now Mind

The Now Mind is the ‘happy’ mind.  It’s the mind you should aim to be in most of the time.

In the Now Mind you are at peace and have a positive Self-Image; an underlying sense of Social Worth.  You are aware there is the potential for negativity in the world but you now have clear evidence you can bring yourself through such experiences and return to the Now Mind whenever you want so you do not worry unnecessarily about those things.  You are not self-critical (nor, by the way are you self-obsessed or narcissistic).

You are able to sit still with a sense of gratefulness for the new world now sitting in front of you wondering ‘wow – I’m alive; what shall I do next?’.  You have no hostile intent and no anxieties.  Your Subjective Mind (your emotional response mind) is quiet.  Your Objective Mind is not trying to figure anything difficult out.  You realise you feel buoyant.

And then a negative situation appears; not of your doing, and you can see, plain as day, someone or something else is creating it for you.  Unfortunately you cannot just pretend it isn’t happening; you have to respond.  The question is: how?

Well, it depends on which of the many response roles available you want to play.

Response Roles



 

Just take a  look at each of those response roles – you can respond to any situation using any one of them and produce emotional responses designed to ensure you play that role.  Then you can change your roles as you progress through the various steps in dealing with a situation.  It depends on how you see yourself in regards to the situation and how important it is for you to manipulate how others see you – and in turn how you want your Self-Image to turn out when you look at for yourself.

Are there some situations in which you act like a nervous wreck but in others respond like a tiger?  You can mix and match your roles – for example you could be a Comedian-Victim who laughs bitterly at the ironies of life as the next blow falls; a Guardian Supporter who reassures a victim everything will be OK because you know what the big picture looks like and you want to put their stressed minds at rest (“Search your feelings; feel the force” and all that kind of thing oh Wise One).

You may know people who appear stuck in one or more of these ‘response roles’ as if it were their default personality but actually what’s happening with them is they’re stuck in that role because they’ve not yet released the emotional energy provided by their Subjective Mind when dealing with an old situation.

You, however, can avoid getting stuck in a ‘response role’ by making sure you have fully discharged the emotional energies driving your response; you allow yourself to express all those emotional energies safely and return to the Now Mind.

The Now Mind is the only true mind.

And that’s how it is for every one of us.

You see, when a situation arises, regardless of who or what causes it, we get caught up in the ‘story-mind’.

The Story-Mind

Since early childhood you have been trained in the habit of engaging with stories.  All good stories involve the four minds and all of those response roles I’ve listed.

In the Now Mind state you go towards a story: you experience it; analyse it then judge it as socially worthy or not.  Then you leave the story to return to your previous Now Mind state.  Those with incomplete personal stories; particularly stories in which they cannot resolve information being processed in the Subjective Mind because we are simply not designed to accept negative Self-Image information, remain stuck in emotional turmoil.

Your life is your personal story with you it’s only writer - if it’s not working out for you – if the audience tells you your story stinks – it falls to you to rewrite the story repeatedly in a bid to please everybody else or change the audience for one that will give you different feedback.   At some point your story will come to an end.

Author Brendon Burchard, in his book ‘Life’s Golden Ticket’, tells us at the end of our days we ask ourselves three simple questions:

• Did I live?


• Did I love?


• Did I matter?

We refer to whatever Self-Image we have at that time for the answers.

Every fictional story has a goodie or a baddie with each representing an argument around a central issue and we, the audience, root for one or the other.  Success versus failure.  Intelligence versus stupidity.  Attractive versus ugly.  A choice of two opposing self-images one of which we are invited to identify with.  The outcomes of the story can be win-win; lose-lose; win-lose; lose-win - or the tension remains and we wait for the sequel.

Both goodies are baddies are supported by all those response roles listed above – which represent all the different approaches available, in any story; ‘real’, ‘fictional’ or your’s.

In reality there’s no such thing as a ‘goodie’ or a ‘baddie’ – because truth is, anyone who does anything, harmful or beneficial, can find a Social Justification for it if they look long enough.  That justification does not even have to be based on something real – it can be a notion.  A social meme.  An idea.  Not a single, systematically evil person on the planet believes that’s what they are.

Because they surround themselves with people who support their view – which strengthens their Positive Self-Image no end.

To you the situation you’re dealing with may look as though it’s being driven by a narcissistic nutcase but to the people they socialise with they are heroes.

This is why, when you’re in a situation dealing with a self-centred trouble-causer, you cannot get them to just stop through ‘reasoning’.  Their positive self-image is based on a history of social positive self-image reinforcement and their egos would fight to the death with you to defend it.  As far as they’re concerned they feel great about themselves.

How about you?  Are you willing to do what’s necessary in any situation to get back to the point you feel great about yourself afterwards?

I’m going to write more about this later but in the meantime here’s a model I suggest you follow:

 



 

Regards – Carl