Monthly Archives: December 2020

Chaos is the Sociopath’s Playground

27 Sunday Dec 2020

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Someone once told me that they’d never seen a family like mine who was always engaged in some sort of self-induced chaos. She noted that we were like a soap opera by the way we would divide into teams and charge into battles of anger, distrust, rumors, gossip and lies with each other. Then, we’d all forgive each other and get back together—until we would suddenly divide into new alliances and launch another frivolous, stressful, unnecessary war with each other again. She commented that she’d never seen a family repeat this soap opera of chaos over and over and over again, year after year after year.

But that person, as observant as she thought she was, never took a close enough look at her own assessment. While it was true that my family was always breaking into teams to attack each other over everything from suspicion of favoritism, to who didn’t deserve what they had, to out-and-out thievery, there was always one common denominator—one single sibling—planted firmly in the center of each and every family battle. It was not by accident that she was always there in the center of all the repeated chaos because in hindsight, she was, pretty much without exception, always the instigator. The rest of us siblings, our parents, aunts, uncles, in-laws, cousins, nieces and nephews were repeatedly tricked into going to battle, always per her plan.

The Socio-pathway to chaotic life

I share this story from my own upbringing because it is the perfect example of how sociopaths use chaos as a tool for their own enjoyment and personal gain. And believe me when I say that my family was not the only family to practice this. I hear stories from my friends and readers, all the time, about their own families who suffer the same battle scenes, year after year, and again at the direction of just one parent or sibling.

Statistically only 4% of people are born sociopaths. That’s the equivalent of 1 person in 25, or 2 people in any full city bus. So the one frustrating question that each of us must ask ourselves is; Why do we allow this 4% to keep the 96% of us good, peace-loving people in constant chaos and turmoil?

Getting back to what I know, from the many years I’ve spent in The School of Hard Knocks of which I am a graduate, I spent the first 50 years of my life under the spell of not only the sociopathic sibling herself, but of the entire family whose pressure on me to was constantly forgive the instigator for every evil she could propagate. In order to repeatedly forgive the instigator, I was encouraged to question myself by having to answer the age-old question, “Oh now, why would she say/do something like that?”

So why would he/she say something like that?

Have you ever been shushed or minimized after an atrocious attack by someone asking you that question? “Oh now, why would he/she say something like that?” Their question completely disarms you, leaving you vulnerable to the lies that were told and at the mercy of those who choose to believe that you are “making it all up in your head.” All too often, that question makes you look like the crazy person after you’ve tried to expose what the insane sociopath really, truly did say or do. This is Gaslighting. Too many people are driven crazy through the act of Gaslighting, not so much by the sociopath’s evil tricks, but by the scores of supporters that surround them and who transform the lies and gossip into a new twisted “truth” just because they choose to believe “He/she wouldn’t say/do that, now would they?”  The truth is the sociopath would do it and they did do it and they’re going to do it again. They are going to succeed again too, because their supporters are still firmly holding to their act of minimizing the eyewitness testimonies and, rather than help the victim, they choose instead to help spread the distrust, and the lies and half-truths.

My time in the Gaslighting trap lasted for fifty years, during which time any effort I’d ever made to remove this sibling from my life was met with an intervention in which our mother would set a trap to lure us into a room together so she could encourage me to forgive the sibling again, kiss again, and makeup again. Mom would put on her pouty face and whine “I just want all my children to get along.” In reality, her version of loving me was to tie me to a monster and shame me into accepting whatever dishonest torture I’d been subjected to. Siblings and cousins offered me no support and left me feeling as if I’d been ganged up on by the entire family until I “chose to be a nicer person to my poor evil sister.”

Just like any other victim of Gaslighting, I was not fighting the mental illness of my sibling, I was fighting the social structure of my entire family, which was centered around responding to the lies that oozed from one of our five sibling’s mental illness. My parents or other siblings would never stand together to make her behave with civility, so to avoid being kicked out of the family myself, I ended up having to forgive the monster thousands of times over the fifty years I’d stayed in that family.

Who else walks this path?

Does any of this sound familiar? Has it happened to you at home or at work? Has a sociopathic boss or cubemate repeatedly accused you or your teammates of wrongs that can’t be defended against, or have they planted seeds of distrust into each teammate so that the whole team can’t function anymore? If so, then you are one of the millions who has found yourself lost in the chaos of a sociopath’s playground.

When a sociopath starts a gossip storm, and accuses an innocent teammate of something, most teams tend to place the burden of proof onto the innocent person who has been falsely accused. Other teammates respond by shushing and minimize the testimony of the victim with questions like “Oh, now why would he/she say that about her/him if it wasn’t true?” Why? BECAUSE THEY’RE MENTALLY ILL!  THAT’S WHY! They will continue to commit bizarre acts on individuals until we stop trying to apply our dearly beloved rules of decency, honesty and civility onto their twisted manipulations of social trust and peace. They don’t understand civility the way we do so they don’t behave the way we would so we must stop trying to believe that sociopaths behave just like us. Their behaviors are nothing like ours.

Do you swim with alligators?

Sociopaths are humans also, so since we are all one body of conscious humanity, (What Christians call The Body of Christ) they too deserve to be loved and forgiven, but their motive and words are not to be trusted. I personally fear alligators, but I don’t hate them. I don’t want them to be punished for being alligators, but I keep a distance. I won’t swim in their pond, and I warn others to not swim in their ponds also. I feel this same way about sociopaths. I don’t hate them. I fear them. I recognize them as mentally ill evil-doers because that’s what they are. They were born with damage to the frontal lobe of the brain, where conscience exists for the rest of us. In today’s psychological world there exists no cure for them. I don’t hate them, but I recognize the dangers they intentionally pose for the rest of us. So I stay out of their reach if I can.

Bring healing to the world by trusting the victims more than the perpetrators

While not hating sociopaths, I have learned, through thousands of scars and bruises, to simply stay away from them. To not listen to them. To go a step further, I support their victims by more quickly trusting the rantings of their testimonies—as crazy as the rantings may sound. I know that sociopaths do things that sound crazy to the rest of us, so when someone who is at the end of their rope rants on to me about some insane thing someone did to them, I don’t shush or minimize their testimony. I give them the respect they deserve by considering they may be actual victims of insane Gaslighting—a fate I’ve suffered too many times to count in just my own lifetime. I go even one more step further and share what I know to the public, in hopes I can show others how to stay out of the pond with the alligators. I wish to convince my fellow humans to recognize the tricks and traps of the sociopath and to stay away from those sociopaths and to pray for them from a safe distance.

Sociopaths hate themselves. We know this because they hate us, and hate does not come from love any quicker than bananas come from apple trees. These 4% need to find self-love before they can give love out to others. But I can’t grant self-love to a sociopath any quicker than I can convince an alligator to not eat me, so, in both cases, I just stay away from them.

We all need to stop enabling the lies and tricks

My solution to the infestation of sociopaths in our lives is: Stop empowering them by believing their lies. You don’t have to mortally hate them. Just know that if they are speaking, they’re probably lying and that they’re dangerous and incurable. Chaos is a sport to them. They go home feeling energized by knowing they’d had the power to ruin someone’s life today. That’s literally the reason they do it! Sociopaths are miserable human beings with no self-love in their hearts. They get no joy out of watching us live happy, loving lives with families and friends who trust us, so to cool their burning jealousy they need a dopamine boost to make up for their lack of self-love. Causing chaos gives them the same adrenaline rush as does jumping out of a plane with a parachute. It’s exhilarating to them, and because it’s a dopamine addiction, it needs no other reason to happen but that it gives the sociopath the rush they need to get through another boring, loveless day. Once we stop believing their lies, they lose their motivation to keep lying to us and they move on.

Immeasurable cost to the innocent

On the largest scale I would be willing to bet that sociopaths cost families, corporations and countries more in money, cohesiveness, confidence and productivity than every other mental illness combined by first undermining a team’s ability to trust each other and then by forcing innocent teammates to stop being productive and organized, forcing them instead to spend days, weeks, months or years trying to build a defense against false accusations they are totally innocent of.

Gaslighting teaches us to not trust ourselves

For me, the 4th in a line of 5 siblings, two parents and a plethora of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, I had simply accepted the lifelong fact that, because of the repeated scenarios of lies and gossip, I would never be able to trust anyone in my family. Because of the whole family’s blind faith in the hateful speak of the demon at the center of all chaos, I never knew what any family member thought they knew about me. So even when I was talking one-on-one with one or some of them, I didn’t know if they were secretly viewing me as a liar or a thief or—just about any other bad thing you can imagine.

My sociopathic sibling knew how to plant seeds of distrust into each and every one of us, to the point that we were so used to not trusting each other that most of us didn’t even realize it was a problem. That’s Gaslighting. We all just thought that “all families fight” but I know many families who fight very seldom. Ours fought constantly and always over nothing. I can’t count how many times she and my brother, her closest ally, would randomly call me a liar to my face when they didn’t agree with whatever I was saying. And to them, I either accepted their word as pure gold, or, again, I was either stupid or a liar.

Disagreement wasn’t something they had enough maturity or self-love to handle. Having my elder siblings constantly calling me a liar, or stupid, for fifty years conditioned me to the point that after having been raised by them I didn’t know how to trust my own perceptions of life. That’s what Gaslighting is intended to do to its victims. First you lose faith in the people around you, then, after years of being convinced that you were wrong…or lying…or stupid…you lose the ability to trust even your own thoughts, memories or ideas.

Distance. The only cure

It became obvious at fifty years of age, that the only solution was distance, and from the whole clan. Almost everyone in my family or who knew my family had become puppets to the puppet master’s lies and tricks, so I truly couldn’t trust anyone. For my own survival, I finally walked away from almost all of them. I changed phone numbers, email addresses, and have never made a single attempt at talking to any relative who knew them. That was over ten years ago and I am happy to report that my life has been chaos-free for over ten years now. I’ve also learned to trust myself. Surprise, surprise, I’m not an idiot just because I don’t blindly agree with everything some uneducated sociopath blurts out of her uncontrolled mouth. Not one single person has called me a liar, or stupid in over ten years and I no longer question every thought or memory I have.

Why can’t sociopaths live in peace?

Peace doesn’t give a sociopath the unfair spoils that they crave. Sociopaths create chaos because following the rules of civility doesn’t allow them to steal and cheat with the ease that chaos allows. For example, a sociopathic boss or leader will fire people willy-nilly, so that the rest of us employees can’t trust that we won’t be next. Unable to trust that we will keep our jobs for another day by following the rules of truth and honesty turns our world to chaos. Once we are in chaos, and focused on daily survival, we change our priorities from doing what is fair and right, to doing whatever we hope will appease our sociopathic monster of a boss long enough to let us keep our jobs for one more chaotic day.

During the time that we are in this trap, psychologists call us “Flying Monkeys.” As we recall, when Dorothy melted the Wicked Witch of the West, the Flying Monkeys, who had been willingly performing the acts of her evil for her, cheered. It was then discovered that they’d hated the witch all along but did as she directed anyway. The Flying Monkeys were her power. The sociopath is the Wicked Witch who breaks all the rules and creates chaos and fear where there is ample space for peace. Why? Because through chaos and fear, the rules of productivity no longer apply. To us, the rule becomes eat-or-be-eaten, rather than work together toward team goals and company profits.

All’s fair in love and war

In my novels I call this technique “crisis rules” or “the rules of crisis.” In the rules of civility, I would be punished for pouring water on your brand-new couch. But if that couch were on fire—or in crisis—then I would be praised for pouring that same water on that same couch. Sociopaths know this better than we do. They know that if they want to take something from someone who earned it fairly, they need to create a crisis, which creates fear, which prompts us to take drastic measures. They know the old saying “All’s fair in love and war” better than we do and they’ve learned how to use it to their advantage.

An example of how chaos benefits the liar

A man married to a sociopath, might one day find out that she had been running up credit cards behind his back or had somehow gotten him into a financial bind so severe that he was now, suddenly, willing to cash in his 401k to pay off the crisis. He had been following the rules of civility by properly saving for his retirement, but because of the crisis his spouse had gotten him into, he was now willing to do what he’d promised himself he’d never do, leaving him to start over on his original plan from ground zero. But that’s okay, right? All’s fair in love and war, right? It was a crisis, so he did what he had to do. By giving up everything he’d worked for, he became the hero who saved the day. What a clever manipulation!

The problem is that the sociopath had created the crisis intentionally just to get him to release his grip on his own future and give it all to her. And, to go a step further, if he didn’t divorce her over it, he might as well prepare for it to happen again. Sociopaths know the tricks but they’re not as intelligent as we give them credit for. They’re driven by raw primal instinct to do whatever it takes to get what they want. They say evil things like “the ends justify the means.” What I’m trying to say here is, it worked, so like little robots they’re going to do it again, exactly the same way, as soon as an opportunity arises. They know we’ll eventually forgive them and then put ourselves right back into the trap just like before.

When will the 4% of people who are sociopaths stop controlling the 96% with their evil?

When we stop listening to them.

We don’t need to hate them. We just need to stop listening to their lies and clever war cries. Sociopaths have but one single power, words. Not the words they say, but their words that we let ourselves respond to. The Flying Monkeys far outnumbered the Wicked Witch, but for some social reason, they let her jerk them around until the day came that someone else stepped in and removed the Witch altogether. Why did they obey the sociopath in the movie? Why do we obey sociopaths in real life? Are we the cause of sociopathic rule in this world?

My family collectively allowed one single sibling to destroy the entire clan, and for no reason more complex than to appease the daily addiction to chaos that gripped one single person.

We allow sociopaths rule us by not turning off their mic, or rolling our eyes and moving along whenever they speak lies. On deep levels, we usually know they’re liars and thieves, but we would rather say “Oh, now why would they say that?” than tell them to behave themselves like adults.

Everyone Knows? A Sociopath’s Attempt at Baffling with BS

19 Saturday Dec 2020

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You might be a sociopath if: You start any sentence with “Everyone knows.”

Why do sociopaths think “everyone” knows anything at all? That’s easy: It’s manipulation instead of honesty. A sociopath wants to divide you out and make you feel alone and isolated so they can convince you of something they know isn’t true. A sociopath knows they are outmatched enough to fail at convincing you of anything with actual facts, so instead they use verbal tricks, which are lies. In reality, it’s impossible for “everyone” to know anything at all. It’s also impossible for the sociopath to know what “everyone” knows. So they start their feeble attempt at convincing you of something that is not true by using the lie, “Everyone knows” to make you feel outnumbered right from the start.

Remember the old saying “if you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bull$4lt.” Starting a sentence with the lie “Everyone knows” is a sign someone is trying to baffle you with BS to make you believe something that isn’t true. People only manipulate when they know honesty won’t get them what they want.

WARNING BELL!: How to NOT follow the socio-path: When you hear “Everyone knows,” heed the warning bell: You are likely being manipulated by a sociopath. Whatever they say next is probably a lie or a pathetic attempt to get something from you that they know they aren’t smart enough to get with honesty. Just don’t engage. Don’t listen. Or even better yet, wish them “have a nice day,” turn and go find someone to talk to who loves themself enough to be honest and forthright with you. If you want to help the sociopath, don’t engage with their non-brilliant tricks. Go and pray for their soul. They’re someone to feel sorry for. They are wallowing in self-hatred. Only a person who is filled with self-hatred can spew hatred and lies. A person who is filled with self-love can only spread love. Remember, from my other tips; bananas don’t grow on apple trees. Whatever you are inside (self-love or self-hate) is what you give to the world around you. If someone is lying to you with words like “Everyone knows” remember, lies don’t come from a place of self-love.

Summary:

Rule 1): Heed the warning bell: “Everyone knows”

Rule 2): Don’t engage

Rule 3): Don’t engage

Rule 4): Don’t engage

Once your sociopath can learn to love themself, they’ll find the capacity to love others enough to learn how to participate in intelligent conversation with honest communication rather than having to manipulate the words of their sentences with lies like “Everyone knows.”

As Always: Be the love you want to receive: Show them tough love by not engaging in their verbal circus. If they get what they want through today’s lies, they’ll just lie again tomorrow. Pray for them. Maybe one day they’ll learn to love themself enough to show respect back to you. It’s a win/win if that happens.

Is Learning to Love Ourselves the True Meaning of Life?

14 Monday Dec 2020

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Self-love Just May Be the Single Most Important Lesson for All Humanity to Learn

Loving yourself empowers you to love others. Loving yourself also enables others to love you in return. If there is meaning to life, then I believe it is for each of us to regain complete love for ourselves. I propose that self-love is the single most important lesson for all humanity to work on as individuals and together, overshadowing every other reason we live at all. If everyone alive loved themselves enough to love everyone around them, then pretty much every other problem in all of human existence would vanish.

Here is a short list of just some of the negative side effects we suffer with by not fully loving and forgiving ourselves:

  • Depression
  • Anxiety
  • Addiction
  • Suicidality
  • Anger
  • Nightmares
  • Sleep disorders
  • Eating disorders
  • Road rage
  • Politics rage (Polarization of the Americans who don’t love themselves, so they hate others too)
  • Loneliness, even when in a crowd (Isolation)
  • War
  • Greed
  • Blame
  • Dissatisfaction
  • Fear of Failure
  • Fear of Success
  • Repeatedly making friends with, (or marrying) the wrong people
  • Never reaching our own full potential
  • Etc.

Before we begin, let’s not confuse self-love with narcissism. Anyone who truly loves themselves WILL love the people around themselves. Narcissists don’t love anyone around themselves. If they are kind to us it’s so they can get something in return. If they are filled with love then they can only give love. If they lash out in anger or whining, then they are filled with anger and whining. If bananas don’t grow on apple trees, then anger, jealousy, depression, bullying, stealing, lying, gossiping, name-calling, lack of conscience or remorse, polarized political rage, road rage, etc cannot grow on the tree that loves itself wholly. Anyone who lashes out, is lashing out from whatever ingredients are within them to lash out with. If they lash out in anger, then it’s anger, not love, that’s within them.

Healing the Side Effects Doesn’t Fix the Problem for Very Long

The side effects of poor self-love listed above are just some of the negative side effects that we all have to deal with when we don’t fully love ourselves. True healing doesn’t come from healing only the side effects. True healing comes from also identifying and eliminating the root-cause of those side effects in the same way that killing fruit flies doesn’t solve our fruit fly problem. Fruit flies are a side effect of keeping rotten fruit in the kitchen. We can kill all the fruit flies today, only to find another swarm in our home tomorrow. Throwing out the rotten fruit fixes the fruit fly side effect permanently. (It also fixes the kitchen odor side effect at the same time).

Why Most of Us Lack Self-Love—The Root Cause

One major reason for this imbalance makes sense when we consider the whole picture of human child rearing. Most of us were raised by parents, teachers, ministers, friends, siblings or peers who seemed fixated on our shortcomings and mistakes, calling us brats, and clumsy, and helping us to settle for less because they didn’t think we could handle the success of the potential they couldn’t see in us. As a child, my peers pranked and ridiculed me every time they felt the need to feel as if they were better than me. Meanwhile parents and teachers would ask me “What is the matter with you?” whenever they were angry or embarrassed at the fact that I was just a child who still needed to be taught social and mathematical skills. So as an intelligent boy I tried to find the answer to the question they had just asked me. What was the matter with me? Of course the only answer is “I’m human” But that answer wasn’t allowed to be given to my parents or teachers. So by not having an acceptable answer, it proved that I was just simply incompetent in a world where other kids my age weren’t. My parents and teachers would say with words that they had faith in me, but their actions didn’t match those words. Their actions proved that I was incompetent at making my own decisions or finding joy in things that they didn’t think I needed to find joy in. An example from my own life is: As a boy, I wanted so badly to play piano or any other musical instrument that I repeatedly asked if I could join a school program or take lessons. My parents scoffed at that and refused to allow me to join any musical programs at school or anywhere else, saying “if we buy an instrument, you’ll just quit and we’ll be stuck with an instrument we don’t need.” It didn’t matter how many times teachers or parents would use words to say that they believed in me, their actions always told the absolute truth of what they truly thought of me. As a child, I learned to believe their actions, not their words.

So, like most of us, I grew up knowing that verbal compliments or verbal support didn’t prove anything at all. So just telling me to love myself today isn’t going to motivate me any more than telling me to jump across the ocean. I know I can’t do either. It’s been proven through thousands of actions over my lifetime that when it’s time for real support, most people will back down and prove that they have no faith in me at all. So I learned not to have faith in myself either. I can’t fully love myself if I have no faith in me.

Self-love and Self-forgiveness Go Hand in Hand

I grew up struggling to love myself because I could never forgive myself for being the incompetent child my mocking peers, or unsupportive teachers proved to me that I am. In this way, Self-Love and Self-Forgiveness are synonyms.

I find it helpful now to identify one memory each day that identifies a time when someone taught me I was someone who couldn’t be forgiven. Then, each day I can begin the task of finding forgiveness for that person, and then for myself. I submit that the truest daily goal each of us should focus on is to identify the scores of places in our lives where we learned to NOT love or forgive ourselves. From there, we can begin to work on accepting the truth, one tiny piece at a time, that we really can forgive those things about ourselves.

Over the period of my childhood, I systematically lost love for myself because I kept adding to the list of things I couldn’t forgive myself for. I eventually took over all my teachers’ roles to become my own personal self-deprecator. I learned to close my eyes, slap my own forehead and say “I’m so stupid” every time I did something that didn’t go well. Bananas don’t grow on apple trees, so those of us who truly love and forgive ourselves for being normally flawed humans, aren’t going to call ourselves stupid. So what is this automatic act and chant “I’m so stupid” honestly telling me about myself? If I’m automatically calling myself stupid, then something within me believes it to be true. Now I’ve identified a place to work on and forgive myself for. Once forgiven, I can love myself.

We Have No Reason to Feel Shame About This

I don’t want anyone, anywhere, to feel ashamed of themselves for not fully loving yourself, because absolutely everybody on earth needs to work on their self-love also. It’s probably the “original sin” we’re all said to be born into, meaning that lovingly learning to forgive ourselves is the reason we are here at all. Almost no one has it handled, which explains why so much harm is done through jealousy and a thirst for personal power. Almost all human life struggles with self-love and almost all social problems, from health and health care, through global hunger, global warming, corporate bullying and political dishonesty, are caused by too many individuals who can’t love themselves enough to feel satisfied that their lives are wonderful just the way they are, or in the belief that their own personal goals for happiness aren’t worth pursuing, so they take their lack of self-love out on others instead. This is why people hurt each other. Looking into another’s soul is like looking in a mirror. If someone looks into my eyes and hates me, they are really looking in a mirror hating themselves. We’re all connected. We’re all fragments of the same global consciousness. What affects you affects me and vice versa.

Self Love and Self Forgiveness Go Hand in Hand

If you were to meet you today for the first time, would you like you? A lot of us feel like we wouldn’t like the person we met if we met ourselves. Maybe it’s because we each know the skeletons that we’ve hidden in our closets, so we think we’re not the person others see us as. I can’t count how many times friends have said something like this to me “If you really knew everything about me you wouldn’t like me.”  A lot of us have friends who like us more than we like ourselves, or, I should say, we have friends who love us more than we love ourselves. The whole scenario is out of balance. I should be capable of loving myself as much as you love me, or as much as I can love anyone else, because I’m here to tell you that everyone has skeletons hiding in their closets. Everyone has made mistakes that they don’t talk about. Everyone is equal in this scenario. Why would I need to be harder on myself than I am on them? Bananas don’t grow on apple trees. If you are a person who can love yourself no matter what, then you are a person who can love anyone no matter what.

So since we were not born broken, but were taught that we were broken, too many of us grew up to become who we were raised to be more often than who we were born to be. If this, in any way, describes you, then the good news is that you need not feel alone with the devalued self-love that we are all suffering with. Devalued self-love happens to the vast majority of us, in every country, in every social class, every day. The even better news is it is fixable, and, even better yet, the fix is completely within our own control.

How We Almost Get It

Only a few people have taken on the challenge of learning how to achieve self-love. Billions of us have turned to various different religions and belief systems, many of which were originally designed to teach self-love, but somehow their follow-on teachers have since morphed the beliefs into systems of rewards and punishments and majestic steeples and how to fill collection baskets or go out and recruit more tithers. In Christianity, their mutated version of the original message actually creates more shame and more self-hatred because the message they teach is that our “salvation” depends on our physical acts of putting others first. They drive into our minds that we were born as sinners, and they raise us in childhood bible classes, with a constant reminder that we are born bad and have to atone for our inner evil, even claiming that because of our own inner evil, their Jesus character was forced to die for us. Yeah. Like I can really love myself after digesting that message. Calling a child a sinner in Sunday school is exactly the same as calling her or him a brat at home. As children and teens, our nature is to learn who we are through our teachers and protectors. If they say we’re sinners and brats, well, then they’re giving us the inner voice that will permanently guide us through our entire adulthoods.

Too many churches have watered down the message, which is Love your neighbor AS yourself. I used upper case on the word “AS” because it is the key word in that sentence. According to their own teachings, their Jesus taught us to love ourselves AS our neighbors, but our Sunday School teachers have instead taught us to love others while feeling ashamed of ourselves. As a result, we grew up as they taught us to, leaving too many of us trying to love our neighbors instead of ourselves, or more than ourselves, but when it comes to forgiving the mistakes we ourselves make, we can’t seem to do that. So we live, not in a sense of peace, but of inner rage, anger, disappointment and self-sabotage. Those misguided self-images leak out onto the people around us, leaving us unable to love them no matter how hard we try to. We’ve missed the one, single most important goal that the religion or the belief system originally intended to teach us. I am a human being, created equally in “God’s image.” I really am AS valuable AS any other human being. By loving and forgiving others while not loving or forgiving myself, I’m still not balancing my love for life itself, nor for others as well. By not loving myself I’m accusing God of being a screw-up who created a flawed human.

We’re All Connected: When We Don’t Love Ourselves, We Don’t Love Anyone

I can tell you from experience that when I’m unhappy with myself, I’m unhappy with everyone. On the other hand, during those rare times in life when I feel like things are going my way and I’m not wallowing in self-guilt or defeat, those are also the times when I can successfully forgive anyone for anything. When I’m feeling good about myself and my neighbor’s dog won’t stop barking, I can smile and just turn on some music to drown it out. But when I’m unhappy with myself, or feeling defeated and ashamed, I want to scream “SHUTUP!!!!” at that d##m dog as loudly as I can and start looking for ways to get revenge on the neighbor.

In nearly all my writings I refer to the fact that we’re all connected, and this connection helps explain the reasons for why I’m able to love and forgive everyone around me when I’m feeling love and forgiveness for myself. I’m a person just like you are. If I hate you, it’s because I hate myself too. If I hate you because you disagree with me in politics or religion, then I’m putting way too much of my self-worth into that political party or that pastor. My ability to love myself is not my political party or religious body’s fault. It’s mine. Even though I was given a poor self-image by my culture, it’s my problem now, which gives me the power to begin the healing process.

Imagine You’ve Achieved It

When I was a badly bullied young boy in the Christian Schools, the stress of all the hatred around me would drive me deep into my own imagination. Today’s bullied kids can hide in video games where they can kill anyone they want to without remorse. But video games didn’t exist for me in the 1970s, so I had to hide inside my own mind to find relief from “the cruel real world.”  I found it by imagining that I’d somehow sailed to an uncharted island that no one knew about and where the natives were all like me. In my fantasy, they accepted me. They fully understood me. I never had to explain myself or make excuses or accept my failure at being good enough for them. The imaginary island, which was filled with people who didn’t judge or dislike me was my happy place. The physical relief that these fantasies gave to my body were enough to calm my nerves and allow me to fade off to sleep each night.

Try an Imagery Exercise

What would it feel like to experience a life of pure self-love?  Stop for a moment, right now, and imagine yourself feeling as if you’ve achieved total forgiveness for every silly or clumsy or mean thing you’ve ever said or done. Imagine that the hand of God has touched your forehead and magically wiped out all memory of any of your past mistakes. The hand of God has wiped your slate clean once and for all. Today is a new day and you are now totally and completely accepted for who you are. Imagine that every human being alive now loves you unconditionally for who you are. Your parents, your pastor, your neighbor, siblings, workmates all smile a loving smile when they see you. No one wants anything from you. All they want is to chat over a morning coffee with you. The hand of God has touched them too, and they’ve all become enlightened and they all love themselves as much as you love yourself. Imagine this for just a moment and check in with your body. Does this bring you any peace? Can you imagine maybe someday going off your anti-anxiety meds if this were to become your permanent way of life?

Now Begin the Journey of Your Lifetime

Naturally this exercise can’t make other people love themselves AS they love us, but the wonderful news is that today, we can begin our journey of learning how to love and forgive ourselves, with or without their permission. The trick is not to fall into the trap that religions have fallen into: Don’t fixate on the end goal of living a perfect life someday in Heaven with no self-doubt, but DO agree to begin the journey toward that “Heaven/Zen/Shangri-La” state and then enjoy the journey itself.

As we learn more and more ways to adopt a tiny bit more self-love and self-forgiveness each day, we become less and less concerned with how we’re treated by others. In fact, while we can’t control others, remember we are all connected, so as we become more and more at peace with ourselves and with our own existence here on this earth, we become a positive influencer to those around us. Kindness spreads. Forgiveness spreads. People take notice. SOME of those people will learn by our example and maybe even one or two will finally ask us what our secret is and will ask to learn from us.  Like the old saying teaches, we can “be the change we want to see in the world.” Will we change the whole world? Who cares? If we’ve become more satisfied with who we are, the world’s problems won’t feel so bad, and yes, as forgiveness spreads, more of the world’s problems will begin to fade off. Again, don’t fixate on the world’s problems, focus on your own self-love and let the world’s problems fade when they fade.

The Goal Is to Enjoy the Journey Itself

To become totally and completely self-loving, is pretty unattainable, so we can’t let ourselves become defeated by thinking we have to achieve it totally. Think of it this way; People don’t take Cruise ships as a means to get to a location, they take the cruise to enjoy the food and the scenery and the entertainment of the cruise itself. Think of the journey toward self-love as the cruise ship you want to ride on for the rest of your life. Think of how fun it would be to learn one more thing every day that helps you love and forgive yourself and those around you even better today than yesterday, all the while knowing that tomorrow you’re going to get even better at it than today.

Don’t Fixate on the End Result

Once we fixate on the end result, we lose our love for the journey. As an example, I ride my bicycle to the market almost every day. I have a perfectly good Jeep I could drive, but I ride my bike for the exercise and the feeling of the wind blowing across my face. Sometimes on the journey I get frustrated that I’m not there yet. While I’m riding toward the market, I sometimes find myself wishing I’d driven the Jeep because if I had I’d be there already. But then I catch myself and remind myself, WAIT! I’m riding the bike for the bike ride! I don’t even want to be at the store yet because I’m still enjoying the free feeling of wind on my face and being able to say “hi” to people as I ride past them. I’m exercising my legs and my lungs while feeling a bit like a kid again. The journey, not the destination, is the goal. The destination is the target I’ve chosen to give myself an excuse to take the journey.

So How Do We Learn to Love Ourselves More?

The tricks and tips and methods for building upon our own ability to love ourselves with each day are too numerous to mention here in this blog. Also, the reason for not needing to list them here is that they are available in millions of therapists, teachers, coaches, posts, classes, books, podcasts around the globe.  My goal with this blog is to show that self-love is worth pursuing, and then to send us all off to pursue it.

Here’s a small beginning list of some techniques we can use or remember to love ourselves a little bit more today than we did yesterday:

  • No one is perfect: Accept that everyone hides skeletons in the closet, so we’re not the one bad person on this earth just because we also hide past mistakes in our memory files.
  • Begin to forgive those who gave us wrong information: Accept that we were likely taught by someone else to dislike ourselves. We can work to grasp that this was their own lack of self-love that they taught to us because that’s what devalued self-love does—it spreads. The more we work to forgive them for what they taught us, the more we forgive ourselves for having learned it.
  • We’re all connected: You can’t love/forgive yourself if you don’t love/forgive others: The definition of love is a sense of connection. We love people we feel connected to. And we’re all connected. No one can hate you if they love themselves. Likewise you can’t hate anyone else if you love and fully accept yourself for who you really are. We’re all connected. For the science minded, “together, we’re the single consciousness of the Universe.” If you’re Christian, then “together we’re all the body of Christ, each of whom was created in God’s image.”
  • Bananas don’t grow on apple trees: If you feel pure, uncomplicated love for others then it proves you feel pure, uncomplicated love for yourself. If you feel raging anger at others, know you need to focus on your own sense of raging anger at yourself for a few minutes. And if you see people not loving others, remember bananas don’t grow on apple trees, and hate doesn’t grow out of love. If you see hatred on any level, you are witnessing the physical fruit of self-loathing within someone.
  • We’re on a journey that improves us a tiny bit every day: Don’t fixate on the final goal of total enlightenment or total love. You’ll defeat yourself and go back to your old self-destructive ways. Enjoy being on the hypothetical cruise ship each day, knowing that today you can work to achieve one more tiny inch toward loving yourself more than you did before you started the journey. Enjoy and savor each bite of the feast that is the reward of learning something new today. Enjoy knowing that tomorrow, you will have the chance to learn even one more new thing and you will love yourself even more tomorrow. If you so choose, you can stay on this journey every day for the rest of your entire life.
  • Explore the teachers of the world: Some psychologists get it. Others don’t. So shop around for a good therapist if you can. Find one who believes that we’re all connected, and that self-love is the true goal. Also, the internet and the bookstores of the world are filled with the writings of people who have the very message we each need to hear to get us from self-loathing to self-loving. Just be cautious, as you choose who to listen to, that their message stays pure; that loving yourself equals forgiving yourself equals forgiving others equals loving others. As soon as the expert you’ve sought out starts to fixate on the end goal, they’ve gotten off the cruise ship and are treading water right where they got off. Teachers are plentiful and you have the right to go find another teacher so that you can stay on the proper journey toward self-love. Those who are treading water will eventually find their way back onto the ship if they so choose. You don’t owe them anything.

Why do we admire and support toxic people?

01 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by in Creative Writing Project

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According to science, religion and psychology we humans are all connected. Many of us (empaths) know that to be true while many of us (sociopaths) can’t seem to grasp the fact. But like the knowledge of a round earth, believing in, or hiding from any indisputable fact is your personal choice.

Fact: Most of us are born and raised with the knowledge that we’re connected. How we practice that connection is accomplished through a natural human practice called projection. Those of us who are good people will choose to not hurt other people because we know what pain and betrayal feel like, so through projection, we conscientiously become unable to hurt or betray others. We “treat others how we want to be treated” because “we know how it feels when it’s done to us.” We cringe at the sight of another’s bloody wound because we project our own pain memories onto them and cringe because we believe we know what their pain feels like. We also celebrate the successes of others because we believe we know what their success feels like.

But in truth we can’t possibly know what another is feeling inside their own body, heart and head. However, we can believe we do by projecting our own experiences onto them, leaving us able to believe that we know exactly how the other person feels. This projection gives us empathy which then gives us physical connection to one another. And a feeling of physical connection with another human is the very definition of love.

Is it refreshing to be lawless?

But like with anything, projection also works against us. Being a good person is exhausting. Some of us really want to cut loose, break the rules and get away with it. WooHOO! Party! And this is why so many Americans worship toxic people. Projection. “I want to be like him or her so I admire them for being what I want to be or for taking what I wish I could take. I project what I believe it feels like to be them onto myself and I get a dopamine rush that I call refreshing.” Toxic people (sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists—anyone with anti-social personality disorders) blow up the rules with every chance they get. When a toxic monster that we admire takes something none of the rest of us can have, we celebrate with them because we project ourselves onto them so we can pretend we get to feel what they must be feeling with their ill-gotten reward. Toxic people don’t follow the rules of decency and aren’t, in the least, bothered by that. Oh my gosh, how fun would that be?

Bond. James Bond

James Bond steals cars and motorcycles and kills anyone who gets in his way. Rather than feeling remorse, he seduces a supermodel and downs a half dozen martinis, usually in a swanky multimillion-dollar hotel in some exotic city. Who wouldn’t want to live their lives free to be as dangerous and racist and rude as they want to be without ever feeling accountable? The good news for the slow-witted is: You can feel the freedom he or she feels by just allowing yourself to project his or her “success” into your own heart and pretend you are as happy as you believe he or she is. Call it refreshing if you wish. It’s a dopamine rush just like the rush any other toxic drug gives you.

But what does this say about you?

If you decide to pretend the toxic, lying, steeling, raping, abusive, bully monsters in your life are “strong leaders” really ask yourself why you want to be like them so badly. Why are you willing to close your eyes to what they really are? Monsters. Maybe you wish you could feel as free as they appear to feel. Maybe you’re so afraid of them that you’d rather be on their team than be their victim. Maybe you think you can share in their spoils, or inherit their cash when they die. Or maybe, deep down inside, you get excited that you could maybe do like them and take anything you want from anyone without the bother of an annoying sense of remorse afterward. 

What would you do if you woke up one morning to find everyone on earth was gone except you? If you answer “I’d find a Farrari and drive as fast as I want to” then you are experiencing a brief moment of the same release that others feel when they project themselves onto toxic people who live that way already.

Devil on one shoulder, angel on the other

There’s a toxic sociopathic devil inside all of us. But there’s also an angelic Christlike intelligence that knows we share this world with the rest of our species. What defines people as good or bad is how hard we each work to give ourselves over to the angelic voice rather than the devil. Our angelic voice teaches us to help the survival of the whole species by loving and sharing and helping each other. Most of us have embraced that voice as we allow the ugly selfishness of our primal instinct to shrink away. Friends, we are each evolving at different speeds from being the nasty sociopathic cave-animals we once were to becoming the cooperative celestial beings who will soon be traveling the universe in the vessels that we’re creating in teams and launching into space right now.

Toxic people are toxic. Not happy

They act happy. They puff their chests with self-pride and haughty arrogance. They tip their noses up at us from their yachts and Porches but make no mistake, they are filled with toxic anger and poisonous hatred. It’s what drives them to be so prideful. They know they cannot have love the way a compassionate person does and that enrages them. It’s often why they choose to hurt you for no apparent reason. Jealousy. Human beings are created to be social creatures. The cruelest torture known to man is solitary confinement. How have toxic people not created their own version of solitary confinement by buying friends with gifts and favors? They surround themselves with untrustworthy friends who will turn on them the second the well of free gifts runs dry. When toxic people laugh at you it’s not out of joy, it’s out of jealousy and hatred. It’s all they know.

Hell is not reserved for bully victims

Heaven is not a reward and Hell is not a punishment. They are the dream or the nightmare you’ve chosen to set yourself up for when you leave your body but keep your soul. Hell isolates the isolators; Heaven connects the connectors. If you have any spiritual beliefs of any kind, then think about this: If we create a life of selfless love and connection with others, then we’ll eventually leave the earth riding the wave with the momentum of that selfless love and connection. But if we pave our road with selfish anger and hateful opinions, or with the screaming voices of FOX news, CNN and the distrusting BS of conspiracy websites, and if we shun the good people and praise the sociopaths who we admire for behaving like rude and selfish 3-year-olds, then that’s the nightmare we will pass into after we leave this world. It’s the Heaven or Hell of our own making. Heaven is a place for love and connection, and it’s reserved for people who’ve given themselves over to love and connection. Hell isn’t reserved for bully victims, my friends, hell is crowded with the bullies themselves. Sure, these toxic “winners” win their daily selfish battles and get the snacks and the sex and the cash that they want on any given day, but in fact, by isolating themselves and refusing to project love and connection, they lose the whole war. There won’t be any money, sex or Porches in the next life, so whatever they’ve built or stolen stays here and they are left with what they created inside their hearts; Anger, revenge, selfishnes, isolation. They slide into the afterlife on the wave and momentum of the loneliness they supported and taught. Hell may be crowded with these monsters, but it’s a lonely place where each resident burns in the lonely lives they’ve built for themselves by choosing to not connect with the thousands of people they came in contact with when they had the chance. They got what they wanted and now they don’t have to share it with anyone because, by their own design, there’s no one to share anything with at that point in their miserable nightmares. Don’t admire these people. Don’t try to emulate them. They’re to be pitied.