What does it means to be blissful

Ignorance and innocence are perceived by many as almost synonymous as the old saying: "ignorance is bliss" which is a great indicator that most of us didn't found yet a way to be happy or contempt without being ignorant.

To be very clear the meaning of the word innocence according to the dictionary is: the quality or state of being innocent; freedom from sin or moral wrong.

As we start life as children we are by nature ignorant because we don't have any experience, we are unaware of the majority of the dangers that potentially could happen to anybody nondiscriminatory and relatively free of mistakes and "sins".

As we mature and we learn more about the world our ignorance goes away and with it so dose our innocence. I think beside all the other traumas and stress this is one of the reason why young people have a higher desire to take drugs, party extensively, have a lot of meaningless sex without commitment etc.

They are literally going through a crisis, it is like a fall from grace. Where for years you enjoyed a state of innocence as a gift from nature now you are starting to realize the true nature of the world which can be a little stressful to say at least.

Escapism is an attempt to return back to ignorance, only that since you know something you can't unknow it. So in order for you to have any degree of peace you need a constant distraction from reality. This is the purpose that drugs, sex, movies, the internet etc. play.

From a psychological perspective you are not an adult until you don't move from a state of innocence through ignorance to a state of bliss. Which is the capacity to be happy and feel contempt without being ignorant.

There is a process of grief that needs to take place whit any major loss, especially with the loss of your innocence, but also it is necessary to learn other strategies to be care free as it is impossible to return back. When you realize that it is impossible to return back, which is what escapism is, an attempt to go back to a state of ignorance, there is nowhere to go then forward which is the end of the process of grief when you accept reality for what it is.

Because it is impossible to become ignorant after you acquire knowledge about certain things, now you have to learn to be happy and contempt while simultaneously having that knowledge.

Pleasure without purpose is hell on earth, the classic archetype of the contract with the devil is a trade of your soul which is necessary to achieve happiness and love for pleasure. Indulging in this types of activities is not living your life fully as much is being in a zombie like state. Where instead of living fully you are trying to run away from life.

For adults happiness comes from self discipline, from the process of mastery, by learning to transcend your limitations and constantly move forward no matter what life throws at you.  

Interrupt your mind!

It is not your responsibility to change your mind, as most of the functions of your mind are involuntary and you have limited to no control over them, like thoughts or emotions for example.

The world responsibility comes from the french respondir and able, so basically in order to be responsible of something you have to be able to respond to it in such a way to change it or influence it. You are not directly responsible for your thoughts and emotions the same way you are not responsible for how fast your heart is beating or how dilated your blood vessels are.

However there are actions that you can take, that will influence this factors you don't have any direct control over in an indirect way. Like for example you can decide how fast your heart is beating, but you can decide to go for a run which is almost certain to elevate your heart rate. The same is valid for things like thoughts and emotions you can indirectly influence them based on the environment that you choose to live in, the people you allow in your life and even others factors like food and exercise can be decisive factors in how you think or feel.

Unfortunately some of us get trapped into negative momentum where based on your past experience of chronic stress your mind adapts in such a way to protect you from re experiencing any more stress. So no matter what changes you make in your life no matter where you go, and what you experience you can't get out of your negative momentum you accumulate in life. Everywhere you look you see only failure disappointment and rejection, it is a great survival strategy but unfortunately not a great lifestyle.    

This problem is a lot more trickier than it might sound because you still don't have direct control over your mind and if the environment is not enough to change it, pretty much everybody is clueless about what to do about it.

My understanding of it is that you become more sensitive to stress so your fight or flight mechanism is being triggered unnecessarily making you act strange or unnecessarily cautious which is reducing the quality of your life.

The fight or flight mechanism is generally speaking triggered and turned off mostly by visual stimulus, like for example if you see a car coming towards you very fast you either run to save yourself or you show the driver your middle finger which is basically fight or flight, when you see the car being far enough from you where it can't hurt you anymore this survival mechanism automatically switches off.

When the fight or flight gets triggered by something from the past from your memory, there is not such a clear visual indicator where does the danger starts and where does it end, or even if this time the there is going to be any danger at all in the same situation. So your fight or flight remains active unnecessarily or for longer than it is necessary.  

There is some evidence that you can use the neuroplastic capacity of your brain to turn this sensitivity off. When an area of your mind becomes active if you introduce some new stimulus that uses the same are of that mind is going to literally change how your mind works.

When you are talking about fight or flight the visual cortex is essential at perceiving when the danger starts and when the danger ends. This is why if you are in a state of fight or flight and you visualize something in your mind you are literally turning your stress off for just a couple of seconds. This is more effective than breathing exercises or mindfulness etc. at turning the fight or flight because is stimulating the visual cortex in a very intense way to temporarily change its function.

Sure as soon as you stop visualizing your stress is going to come back, but is the cumulative effect over relatively longer periods of time that is going to change your mind. After all the mind gets changed by itself through experience, so it make sense that introducing new stimuli is going to change it.

When nobody cares about you!

If you are a victim of long term abuse, it is safe to assume that there weren't a lot of people around you that cared, otherwise you wouldn't be in the situation that you are today.

The past is the past there is nothing you can do to change it, but unfortunately the abuse from the past weakened and damaged you to the point that you are now so vulnerable that you are constantly attracting abusive people in your life or you might have a problem attracting anybody in your life.

You see unfortunately you were dealt a really bad hand, predators attack the weak member of a species, so the more abuse you experienced in the past and weaken by it the more likely it is to experience even more abuse in the future.  

Not like there is something wrong with vulnerability, there are two types of vulnerability, the type that you have to experience in order to grow and the type of vulnerability that screams I am broken and damaged, this type of vulnerability is like blood in the water for sharks. It will attract all the wrong people and paradoxically reject all the good people.

You desperately need an allay someone to help you to protect you but the people that were the most close to you that should fulfil that purpose hurt you and left you to fend by yourself.

The general instinct human being have when we are sick is to really isolate ourselves, I think that this is probably the best course of action to take until you manage to put yourself back together, that actually makes sense. However when you don't know what to do in order to heal, you are looking at a very long period of solitude, if you are experience just the regular grief you are looking at 3 to 6 months depending on the severity of the situation.

When it comes to recovering from long terms abuse this takes people a very long period of time in general, years to decades sometimes.

So now you find yourself in a vicious cycle, where your past is damaging your present. You desperately need people in your life but you either fail to attract anybody or you are constantly attracting only abusive people. This unfortunately won't change until you don't get better, and you stop sending the wrong signals in to the world.

You have to find what works it is the only way out of this cycle, exhaust all the options, read all the books, leave no stone unturned. You can't let the bad people win, this is your job this is the job that was assigned to you just because is hard it doesn't mean you have to give up, everybody is tired. There is no excuse, PLEASE DON'T GIVE UP EARLY! You can lose a fight but the war is not over. 

Understanding the mind

A pretty good comparison for your mind is a computer, that has two components hardware and software.

The hardware being the physical component that you can touch but it doesn't do anything without the software that is controlling it.

Your mind is like software that is design to control your brain and through controlling the brain also the body. It is not necessarily localized inside your brain, this is largely an open debate regarding where the minds is physically contained like the way you can put a piece of software on a cd. But there are neurons all over your body which lead certain scientists to speculate that the mind is not confined by your brain.

Not only the mind is controlling everything but it is also reprograms itself based on the information that you gather from the environment and while your mind is being reprogrammed there is also a change in hardware. When you learn something is not just an abstract concept based on which your body is now able to perform a new task there is actually a physical change inside your brain as new connections are made or strengthen.

So the functions of the mind is not only to control but as well to learn and adapt and make physiological changes in order to give you the best chances of survival.

You could split the mind in three components: awareness, thoughts and emotions. Based on the information that you gather through the awareness of the mind and your senses you are going to end up with different thoughts and emotions that will eventually lead to different actions.

Unfortunately the mind can become diseased like a computer that catches a virus, by gathering certain type of information your mind can adapt in a way to cause you to self-sabotage. If you catch a trojan virus it will give the command to your computer to copy certain files until your computer will run out of resources and become so slow that is basically unusable. The equivalent of catching a virus for your mind would be being a victim of chronic abuse.

If I want to change your actions I have to change your emotions and thoughts first in other words I have to change your mind. if someone puts a gun to your temple it will definitely accomplish that, your thoughts will change and your emotions will change so now I have a certain control over you that i wouldn't had otherwise.

As the traumatic events are pretty common we are able to heal from them through the process of grief, however when the abuse happened repeatedly faster than you could ever heal, your mind will change your brain in such a way to create hypersensitivity in order to prevent further damage.

The same happenes with physical pain, for example if you break an arm, technically if it is set correctly in place, immobilized and the right amount of time is left to heal the bones that fused together are much more stronger in the place that fused than the surrounding bone yet that broken arm will have an increased sensitivity than the arm that you never broke even if there is nothing physically wrong with your arm. Now imagine breaking that arm every day before it even has a chance to fuse back, every time you do that it will become a little bit more sensitive until the point that you are probably not even be able to use it even if it has a chance to heal eventually.  

It is absolutely essential to understand from where you caught that virus and how to protect yourself from it in the future. Probably the best equivalent of an antivirus we have so far is learning critical thinking skills. But if you were a victim of chronic abuse you might be having a hypersensitive brain that is prohibiting you to function even after you stop the repeated injury. Fortunately you can purposefully use your mind in such a way to alter the physical structure of your brain this process is called neuroplasticity.       

Understanding pain!

There are two types of pain physical and emotional pain, as far pain acting inside the brain it was shown on mri scans that the same areas of the brain light up regardless if you are talking about physical or emotional pain.

The purpose of emotional pain is to alert you when there is some tissue damage that occurred, this could happen in multiple ways like through impact or high heat, infection etc.

The purpose of emotional pain is to alert you when you are experiencing certain loss, this generally happens either through being a subject to violence as a motivator to do things that are unfair for you or through being lied to, there are also natural causes that could lead to loss it is not all the ill intention of other people that causes loss things like disease or death will also cause emotional pain.

Also the pain in itself can be of two types acute and chronic. The purpose of acute pain is to let you know when there is some damage that just occurred in order to prevent further damage, for example if you break your arm that is what would represent acute pain, it generally at the beginning of the trauma and it tends to stop or get better when you stop moving your arm. Acute pain will stop when the wound is healed, either the physical wound like in the example of the broken arm or in the case of emotional pain through the process of grief that generally last somewhere from 3 to 4 months after the trauma, after which the person that experiences the acute pain regains his functionality and the pain subsides.

From the experience of the acute pain, under certain circumstances it can become chronic pain. There are two circumstances that can create chronic pain. Acute pain becomes chronic pain either when you are constantly re injured like for example if you hit the corner of a table with your leg everyday and get a bruise that bruise will never heal until you don't stop hitting the corner of the table. The same is valid with emotional pain if you have someone in your life that is constantly lying to you or that subject you to violence often enough you will never heal until that stops.

The other circumstance under which acute pain becomes chronic pain is when after the repeated re injury has stopped the pain still persists. As a result of being subjected to pain for a long time you actually become more sensitive to it. Pain behaves the opposite pleasure does, the more you experience pleasure the lees exciting is going to become, like if you eat your favorite food everyday you are going to enjoy it less and less. Pain is the opposite the longer you are exposed to the traumatic experience the more damage you are going to suffer, so your body produces an adequate emotional response to motivate you to get out of that situation.

If you put your hand in to a fire the longer you hold it there the more severe the burn is going to be. Pain has to be worse than death because the purpose of pain is to motivate you to avoid dying in that regard living your life in pain is worse than being death. Like this you become hypersensitized to the pain and you over react to small relatively non harmful situations.

When emotional pain becomes chronic it is no longer just grief it becomes mental illness, all the label modern psychology puts on people, is for the attempt of the people that are suffering from chronic pain to control or escape the pain, regardless if you are talking about: depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar etc. behind all this symptoms there is chronic emotional pain.

It is like being in an airplane with broken flight instrument that are telling you that you are going to crash in to the mountain when in fact you are flying over the clear sky. This in itself can disrupt your life and make you disfunctional, the purpose of this is to avoid retraumatization if you actually think about it, regardless the fact that you are dysfunctional it is a great survival strategy it is not a great lifestyle or way of living a full life but you are at least alive which is better than being dead.

The common wisdom regarding emotional chronic pain that comes from having a hypersensitive response to stimulus is generally to expose yourself to that stimulus in order to desensitize yourself until your brain realizes that you are overreacting to that scenario. What is most commonly called facing your fears. This is a paradox because the more pain you experience the more sensible and reactive you become to it. It is like trying to lose weight by starving yourself, the less you eat and the longer you stay on your diet the stronger your impulse to eat become and the less energy you will have to fight it, until you just brake off and just go on a binge. So all the progress goes down the drain because it is close to impossible to fight your impulse to don't eat.

The same happens with pain the longer you stay in that situation that triggers it the more intense the pain becomes and the less energy you will have to fight your urge to run in the opposite direction. So at the end you just end up with a lot of memories of you failing and maybe some small amount of inconsistent results and often relapses. This method works very scarcely and has a very high rate of dropout.

So what is the solution?

The problem is not necessarily environmental as much it is an internal brain problem, where you formed a very strong neural connection that fires very efficiently when it comes to pain in certain circumstances, in order to reduce your hypersensitivity you have to weaken that connection.

Lakely the brain remains malleable enough for the most part of your life, so this can be done at almost any age no matter how many years ago did the trauma happened.

It is like when you take a long break out of practicing any skill you that ability is going to start to atrophy. The brain works over the principle if you don't use it you lose it.

Of course stopping strong emotions and impulses it is close to impossible, after all that is the purpose of an impulse, it is like the emergency button that overpowers everything and change it's course. So what you do instead is to replace it with something else, no matter how intense the emotion or impulse a small part of your brain remains conscious.

You can compete by using that small conscious part of your brain in order to slowly disrupt those really strong connections. I have had success with visualization so far every time my pain would com out I would just visualize something for just a couple of seconds. In the beginning this won't give you a lot of pain relief the first day you attempt it at best just a couple a seconds, but the more you do it the weaker thouse connections become so by the time 30 days have past I was pretty much pain free.

The name of the game is persistence, you have to be as persistent as the pain, every time you feel the pain visualize something it really doesn't matter what you visualize. The goal is not instantaneous pain relief as much it is the long term goal through slow accumulation that will eventually desensitize your brain to pain, so you can become functional again.

What cause a mental blockage!

When you are doing an activity that requires you to be creative. Avoiding failure is like attempting to go for a swim without getting wet.

Creativity is combining already existing concept and ideas in ways they were never been combined before. As this involves going on new and untested territory your chances to experience what we call failure are simply astronomical.

When you experience a blockage it is not like you can't do that activity at all as much, that your have so high and unreasonable expectations of yourself and you completely eliminated the possibility of failure.

For example if you suffer from writer's block, it is not like you can't write at all as much that you stopped writing for yourself, instead of playing with words and ideas no you are trying to impress others with what you write.

Unfortunately performance it is not such a straight forward process, generally the way it works you have to practice a certain skill for a long time before you can produce anything of value.

So you just write and write and eventually your​ skills will increase and be able to produce something that you weren't able to do before. It is not necessarily a constant process, sometimes you get worse after you get better, it is persisting through this fazes that allows you to improve.

Work an learning are two activities that naturally happens through the process of play. As the purpose of play is allow you to be the most effective when you learn or work.

There is a weird concept in to our culture that play it is only when the game has no real consequences, I would't call that real play like a game of monopoly is not playing because it is voided of purpose, you are not learning or producing anything. A game of monopoly is simulating playing, it is pretending that you are playing.

The purpose of play is to make you detached enough of the consequences of your action in order to perform at your best. When you are playing and you experience failure it is a lot easier for you to get over the failure and try again. The detachment doesn't come from the absence of failure, it comes from the understatement playing involves failure.

Another misconception about playing is that you can't play when you are doing serious things, like when you are facing real consequences. If the purpose of play is to make you very efficient and effective, to say that you shouldn't play when things are serious is to say that you shouldn't be efficient or effective whit the things in your life that have the higher stakes. It is especially with those things that you want to maintain your playful attitude. 

All decisions lead to loss

No matter what you chose, and what the outcome of that decision is, it also means that you are not doing all the other available options that you could do instead of what you chose.

As the purpose of emotional pain is to give you feedback when you experience loss, if loss is intrinsic and unavoidable in any decision you take, than this means that avoiding loss and emotional pain it is simply impossible.

There will always be some regret about the decisions you took, no matter how positive or negative the outcome is. Being insane is not experiencing anxiety as much it is about thinking that you shouldn't experience it or that you can overcome it through certain accomplishments or processes.

For example if you have to chose between going out or studying for an exam, if you chose to go out you will regret the fact that you are not studying and have a higher chance of getting a small grade, and if you stay in and study you will regret that you are not having fun with your friends. No matter what do you chose there is always regret.

One of the problem the person that suffered long term abuse is that he or she has no reference for what normal is, how could you know what does it means to be normal when you never experienced that in your life. In order to recover from abuse it is not only important to understand what is causing you to experience an abnormally high level of emotional pain, but also to understand what is a normal level of pain, or what is the best case scenario. In the words of Sigmund Freud the purpose of psychoanalysis is not to make people happy it simply to bring them from an abnormal level of unhappiness to a normal one.  

Emotional pain it is simply build in to the essence of life, if you are going to avoid it you are also going to avoid life. Suffering from anxiety is not a disease it is a normal consequence of life, it is being paralyzed by it that is pathological. It is when you can live your life because of it, when you don't realize that you have to live with it and that it has no end.

Even choosing a lifestyle that is design to minimise risk in order to avoid your anxiety, it still dosen't mean that you won't experience anxiety as a matter of fact it is probably as a prevalent part of your life as it is part of anyone's life, perhaps even higher because by not being proactively involved in your life you experience more loss.

As anxiety is not being afraid of the things that could hurt you as much as it is being afraid of the things you desire, it is being afraid of missing out on experience. So every time you chose something you miss out on everything else, this simply makes anxiety impossible to escape and avoid.

What does it mean to be a good person

Are you a good person? And if you are how do you know?

According to Socrates all vices happen because people don't realise the full negative effect of their actions. There is always a certain degree of denial behind the destructive actions, so how can you know if you have vices that are harmful for others, when in order to have a vice you have to be completely ignorant about it. 

So just thinking to yourself that you are kind there is no guaranty, that you actually are. It might actually be an evidence of the opposite. You see most traits of who you are will vary, nothing really stays constant, so your perception of yourself will vary with them. As your body constantly gives you feedback on how you are performing.

You would think that being very self assured about your interaction with other people, but this might actually indicate a lack of care about their needs. It is when you are a little unsure and self conscious, when you are constantly wonder if you upset anybody or if you performed to the expectation of the people you are interacting with, that is a much better indicator of actually caring about the people around you.

Good people don't lack the capacity of having vices or committing violent acts, as much as they have an active moral conscious that makes them feel uncomfortable when they are bad. It is an inner voice that torture them to the point that they have to stop.

To care means to take time, energy and resources out of your life and spend it for someone's else interests and well being. 

It is not enough to feel bad, it is easy to sometime distract yourself from your consciousness and suppress it, or just apologize and talk about how bad you feel to create the illusion that you care. To be kind means to constantly correct your behaviour in accordance with the feedback you receive from others. Of course not in a dependent way where you sacrifice your needs to please others, but in a interdependent way where you seek to please others while you maintain your own happiness and boundaries. There is a common misconception where people confuse kindness with weakness, they perceive the world as being impossible to be happy if you are kind because it makes it hard to get what you want.

Just because you are a kind person it doesn't mean that you can't turn people down or ask for what you need from other people. It is simply ones dedication to treat the people around him as fair as humanly possible. 

What causes arrested development

We are designed in a very simple way, when it comes to learning, we have to simple mechanism that work together to avoid danger and self correct course when you deviate from it.

The first mechanism is autonomy, like when you are first born you want to explore the world around you, making a child learn is really, really easy because is what they naturally want to do.

But of course there are also some dangers in too the world so you need a mechanism that when the information about those dangers is discovered in any way, you will avoid that danger in the future, like for example if you touch a hot object and burn yourself, next time you have to interact with that object you are either going to be cautious or avoid it. That mechanism is called free will, which is the capacity to take better decision based on the information that is available to you.

When you are exposed to abuse, you lose your autonomy, as the general purpose of abuse is to force someone to do something against his/her will for the benefit of the abuser. This results in a loss of autonomy impairs your capacity for learning, because when you lose your autonomy you can't respond to external feedback very well.

If you are talking with a slave and you try to give him education on how to make money, his action are limited by his chains and the will of his master. He can't do all the things that you are telling him that they work because his master won't allow him. But of course most of us are controlled by anxiety not chain, being a "slave" is not necessary living your life in chains as much as being controlled by someone else through some means in order to take the fruits of your labour. Most of us are controlled by anxiety, we don't live our life in chains we live our lives in fear which is the tool of control of our master.

So because you are afraid, in order to control your anxiety you attempt to control yourself in order to control the world around you. Not only you lose your autonomy but also you try to take the autonomy of everybody around you.

When people loose their autonomy they have a really hard time correcting the course, they don't learn out of their own experience or from other people wisdom and advice. This generally leads to arrested development, I don't know if you ever meet someone that acts very immature for his age, like a child trapped in an adult body, that could easily be a side effect of abuse.

The unfortunate thing is that recovering your autonomy can happen only from the inside out, there is very little you can do to people that lost their autonomy, other then educate them, but you have to take in consideration that they suffer from arrested development and they don't respond very well to external feedback. The only way to recover your autonomy is to voluntary decide by yourself to stop controlling yourself to control the world around you.

How to recover your internal autonomy

The general purpose of abuse is to erase someone autonomy, in order to make him take decisions that are more in the advantage of the abuser.

To recover from the abuse is to undo the process of having your autonomy erase.

The entire world is in a pretty sad place, where government and his institution abuses the general public on the regular basis, and this is seen by most people just regular necessary business. Sadly your external autonomy is hard to recover at the time, but nobody is stopping you to do so internally.

When wrong feedback is introduced like a lie, this creates confusion you see what is wrong in the world as right and what is right as wrong, which is going to lead you to take the wrong decisions over and over again because you have the faith that is the right thing to do. So you force yourself to do things you don't want because you think that it is dangerous to don't do them. We give up our autonomy because we are scared, particularly scared of things that are not real threats. You wore lied to believe that certain things are a lot more dangerous that they really are in order to control your behaviour.

Because of this you end up self sabotaging yourself and end up in a state of chronic emotional pain. This will lead on a longer term to be even more impulsive, which is going to create all kinds of self sabotaging behaviours like addiction without ever getting any sense of closure.

There is a constant competition inside your body, between your impulsive part of the brain, the emotional one and the rational one responsible with reasoning. Competition is just the natural process through which the most competent part of you becomes the most influential at the moment and when is no longer relevant or as effective as some of the other parts of you, the power is replaced by the part of you that better suits the function you are trying to accomplish at the time.

Whenever you are trying to erase the competition it is like an internal dictatorship, through resisting and attempting to control things over which you have no control you become less efficient and impractical one part of your mind becomes dominant and everything that is not served the best by that part that becomes dominant becomes compromised.

In order to get out of this vicious cycle you have to recover your autonomy, this means that you have to let the natural competition system to take place and let the winner lead you. There is always anxiety that motivates people to control themselves. After all it is not a guaranty that if you let yourself to have autonomy you will never hurt yourself or others.

Nature took care of this problem with a tool that we call free will, which is our ability to take better decisions when new information is presented to us. Your free will was used against of you when they lied to you, they used your free will in such a way to scare you to erase your autonomy.

The way to restore it is from inside out, as people without autonomy don't have free will, you can give them all the information in the world they will keep taking the same sabotaging decision over and over again probably until they will dye early.

The natural state of the world is one of anarchy, which means that you need competition, when you are forcing yourself to do something that doesn't feel right you are erasing that competition and your own autonomy with it.

We are treating abuse with abuse

Psychology and psychiatry remain largely unsuccessful branches of medicine, regardless all the modern technologies and advancements we have today.

I have a feeling that we are not failing to treat people with mental illness because of the lack of advancement or lack of technologies as much it is a philosophical problem.

It is our general perception over mental illness and how we treat people with it. There are many approaches to the philosophies over which the therapies are based.

As psychology is technically philosophy applied to medicine, there are many philosophical teachings out there some of them quite contradicting each others. Because truth doesn't change regardless of time, place and circumstances someone must be wrong.

The therapies are simply exercises based on the philosophy behind it, if the philosophy is based on lies than the therapy is going to be ineffective or harmful. At best it is a waste of time at worst it is more abuse to be endured by someone that probably already suffered extensive abuse.

One of it is based on the Pavlov experiments with dogs, to help someone is like retraining a dog. You just have to introduce the right reward when positive behaviour is happening and punish or not reward the negative behavior. This philosophy completely disregard the fact that human have autonomy and free will.

Perhaps dogs are not too good of a comparison for humans, we are more like donkeys because we are incredibly stubborn. When you pursue someone to do something he or she dosen't want this will lead to two potential reactions.

 If you manage to convince them they will resent you and your relationship with them is forever compromised, if you are not successful they will resist and rebel against you. The only way to help people is to help them accomplish what they already try to accomplish for as long as it is not immoral. Either way bypassing someones will it is to some degree harmfull.    

Generally speaking all abuse is a strategy to bypass someone's free will, to force them to do something that it is in the advantage of the abuser in an unfair way. This could leave the victim with a lot of confusion which is going to lead to self-sabotage. To help someone rehabilitate in my opinion is not to force more decision or ideas in his head as much is to help restore free will. To the point that there are no more strong impulses that causes that person to self-sabotage.

Unfortunately most of the philosophies on which the therapies are based, involve to some degree an attack on your free will. Regardless we are talking of Freud, Jung or Humanistic Psychology, there might be some seeds of truth in there but that doesn't make the entire thing truthful or effective.

Psychology and psychiatry are not only branches of medicine, but they also unofficially serve as an extension of the justice system. That allows the authorities to punish people for things that inconvenient their agenda but they couldn't make illegal by law. Like for example during the Soviet Union, everybody that was caught disagreeing with the current regime was diagnosed with various mental illnesses and hold against their will in various asylums. I also could argue that there is not much difference between what the Soviets were doing and what are we doing to our kids today in school if they cant pay attention. 

How to stop being manipulated

People who are manipulating you are very uncomfortable with rejection, so their behaviour and words they chose are specifically design to create the illusion that you can't say NO.

It is an attempt to bypass your free will and force decisions on you, that you wouldn't take under normal circumstances.

Like a "magic" trick, like one of those illusionists that have spectacles creating illusion to deceive you that they are bending the law of physics.

Even if you know it is not real it could still have a profound effect on you, it can live you with your jaw dropped to the floor it might make you think irrational thoughts like, maybe this person actually has magical powers and can make seemingly impossible things happen.

If someone reveals to you how the illusion is performed not only that, your hypnotic trance an irrational thoughts are being broken but now you can't take your eyes over the hidden elements of the trick, now it is impossible to be ever fooled by that trick again this is how finding the truth can set you free.

After the truth is revealed to you, your attitude towards that person is going to dramatically change, your emotion will change and your actions always follow your emotions.

Finding the truth starts from inside, as the old saying goes in order to be bought you have to sell yourself first. Or we could say that in order to be deceived you have to deceive yourself first. Being honest with yourself is what allows you to be honest with others, like for example if you are talking with someone who is very pushy, and is making you uncomfortable.

Before you can state that you are uncomfortable to the other person you have to admit that to yourself, if you ever justify felling bad as something normal under certain circumstances, than you will never mention that to the person that is forcing your boundaries. Honesty is the antidote to manipulation.

One of the most common lye told by people who are trying to abuse you is that you have no choice, that you are trapped with this horrible scenario that they presented to you. There is always a solution, if a problem exist there is a solution waiting to be discovered. It just takes willing and persistent individual to seek it, to see beyond the illusion and find the truth.

The magical word that will stop others from manipulating you is: NO. 

What does it means to be humble

Humility is the virtue that exists between anxiety and arrogance. To be anxious means to believe that something bad is going to happen to you in the future even when is very unlikely.

Not to confuse anxiety with fear which is a self-preservation instinct. If you are in the forest and you stubble upon a bear running towards you, that would be a fear response from your body that is giving you the best chances of survival.

Anxiety is walking through the forest being worried that you are going to be eaten by a bear even when there is a low chance for that to happen, it is not improving the quality of your life, it is destroying your experience in the moment.

The opposite of anxiety is arrogance, which is the belief that you are so great and good that nothing bad could ever happen to you. Another illusion that your mind can play on you, as nobody is immune to the negative aspects of life, arrogant people are not arrogant because they are really that great as much that this is a form of regulating anxiety, there is always anxiety behind arrogance. Also arrogance generally speaking is a sign of incompetence, most people that have advanced significant skills tend to be more humble.

When you spent ten years of your life mastering a skill you have years and years of failure, which makes you realize that you are as vulnerable as everybody to everything, which gives you the characteristic humble attitude of a master.

Humility means to consider yourself as being non significant or of any great importance, this means that you are not immune from anything positive or negative. At any point in time when you are trying to express your intentions into the world there are three possible scenarios:

1. Fail to try

Many times some of us set goals, but fail to follow through with action. This will happen even to the most experienced, you are never too good to be passive or procrastinate.

2. Try and succeed

There is an equal probability for you to succeed as much as it is an equal probability to don't even try or fail. Humility is not thinking that you can't ever succeed or that you don't deserve to, as much as it is having a complet wiev of reality.

3. Try and fail

Failure is inescapable, it is perhaps the best to make peace with it rather then resist or try to avoid it, as this is impossible.

Every one of this can happen directly as a result of your fault, as a result of someone else fault or as an external factor over which you have no control.

Emotions don't react to logic, learning the truth is the beginning of the ending. Emotions are largely responding to your surrounding environment, in order to change your emotions you have to change your environment or the way you see it.

In order to cultivate humility you have to humiliate yourself. Humility is like discipline in the regard that when you discipline yourself you are just pursuing your goals if you are being discipline from the outside by someone else it is actually abuse. Because in order for someone to discipline you would mean to force you do things you don't want to do, or use external punishment and rewards which are forms of abuse.

The same hold true for humility, when you humiliate yourself by failing at what you want to become good, you strengthen your character, when other humiliate you they are abusing you.

If there is any flaw with the way people perceive the world it is not that we are too negative, as much that we rejected the negative. With the invention of mithology and religion negativity is no longer a normal part of life as much it is a matter of upsetting a God, or being a sinner, think to many negative thoughts, or not having sacrifice enough virgins to the God.

Mythology and religion made the simple task of existing and going through the normal phases a life a horrible burden, where one constantly ask himself what did he did wrong to deserve such a horrible faith, instead to accept the negative as a simple inescaping normal part of life. This is why modern humans lost their capacity to simply exist and fell contempt.