What does it mean to have boundaries

If you have problems establishing your boundaries, you actually have problem expressing your anger. As the purpose of anger is to create safety by making you defend your boundaries. It is the energy that fulls you to do that.

Boundaries have two main characteristics they are nonnegotiable and unalterable.

In order to be enforced, the other person either respects them or the relationship ends. There is no in between when or compromises when it comes to boundaries.

This are things that absolutely need to be respected in order for you to be treated fairly, or have a chance to be happy.

Like the borders of a countries, if you want to enter that country and you don't meet the requirements you are not getting in no matter what do you do. If you try to enter with force in some cases you are going to get killed.

If the person in charge of defending the border becomes corrupted and lets people in by accepting bribes. The entire community is going to suffer the negative consequences of the people that got in and shouldn't. Assuming the value of the community by which they chose to keep certain people out are not corrupted, as far as I know psychopaths can have very strong boundaries.

Look at countries like North Korea, they are very selective with the people that they let in to visit not because they are bad people but because they want to protect the dictatorship. Just because someone has strong boundaries it doesn't mean it is a good person.

So it is also important to chose your boundaries wisely, based on virtues and higher values than yourself, this is why self knowledge is important.

People who have low capacity to defend their boundaries in their relationships, are like corrupt border guards. Only that instead of money they ultimately accept as bribes a couple more minutes of not felling their anxiety, and then they suffer the negative consequences of bad people that shouldn't be in their life anymore. Instead of the end of civilization that happens when a country has no more boundaries, you will experience the end of your happiness and the end of your love towards that person.      

In order to have a bond with someone you need two things, some sort of value that it is relevant for the other person and boundaries, rules under which you agree to share your value with that other person in a way that is fair for you. If someone walks all over you not only that person is not loving you now and it doesn't have any respect for you but that person never loved or respected you to begin with.

Behind your anxiety there is rage, the energy that it is making you run away right now can also make you strong and move you in to action, if you ever chose to externalize it. 

Your life won't get any better. Here is why!

Life is always a tragedy no matter who you are or what do you accomplish, the ending is always sad. In real life there is not such thing as a happy ending, thouse exist only in fairy tales and movies.

The best thing a human can do is not to try to change himself for the better, achieving success it is a combination of luck, serendipity, hard work and talent. From all these four you barely have control over your actions and chose to work hard, it is not fair to yourself to hold yourself fully responsible to your lack of success in life, other than your actions.

Beside even if you are going to achieve whatever your version of success might be, the ending of your life remains the same.

The best decision you can take in your life is to choose to live your life without denial, to try to see yourself and your surroundings for what they really are.  

Being positive is the easy way out, seeing things for what they really are is really one of the biggest challenge you will ever encounter.

The purpose of denial is to keep you functional whenever you are trapped in pain, you simply stop paying attention to it because there is nothing you can do about it. We are not only in denial sometimes about the nature of our relationships, like for example someone who is in an abusive relationship, but we are also in denial about the nature of life.

And our denial about life puts us in a situation, where we spend most of our life engaging in various denial strategies rather than live it fully. This increases the amount of sufferance you experience, the same way for an alcoholic denial is dangerous, the more he denies the more he drinks. The more damage to his body and mind also the wasted time.  

Take for example depression, something that everybody experiences from time to time. Most people get depressed because of a certain situation, like your car broken and you weren't financially prepared to pay for the repairs, so now you are running low on money.

Whenever you experience a lot of these negative events that trigger your depression, it is like seeing backstage of a broadway show, you see the actors without costumes and makeup on their smoking break, talking about boring stuff. It kinda kills the magic of the show, now you can't get fooled that those people on the stage are who are they are trying to pretend to be, you just saw them five minutes ago smoking and talking about politics.

The same happens with depression whenever you experience it a lot it kills the magic of your life, you can't get fooled that everything is going to be ok, or that things are going to get better. After you experience it frequently enough, your depression might get triggered by a random event, but it is not just that event that is making you feel depressed, why you really are depressed is because you realize that you are going to die one day, everything decays and failure is unavoidable. Your depression is no longer specific it becomes existential.

There is nothing you can't do about that, there is no fix, at best you can soften the blow with things like diet, exercise or some scientific discoveries, but you can't stop or avoid it. There is no way out, if you are an alcoholic and you come out of your denial you can stop drinking alcohol, if you are in denial about death and you come out of denial you are still going to die.

The only advantage you get is that instead of a life of constantly being engaged in denial activities you get to live fully.

The fact that almost everybody is trying to avoid is that life doesn't get any better, neither for the individual that is going through life and progressively ages, loses his physical and cognitive capacities. Or for the rest of the civilization as a hole, as the technologies progress and civilization advances things just become more complicated. And when you are dealing with complex things there is an increase probability for things to go wrong and malfunction. Progress is directly proportional with loss and pain, the more you have the more you will lose so the more pain you will experience.

Life is like a control crush, because it is impossible to get to the ground safely, the best you can do is get there without to much damage.      

What does it means to be an "ashole"

An "ashole" is someone how is willing to take advantage of other people's vulnerability for his own pleasure or benefit.

I was originally intending to write a post on how to stop being an "ashole", but then I realize the miniscule chances of someone who is one to read this or seek self-knowledge.

Because all vices happened in the presence of ignorance. So it is very likely to be in denial about taking advantage of people in an unfair way or maybe you might lack the necessary consciousness and empathy so this would be of almost no value.

I am writing this, because I know long term victims of abuse often questions their own integrity often, as a survival adaptation you blame others horrible dids on yourself in order to minimize the amount of external abuse you experience. For example the slave might be particularly stressed for not respecting the request of his master not because it is immoral or wrong, but because he doesn't want to get wiped.

The five qualifying factors that makes you an "ashole":

1. kill someone

2. hurt someone physically

3. rape someone

4. steal

(Stealing it is not necessarily limited to just someones material possessions, I would also count things like peace of mind or innocence.)  

5. damage someone propriety


People suppress their negative emotions and discomfort and blame it on themselves. To be self loathing means to feel disgust towards yourself, but not disgusted because you did something wrong, most people who do bad things are in denial so they are completely ignorant to what they do. Most likely if you are self loathing it is because you blame yourself for others bad dids.

I grew up in a fairly poor family, my parents sent me to the neighbourhood school, which from my understanding now was a little better than minimal security prison. I was put trough constant abuse from both teachers and my classmates, in order for me to survive that experience at the time it was smart for me to become self loathing.

In particularly there was a lot of violence, like for example once I was hold at knife point in class with the teacher just going along with the lesson plan. One day I was getting bullied by this guy that was constantly taking pleasure in torturing me, so for a few seconds i blacked out and hit him repeatedly in the face until one of his eyes turned purple.

Knowing what i know now, that was done in self defence and would be considered moral and ethical, but at the time I remember crying hysterically wondering what is wrong with me, why would I hurt someone like that. And the fact that I internalized the abuse and blamed my act on defencive force on myself it actually helped my situation,when the teacher found out, there was no punishment for me. Doing that to one of your classmates would easily get you expelled.

In this types of situation, blaming other peoples would've lead to negative consequences for myself for doing nothing that could be considered wrong or immoral. So I adapted to survive to that environment.

Unfortunatley later on in life this did not helped me very much, It kept attracting abusive people in my life, and prevented me from asserting my needs. 

Intimacy for men

Intimacy is the capacity to be yourself in the presence of other people. Generally speaking there are two reason to hide who you are either because you did something wrong and if people found out wouldn't be ok being around you, so you manipulate them by using various tactics to distract them from seeing who you are.

The second reason people hide who they are is because they think they did something wrong without actually doing anything. This type of confusion it is the result of chronic abuse, where the victim of abuse is made to believe that there is something wrong with her.

Further on because he is weaken from the abuse, and lacks a bond with someone to protect him, this vulnerability is going to invite others to abuse him. Not to place the responsibility fully on the victim, but the way the victim perceives the abuse can have an outcome on the severity and duration of the recovery of the abuse.

The way we signal to others that we don't have a bond is by hiding the truth, if that person is not willing to tell the truth or he doesn't have anybody close enough that is willing to protect him then it becomes an easy victim where is easy to avoid the negative consequences of having to abuse someone.

In particularly man have a problem with being weak, unfortunately society has bizar standards for man where you are not allowed to express certain emotions like fear or sadness, so in order to fit as an attempt to get love, we hide that we are weak.  

And hiding the truth not only makes it impossible to have intimacy with other people, but simultaneously signals to others that you don't have strong bonds and that you are a safe victim to abuse.

As victims of abuse tend to be self loathing, they will blame the abuse on their weaknesses rather than look objectively at the situation. They will often conclude that the negative outcome of their interactions is because one of their personal flaw rather than

Being week is not a crime, hiding your weakness is not strength is cowardness. If revealing your weaknesses is meet with hostility by other people this simply reveals the quality of people you have around you. An ashole is someone who is willing to use other people vulnerabilities for his own pleasure or benefit.

As the old saying goes, you teach people how to treat you!

The purpose of hate

Hate is a healthy emotions, and almost impossible to avoid, we all hated someone or something through the course of our lives.

Like most of the negative emotions unfortunately gets a bad connotation, when in fact hate is simply a self preservation instinct.

It is problematic when someone remains fixated on hate, but not because hate is bad or unhealthy, as much that that person fails to find a resolution to his hate in a relatively shorter period of time.

In order to hate people you have to stay around people that are hurting you in some way.

Sometimes this happens because people are trapped with eachothers, like for example if you are kid going to school that is getting constantly bullied. Because is not the decision of the child to go or not to school he is going to keep getting bullied and develop a deep feeling of chronic hate towards his bullies.

 Simultaneously people that internalize the abuse from the past, are conditioned to stay with people that they hate even when they have the option to leave at any point. But their habits from their past prevents them from breaking contact with the people they hate. Like in the case of someone who develops Stockholm syndrome. For example women who stay in relationships with their abusive husbands, when they could leave the relationship or divorce them at any time.

It is worse to have the available option to leave and stay in an unfair abusive relationship, if you are trapped in abuse before you internalize the abuse you hate the people who are holding you trapped there. If you chose to stay your hatred is going to go towards yourself, you are going to become self loathing.

Just because you stay in that relationship your hate is not going to go away, not only is it going to persist but you are going to have some really bizarre and unhealthy expressions of it. Which I think most of us have the image of unhealthy expressions of hate into our mind, this is why we associate such a negative connotation to it.  

Some example of that are: passive aggressive behaviour, hate speech, hate crimes, self hatred and low self esteem etc.

Behind hate there is unexpressed anger, like all negative emotions are part of the fight or flight system, hate is a different nuance of anger. To express the anger behind the hate in a healthy productive way, generally speaking that means to channel your anger into assertiveness.

When it comes to me,I don't really hate people anymore because I don't keep contact with the people who hurt or want to hurt me, and if it happens to feel hatred towards someone it doesn't last very long.

Anxiety is suppressed rage

Anxiety is part of the fight or flight mechanism. Whenever we encounter a threat, based on a quick assessment over our abilities and the situation we are in we chose to either fight the threat or run away from it.

Whenever we choose to confront that threat, the emotions behind that drives us is anger, whenever we chose to run away from the threat the emotions behind is fear or when it gets very severe it turns into anxiety. Behind depression there is suppressed frustration, and behind anxiety there is supressed rage.

In order to stop your anxiety you have to express the anger behind it in such a way that it is going to lead to a resolution and is going to reduce or eliminate the possibility for the situation that triggered your anxiety from happening again.

Rage is generally the emotions someone feels before they kill, I am not saying that you necessarily want to kill people or that you will one day as much that you feel like doing so. This is why you want to be careful whenever you externalize your anxiety because you don't want to cause any permanent damage to yourself or others.  

We suppress emotions as a self protection mechanism, if you want to see people with a low capacity to suppress their emotions go and visit a prison. Suppression is not always bad, sometimes it is necessary, it is a great self preservation instinct.

In order for you to conclude that it is necessary to suppress your anger, you must of found yourself in a situation where you were trapped in chronic abuse, where at the time there wasn't anything you could've done.

When we are trapped in abuse we internalize the abuse in order to minimize the external abuse we receive. For example a slave is very careful to please his master not because he wants it or because he has something to gain, but if doesn't he is going to get whipped. So if he pleases his master he doesn't get hurt as much.

The way we internalize is by either being selfrighteaus or by becoming self loathing. For the self righteous person the fault is always placed outside on environmental factors and other people, so personal flaws and deficiencies are left unexamined and untreated.

Selfrighceous people externalize their anger but because they have so many blind spots it is not done in a productive way that leads to a resolution.

Self loathing people always blame themselves for whatever they do, there is no one to be angry other than yourself, so there is very little external expression of anger. Whenever some unfairness happens the self loathing person finds a reason to blame it on himself.

It is always a warning sign, when someone places the blame either completely on himself or external. That is almost never the case, there is always a combination of factors that contribute to the outcome of a situation, sure one party can be more responsible for the outcome than the other party. But the responsibility doesn't ever belong exclusively to just one party.

In order to let your anger out in a constructive way, you have to learn who you should blame and hold people responsible in a righteous way.            

What causes suicide

I recently find out about the tragic suicide of the lead singer of Soundgarden, Chris Cornell, one of my favorite band as a tenager.

Which got me thinking about what is really the cause of suicide, the determinant factor that pushes people over the edge to take their own lives.

I heard people talking about a lack of purpose, when you become very good at something and reach a certain level of fame and prosperity, you can simply buy everything you need so life becomes very unchallenging and easy. Which is not necessarily as good as it sounds because, happiness is an emotionally rewarding system for the effort you need in order to overcome scarcity.

This could definitely be a contributing factor, but I really don't think that ultimately this is the determining factor that will push someone over the edge to take his own life. A life that is too easy doesn't sound like a good enough reason to me to kill yourself.

As social animals we need each other to survive and be happy, without other human beings around your survival is going to become increasingly hard or impossible depending on your level of skills and abilities. We need each others not only for reproduction but also to provide services to each others, for a baby just living it alone for a few seconds in a room by itself it is a terrible nightmare, because this in a natural environment with predators could mean death.

Not only we develop reward system to motivate us to work but we also develop system to motivate us to maintain our relationships and bounds to each others. It is such a cliche for people that come out of a relationship to commit suicide or fell suicidal. Because losing that bond with that human being to some degree means death especially if you are not going to form another bond. So it make sense to kill yourself to spare your sufferance rather than allow yourself to die slowly in an agonizing way.  

When you look at the life of someone like Chris Cornell, you would assume that with fame comes a great amount of love and deep relationships, after all he gets up on the stage and performs in front of hundreds of thousands of people that sings his lyrics and worship him like a demigod.

There is something missing out of that, that is intimacy which is the capacity to be yourself in the presence of other people. What Chriss and other artists does on the stage is a performance, it is not a real human interaction.

The word personality comes from the latin persona, which is the word the roman used for the masks they used in theater to pretend that they are someone else. A person is a life actor, a human being that is playing a role, to some degree being a personality is dehumanizing, it can lead to ignoring the needs of the human behind the mask.

The saddest thing is when you manage to get away with it, when you make other people like your mask instead of the human behind the mask, regardless the fact that you are surrounded by human beings there are in your close proximity and you have some interactions with them, you are not receiving what you need from them, there is an inability to assert your needs that leads to a deep feeling of isolation, so your emotions are going to let you know this often leads to depression or anxiety.

Human being don't commit suicide because they are poor, we commit suicide when we become alone!

The difference between anger and catharsis

Behind all self sabotaging behaviour there is suppressed anger. As anger is a self-preservation instinct, of which purpose is to create safety through defending your boundaries. Because it is a self preservation instinct it can't never be toxic, things can't be healthy and toxic at the same time.

When a healthy thing expressed becomes in some way toxic it is no longer an expression of the same thing. In the case of anger when it is expressed and it becomes toxic or damaging for you or the people around you it is a catharsis not anger.

A catharsis is a way to vent of the energy behind your anger without accomplishing the actual purpose of expressing anger. Catharsis can take a lot of forms: from violence, rage, addictions, dysfunctional relationships, sadism and masochism etc.

There is a great quote from Aristotle: "Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."

All expression of catharsis are toxic, I guess is what you could call a vice. If it is not hurting you directly, or hurting anybody around you that is not guilty of anything. It will hurt you in an indirect way by not releasing your anger freely in a way that accomplishes the purpose your anger should accomplish and lead to resolution.

Anger is a largely a taboo in today society for multiple reasons, one of which is that is the way the victim of abuse set themselves free from their abusers. Which means that for a lot of people that means the end of the free raid, and their parasitic lifestyle, it is a way to disarm the victims of abuse.

You can go back to most peoples childhoods, where expressing anger was forbidden or severely punished, because the parents were abusive and they didn't care about the needs of their children. Allowing the people around you to get angry is one of the best indicator that you care about them, it is an indicator that you are willing to negotiate and find a win/win solution to whatever challenge you might have.

This is how we are conditioned in the early stages of our lives to suppress our anger, and suppressing your anger was the right thing to do during your childhood if you grew up with abusive parents. Internalizing the abuse allowed you to reduce the amount of abuse you received from the outside. Unfortunately this is a pretty hard habit to break and a lot of adults still behave like children with abusive parents.

The energy behind your anger can go away, it needs to be released in some way in to the world. And that is the purpose of a catharsis, sometimes catharsis can take the form of self destructive behaviour while often can take the form of innocent actions. Either way just releasing the anger through a catharsis is not enough to solve your anger problems. Until you don't manage to assert your needs and successfully defend your boundaries, your anger is simply going to persist because there is no resolution from the threat.  

What is acceptance

Acceptance is learning how to differentiate between what is normal and what is abuse.

Under normal circumstances you accept what you can't change and resist what is changeable.

There is a huge misconception, propagated by various ideologies, that will lead you to believe that all sufferance comes from resistance and in order to stop it you have to accept everything. You probably heard phrases like: "what do you resist persist".

Resistance which is the rejection of the outcome of a situation, it is a self-preservation instinct, necessary for self defence and other important function. To frame acceptance as the only root for sufferance is either naivety that comes from a lack of understanding or a way to disarm people.      

It is possible to experience sufferance that comes from resistance, but not all sufferance comes from resistance. It is true that when you resist things that are normal not only you destroy your emotional experience in that moment but you also affect your performance, making it less likely to grow or move on from unfavorable situations.

Resisting the normal consequences of life makes it impossible for you to enjoy life, because you stress yourself normal things that are sometimes impossible to avoid. This is why learning to accept things it is a pleasurable experience, and it will make your life more enjoyable.

For the long term victim of abuse it is difficult to understand what is normal since he never or almost never experience a state of being normal without coercion.

One of the negative consequences of abuse is confusion, the person that suffered the abuse is going to have an inverted perception of reality. He is going to see some wrong things as right and right as wrong.

This will lead to an attempt to resist normal things and accept abuse, which is going to lead to constant dissatisfaction to small trivial normal consequences of life, while simultaneously become an accomplish to his own abuse by tolerating it, because he wrongly believes that it is normal or there is nothing possible to do in order to stop it.

In order to more accurately determine what you should accept and what you should resist you have to clear your own confusion. Learning morality allows you to determine good from evil. If there is one thing that I am one hundred percent sure that you should resist that is abuse. Perhaps the only scenario where this is not true is if you realize that is impossible for you to win that conflict. For example if someone holds you at gun point.      

Normalizing negativity

Negativity is like the fiber from food, it doesn't give you any pleasure and the direct outcome of ingesting it is s**t, but because it was so present in everything that we ate we adapted to use it and function properly with it.

So if it is not present in your diet you are going to get sick and suffer.

Like the increased presence of process food, today we also have more ways to avoid negativity, we have more ways to avoid it and stay in denial.  

Avoiding negativity is like process food gives you a lot of pleasure in the moment, but makes you sick in the long term. By avoiding negativity you avoid the benefits that it can offer you, like for example: it is necessary to fail in order to grow and improve, rejection is quality control when it comes to relationships etc.

There is also negativity that comes from the unpredictability of life things like accidents, which has a more destructive impact on your life and almost no benefit. However there is a difference, how someone who is tempered by being constantly challenged, is going to handle this types of situations, rather than someone who lived a life relatively unchallenged.

Somehow a lot of us were programed to believe that we are special, and as special superior beings we are immune from the normal hardship regular people go through. Probably this is the worse form of sabotage, if you want to make someone completely incompetent and self destructive try to convince him that he is above everybody.

To some degree this is what a lot of religious ideologies are doing, and a lot of the contemporary stories of our culture, they serve as tools of denial through which the individual that is subjected to them gets to escape the negative aspects of life. A hero is someone who succeed when it shouldn't, worshiping that person that succeeded despise the seemingly impossibility of his success it is a way to deny failure and rejection.

Which maintains the vicious cycle through which civilizations go through, the raise at power of a nation after they become incredibly powerful they become corrupt and collapse.

This is why virtue like humility is so important, it is the antidote to fake entitlement and incompetence.

The person that has a corrupted mind, while experiencing some negativity might ask herself: "why me, what have I done to deserve this!?", followed by a long negotiation with magical deities where a strong case is constructed, that the magical deity should make an exception and bend the laws of physics just this time to spare that person of his pain and consequences.

This is probably one of the hardest truth to swallow, I know it took me ears to internalize it. Nobody is special, nobody is immune from anything.          

Emotional Camouflage

Camouflage has two purposes, defence and ambush. Animals like zebras develop striped patterns that makes it hard to distinguish individuals this increases their chances to survive in the case of an attack.

But simultaneously the light brown color of a lion is a form of camouflage that helps the lion to be less visible in the grass. This gives the lion the advantage to remain unseen until the critical moment where he is an advantage before he attacks.

Human beings are not like zebras, we don't necessarily develop physiological adaptation to fend off predators or become more efficient hunters.

But we do use clothes and the way we groom our bodies in a similar way animals develop evolutionary adaptations to camouflage.

Defensive camouflage is all about hiding your emotions, because they are going to give out the fact that you are weak and easy to exploit. While ambush camouflage is about hiding your intentions,

In order to develop camouflage you need to be trapped in a situation where it is impossible to avoid predators or it is impossible for you to get what you need in a fair way. This is why camouflage is accompanied by denial, people who use it are often unaware that they do. Denial it is in itself an adaptation to being trapped in abuse or lacking the knowledge to how to get out of the abuse. You could say that emotional camouflage is just a symptom of denial.  

As the most efficient predator that attacks humans is the human itself we have to develop camouflage that works against our own species. Which means that the camouflage that we develop has to both attract certain people of our species while simultaneously reject another group of the member of our species.

A great example of this is the alternative cultures that develop around the mainstream culture, like currently the hipster movement. There are other ways people use camouflage: like wearing a suit, body building, alternative culture clothes even poor hygiene could be considered to a certain degree a form of camouflage the same way a skunks uses a strong pungent smell to repel predators, being overweight etc.  

By wearing different clothes that the older generations does not wear anymore and using grooming like big facial hair you accomplish two things you alienate the older generations which serve the purpose of the predators. While you simultaneously make yourself appealing to other people like you that fell victims to the abuse and felt the need to camouflage using similar methods.

This is a great way to alienate the abusers and surround yourself with people that don't posses predator instinct. However there is a flaw to this strategy, victim of abuse are not the most functional people in the world so you limit yourself to having relationships only with dysfunctional people.        
If it is true that you are trapped in abuse and there is no way to escape it, living in fear and hiding who you are it is the best course of action. After all what is the zebra supposed to do there is no way out. When it comes to humans things get a little more complicated, because is not your species that defines you as the one that is being hunted. As much it is your view of the world and reaction to it and this is possible to change, it is like having the possibility to teach zebras how to use weapons.

The solution is not necessarily to become the hunter instead of the pray, because hunters need camouflage too as much as it is in learning how to disarm and avoid the predators and demand to be treated in a fair way.        

The purpose of depression

Depression is an emergency shutdown of your body, it is a way your body prevents you from wasting energy when the chances of success are very small.

Another effect of the depression is introspection it makes you questions yourself in order to figure out what did you do wrong.

The precursor for depression is frustration, which comes from repeated failure in one area of your life.

You have probably heard the classic Freudian psychology statement that depression is suppressed anger, to be more specifically behind depression is frustration which is the type of anger you experience from repeated failure.

Experiencing depression is not necessarily an anomaly as much it is a self-preservation instinct, that has the benefit of saving energy and it also gives you clarity by making you question yourself.

Everybody gets depressed from time to time and has the capacity to become depressed it is not a genetic illness, it is a self-preservation instinct. When depression becomes persistent it is generally because there is no resolution to the problem, which keeps the cycle of repeated failure, frustration and depression alive.

Talk therapy or medication is not enough to treat depression, at best it can prepare you for what you need to do in order to stop this cycle.

In order to stop the persistent depression you have to stop the repeated failure that starts the vicious cycle of frustration - depression, it is more of a hands on process in your day to day life learning new skills and learning more about what do you struggle with.

If you are going to master your reactions with the environment around you, it is necessary to practice with your environment.

One major sticking point majority of the people have is that they are in denial about their situation, which keeps them from improving by repeating their mistakes. In a way the purpose of depression is to help you to get out of denial, but sometime there is not enough knowledge about yourself or the world around you for your depression to be efficient enough to end your denial so you just fall back into it.          

It is like the concept of the purgatory, you are in this limbo between good and evil and until you are not going to learn your lesson you are going to repeatedly recreate the same experience. This can be very demoralizing frustrated in itself it can cause a lot of people to give up on trying to fix it and find happiness.

Well just because you give up it doesn't mean that your body does too, so the pain is going to continue, the only refuge is escapism like developing an addiction, which is going to push you even deeper in to denial. 

The purpose of rejection

Rejection is the equivalent of quality control for human relationships, if you want quality relationships not only you have to be rejected but you also have to reject people.

Not only the rejection in the beginning, like choosing with whom to go on a date, but also while you are in a relationship.

Paradoxically this creates a bond, between the two parties. In order to have a bond you need boundaries.

Rejection is part of the negotiation process, it is the part where you find the common ground, the win/win solution to the challenges of life.

Without rejection there are no clearly determined boundaries, if you are going to have any relationships at all they are going to be win/lose because the other party is going to get compliance from you. Which is not going to earn the respect or love of the other person, because there is no exercise of virtue.

I don't know if you are aware with the concept of negging from the pickup artist community, that in order to spark attraction in a woman you have to playfully reject her. That technique is a form of manipulation of the natural self preservation instinct of rejection. It is a way to create the illusion of a bond in people that are a little bit more weak minded.

The entire pickup artist community is missing the obvious point, sex is a natural consequences of intimacy, this is why we use the word intimacy as a euphemism for sex. The reason why some man can't have sex is because they lost their capacity to be intimate. Learning manipulation techniques to create the illusion of a bond serves as a form of denial for your pain and true issues.

Rejection expressed in a healthy way should come from intimately asserting your needs, rather than as a tool to trigger attraction in the other person.

But expressing yourself for who you really are means also accepting the fact that you are going to get rejected, not everybody is going to be willing to cater to your needs. This is how negging you are trying to reject others to make you like you so you don't have to be rejected. It is a form of denial of rejection.

Denying rejection has the horrible disadvantage of the fact that it makes it impossible for you to have healthy win/win dynamics with other people. Which is going to significantly shrink the pool of people that you can be friends with or date, because sane people are going to reject you. Also the relationship you will have are going to have a lot of unnecessary drama because of their dysfunctional nature.           

The spectrum of anger

There is a spectrum of anger, the purpose of an emotion is not only to give you feedback and make you aware of certain things, but also modify your behaviour in order to deal with that situation in a better way.

Anger is supposed to alert you when there is the potential of failure and help you prevent it. Based on your performance in the world your emotions will change to make you react in an adequate way to the challenge, so this is why having a spectrum is important. Anger ranges from plain anger to frustration and finally to rage.

Every step on the spectrum will produce a different result in your behaviour, anger produces determination, frustration produces assertiveness and rage will make you react externally in a forceful way.

It is not always a guaranty that your anger is going to prevent loss, when anger fails to protect, you move from fight to flight in too sadness. As well as anger sadness goes on a spectrum that ranges from plain sadness, depression and finally anxiety.

Each step of the spectrum produces a different outcome in behaviour, as the general purpose of sadness is to bring clarity, depending on the level of sadness you experience your perception of the world will change.

At the level of sadness you are going to start to believe that something is wrong with the world around you, at the level of depression you start to realise that something is wrong with you, at the level of anxiety you barley understand anything you just know that it is going to happen again so you emotionally anticipate the pain.

At the middle of the spectrum is where self development happens. In order to experience frustration you have to fail at something over and over again, which gives you the power to assert yourself, if you have the knowledge to overcome the situation you are in assertivity will give you the energy behind the knowledge to apply yourself to the world.

There is a huge misconception to believe that assertivity is by any stretch of imagination a personality trait or something you get conditioned to have during your childhood, and if you don't develop it during your childhood you will never have it.

Assertivity is simply a self preservation instinct everybody posses one, you just require the self-discipline to cultivate it and maybe some knowledge.  

However when there is a lack of understanding and knowledge assertivity will fail, which will make you withdraw in to depression. This is a brilliant adaptation of your body to make you question yourself and examine your strengths and weaknesses as well as preserve energy and stop wasting it on ineffective strategies. There is a dark side to depression when you experience it frequent enough it will lead to low self esteem and more insecurity.

Rage is the last attempt to stay alive, this is where destroying other forms of life becomes essential if you are going to survive. Anger and frustration are not necessary win lose but rage definitely is.

This is what the story about the Hulk is all about, an anxious geeky scientist that becomes the victim of an accident that externalises his anger, as an uncontrollable destructive force that also gives him physical strength beyond his normal capacity.

At the level of rage there is very little understanding about the world other than the fact that you are in serious trouble and you need to protect yourself.      

How to remove emotional blockages

There are two strong emotions getting in each other way in an emotional blockage, on one hand you have the desire to make things happen and acquire new experiences, but simultaneously you experience significant anxiety of which purpose is to keep you safe.

This makes you to feel trapped between two very strong impulses that prevent you from taking any action. Unfortunately it is impossible to do anything without some degree of danger or risk, so avoiding danger it means avoiding life itself.

We are design to live with this emotions under normal circumstances they function pretty well at keeping you motivated and safe at the same time. You are not intrinsically flowed and broken by design.

In order to become blocked you have to receive "criticism" from an exterior source that is not very benevolent. It is particularly the type of criticism that blames you personally for your performance instead of your skills levels at the time. There is a fundamental difference between judgment and criticism. Judgment is a subjective opinion you have about someone or something while criticism is an objective observation that requires you to gather informations process it objectively and reach a conclusion.

Also it is important to note that giving and receiving criticism it is a humbling experience and in order to give good criticism you have to be humble yourself in order to prevent your biases to intervene. While simultaneously receiving it is humbling because you are allowing someone to expose your weak points. Which is of a tremendous benefit to someone who is trying to grow.

If you confuse judgment for criticism you stop performing for yourself as much as you do it to please the person that judged you, which means that you are going to try very hard to don't fail.

Resistance to failure is anxiety, performing to please others is going to create particularly strong anxiety and this is how you put yourself in this situation. I think that's what the old saying "dance like no one is watching" is all about, I wouldn't say that watching is really the problem, after all the purpose of dancing is to display your body you wan't people to watch, it is the judgment that is the problem.

Failure is natural part of growth, you can't grow without testing the boundaries of your abilities and put pressure on yourself. If you desire to grow you also desire to fail because that is what growth requires.  Failure does not make you successful directly, as much as it allows you to build momentum, and from that momentum you grow and expand your abilities. So you gradually slowly move towards success.

Like this you claim back your practice from the hands of the people who judged you, your anxiety is not really about failure as much is about other people hurting your progress with judgment. So it is not only important to build back the momentum but as well to learn how to tell the difference between judgment and criticism.     

How to be negative in a productive way!

Negativity is simply a self preservation instinct, part of your fight or flight response design to help you survive.

There are a lot of philosophies out there in the self help community or some religious beliefs that will tell you that negativity is the source of your problems and in order to change your life you have to be less negative.    

This types of beliefs tend to make people go at war with themselves, it create a selective blind spot by telling people that the environment around them has no importance about making them feel negative emotions. It is the way they react and see the environment that creates the toxic negativity in them. Which absolves everybody around you from agency and dumps all the responsibility on the person who had enough and is attempting to change.

At the core off all self sabotage is suppressed anger, assuming that you are not really trapped in an abusive situation where it is impossible for you to get away or fix it. The reason why you keep staying in those abusive situation and constantly hurt yourself is because you are constantly failing  to feel and express your anger.

Anger in particularly is a taboo in society, when you have a very unfair world where a lot of people are getting abused on a regular basis. If they start to get angry about it they are more likely to do something about that unfair situation and stop it. Slaves are not allowed to get angry, if they get angry they get whipped. Causing others to suppress anger is just a way to disarm them.

There are four negative aspects all of them have a clear purpose and a benefit to enjoy when they are expressed in a healthy way, however when you are trapped in abuse or you think you are trapped, you are doing damage control which creates the impression that negativity is self destructive. Your negative emotion will persist for long periods of time when there is no closure and resolution.  

1. Failure:

• when you fail under pressure you grow;
• If you are trapped in abuse you are going to get in denial and fail over and over again because your self preservation instincts are no longer working

2. Rejection:

• You can get rejected by others, which gives you feed-back about yourself revealing some of your flaws and limitations;
• Or you can reject others because they are not good enough, this will eventually lead to having higher quality relationships.

3. Anger:

• You will feel anger when you are exposed to an unfair situation, and if you are successful at expressing your anger you will create safety in your life;
• Or you will experience anger when you are about to lose something that you already have.

4. Sadness:

• You can experience sadness when you realize that you did something wrong which will eventually lead to clarity;
• Or you can experience sadness when someone else did something wrong and unpredictable which generally leads to confusion. 

Being trapped in abuse will cause you to experience failure as denial, you will get rejected by others more often, experience anger when you realize you are losing and then fell sadness without understanding the purpose of it which is going to be confusing. Than experiencing negativity is just another horrible aspect of living in hell.

The purpose of denial

Denial seems to be a pretty negative self destructive thing to do to yourself, it is strange to think that we develop such a self harmful behaviour as a self preservation strategy.

To think that you can do the negative without the negative consequences seems a pretty self destructive approach to life. You can't eat the cake without getting fat and sludge your arteries. But if someone forces you to eat the cake it is better to don't focus on the negative aspects that come out of eating that cake.

It is in fact a self protection strategy, in order to develop denial you have to be trapped in an abusive situation where your natural fight or flight instincts are not enough to lead to a resolution.

Like for example being locked in a gulag or being born in an abusive family, your chances of self defence are non existent in this two situation.

So in order to protect yourself you internalize the abuse, to reduce the amount of external abuse you are going to experience. If you had parents that were very particular about you doing certain things, and if you didn't do some of those stuff they would use violence or manipulation techniques. You would really want to avoid that situation so you would stress yourself a lot and you would internalize what your parents told you when you didn't succeed to meet their request. You do this in order to avoid more external abuse, which actually makes sense as self preservation.

When you internalize the abuse you externalize the responsibility, because you concluded that there is nothing you can do to solve the abuse so you just adapted to it. This might be true at the moment, if you experienced abuse when you were a child there was nothing you could do at the time, but now you are an adult you have option you didn't had when you were a child.

Unfortunately there is a tendency to build bad habits during the helpless period that sometimes follow people for their entire lyfe.      

Because there is no way to defend yourself you suppress your anger towards the abusers, you see the purpose of anger when it is express in a healthy way is to create safety. When you suppress there is a huge chance you will use your anger to abuse others. Instead of using it to create safety for yourself and your loved ones, you hold it in and lash at weaker and more vulnerable people than you because it gives you relief.

Sadist find inflicting pain on other innocent people pleasurable not because they have something personal with that innocent person, it is because they have something personal with the original abuser that triggered their anger but never did anything to express it.

 This type of sadistic abuse is often justified in society as being necessary to keep society running of course we don't do it because it gives us pleasure. People that are in denial are not very aware to why they do what they do. So this is how this "virus" gets passed from one generation to the next one. 

Shyness is not a personality trait

One of the symptom of being sick is feeling like you have to isolate yourself. Like for example when you have the flu you don't really feel like going out and spending time with other people. probably the thing that you would prefer to do the most is spend all day in bed by yourself.

Pain is depersonalizing, when you are experiencing pain you are really not being yourself it changes the way you interact with others.

Suffering from a mental illness is like having a flu for decades of your life. Your personality is being altered by the pain for years and years. Only that nobody sees what you are experiencing emotionally, so they blame your unusual behavior on your genetics.

It doesn't make sense to say that this is natural, because we need people, as we are social animals it just goes against self preservation rules to be born with a reduced desire to interact with others. Is like saying that someone was born with a reduce desire to eat. If you are afraid of food, in order to develop a stress reaction to it you need to experience some negative experience with it first. Like you might be afraid of peanuts because you are allergic and they almost killed you once.

Your nervous system has to perform two main tasks. First it has to make sure that you avoid all threats and possible threats that could lead to an early death, in neuroscience this is called the sympathetic nervous system. Second it has to solve problems in regard to your needs of eating and reproducing, this part of your nervous system is called the parasympathetic nervous system.

When you are under constant threat, you become predominantly controlled by your sympathetic nervous system and one of the symptom of to tun off social engagement as tool of preventing threat.

It is not a problem of overcoming shyness, because shyness is a symptom of a bigger problem and symptoms can't be treated at best you can get some relief. The shyness will go away by itself after you address the cause.

Until you won't address the reason why your body perceive danger often enough that it keeps you in a predominantly sympathetic nervous response your social life is going to suffer.    

There are two scenarios in which a person gets stucked in to chronic pain and stress. It is either constant re injury, experience abuse to frequent enough that doesn't gives your body a chance to heal, or it is an adaptation of the brain where the brain becomes hypersensitive as an attempt in avoiding future re injury.       

What does it mean to be blissful

Bliss is not ignorance, it is actually the opposite of it. Is an intense and constant state of happiness with the presence of knowledge.

As children we are innocent because we are ignorant by nature, as we mature we gain experience, with that experience we also lose our innocence.

Achieving happiness through ignorance as an adult it is impossible. I would say that not only ignorance is not bliss but the opposite of it, hell on earth.

There is a myth that some of us still believe, the myth of an easy life, a life free of failure, worries, rejection, sadness and anger or most of the other negative aspects of life. I never meet someone with an easy life, I have meet some happy and fairly successful people but they had problems and they were stressed like everybody else. By no stretch of imagination this people had it easy.

My definition for bliss is the normalization of the negative aspects of life. It is easy to be happy when good things are happening to you, but if your general state of well being ends when with the experience of good things for about half of your life you are going to be pretty miserable.

One of the first skill I teached myself when I was a tenager was to play guitar, as a new player I started with a chord it took me multiple tries to get that cord sounding good. The first day I practiced until I got frustrated and quit, the second day I nearly got it to sound decent but I still didn't developed enough strength in my fingers to put enough pressure on the strings, so it still sounded a little off but by this point I felt like a demigod. My assumption at that point was that the hard work was done and from now one it is going to be easy, so as I moved to the next chord I wanted to learn I discovered that it was just as hard as the first one.

So I still had to work hard and make small gradual progress but because I wasn't expecting for that to happen I was also miserable and frustrated. For the next years as I practiced and learn progressively more complex things I pretty much maintained the same attitude, which made my experience of learning how to play pretty hellish, with the exception of the times when I would realize I have made some progress.

In order to be blissful you have to realize that it will never get easy, no matter where you are and what do you accomplish you can't escape the negative aspects of life. Why not turn the tables and expect that every day of your life is going to include some hardship. If you expect failure every day it is no longer a tragedy as much it is a certainty.

There are really only four big negative aspects that you will experience almost every day of your life:

1. rejection

2. failure

3. sadness

4. anger

*There are more nuances to emotions like sadness and anger but the essence of your negative emotions is the fight or flight response the emotional impulses behind it is anger or sadness, when I say sadness and anger I do include all the nuances like: rage, frustration, depression, anxiety etc.

Self discipline vs. self control

There is a huge misconception when it comes to self discipline, there is this idea that you have to be very controlling about what you do. For example a person that want's to follow any specific diet stays hone and he concentrate very hard to don't eat cookies.

Self discipline is actually the opposite of that, the purpose of it is to cause changes in your mind and body to the point that you are a changed person.

By putting pressure on yourself you transform who you are, being self-disciplined about your diet doesn't mean to use willpower around cookies, because willpower is a finite resource and you will eventually fail and eat the cookies, when you are self discipline you reach a point where for the majority of the time you don't fell like eating the cookies, so staying on your diet is rather effortless.

Diamonds are made under pressure if you are going to put pressure on you by making yourself to do things that you are not very good at, there is a very high probability for you to fail. My definition for self discipline is the willingness of an individual to fail under pressure.

It is the opposite of self control, because by practicing self control you are trying to never fail, you are going to start this new diet and never relapse. Which is almost impossible.

When I say failure, I don't mean failure like the type of it, when people give up where they know they have problems, they just don't do anything about it so they just accumulate all this negative momentum in their life. That is not self discipline because there is no pressure in there, no desire to grow and change.

Not only your willingness to fail is important but also the variety of failure you try, as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insanity. You get new ideas of trying new things either by watching other people that are good at what you do or by understanding what you are attempting to master better.

Unfortunately the world is not very friendly with failure, there are very little people out there that normalize failure. Also you vere educated to resist failure in school, whenever you made a mistake your teacher punished you to "help" you learn. This makes normalizing failure a little harder because you have to overcome the indoctrination you received in school.           

Live to Die!

I am sure you heard the old Jerry Seinfeld routine about people being more afraid of public speaking than they are afraid of dying.

There is a seemingly paradox, that we are trapped in we are to afraid to live our lives fully while simultaneously we are afraid to die.

I remember at a point in my life when my depression reached one of the lowest point and I was felling suicidal, the only thing that stopped me from killing myself was the fact that I was afraid to lose on new experiences. I was trapped between the miserable experience I was having at the time and my desire to live fully.

It is impossible to live your life fully until you don't make peace with all the negative aspects of life. The solution to fear of life is not immortality, because death is only one of the aspects that people resent, you would also have to be immune to failure etc. Life is not short almost a century is plenty enough, the problem is that most people don't extract the maximum value out of it.

If you wan't to live your life fully you have to embrace it as it is you can't afford to escape any of it. Any day without failure or without experiencing some of the emotions on the negative spectrum is a waste of your time. If that doesn't happen you are not pushing hard all the buttons you should push, it should be a priority to experience some negativity every day not to avoid it.

Sometimes people justify escapism, indulging in empty pleasure to excess, like yolo type of situations as way of living fully. Of course addicts are in denial they justify running away from life as a way of celebrating life. But how could indulging to the point of damaging yourself be a way of celebrating life. Like for example if you really like life you are not going to eat cheeseburgers until you give yourself a heart attack, if you really like life you are going to have a moderate diet that allows you to live the longest in order to enjoy the most life as possible.      

Another way we deny death is by attempting to make ourselves indispensable and irreplaceable. We live with the anxiety that one day we are going to be obsolete and irrelevant. So we try really hard to offer so much value to other people that is going to make them want to build a statue of you.

The closest you can get to immortality is by leaving such a huge contribution behind you that others are going to keep using it long before you are dead. Even if the legacy that you live behind is going to be so great you are still going to die, and live behind an unlived life of an workaholic.

Becoming obsolete is nothing than a certainty, look at the old people right now with technology, that is going to happen to all of us to some degree and then death. The purpose of life is not to get ahead is to help the people around you, if obsolescence is a certainty why resist it. At the end of the day you know you did your job well enough when the people that you helped no longer need you.      

Why changing your habits is not enough

Is recovery a choice? Someone who is debilitated by a mental illness and is suffering from self sabotaging behaviour. Does he have the choice to stop at any point or there is a much stronger force acting upon the mind!?

When it comes to the spectrum of actions, your actions can come from three places: behaviours, habits and impulses.

Behaviour are actions that happen fully voluntary and require you to be conscious when you exercise behaviour. Like for example right now you could stop reading this post and do something else instead with relative ease. You have full control over your behaviour, so you have full choice to stop or start any new behaviour you want.

Habits are a way to save energy, after you have been exercising the same behaviour frequent enough, you will adapt to that situation by disengaging your conscious part of the brain. Think for example when you drive, in the beginning it took your full attention and concentration, the more you practiced the more relaxed you have become and you gained the ability to multitask like keep a conversation or listen to music while you are driving.

Habits are composed out of three components: a cue, a routine and a reward. The cue can be any perceived stimulus through your senses that will trigger the routine. After the routine starts your mind switches off and becomes almost unaware about what you are doing. If the routine is interrupted and you are not receiving the anticipated reward at the end of the habit there are strong emotions of anger and frustration that generally take place. Your choices in regard to habits is to either indulge or be abstinent. Because if you stop after the reward started your emotions will overwhelm you and make you complete the routine in order to receive the reward at the end. This is why addicts can't simply learn to be moderate, if you are an alcoholic your choice is either to continue to drink in excess or to stop entirely. In order to practice abstinence you will have to avoid the cues that trigger the routine of your bad habits like stop going to PUBS and night clubs or stop seeing certain people don't keep any alcohol in the house etc.        

Impulses are part of your emergency survival strategies, they are explosive amounts of energy released  over short periods of time. It is like pressing the emergency button in a train, it is going to bring the whole thing to a hold and stop all the momentum in order to keep you safe. Your choice when it comes to impulses is almost zero, after all that's the purpose of an impulse is to trigger an emergency protocol where you just act instinctively without choice in order to maximize your survival chances.

All your bad habits are formed starting from a negative impulse, like someone made you get really angry repeatedly and you start expressing your anger in a very unproductive way, or you felt very sad for a relatively long periods of time and you used alcohol to cope with your sadness.

The impulse is the cue of your bad habits, if in order to practice abstinence you have to avoid the cue that triggers the routine of your bad habit. In order to stop the bad habit you have to stop the impulse, this is why rehabilitation programs that focus on abstinence are mostly unsuccessful. It is not enough to stop the bad habits and replace them with good ones you also have to deal with the cause of the chronic stress that made you develop them in the first place.     

In what to have faith if you can't have faith in God

According to the XIX century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead". As we progress and evolved we became more objective, empirical and scientific. For a lot of us the concept of a deity becomes less and less plausible.

But religion is not just some silly thing people used to believe in the past it actually played an important role, it gave life purpose and helped us deal with though times and death etc.

Looking at religious philosophy it is more of a matter of separating the useful from the crazy. There are some seeds of truth in religion, you don't want to throw the baby away with the bathwater. So then the problem becomes what to keep and what to disregard and whit what to replace the crazy. The bad is there simply because we don't have anything better to replace it with.

Faith is important because it gives you a general direction to walk in life and to some degree protection from negative outcomes. If you can no longer accept the concept of God because it is massively speculative and impossible to prove, that an invisible man lives in the sky and is pulling all the strings, for which I can't blame you.

There might be tempting to abandon all the rules and principles and become a spiritual pirat. To live a relatively selfish and undirected life without guidance where you prioritize yourself. When you do this you are basically replacing the role of God with yourself.

If you are in a relationship and you prioritize yourself you are basically a narcissist and your relationship is going to be to some degree dysfunctional. If you prioritize your partner you are a week dependent person that doesn't maintains his boundaries and again you are going to find yourself in a dysfunctional relationship.

This is why you need something to put in front of the both parties, you need some higher than yourself and your partner principles. There are values that are higher than a human being, like honesty for example. It is a higher value because human can't fully embodi, even the most integral and virtues man ever lived, lied from time to time.

So if you are having an argument and instead of prioritizing yourself or the other party with whom you are arguing, you prioritize truth. This means that instead of trying to win the argument you just try to find out the truth which might make you lose and you will have to apologize and offer retribution if it is possible, simultaneously it means not to cave in if you know you are right.

There is no guaranty that things are going to work out for the better if you are honest, this is why it requires placing your faith that if you are honest with other people things generally work out. Sometimes they won't, sometimes things get worse before they get better while other times things resolve easy and almost instantaneously.

By placing your faith in a higher value you hold yourself to high standards which gives you the benefits of living to those standards, while simultaneously gives you protection from the negative consequences that would come in to your life if you wouldn't live to high standards. The same way people who believe in a God expect to receive favors from their God and protection against adversity.

When you hold yourself to impossible standards like honesty you will always fall a little short, you might get temporarily lost and need to return back to those values. The same way God test the faith of even some of his most loyals followers, when that happen you simply have to return back at holding yourself to higher standards than yourself and you will stop to suffer.