Sunday Journal, 520 words
Compulsive about Compulsives
By Dalton Roberts
IPS Features
One
year in my journal a friend and I were whining on each other's shoulders about
being taken advantage of by those we had trusted. He had befriended a homeless
person who secretly ran up a high phone bill talking to her husband who was in
jail for beating her. He could ill afford such a high phone bill. He
acknowledged her compulsion to be abused by her mate and to use anyone she could
use to help him and herself. He said our problem was trusting compulsives and I
agreed.
After
thinking about it I had to face the face that we were also compulsives. Our
compulsion is to be rescuers. We need that feeling of rescuing others to feel
complete. It's self-betraying behavior we picked up in our pasts.
So
before you criticize someone for using you, look at thine own self and see if
there has been a tendency to trust the untrustworthy, to help the ungrateful.
The homeless don't often get homeless without making some horrible choices.
People seldom get in destitute financial condition without a long pattern of
money mismanagement. They cannot be helped without surgery on their
decision-making equipment and they have to make the decision to seek such
surgery.
I
am not telling you to not care for people in need. I am telling you not to help
anyone with a pattern of compulsive abuse and self-created hell unless you like
to be abused and create a hell for yourself.. Don't be compulsive about helping
compulsives.
RECOVERING
ROBOT
A
musician friend showed up at a recording session a few years ago with a tee
shirt that read, "Recovering Catholic." Since then I've seen many
variations of it. Recovering Republican, Recovering Democrat, Recovering
Baptist, Recovering Nazarene, Recovering Presbyterian – even a Recovering
Psychiatrist.
What's
wrong with life that so many of us are in recovery? Some Catholics, Republicans,
Democrats, Baptists, Nazarenes, Presbyterians and psychiatrists don't feel they
need to recover. They are happy being what they are.
It
all boils down to this: whatever is drilled into us is at some point either
accepted or rejected. If it is accepted, we sort of merrily move along in our
"drilled" roles. If it is rejected, we go into recovery and must find
a replacement for our drilled-in beliefs.
The
one thing for certain is that most of us are robotized in our formative years by
parents, teachers, preachers and others we see as authorities. All of them have
installed their tapes in our heads. The tapes contain much wisdom as well as
bias. We become recovering robots by carefully reviewing the entire tapes,
adopting those parts that harmonize with our understandings and experiences and
rejecting those parts that don't harmonize.
The
two mistakes we most often make are adopting or rejecting the whole tape without
full review.
All
progress humankind has ever made or will ever make comes from recovering robots.
Only those who reject the bad stuff, keep the good stuff, and add their own
unique stuff can possibly lead us on to higher vistas of consciousness and
achievement.
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