Right now you have every thing you need to be perfectly happy. You appreciate your self and your unique parcel of talents.
You express a balanced appro priate response to inner and outer stimuli.
Distorting Paradigm
Specialness
Maladaptive Cognitive Schema:
You feel sad because you have become separated from your essential nature. You feel in complete, inauthentic, lack ing, and disoriented. You be lieve you must do something to make yourself special. You feel abandoned, left be hind . You see yourself as an aristocrat in exile, apart from the main.
If
you make your self special, then maybe oth ers will remember you and love you.Passion:
Envy
Maladaptive Emotional Schema:
You envy others who seem to have something you're miss ing. You envy others' relation ships and happiness and natu ralness .
You have exaggerated, dra matic mood swings.
Area of Avoidance:
Ordinariness
You fear the common and ordinary. If you're ordinary, you're nobody. The ordinary is boring and you want to be exciting. To exist you need to stand out from the crowd.
Defense Mechanism: Introjection
Instead of simply grieving, letting go of the past, and getting on with your life, you carry your suffering and loss around inside of you. This melancholy is a familiar companion, and it makes you feel special. Yearning and longing are constantly in the back ground of your experience.
How the Distortion of This Style Developed
• You originally felt close to a strong parent (often the father),
then that parent went away (perhaps because your parent died, or your parents divorced, or the parent became busy at work, or a sibling was born, or the parent withdrew for some other emotional reason).
•
You felt abandoned and interpreted that experience to mean there was something wrong with you or you weren't good enough-otherwise you wouldn't have been left behind.•
Then you tried to create yourself into aspecial
person that theparent would notice and love. You came to believe that if you were special, then others would pay attention to you and wouldn't leave you.
•
Your sense of tragedy, loss, and suffering may come from some original experience of being abandoned.•
Your mood swings may come from the alternation of a parent being available to you or not or of being kind or cruel. When the parent was there, you felt good about yourself andup.
When the parent wasn't there, you felt bad about yourself anddown.
•
You felt expelled from the garden of love and are now longing to be readmitted.•
You received attention if you were sick or suffering; other wise you weren't noticed.•
You got attention and your identity from living at the edges, at the extremes.•
You came to believe that being ordinary or calm meant being nobody or being boring.•
You felt alive especially when you made yourself feelintensely.•
Living intensely or living in your romantic world made you feel more special and important than living in the world as it is.•
You found you could compete successfully in the arena of style and flair.What You Miss as a Result of the Distortion of Your Style
•
The spontaneous expression of your thoughts and feelings.•
A balanced, modulated life style.•
Intimacy; being close to others without fear of rejection of be ing abandoned.•
The sense of fulfillment and satisfaction with who you are and what you have.•
The sense of being connected by your common humanity, be ing a part of the whole instead an island.•
Really having what you want vs. yearning for it. Paradigm Shifts You May ExperienceUnder Stressful Conditions
A
Shift to the Low Side of Your Own Style
•
You may channel your feelings into your body and become physically ill instead of letting your feelings energize and guide your actions.•
Your mood swings may widen, with your lows becoming lower and your highs higher.•
Instead of being assertive and expressing your anger cleanly, you may become either passive-aggressive and suffer, com plain and blame more, or you may become aggressive and vindictive and vengeful.•
As you feel worse about yourself or consider it's your fault that things aren't as you would like them, suicidal thoughts may preoccupy you more. Suicide may have several functions: it makes you special; it stops the suffering; it gets even with others; it lets them realize what they've done to you and how much they'll miss you.•
You may move away from people and isolate yourself more.•
You may throw yourself into work and become hyperactiveto avoid dealing with your real issues.
A
Shift to the Low Side of Style 2
•
You may avoid dealing with your own needs and wishes and attend more to others' needs. Instead of being sensitive to ward yourself, you become sensitive toward others.•
You might flee into service instead of healing yourself.•
You may repress your feelings instead of expressing them directly.
•
You may become more manipulative instead of asking directly for what you want or taking action to get what you want.•
Your issues around dependence and independence may become exaggerated. You might become more possessive or more aloof.
•
You may say, /IWhat's the use. I'm beyond repair, so 111 help
others."
•
You could become a suffering servant, a martyr, a sacrificial victim.A
Shift to the High Side of Style 2
•
You can genuinely care for and serve people and get out of your self-absorption.•
You can accurately empathize with others.Paradigm Shifts You May Experience Under Relaxed Conditions
A
Shift to the High Side of Your Own Style
•
You realize you are alreadyoriginal.
You don't have to be ec centric or make yourself special. You search for and find the beloved within you vs. outside you.•
You can be spontaneous and let yourself go instead of being so composed.•
You can find the extraordinary in the ordinary.•
You accept your unique parcel of talents and don't compare yourself with others. You use your envy to help you locate and appreciate the values in others and to find those values in yourself.•
You pay attention to your real feelings vs. the exaggerated feelings that come from the excitement of your moods. You move from an addiction to romance and fantasy to action in real life.•
You stay in the here and now and realize that right now you have all you need to be happy.A
Shift to the High Side of Style 1
•
You take an action-oriented, problem-centered approach. You think about what you can do about the problem vs. bemoan ing your fate. You switch from a passive victim stance to be ing an active agent. You don't just yearn there, you do some thing. Put your show on the road instead of overrehearsing.•
You focus on one feeling at a time. What are you feeling now?And what do you want to do about it? You stay specific and resist generalizations and dramatizations. You stay with the facts.
•
You maintain a sense of proportion, balance, equanimity. You don't exaggerate your response or heighten the stimuli. You do exactly what the situation requires.You do your work ob jectively.•
You can say,1/1
amgood'
or 1/I'm good enough
as I
am' instead of
1/ I'm not good enough."
You reown your own strength, goodness, and wholeness.•
You can get in touch with your anger, focus it, and use it to get what you want instead of turning your anger against your self, feeling depressed, and believing you don't deserve or can't attain what you want. You ask directly for what you want and state your needs directly.•
You realize that realisticisn't necessarily philistinistic.•
You can commit yourself to being in the world even though itis flawed and unfulfilling. You contribute to something you believe in.
A
Shift to the Low Side of Style 1
•
You may throw yourself into work and become hyperactive.•
You may get messianic about your fantasies and become emo tionally overinvolved with your idealistic principles. "Imust
do my life's work!"