IMO, if I am enjoying healthy thinking, most of my thoughts will be positive about myself and others, which will lead me to have more positive feelings and in turn, to behave in more positive ways, in general.
To me, if a person is "aware" of causing harm to others, and "enjoys" or even seems to "enjoy" causing that harm; if that person "plans" their acts, without letting their "knowledge of right and wrong" direct them morally (indicating a lack of conscience imo); when they appear not to show and do not express remorse (indicating a lack of conscience imo); and when they fail to seem to consider the consequences or to "care" about the effects of their acts (indicating a lack of conscience imo); when a person behaves in such a manner,
especially if they do so over and over and over again..........
Well, that tells me that that person is
not thinking in a very healthy way at all, or with any healthy regularity. There has to be something wrong in the thinking such a person is experiencing. Their thinking is.....
diseased.....or sick. It is not a healthy state of thinking.
If that perosn had diabetes or typhus....they would have no control over those disease processes. It would not be their fault. So why do I think they have any control over their diseased thinking? How can that be?
They are making choices based on unhealthy thoughts.The cause of their behaviour is nothing magical, nothing satanic, nothing in their true being or of them. It is their thoughts that are the evil sickness, not them, not the person.
It's a concrete thing---something solidly wrong....... with their thinking. Not with them...but with what is going on in their mind. Their thoughts are ill.
To explain this separation of person from thought, feeling, behaviour:
In parenting our children, we strive to do this. Our child misbehaves and we say: "I love you and you are good but I don't like your behaviour..."
We try to teach the child that the behaviour is wrong but that they... are good and that we love them, even when they behave badly. We do not accept their behaviour, but we do not for a moment, stop loving them.
We may feel ..upset with their behaviour but we still love them, just as much as ever before. It is not the child we are upset with, the person, it is their behaviour and it is their behaviour that we strive to correct. As people, we accept our children and think of them as good. We want to help them learn how to behave nicely, not to injure their feelings while teaching them how to behave well, if we are parenting well.
This is so foreign to us when we grow up in an abusive situation. Regardless if that abuse is openly agressive or incidious. Chances are high that our abusive parents said: "You are bad" not even "you behaved badly". They did not tell us how much or often, if ever, that they love us and want us to learn and why it is important. They did not express their love while attempting to correct our behaviour (if indeed we even were behaving badly at the time- which now, as adults-- is questionable).
I don't know if there is a way to help sick thinkers see this or not and in essence, to begin to effect a cure for their unhealthy thinking (especially in certain sicknesses eg. n-ism). Nor do I know if those sick thinkers are aware of their sick thinking and loathe themselves (but I suspect, sometimes, that they do).
So far, the theory is that there is no cure but I try to remember that the "sport" of psychology is the pitching and batting around of ideas and theory, and that we can prove virtually anything by creating the correct study, and then noting the results. It is not a proven, beyond a doubt, bible truth, absolute factual science. Psychology is very much like a sport in that some ideas are ahead of others and the score can and does change, as time advances. An example of this is that homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness and now, it is not. All of that information is wiped form the books and that idea.....is now a dead theory.
I have personally experienced the effects of the behaviour of sick thinkers (as have you) and my own thinking has been non-too-healthy sometimes too. I have seen people with unhealthy thinking come to a true realization, face their own "demons", and effect change. I have done so myself, so I know that it is possible and realistic to have this hope sometimes.
It's a matter of me taking the anger, the fear, and all of the other negative feelings I have that are produced in me, when an unhealthy thinker acts in ways that generate those feelings in me, and putting those feelings out.....releasing them (ultimately) or, at least, setting them aside, until I am able to release them in appropriate ways...that allows me to remind myself that...
unhealthy thinking can be caused by a number of factors and can be corrected sometimes...but the awareness of that messed up thought process
MUST be made
FIRST.
And the
desire to change it into a healthier thought pattern/process/thingy
MUST come ultimately come from...the diseased/sick/unhealthy thinker, which may, or may not ever occur, depending on a whole whack of factors.
I can't instill that desire in the sick mind but I can patiently offer insight and hope for eventual positive effect or....I can accept defeat and not try at all to help because I understand that that is probably not going to happen (eventual positive effect), for that particular person.
But to label them as evil.....in my mind....seems to generate many negative thoughts and then feelings come that are negative and it does
me no good. It causes me to stay in a less than healthy state of thought and to heal a lot less. I choose to think of my children, and people in general, as good, and sometimes, of their behaviour, as not so good. I choose to think of the disease as evil - not the person. The mind as sick and causing the person to behave badly and to suffer too. They have malignant thoughts that never end. What torture that must be! What blackness!
If those people were unable to act correctly because their minds were sick due to some physically obvious cause...say one of the lobes of their brain was missing (a totally silly hypothetical example
), would we then say...the person is mentally deficient? How do we
know all the parts of an n's brain are working right?
The question has been asked: Is N-ism a disease or evil?
I ask then: What is n-ism? What are we asking about? Behaviours or physical problems? Unhealthy thought patterns or broken parts? Are they thinking healthy as indicated by their behaviour? Or none of the above?
Whether they are born or made is the cause and whether they are sick or not will determine how we deal with the problem.
I used to believe in evil.
It made me feel really, really angry.
Now, I believe in disease and I have more empathy that way, for the person who is stricken. I feel less anger than before and I see the possibility of hoping for better studies, more batting and pitching of theories and ideas, more physical pin-pointing, in order to try to win against the disease.
This has been healthier for my own personal healing and the only possible way to effect change or find a cure that I can see. I accept people--not necessarily their behaviour.
I watched my father in law experience "progressive dementia".
He voiced his terror to me one time and I felt so loved and trusted when he did that, and such helplessness to ease his fear. I could only muster validation, which was better than nothing, I guess. What could I have said to help him????
I'd be bloody terror-stricken too--somewhere deep inside--if all I could see was blackness and I'd be terrified of saying so--I imagine.
I don't know...thank God.
As children growing up around unhealthy thinkers, we do not know about disease and it's malignant gifts, nor are we being taught much positive at all. We only know how it makes us feel and mostly those feelings are negative. We cope by various mechanisms.
Now that we are adults, we can choose to learn more positives and to implement them into our lives and we can hope for improvement and work toward healthier thinking.
Please hear nothing harmful and no negative tone and imagine no negative or manipulative intention in this very long, long post.
I write all of this in order to share what has helped me and for any chance that it may help someone else.
s
