Chapter 12 Therapy for Life

Chapter 12

Therapy for Life

   The easiest way to commence this great journey through life is first to determine your own particular temperament type. This is best done by concentrating on the positive traits, as opposed to the negative traits. The reason for doing it this way is because at the beginning of this process of discovery, denial will soon creep in.

   This denial is related to the negative functions that are at work in each individual person and denial does hamper progress. The first part of the journey is like being loaded up with a hundred heavy suitcases, but as acceptance of the truth sets in, one by one the suitcases are flung aside and the journey gets easier.

  

The Best of Melancholics

   In their better moments Melancholics tend to be soft hearted, kind spoken idealists. They are deeply introspective which leads to lots of soul searching, constant self analysis and a great desire to be perfect in every way. They plan well. They pursue deeply satisfying pastimes and pleasures and not only do they criticize others they are extremely critical of themselves.

   Although they are not outwardly emotional, Melancholics can be greatly affected when they are surrounded by beauty and they can be moved to tears if they find themselves or others in distressful situations. This is the reason they have a propensity for becoming very fine stage and screen actors. Many a Melancholic has saved a play or a movie from total failure just by performing in the starring role.

   If Melancholics are able to subdue their need to control other people, they can be very helpful, kind and caring individuals who excel as compassionate health care professionals, gracious hosts and intelligent business owners. Melancholic business owners who enjoy success tend to care more about their employees and they want to encourage them to rise to greater levels of achievement. They have a great sense of style and tend to look more fashionable than their choleric, sanguine or phlegmatic counterparts.

The Best of Cholerics

 Choleric men and women are extremely dependable people. Their word is binding, they usually do not break their promises and they tend   to lean towards having high moral values. Cholerics strive to be the best that they can be in every way and they are firm but forceful, whenever there is a tough situation to be handled. In unpleasant situations such as seeing a child being bullied or an animal being abused, a Choleric is usually the first person to jump in and fight for the rights of the victim, as opposed to the other three types. They make good revolutionists in oppressive regimes.

   Of the four temperament types, the Choleric is the one who has the highest self esteem. This is based on the fact that they know their own strengths and when they are in peak condition, they tend to be strong and courageous. Cholerics are practical people who are not prone to sitting around daydreaming therefore they make good workers and are reliable friends. Many Cholerics are drawn to Hollywood and their candid approach to acting has produced some notable stars. 

The Best of Sanguines

   Everybody likes Sanguines. Life brightens up immensely if there are Sanguines in the workplace. Sanguines are usually kind to senior citizens, children and adults alike and they genuinely feel emotionally bonded to the whole human race. These fun-loving, talkative people make friends easily because their ready smiles and friendly hugs beckon others to join them in whatever pastime, sports or business enterprises they are engaged in.

   Sanguines easily forget past, uncomfortable situations which makes them the most forgiving of the four temperaments. They like to give hugs and kisses, they are touchy feely kind of people and they love to be in social situations where they can make everyone feel wanted.

   Sanguines are the most lovable children. They soak up physical affection whenever it is offered and they do smile a lot. But like sanguine adults, sanguine children crave company. It’s not unusual for other children to gravitate towards Sanguines in the school play yard, and they often end up becoming the teacher’s pet because they can be such agreeable children.

The Best of Phlegmatics

   Phlegmatics make wonderful friends. They are faithful, gentle and kind and they are always there to give sympathy to a suffering soul. They make very good listeners and they are genuinely nice, non aggressive individuals who prefer to relax and enjoy the peace instead of getting involved in strenuous activities. Phlegmatics invest an overabundance of trust in those whom they call their friends and they tend to keep their friends for life because they are not easily offended. This great capacity for being thick-skinned enables Phlegmatics to act as buffers between warring forces.

   Phlegmatic people make the best ambassadors because they think deeply and logically before they make any move or before they say anything forceful. In life, these people always choose the path of least resistance. They avoid getting into arguments, they are eager to please and they take care to avoid hurting other people’s feelings.

   Lucky is the person who can depend on a phlegmatic friend. They are extremely loyal, always willing to help and they tend to put others first at the expense of themselves. Phlegmatics make agreeable companions tending towards being followers rather than leaders, but they do have sound common sense if anyone is intelligent enough to listen to their counsel. Spontaneous wit is one of the most endearing qualities that will draw people to their side in any given social situation.

Confessions are good for the Soul

   In order to master the main job of shedding unnecessary mental baggage on this journey through life, it is entirely necessary to go to confession, but that doesn’t mean going anywhere at all. It is irrelevant whether a person is attached to any particular religious belief or not. Once the temperament type has been established, it is relatively easy to shed all the negative traits of that temperament type, but the oxymoron is that it is so easy it becomes almost too difficult.

   Human beings tend to complicate the issues at hand. Difficulties first arise in the act of acknowledging all those negative tendencies inherent in the type. But when the penny drops, and the person develops a great desire to rid themselves of these heavy, mental anchors, all it takes is to own the negative trait, desire to be set free from it and then develop patience for the passage of time and the powers of the Universe to start the cleansing process.

   This cleansing process can take days, weeks, months or years depending on how adamantly each person clings to the known detriment and how much the person wants to keep it. It is always difficult for people to give up what they are so used to. It can turn out to be a case of I’m stubborn and I like it or so what if I have a bad temper, I think I’ll just keep it.

   People always think that they have to do something. They think that action speaks louder than words but in this case, action drowns out words. A good example of trying to do something to effect a cure can be seen in the effort to become drug or alcohol free. These kinds of struggles can go on for year s and the results of these struggles cannot be relied on because so many people have relapses. The easier way is to set your mind on just being something, as opposed to trying to do something.

   Being something is first acknowledging the inherent negativity i.e. weakness, lack of courage, stubbornness, vanity or whatever it is that is causing distress. The next step is to welcome the genuine desire to be free of whatever negativity is causing the problem, and the third step is to remember to mentally turn away whenever the problem behavior tries to raise its ugly head and take over again. This constant mental activity produces great and permanent results.

   But the greatest struggles in life are most often generated by fear and anger. Cholerics and Sanguines display their anger on the surface and their fear is hidden behind their blustery countenances. Melancholics and Phlegmatics display their fear on the surface and anger lurks deep in the recesses of their minds. It is well to note that the quantity of anger that has taken root in any person is equally balanced by the same quantity of fear and vice versa.

   Great quantities of anger and fear are usually but not always the result of human interactions and this involves some deep digging into the past. It becomes necessary to review all those past relationships that generated feelings of fear and anger because these past situations keep getting relived in a never ending pattern. The place may be different, the people are not always the same but it is as if the same play is being played out in life over and over again, with exactly the same results. Something needs to change and because you cannot change other people you must make an effort to change yourself.  

   Anger and fear are interchangeable. It is not at all unusual for persons who are controlled by fear and anger to be completely unaware of these strong currents of emotion running through their lives. These constant emotions become the norm and people have no idea that their ordinary way of feeling is dysfunctional and it will take a lot of hard work to be set free in order to taste life like a normal person.

   Sometimes it is necessary to seek help from others who are brave enough to point out that (a) you are an angry person or (b) you are a fearful person. A great way to start the healing process is to create a Genogram. A Genogram is a diagram that shows who the people were, what the people did and where it all happened. As always the experiences of the child carry the strongest message.  

   In Genogram example (a) illustrated below, the ‘Angry Choleric Self’ is a child who has no chance of growing up to be a normal, well balanced human being. The thick black lines represent angry relationships that filtered down from the melancholic, maternal grandmother to the melancholic mother, across to the choleric father and down to the choleric middle child. The angry choleric father vents his anger on both the eldest child and the middle child. This causes an angry relationship to develop between the eldest child and the middle child.

   As a result of these angry relationships, the middle child will grow into an angry but broken hearted adult who will need many years of therapeutic help in order to recover from such an onslaught. 

   In Genogram example (b) illustrated below, the “Fearful Phlegmatic Self” is another child who has no chance of growing up to be a normal, well balanced human being. The thick black lines represent angry relationships that filter down from the choleric, paternal grandfather to the choleric father, across to the phlegmatic mother and down to both the choleric brother and the phlegmatic second youngest child. The angry maternal grandmother and the angry choleric husband instill fear into the phlegmatic mother who then unloads her fear onto the second youngest child. This results in an angry relationship developing between the second youngest child and her older sister.

   By the time a person tumbles to the idea that all is not well with them psychologically, he or she either rushes off to see a therapist or tries to brush it off, tries to stop thinking about it or tries to come to terms with whatever is troubling him or her. Some people are lucky enough to have friends or spouses who will listen to the sad tale of woe about childhood abuse, sexual abuse or even emotional abuse, but this can only serve to pacify the suffering individual for a short period of time. Those inner conflicts keep surfacing because the conflicts are embedded in the person’s memory and it is almost impossible to erase them but it is possible to change your reaction to these conflicts and get them under control.

   By the time a person reaches age forty, it becomes only too noticeable that some kind of imbalance has set in. Youth is able to toss off much of the human debris that accumulates in a person’s mind but the toss off is only temporary.

   Conflict arises in the work place and at home. Feelings, which are really emotions, start to dictate and these feelings destroy each day as it comes. It might be that to all extents and purposes everything seems to be just fine, but deep down inside, the individual person knows that something is wrong. This is because the trauma that took place during childhood has never been resolved.

   This trauma is akin to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The soldier survived the war and plunged into normal life but the soldier is unable to cope with normal life because the soldier has been traumatized during the war and needs psychological treatment.

Children are traumatized by adults, teachers, other children, friends and relatives. Every adult who has suffered this kind of trauma during childhood has at his or her fingertips a way to resolve this trauma and again it becomes an oxymoron. It is so easy that it becomes difficult.

   The way to resolve the trauma and the damage that was inflicted in childhood or even adulthood is to relive by proxy every single person from the past who scarred you for life, but this time around although these people remain the same, you are the one who changes and in some strange inexplicable way, the power of the Universe is always standing by ready to help.

   This kind of therapy is not unknown in professional circles but it is frowned upon by the established medical authorities of today. Very few practitioners actually use proxies to affect a cure because this is almost impossible to carry out without having multiple assistants to help with the process.

   In a private setting a proxy kind of therapy would take time, it would be expensive and it would use up many hours of the therapist’s preparation time. But a person does not need to go for professional therapeutic help; he or she can go it alone and do the work themselves, because the work takes place in the wide arena of the world.

   To make a start, it is essential to pay attention to the patterns that keep repeating themselves over and over in your life with seemingly no logical reason. There is a logical reason. For example, if a person experienced conflict with a gruff, middle-aged choleric father, every gruff, middle-aged choleric man will seem to be just like the father with whom nothing was ever resolved.

   The human brain has within itself the ability to use any gruff, middle-aged choleric man as a proxy; a stand in for the father and a stand-in who will have no idea that he is being used to resolve a long ago situation, that he had nothing to do with.

   After establishing the similarities between the two men, it then becomes necessary to start relating to the stand-in proxy in a completely different way. When conflict arises between you as it surely will, the first mental exercise is to review your own past reactions to similar conflicts with a view to recognizing what exactly you said or did, that caused the situation to end so badly for yourself. This doesn’t mean that you were at fault it just means that at the time you were unable to protect yourself.

   Secondly a mental decision must be made to handle the next conflict in a manner that is more in line with feeling like the winner instead of the loser. The whole trick is to relive a potentially, new abusive situation that resembles a situation that took place in the past, but this time around to try to rise like a phoenix and conquer the foe.

   Sometimes this scenario must be repeated over and over again until bingo! You hit the jackpot. You won and the foe was conquered. The foe of course is not the proxy for the father, nor is the foe the father who may not even still be alive. The real foe that is conquered is the grievance, the anger and the fear that had taken up residence in the dark recesses of your mind.

   In the case of the ‘Angry Choleric Self’ in Genogram example (a), this person would need to spend many years reliving past conflicts through the use of proxies for the father, the mother and the sister, proxies who are completely unaware of the drama that they are involved in, because the drama is all taking place in the mind of the angry self.

   Because there are only four distinct temperament types, so many people in life will act just like the father, the mother, the sibling, the husband, the friend, the teacher etc., those persons who damaged the psyche of the subject at hand. Past offences that have never been forgotten must be relived time and time again, and each moment of reliving the past will become a cleansing experience that will last forever.

   But it is essential to understand that all of these conflicts that are trying to raise their ugly heads again are in fact presenting an opportunity for you to free yourself from the past. All it takes is to look at these new conflicts in a different way. By establishing in your mind that this time around you are predestined to become the victor, circumstances, words and actions will erupt around you like a prerecorded act of destiny in order to bring that belief to fruition.  

   It usually takes about five or six separate experiences of reliving the hurt that was inflicted by only one person from the past, but a moment of realization surely will come when the final proxy for the father for example, does not raise any signals of alarm but instead a feeling of amiability or even love starts to blossom in the heart of the previously wounded human being. 

   Month after month, year after year, this practice of standing firm, giving up the need to be vehemently angry or horribly afraid, will get results. A person who was defensively angry with past situations may need to learn how to counterattack and firmly state their case, while a person who used to cower in fear may need to walk away with head held high in anger, in order to state their case.

   Everyone’s case is different and everyone will find that their new words and actions will seem to resolve something that needed to be resolved in their own mind.  Determine to be a healer of yourself, fix what is wrong and never ever back down when you know that you are involved in a fight for your own sanity.

   If you have grown up with a low self image, if you have grown up feeling like a useless human being or if you have grown up feeling persecuted from every angle, know that you will continue to feel like that until you take hold of the reins, take charge of your fight for freedom and plunge ahead into the morass of strange experiences that will come your way.

   Bad feelings will sit on your tail until you start writing a new play for yourself with you in the starring role instead of the usual role of victim. You will fight the terrifying dragons of fear and anger, you will conquer the ugly demons of jealousy and envy and you will escape from the dark dungeons of hell that threaten to drag you under at every turn.

   But don’t expect all of this to happen overnight and don’t expect everyone to like you while it is happening. It really doesn’t matter what other people think, success in healing the effects of a lifetime of anger and fear is the only thing that matters.

   Many self help books, some of them offering good advice, sit invitingly on the shelves of today’s bookstores and there are some excellent, spiritually encouraging, televised programs to watch and learn from, but what is usually missing in the rhetoric is the fact that it takes a lifetime to recover from mental wounds; wounds that were so severe that they left deep mental scars that need some healing balm rubbed on them.

   But the healing balm is not always to try and be nice or to try and be good so that everyone will like you. The healing balm more often than not is to take up arms, defend yourself, but fight for what is right for you and never mind what other people think or say.

   Straightening out the human mind is an extremely difficult operation not to be taken lightly or tackled with the view of having an overnight success. The job of making ourselves into better human beings may not appeal to everyone, especially those who are experiencing success in their current lives. But the truth is that every person is just a temperament type that is set on autopilot and all temperament types need some adjustment.

   The next question would be why? Why should I bother even trying to make myself into a better human being? The answer to that question lies in the realm of spirituality. The answer is because life is short and you don’t really know what is going to happen to you after you die. It surely would be a good idea to put in some preparation for an afterlife because what you are as a person the moment before death, surely remains the same as what you are as a person the moment after death.    

   The whole world is searching for love. People in general want to give love and they also want to receive love. Love is not blind because blind love is just romance in the making, love is not a feeling because feelings are just hormones at work, but the kind of love that we really want, unconditional love is fleeting and difficult to find.

   In the long run getting a taste of unconditional love is almost always short term because our notion of what real, unconditional love actually consists of is wrong. A review of the words of any modern love song can attest to the fact that our notions about love contain serious errors. The words of popular songs are always about wanting to unite with another person, wanting to bond forever and about life being empty without having such an attachment.

   Love is none of these things. Love is actually an absence of hate, an absence of fear and an absence of self. When the self centered, self consumed ego disappears from view and the real person who has been lurking in the shadows is able to emerge, then and only then can love start to happen.

   There are so many people who inwardly protest, if they only knew me, how I really am and what a nice person I could be, if only they would let me, be me. This is the real you, the higher self who is locked in a cage and can’t get out. No other person has the key that will unlock the door of your cage. The only person who can unlock the door is you and in order to unlock this door all the inherent negativity that lurks in your mind needs to be conquered.

   This is a job that will stretch over an entire lifetime and the quantity of love that becomes available to you is in direct proportion to the quantity of negative emotions that you have been able to subdue. Real love lasts forever, real love is peaceful and real love can move mountains. People do not run away from love, they run towards love and the whole Universe is love waiting to happen. It hasn’t happened yet because the Universe is waiting for us to catch up.

   Stop believing that because you are a damaged human being that the battle is lost. The truth is that damaged human beings have already won half the battle. Their egos are already in the process of being cancelled out. We are fascinated by us, the Gods are fascinated by us and the Universe is waiting to receive us as long as we have risen up from the muck filled mire that tries sucks us down into oblivion.

   We shall survive and we shall dine with the Gods but we do not want just anyone sitting together with us at the heavenly table. We do not want to be sitting next to anyone who is self-righteous, angry, jealous, fearful, offensive, cruel or disgusting.

In the words of the great Martin Luther King who fought for equal rights for all people, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

   In the words of the greatest Nazi hunter of our times Elie Wiesel, “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness; it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy; it’s indifference and the opposite of life is not death; it’s indifference.”

 Don’t be indifferent to your own temperament; in the long run it may be vitally important because of what awaits us on the other side of life.

 In the words of J.M. Barrie who wrote the famous story of Peter Pan, “To die would be an awfully big adventure.” 

The End