So the main question is what constitutes equilibrium? Religious texts tell of a few people who had the capacity to hold their own on sheer strength of belief. Jesus Christ and Buddha displayed a high degree of belief in the innate goodness of man. However bad a person’s actions or lowly the background, they were accepted into the fold. Emotional control and focusing on a purpose far beyond the self are important aspects of equilibrium.

If we focus on the personal qualities embedded in these people, we are better able to understand the perspective they wanted to share with mankind. A lesser mind would have baulked at bearing the wrath of the king and an entire populace or leaving the luxuries of royalty to live a life of seclusion. These great beings walked and worked among people who did not at first understand the importance of the message being shared. In times of adversity, these men retained their calm. The calm prevailed and gave them the strength of knowing to forgive the traitor who sat in their midst. There is, then, a superior mental frame at work here. Does this mean that only ‘holy’ men are blessed with the quality of equilibrium?

Inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs and others who follow seemingly impossible or even stupid dreams are examples of people who possess equilibrium. The ability to believe in a dream or larger intent is not within the realm of all people and cannot be understood. The larger group of people may try to bring a person who looks too high or far away to their own level of viewing the world.

The person who retains calm in the face of angry criticism is displaying emotional control. We display equilibrium when we are in control of ourselves in a situation. A fractious child who is distracted into controllable behaviour is being managed with equilibrium. A boss who quietly apprises a team of subordinates of a bad situation is seeking to maintain equilibrium by avoiding an emotional display. A team member may display anger in an effort to get an important point of view across. An angry reaction to a sharp rebuke is an effort to bring equilibrium to a situation. Children may shout back at their angry parents in an effort to voice their view points. Through this emotional outburst, the younger person is trying to bring an internal sense of equilibrium in the face of the strength of parental wrath. The younger person fights back in order to be better equipped to face the conflict. The maintenance of equilibrium does not deter the presence of emotional reactions but equips the person with the strength to remain calm in the face of different forces working simultaneously.

Let us return to the case of Joanna and consider an alternate line of thought. Joanna is a devout Christian who has considered the tenets of her religion. She is undecided about her path and has considered becoming a nun. Her parents believe she should experience life in its fullness and want her to enjoy life and hopefully settle with down with a suitable person. They feel she is an especially talented person who will not find fulfilment by turning her back on the world. As she goes along, she finds that a lot of people are like her, on a quest of some sort, albeit at different stages of understanding. Some seem oblivious to this while others are acutely aware of it. Joanna decides to take up a job and is easily accepted as a part of the group though there are many who contest her religious leanings. Sometimes she is irritated by their obvious inability to see what is so clear to her. She is undeterred and listens and debates as they try to argue and occasionally denigrate her beliefs. At the workplace, she comes in contact with a colleague who finds ways to unsettle her. Joanna gets to know that this colleague is responsible for presenting false gossip and incorrect facts about her to her superior. She is very hurt and takes a day’s leave. She considers her options and the next day approaches her superior and clarifies the situation without bringing her colleague’s name into it. Later, when she is required to send important information to the same colleague, she does so unhesitatingly.

In a way it was now possible for å new conflict to enter the stage, but since Johanna has established more confidence in herself, she manages to resolve the conflict without letting the feelings of soreness and infringement corrupt her way of handling the situations at hand. She manages the situation in a mature manner, and she will not allow for her colleagues inappropriate statements to affect her quite so much. She ignores it, and then she is able to take hold of the situation, but this time in an orderly manner that does not add up to further conflict and a kind of social warfare in the workplace.

As time goes by, she realizes she would like to work on helping homeless and abandoned people. She starts to think of ways to make this intent come true. She is contemplating the study of social research so that she can work with agencies that help the people she wants to focus on.

Here we see the forces at work, the family, her personal beliefs and her intrinsic strength. The situations are similar but since she is working on the strength of an internal belief system, she is undeterred and unmotivated by the opinions of people around her. At times, she is rattled but this does not affect the strength of her beliefs.

Now, it is possible to weigh whether Joanna is likely to get cooperation from her colleagues and the thoughts she has about their behaviour towards her. Her professional approach makes it possible for her to change the way her colleagues view her behaviour without her having to say much. Her choices are driven by what she wants to do instead of what a few others think she should do. When faced with conflict, she feels pain but finds effective ways to quickly settle the situation by calm confrontation and exhibiting her focus on a larger purpose. Her capability to consider the larger purpose of the work being done allows her to foster cooperation.

Thus, her mass (mental equilibrium) is determined not by overt signs of confidence but by way of acceptance of her strengths. Situations of conflict and harsh words will and do appear though she prefers to sort herself out before approaching these situations. Another approach could well be an immediate confrontation with the colleague without an emotional display or quietly going about work in a professional manner that displays the falsehood about the rumors that are being spread about her. Sometimes, a short burst of anger helps bring a situation to normalcy. She may choose to adopt this mode if she feels it will alter the situation without making her lose her sense of equanimity. Her choices will be determined by inner acceptance and belief of what she wants to do rather than an effort to impress or please the people in her life.

The theme of this article is a continuation of the theme from the first article in this series: To build a confident personality part 1.

Sondre Risholm Liverød &
Shobna Subramanian Iyer
WebPsychologist.org

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Kenneth Gergen (1991) is a prominent representative of social constructionism, and he understands the self or personality as socially conditioned. In other words, he believes that human being is entirely a product of social interaction. Professor of Philosophy Dorte Marie Søndergaard (1996) from Denmark takes on a similar approach when she talks about multiple selves. The latter means simply that personality is context dependent and thus altered in different social contexts. Most people will probably recognize themselves in this social theory of individual development. A man is never quite the same at work with his colleges as he is home with his wife, or out partying with friends for that matter. This diversity in our sense of self might sometimes create a kind of identity problem. Who am I, really?

Newton’s second law of motion tells us about the effect of net force on a body. Net force is understood as the sum of all forces acting on a body. Thus, force is equal to the acceleration produced per unit mass. The law goes on to clarify that the higher the mass of the body, the lower is the acceleration. Let us try to view this from the angle of the working of our mental frame. The mass is the core determinant of the effect of random forces that will work on us in this journey of learning. The higher the mass the less is the disturbance on the object from its path.

The object is the individual and the forces acting on the object refer to the impressions of the world at large. Mass refers to the weight of the individual’s view of the self (mental equilibrium) and acceleration is determined by the action of force on the individual.

Complex? Let us clarify this and make it more concrete.

Joanna (the object) comes from a strictly Catholic background. She believes in her innate goodness and tries to live up to this image of herself. At home, Joanna’s belief in herself is reinforced as her family is openly appreciative of everything she does. Her neighbors view her as a ‘good girl’ though she doesn’t have many friends. At work, however, Joanna is seen as a little uppity, unable to get along with co-workers and difficult to get cooperation from. The last time she tried to take a copy of a paper that her boss wanted, the machine did not work. When she asked for help, a few colleagues looked at her blankly and returned to their work. She was delayed at the copier for almost a half hour and her boss was livid. She later understood that a new copier had been placed at the other end of the office and none of her colleagues had bothered to inform her. Joanna states that she doesn’t really care about her colleagues, after all she is there to work for her boss. Secretly, she feels miserable at the work place since she feels that her co-workers gang up on her every time. This is a belief that Joanna has had since the time she was in school.

Joanna has a boyfriend who wishes she would loosen up a bit and hang out with him and his social group. Joanna avoids going but believes this is against her religious tenets and decides against it. She seriously believes she should join a religious order and dedicate her life to God since other people do not relate to her.

We now have a fair idea of the pull and push forces acting on Joanna – her self-image, the expectations of her family and her drive to live up to them, the likely behaviours that she is exhibiting at the work place and with her boyfriend and the feelings generated by these interactions.

Mass is determined by the equilibrium of an individual, as in the value a person places on the self regardless of achievements, statements of acceptance or rejection by others and any other external forces that come into play. The higher the mass of the object, the lesser is the effect of the force.

We are able to gauge that some forces acting on Joanna are likely to be stronger than others. Some forces will be positive to her while some are negative. Her equilibrium will determine her reactions and the direction she moves in.

Now, let us consider a scenario where the forces acting upon her change. Joanna is called in by her boss and given the feedback that there has been a serious complaint about her. She failed to provide timely information to a colleague, which resulted in a customer service delay that was escalated to the head of the company. Joanna starts to explain but is told that her attitude is a cause for concern and she needs to enter a discussion with the HR Manager. Joanna is devastated; she wants to explain how she has been harassed by her colleague. Her superior does not want to know her side of the story and she expects that the HR Manager will not give her a chance to speak either. As she expects, the HR Manager explains the need for building and maintaining a rapport with colleagues and to take a larger view of her actions.

Joanna meets her boyfriend whose immediate response is, “Obviously they don’t like you! You believe you are walking a few feet above the ground, but haven’t any achievements to show for it. Huh! If you were so great you would be somewhere else, not working as a customer service flunky.”

Joanna is stung. Her boyfriend proceeds to tell her he wants some time to reconsider their relationship. “I don’t know if I can have a long term relationship with someone who wants to be a nun and believes that this makes her superior to everyone else. You ought to check what attitudes religion recommends.”

Now, we see the action of forces working on Joanna’s ‘mass’. When she returns home and recounts the events to her family, they rally around her. Her strong need for acceptance is satisfied by her family. The extent of equilibrium determines whether she analyses why she is facing unpleasantness in the workplace and choose remedies or chooses to blame her colleagues and the entire company as unfair. It determines for her whether she needs to consider changes within her behavior repertoire or continue as she has in the past and change the circumstances by finding a new job.

The stronger a person’s beliefs about the self the better able are they to adapt to new situations. One person may lose his job and turn to alcoholism while another takes it as a learning and chooses a new line of business or a new way of working. The first displays signs of low equilibrium while the latter is the opposite.

Emotional and mental equilibrium is something we earn if we dare to look at our own faults and examine the situations where we run into conflict with other people. To look for errors in others are generally not a constructive strategy, even though the counterpart may have the main responsibility for the conflict at hand. It is only our own reaction we have the possibility and ability to adjust. If we can encounter people with openness, avoid aggressive or passive aggressive behaviour, try to control our automatic defence strategies when we feel pressured and take lessons from problematic events, rather than ending up in bitterness, we can call ourselves psychologically wise or emotionally intelligent. People with this kind of abilities rarely end up in conflicts and they usually have a high degree of satisfaction in life. They also have a superior psychological equilibrium (a solid mass, i.e. solid confidence) that makes them resistant and able to handle strong forces that affect them without losing its steady course through life.

The theme of this article will be continued in next article: To build a confident personality part 2. Please consult this article for further discussions about personality development.

References

Gergen, Kenneth J. (1991). The Saturated Self. Basic Books.

Søndergaard, Dorte Marie (1996). Social konstruktionisme – et grundlag for at se kroppen som tegn. I: Sociologi i dag, nr. 4, 1996.

Sondre Risholm Liverød &
Shobna Subramanian Iyer
WebPsychologist.org

The WebPsychologist.org asserts copyright over this article and all articles containing this copyright declaration. This work is not in the public domain. This work is under Copyright protection © 2010 – WebPsychologist.org and its owner Sondre Risholm Liverød. All rights reserved. Publication elsewhere, copying or other distribution of the text is not allowed without approval from WebPsychologist.org. Please contact us if you have any questions or want to discuss an agreement in relation to this material. Please assert our full copyright declaration for more information about terms of usage.

It may be hard to meet people in grief. How should you behave and what should you say? This insecurity can often lead us to say something that does not fit, or at worst reinforces the sadness, for example, in a funeral, although our intention is to tread support with well-meaning words. To offer your condolences means that you feel the grieving, but it is sufficient to say my condolences? Everything will of course depend on the situation, but in this article we will attempt to reflect some of those situations where people meet in grief. Maybe it can give some general guidelines on how you relate in such contexts?

The old lady sat slumped on the floor. The body of her 30 year old son lay next to her. Accidental death the record stated. A stream of shocked visitors had started flocking to the door of her house. The visitors spoke among themselves in shocked whispers. Somewhere a child started to cry.

The old lady moved towards her son and stroked his face. She laid her head on his chest. Tears streamed from the eyes of the visitors. Suddenly one person spoke up, “They did a post mortem, tell her not to touch him below his head.” The shocked bystanders glared him into shutting up. The lady heard him as the weight of the words slowly dawned on her.

The funeral was completed and people started returning to their homes. A man came to the side of the old lady and wept openly. “Don’t feel bad,” he said, “you were cursed with the bad luck of outliving your son. What can you do?”

She stared at him blankly. A year after the death of her son, the old lady remembers these two people who spoke to her. She remembers and weeps because the statements compounded the pain of her loss. In an effort to express feelings or thoughts, it is possible to unwittingly cause more pain.

When we go to a family that has just faced a tragic loss, we are trying to express solidarity with the survivors. The surviving family may cry openly, say things incoherently and behave in a manner that seems abnormal. Often we are moved to saying something since we feel the grief too. At times like this, we may say words that will unwittingly cause pain.

Communities across the world have laid down rules for helping the grieving family overcome the loss and move on with life. The overriding purpose for these social rules is to ‘Be There’. Feel the grief, participate in ceremonies, lend a helping hand, listen to the feelings that are expressed are all a part of being there. It is not necessary to speak; in fact it is not advisable to do so.

Death of a loved one creates a deep sense of sadness that no words can provide a salve to. The void of grief can remain for many years, in some cases lifelong.

What to do

Accept that you are unaware of what to say and remain silent.

If the death has occurred due to an accident or sickness that necessitates limited physical contact with the body, hold the grieving person to pre-empt excess contact. Be available to provide support to elder people from the immediate family.

Sudden death can lead to shock among the family members. Keep a family physician informed so that emergency aid can be provided.

Avoid any reference to the dead person as a body or make a reference to the suffering that the person has undergone. The family may talk openly about it, listen to them.

If you have undergone a similar experience, you may find yourself inundated with past memories of your own; let the tears flow. It is acceptable to stay in a corner and grieve. Control the need to express your feelings in this situation.

If the person who has passed away was ailing and elderly, the acceptance of death may or may not be easy. The elderly spouse or partner may be alive, be sensitive to the fact that a close bond has now snapped. Realize that though the family seems to accept the loss in a rational manner, there is unspoken pain. The appropriate attitude to adopt is that of a listener or of a helper.

When the rituals are completed

The return to outward normalcy may happen within a few days after the passing of a loved one. This does not mean that the person feels fine internally. It is appropriate to initiate contact and let the person or family know that you are available for them when loneliness or grief gets the better of them. If the survivor is an elderly person who is alone, a personal visit makes a difference and makes it possible to talk about the loss.

Friends should take turns to help a common friend especially through the first year after the passing away. This varies depending on the attitude of the survivor towards death. Some people accept death as a transition and are quickly able to return to a state of normalcy by setting new routines that keep them occupied and in good company. Others tend to brood about the loss and require support of a few friends who understand and accept the feelings. Sometimes, the person slumps into a state of being unable to accept the loss and return to the business of living. In such a case, professional advice is required and help must be provided in setting up new daily routines.

Sondre Risholm Liverød &
Shobna Subramanian Iyer
WebPsychologist.org

The WebPsychologist.org asserts copyright over this article and all articles containing this copyright declaration. This work is not in the public domain. This work is under Copyright protection © 2010 – WebPsychologist.org and its owner Sondre Risholm Liverød. All rights reserved. Publication elsewhere, copying or other distribution of the text is not allowed without approval from WebPsychologist.org. Please contact us if you have any questions or want to discuss an agreement in relation to this material. Please assert our full copyright declaration for more information about terms of usage.

Isaac Asimov recounts a chance tune wafting from a music shop that suddenly transported him to a time in his teenage and brought a host of happy memories along with it. Events that have led to emotional trauma come in with a similar rush and force a seemingly normal person to relive a past experience. What is it that causes this rush of memory and emotions of elation or depression?

The working of memory

Joe Dispenza explains the working of neural connections in creating lasting memories. He explains that the brain processes incoming information from the five sense organs. When an event causes a reaction that leads to concurrent physiological changes like rapid breath, tightening of abdominal muscles, mouth dryness or clammy palms, the brain registers the reaction. This is a form of learning.

The mind falls into a set pattern of thought. From the moment of awakening, the brain instructs us to carry out a set pattern of activities and somewhere deep within we can hear a continuous barrage of seemingly inane conversation. The inane conversation may be repetitive and leave us unaffected. In some cases the chatter is so severe, that the listener is unable to continue normal work because of it. New events or non-routine activity that set the brain into a new pattern of planning make it possible to overcome the chatter.

What is this continuous chatter that goes on in our heads? Does it go when the pattern of activity changes? For instance, if the normal habit is to wake up and put the water to boil for a cup of tea and is changed by a new action of opening a window and gazing at the sky for a few minutes instead, does the chattering stop? Is there a physiological connection with the constant barrage of verbosity that continues in the head? Can the introduction of a new activity to break the routine change the trend of thought?

Old conflicts that have been left unresolved, anger that continues to fill the mind, negative comments that we have given credence often form the base of the chatter. “This is going to go wrong”, “Never do anything right”, “Always makes mistakes” and similar thoughts that lead to an unpleasant churn at the physiological level and fulfil the words as they repeat in our minds. The distress of fulfilling the negative comments that fill the brain further strengthen the words and reactions and install an irrational sense of fear from moving ahead. The negative outcome becomes proof of the very quality that we try to overcome.

Sometimes, the mental conversation comes in the way of regular activity, the person moves to the refrigerator to take out a bottle of water but forgets what the frig was opened for. A quick retracing of steps quickly brings back the memory of the need but what is happening here? The mental conversation has overtaken the conscious brain and has brought a state of ‘absent-mindedness’ or ‘forgetfulness’. This is a thought habit that must and can be changed with a set of habits that bring the conscious brain’s commands to the fore.

Adopting a new view

As our brain follows the habit of so many years, we must understand it as an organ that is merely reproducing what it has been fed. If you have spent years hearing and unwittingly agreeing to other people who provide negative inputs about you, your brain has been fed potentially disastrous thoughts. As life takes you along its path, you start to feel that you are responsible for things that go wrong. Consider this, you have always been told that you are difficult and stubborn. When you enter the stage of young adulthood, you go through a series of failed relationships. This serves to prove the statements that have been said. You decide to adopt a new strategy, one of hiding your personal views when you enter the next relationship. This is not a lasting solution.

Instead, accept that the relationships were life’s ways of teaching you about yourself. If you look at a relationship as a sort of instruction manual you will start to see behavior trends that appear. Maybe you are impulsive, easily manipulated or maybe you keep your feelings under such tight control that your partner feels you are not serious about the relationship. If you look at this with a clear mind, you will find that your responses to situations are being driven by the thoughts that you carry.

Feed your brain appropriately

If you look at thoughts as brain food, it is time to change the brain food that you have been having. Make a conscious decision to watch your thoughts. When you are given a new assignment, do you say, “Oh no!” Acknowledge the thought and tell yourself “I can do this, I just have to plan it well.” It is similar to getting yourself out of eating something that is bad for your health. You change your eating pattern. But how do you do it? Some people remove the food from their homes completely to control the consumption.

The brain works in an insidious manner and quietly leads you along well trodden paths. Be conscious of what you are thinking at different times of the day and jot it down. Murphy has strongly recommended this habit as a way to track self talk. Let the words flow as you write the context and associated feelings and the words in your head. Now consciously change the negative tone and tell yourself this is just a situation to be managed. You may need help of a friend or a good listener to help you get your feelings at ease when you do this since conflicting thoughts lead to conflicting emotions. The brain will try to continue with the food pattern it is familiar with and will take time to adapt to the new food. It will try to attract you to new habits that lead you along the same thought route.

Do not allow your brain to direct you, learn the art of being conscious and lead the way.

Bibliography

Dispenza, Joe, 2006. Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Your Changing Mind. HCI.

Murphy, P.M., 1992. Loneliness Stress and Well being, Murphy PM, Routledge.

Sondre Risholm Liverød &
Shobna Subramanian Iyer
WebPsychologist.org

The WebPsychologist.org asserts copyright over this article and all articles containing this copyright declaration. This work is not in the public domain. This work is under Copyright protection © 2010 – WebPsychologist.org and its owner Sondre Risholm Liverød. All rights reserved. Publication elsewhere, copying or other distribution of the text is not allowed without approval from WebPsychologist.org. Please contact us if you have any questions or want to discuss an agreement in relation to this material. Please assert our full copyright declaration for more information about terms of usage.

Loneliness is not synonymous with being alone. Loneliness is not an emergency situation you have to overcome or get through. Loneliness is a state of mind that affects all people, and the trick is to manage this state without falling into anxiety, despair, depression, fear or discouragement. But how does one do that?

Joel and Mary have been married for 22 years. It was a case of true love. They have two children, both of who have now left home and stay in different cities. The home has changed from filled with sounds and laughter, to what Mary describes as ‘lonely and dark’.

Joel was back at work as usual. Mary has been feeling down and out. The pain in her joints seems to be a permanent feature and getting out of bed is grueling. It has been a month since her son, the younger one, left but Mary has not been able to overcome the deep feeling of sadness. His room bears his presence though it is completely bare. She had not felt this way when her daughter had left and wishes she could feel the sunshine again.

When the kids were pre-teens, Mary stopped working in her full time assignment as an accountant since she felt this was a stage for providing guidance. She looks back at those days fondly. The kids were happy for her presence when they returned from school and she was happy to take small assignments to keep the money flowing in. As the children grew older and more independent, Mary took up larger assignments. She had been busy and she loved it.

The recession came up and she found her earnings dwindling as the companies she worked for first chopped the work-from-home assignments. Around the same time, the kids got admission to university and were gone before she had got used to the idea of their absence.

Joel on his part knows what Mary is going through but he is working longer hours than usual trying to keep his job down. Now that Mary and he are growing older, their medical expenses have started increasing.

Mary knows that Joel still cares about her, it is obvious in the little things he does for her. But, she feels he does not want to talk to her, maybe she is not interesting now. When he returns home in the evenings, he watches television for a while as he drinks a cup of coffee. She tries to make conversation and he listens, but her conversation topics are always inane. He sits late into the night on his personal laptop while she lies awake with her memories.

Mary has started feeling that she doesn’t know anything. At a recent party, Mary found herself standing with a group of old friends and feeling that they were all ignoring her. Joel’s presence doesn’t help because of his work. The children call up once a week; they seem well adjusted and don’t seem to miss her as much as she misses them. Physical pain, loss of work, the work pressure her husband faces and the move of the children seem to have come together and have caused a feeling of disorientation.

Loneliness – that universal human feeling – can do things to the most rational among us. Loneliness that comes along with a feeling of despair can be a very difficult phase that affects us mentally and physically.

Murphy relates a mental predisposition to the perception of loneliness. He describes a thought frame that considers the self as inferior, uninteresting and similar self-descriptions as the preceptor to extreme feelings of loneliness. The person creates a base of self deficit and assumes that others view this deficit in the same manner. The feeling intensifies to a point when the person is unable to view others with an open mental frame. Others are better, they are happier, they have friends because they are interesting are a set of assumptions that people suffering from loneliness make about others in their surroundings.

Sometimes this thought frame leads to alienation of the self from situations that could otherwise lead to bonding. Loneliness occurs as a constant feeling throughout life. Children fight and come away from play until friends return. Celebrities are known to be very lonely despite the adulation that surrounds them.

Butler and Hope have elucidated the effect of stress on the body. Symptoms like stomach upset, heart disease, asthma and arthritis are aggravated under moments of stress. Therapeutic treatment alleviates the pain but it returns as the stress resurfaces.

Loneliness is set off by latent thought processes and in turn aggravates underlying physical conditions that worsen the feelings of the moment. The cycle needs to be broken using a number of measures.

How should Mary manage her feelings? Firstly, she must treat the pain using the methods she normally does. An alternative is to get busy within capacity. The untidy house will worsen the feelings that Mary is undergoing. She will find herself feeling much better once the house has been tidied. A very important activity is to set up a daily routine that involves some time to contact at least one friend or person outside her family. This is better done when she has returned to some level of activity so that she is better able to consider substitute to utilize the time that has crept in with the reduced workload.

Chronic pain is recognized to be a stressor (Caudill, 2008) and stress management techniques are recognized as a way to control stress and reduce pain. Mary will probably benefit from meditating on a word or phrase for as long as she can. Since she is currently having negative thoughts that are likely to crowd her mind, she should use a chant that she can hear. This will increase her sense of well-being.

Getting professional help in identifying her trend of thought, self hurting presumptions about how she is perceived by others and effective ways to capture and alter her trend of thought.

Loneliness may not leave but with effective mental techniques, Mary will know how to guide her mind when thoughts assail her. She will learn to accept that loneliness is not a situation to overcome but a state of mind to manage.

Often we are not aware that we suffer from a negative thought patterns, but instead living life in a depressive mood. We try to understand this mood by looking for negative qualities within ourselves or look for the negative things outside of ourselves. I am worthless and uninteresting, or I do not have any friends and suffers from a too bad economy. The most important thing Mary does is to accept that loneliness is not a situation she must overcome, but a state of mind that she, and a lot of people with her, must learn to manage.

Sondre Risholm Liverød &
Shobna Subramanian Iyer
WebPsychologist.org

The WebPsychologist.org asserts copyright over this article and all articles containing this copyright declaration. This work is not in the public domain. This work is under Copyright protection © 2010 – WebPsychologist.org and its owner Sondre Risholm Liverød. All rights reserved. Publication elsewhere, copying or other distribution of the text is not allowed without approval from WebPsychologist.org. Please contact us if you have any questions or want to discuss an agreement in relation to this material. Please assert our full copyright declaration for more information about terms of usage.