Online Solutions for a Mind Virus © Martyn Carruthers

Are you entangled in toxic beliefs or painful emotions?
Do you want to manage your emotions and solve relationship issues?

During childhood, we gain most of the content and form of our future lives. Childhood delights and childhood problems define what we later consider to be normal. Many adult habits and behaviors reflect events that dominated them as children. Most people strive to remain normal regardless of how they suffer.

We help people redefine normal. We help people change unpleasant emotions and toxic beliefs. Although bonds and fixations can unite, tie, or link people into groups, teams or families, some fixed beliefs have very unpleasant consequences.

Poor advice and inappropriate guidance can damage not only your relationships, but also your ability to relate. See Mentor Damage.

The bonds we formed in childhood are rarely conscious. People who are bonded usually express their bonds through their activities and words, for example by negative emotions, complexes, arrogance and passive-aggression. Few people can even guess just how bonded they are!

In 1939, psychologist Godfrey Thomson, in Factorial Analysis of Human Ability described theoretical bonds of intelligence in loving relationships. In 1986, Sternberg, in Triangular Theory of Love, used Thomson’s theory to form a model where groups of feelings might yield experiences that we call love.

Bond Distinctions

Coaching people to replace bonds (rather than just dissociate them) requires bringing those bonds to consciousness. People who become aware of their bonds often describe a visceral sense of connection, with sometimes dramatic nonverbal changes such as gestures, posture, pheromone release (unpleasant smell), skin color, etc.

Changing relationship bonds can change mental attachments, such as psychological bonds, intellectual bonds, emotional bonds, financial bonds, synergistic bonds, altruistic bonds, etc. These bonds may be to family members, neighbors, teachers, priests etc … and also to companies, products, salespeople and actors.

We help people to change or manage:

1. emotional bonds – people bonded by shared emotions
2. sexual bonds – shared experiences of passion and orgasm
3. cognitive bonds – people bonded by shared values or beliefs
4. taboo bonds – people who avoid becoming aware of their bonds
5. unconscious bonds – people who are unaware of their connection
6. conscious bonds – people who can describe their sense of connection

Being Special – A Ticket to Disaster?

A feeling of being special can damage lives. We find that undeserved specialness as children often brings unpleasant consequences for adults. With healthy self esteem, people needn’t obsessively boast, brag or compare themselves with others. Such specialness may be called narcissism or a mind virus.

A belief in one’s own specialness can limit intelligence and choices. (The more special people believe they are, the more bonded they may be.) Many people make terrible decisions (including gambling) based on magical thinking or special child expectations. For me, specialness has many characteristics of mental ill health. Here are a few test questions:

• Do you try to remind people how special you are?
• Do you feel special only if someone compliments you?
• Do you expect special treatment from friends or colleagues?
• Will being special protect you from problems affecting normal people?

Undeserved specialness is often easy to recognize. As American president George W Bush said, “If I didn’t believe that God spoke through me, I couldn’t do my job“. Some people generalize their feelings of being special onto their families, communities or countries. This leads to ethnocentrism, aggression and warfare – systemic diseases.

People with faith in their own specialness rarely ask for coaching – or for other changework – until they have suffered a lot. These people may prefer to die, rather than change their beliefs. For some of them, feeling ordinary may be worse than death.

The feeling of being special typically follows emotional incest. Often a parent continues to support an adult child’s sense of being specialness, despite massive evidence to the contrary, negative emotions and horrible relationship consequences.

Evaluate Emotional Blackmail

Emotional blackmail includes excessive demands, punishment for normal behavior, unwanted displays of attachment (love) and withholding affection. The damage caused by this emotional abuse may manifest as a fixation or mind virus causing relationship problems and a great deal of suffering.

Some common symptoms are:

• Goals (You must help me fulfill my important goals)
• Shared obsession (You are my one and only true love)
• Guilt (I sacrificed my life for you … so you must do what I want.)
• Codependent (I cannot cope without you so you must do as I say.)
• Threats (If you don’t follow my principles, beliefs or religion I will leave)

Dissolve Unwanted Bonds

I follow a general sequence when coaching adults.

1. Goalwork and goal diagnosis
2. Dissolve any therapist damage
3. Systemic / relationship diagnosis
4. Check for and manage guilt issues
5. Inventories of emotions and beliefs
6. Identify bonds that sabotage success
7. Identify sequence and tests for success
8. Dissolve and replace unwanted beliefs
9. Resolve originating crisis, trauma or abuse
10. Assimilate split-off personality fragments (parts)

With children, I first discuss the issues with their parents, and then – with a parent present – change their bonds and beliefs using interactive metaphors (Dreamwork).

Do you want to manage your emotions and solve relationship issues?