CALL-IN TUESDAY NOV. 26. Ozanich Book, Chapters 16 & 17: Type-T Personality and Goodism

Call-in Tuesday Nov. 26, Steve Ozanich Book Chapters 16: “Our Painful Personality: and 17: “Goodism.”

This Tuesday, November 26, the call-in discussion group will be discussing Chapter 16 (Type-T personality) and Chapter 17 (Goodists) in Steve Ozanich's book The Great Pain Deception starting at 9 pm Eastern Time. It lasts an hour, sometimes a little longer. Phone lines will open half an hour early so you can talk to hosts and early callers. Here's how to join the discussion (for detailed instructions, visit www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Connect ):

• If you're connecting by phone, dial 1 347-817-7654 and when prompted enter the pin code 183 11 499 pound symbol.
• If you're connecting via your computer (Fuze Meeting), go to www.fuzemeeting.com/fuze/app/48fb7aa8/18311499 and follow the instructions from there.

For more information, visit www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Call-In_Peer_Discussion_Group.


One day I overheard my best friend say “You are not only a beautiful person, you have a beautiful personality.”

He said it to his wife, and she did have a beautiful personality. But Betty (not her real name) had it despite a lifetime of feeling inferior to her younger sister. Their mother had told Betty many times that she loved her sister more, even once telling her, “I wish you had been a cat. I would have drowned you.”

Betty finally had a mental breakdown while she and my best friend were married, but neither she nor her husband nor anyone else knew why. It took being in the mental ward of a major hospital for nearly a year, and daily sessions from a psychiatrist, to uncover the truth of a traumatic childhood and young adulthood because of rejection from her mother.

She had TMS, but at the time no one knew that was what her psychological condition was. Only talking about her childhood brought the relief she needed. She found that, went back home to her husband and three small children, and lived a happy life, finally, and with a beautiful personality. She never had harbored jealousy against her better-loved sister, and was even able to forgive her mother. Years later as her mother was dying halfway across the country, she flew to be with her in her final days and was at her mother’s bedside in her final moments. She had years earlier been able to forgive her.

You and I also are beautiful people and have beautiful personalities. Only, sometimes, as Steve Ozanich writes in Chapter 16 of his book, two things may happen. One, we may not believe it, or some part or parts of our personality may cause us pain. That can come if we are expecting too much of ourselves. People with perfectionist personalities, for example, can be a pain to everyone around them including themselves.

I love one of my nephews, but he has a dominance personality that turns off his siblings and others around him. I call it a “Know-it-all” personality. Mack knows best. He knows everything best. No wonder he’s almost fifty and still a bachelor. One date with him telling a girl she must think what he thinks, and she must decide that’s enough. Steve says “The Type T can be a stubborn mule.”

Steve says that the slowest healing TMSers are “stubbornly resistant to accepting new beliefs and extremely recalcitrant to change as to how they see themselves, only partially accepting TMS, clinging to medication and other excuses for their continuing symptoms. They hold strongly to their own ideas of what is wrong with them, their own concepts of healing and perfection.

Steve elaborates on Dr. Sarno in Healing Back Pain when he explains that the type of personality that gives people the most trouble and pain is the Type T personality. That person was often abused, molested, or abandoned, and have experienced early separation trauma. “They crave the approval of others.” That fits Betty to a T, if you’ll forgive me saying.

Others with T-Type personalities are “goodists, hyper-responsible, worriers, emphatic, competitive (although many would deny it), and on-confrontational,. They fear making mistakes. They possess low self-esteem and high-tension, but function reasonably well in society. Steve says they have, to varying degrees, repressed anger problems. They unconsciously use pain or other symptoms to control situations that enrage them. They are the perfectionists of the perfectionists. (A boss I work for is that type of person. Nothing is ever done perfect for him, or faster, yet he is not really the perfect worker or employer he thinks he is. He makes mistakes which I find and correct, without telling him, of course. Repressing that has caused me considerable pain, but hey, I want to keep my job, don’t I? So long as I identify the pain being caused by TMS in repressed anger, I keep the pain under control. But he lives with his perfectionist personality and, dare I say it, it is not beautiful.

Steve also says that the overwhelming personality type of the TMS sufferer is the introvert. And introversion is often masked by extraversion. So the guy who wears a lamp shade at a party may really wish the lights went out and didn’t shine on him.

Steve says, “Perfectionism is born in childhood along with the first layers of the persona. It can follow the need for parental approval or acceptance that never comes. The child feels that if he becomes more perfect, the angst will cease – rendering rejection an impossibility.”

Children want their parents to love them, but they also need boundaries of behavior. However, the fear of making a mistake for fear of parental reprisal is just as problematic as not having the parent engaged at all in parenting. The child may suffer from a too easy-going or too strict parent or guardian. The child needs to feel security, which is found in a middle-ground of parenting.
Steve concludes Chapter 16 on Type T personalities by writing that one of the more common traits that lead to perfectionism is that as young children they were taught it was bad to show anger. They were told that it was not good, so to be good they developed a method of hiding anger inside the body. But if the person knows she isn’t being true to herself, she may cope by becoming detached, which also detaches her anger. He cites Princess Diana as an example. Who should hide her anger from the world but a princess?

In my biography, Princess Diana (Lucent Books, 2000), I wrote that Diana’s girlhood was lonely. Her parents were in an unhappy marriage to the extent that they hated each other, and she was reared by a succession of nannies. She felt guilty for not having been born a boy since her father wanted a son and heir. He finally got one, after she and her two older sisters were born. When she was six, Diana looked out a window of the family mansion and saw her mother leave in a car, never to return. She said she never forgot her mother’s leaving. A child of divorce, guilt, feelings of being abandoned: all pure TMS. Her father becomes heir to a family fortune, estate, and title of nobility which thrusts her into becoming a Lady while yet a teenager. Soon she was a young woman of high British society who was merely another poor little rich girl from an early life of TMS.

Biographers have described Diana: “The unhappiness behind her beautiful mask was becoming more evident as her true self began struggling with her persona. To grow is to shed the mask that was once worn in order to please others, as the wrong assumptions come from a right person. In attempting to infinitely please, the TMSers finds herself feeling alone.” Princess Diana became a Bulimia sufferer in her own unhappy marriage. She tried to be the Perfect Princess and self-sacrificed to become “The Peoples’ Princess.” We love her for it, but she paid a heavy cost for her perfectionist personality. If only she and those who loved her knew about TMS and its pain begun by repressed emotions in early childhood that were later triggered in what she called a three-way marriage.

Chapter 17 is titled “Goodist-itus – Inflammation of the Low Esteem.” That refers to those who suffer TMS symptoms because they strive to be the best person ever created, but that takes them into conflict with the person they really are. They try their hardest to be like the perfect people they think others are, and probably are not, and that pursuit drains us of our potential, increases our anxiety, and intensifies a feeling of helplessness.

Goodists often feel they need to live like those they think are more perfect than they are. This often comes from low self-esteem. It’s all part of the T type personality and those people tend to let themselves be used by others since they don’t have the control over their anger to say no. Sad to say, these people are usually very dependable but are used by undependable people in order to conserve their own time and energy.

On the other hand, there are those who intentionally remain undependable so as to avoid being asked to help in work or anything. They run from anything asked of them, or told to them. These people often are socially challenged and resort to drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.

Steve says we should not live to please others and need to learn “when good is good enough.” Being accepted by others is not that important in life. It’s much more important to accept ourselves. “Those truly free in spirit are the happiest and healthiest people. They understand that they are not perfect.”

Be perfectly happy with being imperfect. It will help relieve your TMS symptoms.

We hope you will join the call-in Tuesday and share your thoughts and experiences on being a Type T person and a goodist.

 

Walt you did great again. That is a lot of good work. I'm always interested to see what I said.

The guy with the lampshade example is perfect.

One of the great things I felt Dr. Sarno showed us was a specific personality type, of perfection. Many people cannot sense they are indeed perfection-chasers, and they often deny it. But they are detail-success-afraid-to-fail people, that can't sense it within themselves. Several have said they were shocked to find out they were perfectionists. The vision we have of ourselves may not be true due to superego. We feel we are one thing, when we are really another.

Personality is the most important factor in our health, not genetics. So it was important to explain how the personality is involved in health, for good or bad.

Steve

 

Thanks, Steve. I want to be just like my dog. Annie has the best personality and she doesn't try to please me. She just wants to eat.

 

Steve, I wrote about a movie that is a great example of TMS in Pop Culture. It'll be posted soon but meanwhile, if you get Netflix, rent the DVD of AS IT IS IN HEAVEN. Absolutely beautiful movie from Sweden with English subtitles. And there's a beautiful song in it that is pure "be yourself." I include a YouTube video clip of the song and its English translation in the text.

 

At the core of Steve's analysis of the "Painful Personali-T" in Chapter 16 of the Great Pain Deception lies the Jungian concept of the hidden "shadow" part of everyone's personality no matter how nicey-nice they try to appear to the external world:

"Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is . . . . If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections . . . then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow"

- Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

Deep down inside it's a tremendous burden, as Steve remarks,

"to be nice all the time. This is the purpose of the aphorism, never trust a man who doesn't drink, because everyone carries a shadow; if his shadow isn't readily apparent, then it is darker than the unthinkable. Truth has already shown throughout history, that if he doesn't possess some type of visible vice or maudlin personality - if he appears as perfect - then he owns an even darker shadow, because everyone has the cravings of his/her undeveloped self, a curiosity for pleasure that must be squashed by the moral superego in order to satisfy and protect others" p. 215.

Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, and, most obviously, Adolf Hitler come to mind, leaders with perfectly crafted personas that embodied a god-like chastity, omniscience and omnipotence but who, at the same time, had very nasty, vindictive private selves. Is this why all totalitarian systems contain self-destructive, murderous impulses?

Fortunately, TMSers are too anxious to be thought of as "good" to really let those murderous and self-destructive impulses out of their dark subterranean cages in the unconscious, but they do create a burden that expresses itself in TMS pain symptoms.

What's that the British Romantic poet William Blake said,

"Unacted desires create hobgoblins of the mind"?

 

Bruce, you wrote really great about the shadows.

I have a dark shadow that follows me closely. My dog Annie.

 

I think knowing if we are a Type T is crucial in knowing what to watch for and then knowing about the Goodist side is very important. For instance, when I began to heal I still had this extreme goodist thing going which can make you think folks are out to judge you at times if your not good enough. So I had a friend to write me and let me know I was being very good to much and maybe it might help me to acknowledge that, I did and it made a world of difference.

I basically understood what to change and as I worked toward being more mindful of my goodist side I learned to be more outspoken and free. It allowed me to go further with my knowledge and not to worry if someone wasn't going to be happy if I messed up. I was already a good person and I really didn't think I was. After learning to control this side it helped me to become whole, more in balance and I healed. Good stuff

Bless you

 

Talk about a secret, dark, Jungian "Shadow" personality!

http://www.sfgate.com/news/politics...derails-fledgling-GOP-congressman-5005702.php

At the same time he's calling for mandatory drug testing for food stamp recipients, this conservative Republican Congressman was obviously nursing a secret drug addiction that was propping up his public political persona. I think this illustrates what Dr Gabor Mate is talking about in his book on addiction, In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, where the force driving drug use is not the drug itself but a specific addictive personality type that pervades our narcissist, self-made, consumer culture. I would think you could find hundreds of similar examples in the papers every day. I think everyone remembers the Bible-thumping radio preacher in Louisiana a few years back who spent hour after hour raging against vice on the airwaves, but at the same time every night he was driving around the Red Light district in New Orleans picking up street walkers and bringing them back to the church for fun and games. 'Nuff said about the Shadow Self!

 

This is a big shadow for sure, although its just another day in life. I'm sure hes having some anxiety since the truth has come out. That is really sad how things happen in that way though. Some of us often think we are the exception and we wont get caught but life is like that thought id heard somewhere.

It goes like this, if you had a window on your forehead and everyone could see what your thinking about all the time, would you think about the things the way you do now? Its all of us needing to have a common ground and knowing that we all have to check ourselves every day - thoughts are things that will come to pass, just keep thinking em ya know.

Id rather focus on the good. Although Im not perfect ive learned my thoughts are the main reason im feeling a lot better in my body right now, and in my mind. Some of us just worry to much and we dont get into this extreme of carnage but those worries have a terrible way of letting us know were not to confuse them with just being concerned. Nuff said

 

Eric, People who are really ambitious like that, longing for high office, are always tempted to overreach themselves, to become so seduced by their own self-importance that they believe they're exempt from the rules the rest of us have to obey. What's that they say about ambition being blind? And it's obvious he wasn't just a casual user, buying in quantities like that. His whole political career was a false front fueled by a bad drug habit. Bet he doesn't make a miraculous political comeback. Talk about a guy followed around by a Shadow personality. I guess you'd call it the high psychological price of trying to maintain an immaculate public persona that's out of sync with la sauvage pensée, what the French structural anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss calls "The Savage Mind".

 

This reminds me of two people I knew who were compulsive buyers.
I knew a man who loved beer so much, he had a bedroom piled high with cases of cans of beer.
I guess he was afraid the beer industry was going to stop producing, so he wanted to make sure he
would have a reserve supply.

An uncle of mine used to stuff snuff up his nose. He bought little cans of snuff and when he would finish one,
he would keep the empty cans. He stacked them up in piles on his enclosed porch, from floor to ceiling and
along the walls. I never could figure out why he did that.

My mother had a thing about shoes, as lots of women do. If she saw a shoe she liked, in a shoe store or in
a catalog, she would buy it in every color they had. I guess that was to match outfits she wore.
She came from poverty so having the different colored shoes must have made her feel rich, at last.

 

Herbie, what chapter or chapters will be discussed in the December 3 call-in?

 

Those obsessive behaviors and the aching emptiness behind them in your three examples, Walt, are three excellent examples of addictive personality traits, traits, I might add, that permeate Western consumer culture and are no doubt spreading to the undeveloped world as well. This may hint at why chronic pain rates are higher in the developed world? But in the Philippines, Ismelda Marcos had her closets stuffed full of hundreds of expensive shoes too.

 

Chapter 18-19 will be good for Dec 3 Walt

 

Walt, thanks for the movie recommendation...I've put it in my queue.

 

One example of the Jungian shadow from literature that came to mind was Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray

As the narcissistic Dorian sins and sins again, he remains ageless while Basil's portrait, hidden in the attic, changes to reflect the depraved nature of Dorian's soul as he continues on his rake's progress to ultimate self-destruction. Another version of the classic Faustian bargain where you sell your soul to Satan in return for worldly knowledge and power. I guess that's what Hitter, Stalin and Chairman Mao all did on the world stage. That coke addicted congressman was small beer to those guys. But they all wanted power no matter how high the moral price.

I think William Blake once noted in his Aphorisms of Hell that “the walls of whorehouses are built with the bricks of religion”. Much in that!

Perhaps the Picture of Dorian Gray belongs in Steve's list of examples of TMS from pop culture since the Wilde's novel has been made into so many movies?

 

Hi guys,

SO sorry for the delay in posting the recording of the Nov. 26 discussion group. Here it is. As always you can listen to it using the audio player below, or you can download it as an mp3 by right-clicking on this link (or the link below the audio player) and choosing to save it to your computer. Happy listening!

Check out Walt's thread for info on tomorrow's discussion group here.

Click here to download the mp3 audio​