Guardian angel spiritual protection from the day of birth

Tag: emotional

  • White Knight Syndrome Compulsive Need To Help

    White Knight Syndrome indicates those people who feel an almost compulsive need to save others, help them and solve their problems. This attitude can be traced back to abandonment, trauma, and unrequited effects. To this, we owe the intense ability to get in tune with the pain of others. And this even if the help they offer is not always required.

    Most of us know at least one person who tries to help others, someone who instead of the heart seems to have a radar with which to detect the needs of others. Sometimes, as we well know, that help can lead to intrusiveness. It can even make you feel uncomfortable or deny you the opportunity to be responsible and solver of your problems.

    Other times, however, we are grateful to that sincere and always devoted altruism. However, we do not see the background of these dynamics, of this need. White Knight Syndrome describes part of the population made up of invisible individuals, profiles that hide emotional wounds and emotional knots that have never really been unraveled.

    Characteristics of white knight syndrome

    In fairy tales, the rider on the white horse is the one who saves the girl in danger. In real life, this folklore figure can be a man or a woman and his highest aspiration is to engage in love relationships with wounded or vulnerable people. This bond will allow him to feel useful, to heal the other, to reaffirm himself, and make his partner stronger.

    But wounded people rarely manage to heal, often their wound grows, and they become the mirror on whichever greater trauma and suffering are reflected. They are frustrating attempts at redemption, which cause inevitable unhappiness. Here is what lies behind White Knight Syndrome and the following explains this behavior.

    White Knight Syndrome triggering causes

    A past made up of abuse, authoritarian parents, or the lack of a healthy and loving bond during childhood, are the factors that most often give rise to this syndrome. Having lived through different experiences of abandonment both at the family level and on the part of the partner is usually a trigger.

    Characteristics of the white knight

    The rider is moved by the fear of feeling that emotional distance again, of being hurt, betrayed, and abandoned. These are particularly fragile people, with a high tendency to frustration, to feel offended or disappointed by often insignificant actions. They manifest low self-esteem and great insecurity.

    They have little empathy, they cannot distinguish the emotional reality of others from their own, and here they are often subject to emotional contagions. They do not know how to set limits and therefore identify themselves in those who suffer, in those who are worried or frightened, but often with their attitude they intensify the suffering of others.

    They tend to build highly dependent love relationships. They want to be everything for the other person. They try to be that fundamental support, that source of daily nourishment, and that other indispensable half. Such a situation ends up resulting in unhappiness and a high emotional cost for both parties.

    There is only one way to heal from White Knight Syndrome, by saving yourself first. Facing the most difficult journey of all, the one in which you have to face your own inner world, your own demons to understand and defeat them so as to illuminate the darkest corners.

    Finally, he will have to make the bravest gesture of all for a white knight, ask for help from others, turn to an experienced professional.

    This syndrome was described in 2015 by the psychologists and professors of the University of Berkeley Mary C. Lamia and Marilyn J. Krieger.

  • Positive thinking proposes techniques to improve life

    Positive thinking proposes techniques to improve life

    Positive thinking proposes techniques to improve one’s life and manage one’s mental states through conscious and intentional control of one’s thoughts. Positive phrases and affirmations are used to counteract unpleasant thoughts and change one’s attitude towards life.

    In recent decades, this current has been followed and developed by different strands of thought – from positive psychology to the most heterogeneous new age currents. The risk, however, is that this concept goes to endorse a certain widespread belief in the mainstream of today’s society, where we are all called to always be positive, smiling, optimistic and active. It is forbidden to be sad, it is forbidden to stop or linger on negative thoughts or moods.

    Self-help manuals continually encourage us to improve, the current consumer society continually offers us easy and immediate solutions to distract us from ourselves (shopping, going to the gym, eating food, or watching others do it, etc.). In short, everything seems to suggest us not to think, put aside sadness and discomfort and replace them with pleasant activities or thoughts!

    Eliminate Negative Thoughts?

    Let’s try to ask ourselves first – why should we eliminate negative thoughts? The question is not so trivial, that human suffering is something that is expressed through recursive and repetitive patterns is known history. Freud himself had defined this mechanism as repetition compulsion, that is, the tendency of human beings to re-enact symptomatic, behavioral, or relational patterns that are dysfunctional and cause subjective suffering.

    Apparent self-sabotage through which it would seem that people tend to retrace the paths that perpetuate their pain rather than seek new ones. And then, it would be natural to ask ourselves, why not break this vicious circle by forcing ourselves to think about something positive? The rest will hopefully follow.

    In reality, things are not that simple and these techniques often only work in the short term. First of all, because forcing oneself to think about something positive while sad, disheartened or distressed, can be a sort of paradoxical injunction for the mind. As if, in other words, we were imposing on ourselves with willpower something that can only happen spontaneously.

    Friends and relatives of those people who in some moments of their life have gone through a depression know this well. Encouraging them to get up, to go out, or even just to get out of bed has achieved nothing but the opposite effect. Forcing ourselves not to think about something reinforces that thought that we would like to eliminate because we try to change with willpower something that is not voluntary.

    Positive thinking – when it’s a trap

    There is another aspect that should warn us from positive thinking at any cost, sometimes positive thinking can be harmful and sustain dysfunctional states of mind. An example is the state of euphoria in which people who unconsciously deny depressive suffering by covering it up with manic excitement find themselves.

    Their optimistic thoughts contain a certain amount of unreasonableness, excessively grandiose self-esteem, and poor judgment that can lead them to undertake risky and potentially harmful initiatives for themselves or others.

    Another example is the false optimism that connotes the thoughts of those who are addicted to gambling, whenever they suffer a loss rather than stop they continue to gamble, why? Because, ignoring the nature of their condition, they are convinced once again that the win is now close, that now it is not enough to recover all that they have lost previously. Instead of acknowledging the reality of loss, they convince themselves that they are close to redemption.

    Sadness, fear, anxiety, discouragement, and others are all emotions that cause an unpleasant state of mind, but they are also useful in making us recognize a source of danger. To let us process a loss, to signal to us that the choices we are making are perhaps not as right as we thought or that within us there is a source of emotional suffering that we must listen to and deal with. If we pretend to use positive thinking to disavow all this we risk distancing ourselves from ourselves.