This is http://www.essayz.com/a8901221.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %NEED GIVE LOVE ADDICT DEPEND SALVATION EVIL GOOD 890122 Some people always seem to be in need of help, rescue, salvation, assistance, and compensation for their difficulties. They seek what they need in what others are willing to give dishonestly. Other people always seem to need to be giving help, rescue, salvation, assistance, compensation for others' difficulties. The two kinds of people fulfill each other's peculiar needs in perverse ways which do not entail genuine love or personal integrity. Their relationships tend to lack honesty and openness about their transactions. All such people lack authentic self esteem and they seek to acquire it by their transactions of getting and giving in manipulative ways. Their personal transactions are techniques to try to acquire what they believe they lack. Their techniques fail because they are confused about what it is that they need. Techniques are useful only for achieving well defined goals. Techniques are no good for redefining goals in ways which transcend one's own most fundamental paradigm. The Way of Love transcends the way of the addicts who are constantly trying to get others to give them fixes which they feel others should give to them. The Way of Love transcends the way of codependents who are constantly trying to achieve self esteem by giving fixes to addicts while not taking care of their own integrity. The Way of Love is not a compromise between the way of addicts and the way of codependents; it is not a point on a spectrum which is linear. The Way of Love transcends the similar assumptions of both addicts and codependents. Addiction and codependence are twin diseases which are rooted in similar assumptions and convictions. It is hard to distinguish between the twin diseases in many contexts. One person may behave as an addict in one context and as a codependent in another context. Efforts to recover from the manifestations of one of the twin diseases may lead to manifestations of the other twin of the pair. People become diseased in part due to confusion about the Way of Love, the nature of Love, the nature of responsibility to self and others, the nature of salvation, and the roots of personal and communal integrity. It is a perversion of love to sacrifice one's integrity in encouraging another person to be compulsively dependent upon one's sacrificial giving in an unbalanced way. Integrative Love does not encourage others to fail to take good care of themselves by teaching them that they can manage to get all they want by pulling on the strings of immature conceptions of love. Such dependence does not promote either personal or communal integrity. It does not entail real giving, acceptance or gratitude. It is not balanced or mutual in any fundamental way. Christian religions have all to often failed to clarify the nature of the Ways of Love. Too often religious leaders have encouraged codependents to take care of the church and its leaders through sacrificial giving which undermines personal and communal integrity. In such leadership religious leaders have often acted as addicts who are dependent upon codependents to take care of them. The addictive relationships have been respected and the structure of the relationship has not been seen openly and honestly for what it is. The Christian Churches have played a role in creating the context in which people enter into addictive and codependent relationships. Preoccupations with abstract beliefs, rituals, buildings, and personal salvation have often obscured disintegrative personal and communal relationships which are addictive/codependent. Personal salvation which does not entail transcendence of addictions and codependence is not authentic. No system of beliefs, rituals, buildings and personal routines can provide salvation while obscuring the nature of addictive and codependent personal lives and relationships. In authentic salvation there is open and honest discussion about the nature of addictive and codependent living into which human are so prone to fall. To fall into addictive and codependent living is to realize the nature of hell. To transcend addictive and codependent living is to realize the nature of heaven. There is nothing very original about the estrangement which separates addicts and their codependents from themselves and each other. Their estrangement is their evil and their sin. Authentic salvation entails reconciliation and a return to open and honest discussion about the dynamics of addictive and codependent living. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================