the energetic approach to coping with personality disorders
Reconnecting people to their emotions by strengthening their spleen meridian is a key energetic approach to tackling personality disorders.
So now, let's find out how you actually do that!
Let's remind ourselves of what takes Spleen energy out, and then most of the solutions will automatically fall into place without a lot more explanation.
To strengthen spleen, the first thing to do is avoid all the stuff that's weakening it.
1) Trauma - In the secular world, the prevailing theory is that personality disorders are caused by some sort of serious traumatic experience, or experiences, in early childhood. They're right - at least partially - but the trauma doesn't have to be mental and emotional. It could also be physical (ie, a difficult birth, or a serious illness), or spiritual (ie, connected to previous lives and experiences that haven't yet been 'fixed' at the soul level. The Holocaust is a prime example of a spiritual trauma still requiring rectification, on some level.).
What this means, practically, is that the best parents in the world could still end up with a personality disordered child, through no fault of their own. I'll come back to this topic in a separate post, but the traumatic somatic memory / PTSD has to be released, energetically, from the physical location in the body, and the 'traumatic' connection in the primitive brain also has to be rewired, energetically.
2) Junk Food - Fast food and junk food is saturated with chemicals and nerve-destroying poisons like MSG. The meridian responsible for metabolising food is - Spleen! When your spleen is labouring away, trying to dispose of all the nasty stuff contained in your bottle of cola, it gets over-worked, and weak. Healthy, easy-to-digest food gives Spleen a break, and frees up more energy to deal with things like processing negative emotions in a healthy way..
3) Chemicals and environmental pollutants - Soaps, shampoos, toothpaste, washing powder - they all contain chemicals that really can and do weaken human beings by overloading our systems with toxic materials that are surplus to requirement, and need to be processed and removed. A few meridians are involved in this process, especially kidney, liver and our old friend, spleen.
Again, it's a post for another time, but when liver meridian is overwhelmed, people start beating themselves up and fundamentally hating themselves (another key trait of personality disordered people, especially narcissists). When kidney meridian is weak, then fear is the order of the day - and one of the big reasons why people with Cluster B personality disorders always try to brazen things out is because deep down, they fear being exposed as anything less than 100% perfect and wonderful.
(Check out the JEMI Tool that let's you link specific meridians to specific negative emotions by clicking HERE.)
That fear is visceral, debilitating and cuts to the core of 'Cluster B' people. They will do anything they can to avoid it, including lying, indulging in infamous 'narcissistic rage' attacks (where they go on the attack, viciously, in order to preserve their own super-fragile sense of perfect self), projecting their problems on to you, playing the victim - and a few other things besides.
Being on the receiving end of these manipulations, lies and rage fits is incredibly unpleasant (to put it mildly). But the underlying issue is FEAR. Anything that takes the narcissist's fear down, energetically, will help. (I'll discuss this in more detail when we get to the discussion about the Triple Warmer meridian.)
But anything you can do to minimise your exposure to chemicals and environmental pollutants will boost your spleen, kidney and liver meridians. It's also worth mentioning here that conventional medications are also very potent, powerful, toxic chemicals, albeit with a therapeutic affect.
Asthma puffs, steroid creams for eczema, even the humble aspirin - they all weaken the spleen, dump a huge toxic load into your system, and weaken your energy and immune system.
4) Electromagnetic smog - As I've written about elsewhere, the human body is one big, complicated network of electrical connections. Your body produces bioelectricity, and those bioelectric signals regulate a whole bunch of processes in your body, from healing, to hormones, to thought processes, to emotions, and a few other billion things besides.
The electromagnetic vibes coming off your laptop, i-Phone, microwave oven, fluorescent lightbulbs and fridge, to name but a few, are all sending an electric signal that can seriously disrupt the human body's own bioelectrical network, and cause some big physiological problems, especially regarding the immune system.
Now, guess which meridian is most involved in trying to process these outside stimuli? Spleen! You got it.
Personally, every time I spend more than a couple of hours online, I feel completely wiped-out emotionally, and like I have no time or space for anyone else in my head. I have to 'decompress' for at least a couple of hours to start thinking and functioning like a human being again.
If my kids, or anyone else, tries to talk to me, or require a caring response from me after I've been on a computer, I kind of blank them or react like an unfeeling zombie. It was only when I started pulling all the information together for these posts that I realized that my spleen meridian, ie, my energy of compassion, empathy and caring, is getting completely zapped by my PC.
If I spend too long online, I start acting like someone with a personality disorder, unable to connect to those around me and trapped in my own head. This was a huge 'Eureka!' moment for me, and I'm still chewing it over.
For now, let's put it like this: watching videos, spending time surfing, even staying plugged in to MP3 players and i-Phones - this all takes out spleen energy, in a very big way, and makes it that much harder for people to feel their own emotions, and to respond to others with compassion and empathy. Clearly, these activities should be minimised as much as possible.
5) Stress - The stress response, aka fight / flight or freeze, is mounted in the body by the Triple Warmer meridian (aka, the energetic home of the evil inclination. [I wrote a whole big article about Triple Warmer over on Emunaroma, including tips on how to get it to calm down. Click HERE to read it. ) The first place the Triple Warmer takes its energy from in the body is - spleen meridian! I'll explain more about this phenomenon, and particularly how it relates to tackling personality disorders, in a separate post.
6) Negative emotions - It's been scientifically proven that human emotions carry a bioelectric 'charge'. As discussed inthese posts, the human body is one, big, interconnected electrical circuit, comprised of billions of separate electrical interactions.
When you feel 'happy', that creates a particular bio-electrical charge in your body, that in turn sparks off a number of specific physiological reactions. When you feel angry, for example, that creates a different bio-electrical charge, which sparks off a number of other physiological reactions - many of which are usually not very helpful, health-wise.
Here's where you learn another amazing piece of information: human beings (and for that matter, all living organisms) are incredibly sensitive to very small changes in the electromagnetic field that surrounds every single one of us.
We pick up, and react to, the smaller energetic vibrations and charges around us in myriad ways, that are only know starting to be really studied and understood by Western science.
Why this is relevant to our discussion of personality disorders, is because human beings PICK UP THE BIO-ELECTRICAL 'CHARGE' ASSOCIATED WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S EMOTIONS, and that 'charge' can profoundly affect our own physiology, thought processes and feelings.
The impact of super-charged negative emotions
People with personality disorders tend to have powerful, and often powerfully-negative emotions. Their anger, to use one example, is 'super-charged', bio-electrically. Even if they aren't expressing it verbally or obviously - and many narcissists will refuse to honestly acknowledge that they're ever angry, upset, disappointed, or judgemental - their negative emotion is still radiating out of them, and is bio-electrically affecting you.
This is the physiological explanation of why being around passively-aggressive people, or suffering martyrs can make you feel so weak, depleted and inexplicably 'stressed'.
Now, guess which meridian is the first place that gets bio-electrically zapped and taken out? - You got it - spleen! Spleen metabolises all the external 'input' you receive from the outside, from food, to sounds to knowledge, to other people's feelings.
So your own negative emotions can take you out 'from the inside', physiologically, and disrupt the working of a number of your internal systems, and other people's negative emotions can take you out 'from the outside'.
Spleen is also the 'happy' energy in the body, so when you're feeling down or depressed, nine times out of ten, you can trace it back to spending too much time around negative people. Which bring us on neatly to our next subject.
7) Negative people. Human beings are not angels; even the best of us will occasionally have a melt-down and display some sort of bad character trait or negative emotion. Being around someone who very occasionally has a bad day is not fun, and it will still have some impact on you, but the energetic fall-out will be relatively small, especially if they apologise afterwards and try to make amends for their bad behaviour.
By contrast, a negative person routinely criticises, shames, guilts, yells-at, ignores or blames the people around them.
It doesn't take a genius to work out when someone is consistently acting in this way, it usually points to some major, underlying emotional disturbance. If the negative person is going through an incredibly traumatic time in some way, their behaviour can be understood, if not excused: remember that trauma is probably the single biggest thing that takes out your Spleen meridian, and depletes your ability to feel empathy and compassion for other people.
In turn, lack of empathy is the defining component of Cluster B personality disorders - which is where we hit the vicious circle: Energetically, people with personality disorders usually have very weak spleen energy (usually, as a result of some major trauma experienced in early childhood, or even, in a past life that wasn't 'fixed'.)
Their internal negativity reduces their ability to feel compassion still further, and they regularly project their 'negative vibes' on to others, weakening other people's ability to feel empathy, as described above.
Spend too much time being blamed, criticised, yelled-at, manipulated etc, and your own spleen energy will get taken out - and you'll also start to lose your ability to feel balanced, healthy compassion and empathy for others.
Either you'll have no compassion for anyone, including yourself, or you'll have excessive compassion for others, and very little for yourself, and your own needs.
Simple energy medicine techniques can help protect you from negative vibes, as I've written about here, in this post.
But the better strategy, long-term, is to minimise interaction with negative people, until and unless you've got your spleen energy strong again, your immune system is robust, and you can quickly mend any electrical disruptions you experience from hanging out with them.
So now, let's find out how you actually do that!
Let's remind ourselves of what takes Spleen energy out, and then most of the solutions will automatically fall into place without a lot more explanation.
To strengthen spleen, the first thing to do is avoid all the stuff that's weakening it.
1) Trauma - In the secular world, the prevailing theory is that personality disorders are caused by some sort of serious traumatic experience, or experiences, in early childhood. They're right - at least partially - but the trauma doesn't have to be mental and emotional. It could also be physical (ie, a difficult birth, or a serious illness), or spiritual (ie, connected to previous lives and experiences that haven't yet been 'fixed' at the soul level. The Holocaust is a prime example of a spiritual trauma still requiring rectification, on some level.).
What this means, practically, is that the best parents in the world could still end up with a personality disordered child, through no fault of their own. I'll come back to this topic in a separate post, but the traumatic somatic memory / PTSD has to be released, energetically, from the physical location in the body, and the 'traumatic' connection in the primitive brain also has to be rewired, energetically.
2) Junk Food - Fast food and junk food is saturated with chemicals and nerve-destroying poisons like MSG. The meridian responsible for metabolising food is - Spleen! When your spleen is labouring away, trying to dispose of all the nasty stuff contained in your bottle of cola, it gets over-worked, and weak. Healthy, easy-to-digest food gives Spleen a break, and frees up more energy to deal with things like processing negative emotions in a healthy way..
3) Chemicals and environmental pollutants - Soaps, shampoos, toothpaste, washing powder - they all contain chemicals that really can and do weaken human beings by overloading our systems with toxic materials that are surplus to requirement, and need to be processed and removed. A few meridians are involved in this process, especially kidney, liver and our old friend, spleen.
Again, it's a post for another time, but when liver meridian is overwhelmed, people start beating themselves up and fundamentally hating themselves (another key trait of personality disordered people, especially narcissists). When kidney meridian is weak, then fear is the order of the day - and one of the big reasons why people with Cluster B personality disorders always try to brazen things out is because deep down, they fear being exposed as anything less than 100% perfect and wonderful.
(Check out the JEMI Tool that let's you link specific meridians to specific negative emotions by clicking HERE.)
That fear is visceral, debilitating and cuts to the core of 'Cluster B' people. They will do anything they can to avoid it, including lying, indulging in infamous 'narcissistic rage' attacks (where they go on the attack, viciously, in order to preserve their own super-fragile sense of perfect self), projecting their problems on to you, playing the victim - and a few other things besides.
Being on the receiving end of these manipulations, lies and rage fits is incredibly unpleasant (to put it mildly). But the underlying issue is FEAR. Anything that takes the narcissist's fear down, energetically, will help. (I'll discuss this in more detail when we get to the discussion about the Triple Warmer meridian.)
But anything you can do to minimise your exposure to chemicals and environmental pollutants will boost your spleen, kidney and liver meridians. It's also worth mentioning here that conventional medications are also very potent, powerful, toxic chemicals, albeit with a therapeutic affect.
Asthma puffs, steroid creams for eczema, even the humble aspirin - they all weaken the spleen, dump a huge toxic load into your system, and weaken your energy and immune system.
4) Electromagnetic smog - As I've written about elsewhere, the human body is one big, complicated network of electrical connections. Your body produces bioelectricity, and those bioelectric signals regulate a whole bunch of processes in your body, from healing, to hormones, to thought processes, to emotions, and a few other billion things besides.
The electromagnetic vibes coming off your laptop, i-Phone, microwave oven, fluorescent lightbulbs and fridge, to name but a few, are all sending an electric signal that can seriously disrupt the human body's own bioelectrical network, and cause some big physiological problems, especially regarding the immune system.
Now, guess which meridian is most involved in trying to process these outside stimuli? Spleen! You got it.
Personally, every time I spend more than a couple of hours online, I feel completely wiped-out emotionally, and like I have no time or space for anyone else in my head. I have to 'decompress' for at least a couple of hours to start thinking and functioning like a human being again.
If my kids, or anyone else, tries to talk to me, or require a caring response from me after I've been on a computer, I kind of blank them or react like an unfeeling zombie. It was only when I started pulling all the information together for these posts that I realized that my spleen meridian, ie, my energy of compassion, empathy and caring, is getting completely zapped by my PC.
If I spend too long online, I start acting like someone with a personality disorder, unable to connect to those around me and trapped in my own head. This was a huge 'Eureka!' moment for me, and I'm still chewing it over.
For now, let's put it like this: watching videos, spending time surfing, even staying plugged in to MP3 players and i-Phones - this all takes out spleen energy, in a very big way, and makes it that much harder for people to feel their own emotions, and to respond to others with compassion and empathy. Clearly, these activities should be minimised as much as possible.
5) Stress - The stress response, aka fight / flight or freeze, is mounted in the body by the Triple Warmer meridian (aka, the energetic home of the evil inclination. [I wrote a whole big article about Triple Warmer over on Emunaroma, including tips on how to get it to calm down. Click HERE to read it. ) The first place the Triple Warmer takes its energy from in the body is - spleen meridian! I'll explain more about this phenomenon, and particularly how it relates to tackling personality disorders, in a separate post.
6) Negative emotions - It's been scientifically proven that human emotions carry a bioelectric 'charge'. As discussed inthese posts, the human body is one, big, interconnected electrical circuit, comprised of billions of separate electrical interactions.
When you feel 'happy', that creates a particular bio-electrical charge in your body, that in turn sparks off a number of specific physiological reactions. When you feel angry, for example, that creates a different bio-electrical charge, which sparks off a number of other physiological reactions - many of which are usually not very helpful, health-wise.
Here's where you learn another amazing piece of information: human beings (and for that matter, all living organisms) are incredibly sensitive to very small changes in the electromagnetic field that surrounds every single one of us.
We pick up, and react to, the smaller energetic vibrations and charges around us in myriad ways, that are only know starting to be really studied and understood by Western science.
Why this is relevant to our discussion of personality disorders, is because human beings PICK UP THE BIO-ELECTRICAL 'CHARGE' ASSOCIATED WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S EMOTIONS, and that 'charge' can profoundly affect our own physiology, thought processes and feelings.
The impact of super-charged negative emotions
People with personality disorders tend to have powerful, and often powerfully-negative emotions. Their anger, to use one example, is 'super-charged', bio-electrically. Even if they aren't expressing it verbally or obviously - and many narcissists will refuse to honestly acknowledge that they're ever angry, upset, disappointed, or judgemental - their negative emotion is still radiating out of them, and is bio-electrically affecting you.
This is the physiological explanation of why being around passively-aggressive people, or suffering martyrs can make you feel so weak, depleted and inexplicably 'stressed'.
Now, guess which meridian is the first place that gets bio-electrically zapped and taken out? - You got it - spleen! Spleen metabolises all the external 'input' you receive from the outside, from food, to sounds to knowledge, to other people's feelings.
So your own negative emotions can take you out 'from the inside', physiologically, and disrupt the working of a number of your internal systems, and other people's negative emotions can take you out 'from the outside'.
Spleen is also the 'happy' energy in the body, so when you're feeling down or depressed, nine times out of ten, you can trace it back to spending too much time around negative people. Which bring us on neatly to our next subject.
7) Negative people. Human beings are not angels; even the best of us will occasionally have a melt-down and display some sort of bad character trait or negative emotion. Being around someone who very occasionally has a bad day is not fun, and it will still have some impact on you, but the energetic fall-out will be relatively small, especially if they apologise afterwards and try to make amends for their bad behaviour.
By contrast, a negative person routinely criticises, shames, guilts, yells-at, ignores or blames the people around them.
It doesn't take a genius to work out when someone is consistently acting in this way, it usually points to some major, underlying emotional disturbance. If the negative person is going through an incredibly traumatic time in some way, their behaviour can be understood, if not excused: remember that trauma is probably the single biggest thing that takes out your Spleen meridian, and depletes your ability to feel empathy and compassion for other people.
In turn, lack of empathy is the defining component of Cluster B personality disorders - which is where we hit the vicious circle: Energetically, people with personality disorders usually have very weak spleen energy (usually, as a result of some major trauma experienced in early childhood, or even, in a past life that wasn't 'fixed'.)
Their internal negativity reduces their ability to feel compassion still further, and they regularly project their 'negative vibes' on to others, weakening other people's ability to feel empathy, as described above.
Spend too much time being blamed, criticised, yelled-at, manipulated etc, and your own spleen energy will get taken out - and you'll also start to lose your ability to feel balanced, healthy compassion and empathy for others.
Either you'll have no compassion for anyone, including yourself, or you'll have excessive compassion for others, and very little for yourself, and your own needs.
Simple energy medicine techniques can help protect you from negative vibes, as I've written about here, in this post.
But the better strategy, long-term, is to minimise interaction with negative people, until and unless you've got your spleen energy strong again, your immune system is robust, and you can quickly mend any electrical disruptions you experience from hanging out with them.