The Power of Self-Empathy Detering Emotional Illness

These behaviors cannot be stopped, I have tried; I have intense feelings of uneasiness until I say whatever is on my mind. My doctor said that this is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and there is not much I can do about it.

With self-empathy, I discovered my basic need to help others. Before I toss a disruptive word or statement at an unsuspecting person when I am speaking to them, I meet this need in a healthy way by writing down the statement that comes to me and read that statement at the right moment rather than at the wrong one.

Self-empathy has worked for me in my marriage: My wife woke me up in the morning with a telephone call; she announced to me that she would be unable to attend a party I had planned months ago. She gave me some logical argument on why she was not coming; I promptly refused to listen to her explanation.

Immediately I went into a schizophrenic rage. All I could feel was anger and abandonment; I was so immersed in my anger that I had a series of hallucinations of her divorcing me and leaving and with an intense emotion of abandonment and sadness and then a rageful and violent anger that made me punch the wall.

Before I was out of bed and dressed, I was steaming with resentment. The first thing I did was to go to an AA meeting and speak my anger, the meeting was on acceptance, and I could not accept the situation because I realized I did not feel safe as I was living in the hallucination that I was experiencing. Two hours later, I went to another meeting that was on fear, in this meeting I stopped myself long enough to remember my compassionate communication course I had taken a week ago, we practiced using self-empathy.

I knew I was angry and I relaxed and meditated for a moment, and the feeling of fear rose through the anger, I realized that fear was creating my basic need. I then spoke to my inner child's deepest need based on my fear and discovered the need that I was looking for. I found that this party of mine was a big deal to me, and I felt fear that if no one came to my party that I would be alone, I needed my wife to be there because I needed to be cared for incase the party was a disaster, I was expecting my wife to take that role.

Upon realizing my basic need was to be nurtured, the anger left, the rage subsided, and empathy for my wife's needs came into my consciousness. I called her immediately and apologized for my behavior, and then I told her what I needed. She suggested someone else might show up and fulfill that need of mine in a healthy and loving way.

I reported my findings to my counselor the following Thursday night. He praised me for using a successful strategy that when I used it caused me to have control of my symptoms of schizophrenia. The cause of the outbreak was an abandonment issue, before I would have stayed in blame mode for weeks with extreme violent behavior and flashes of hostile intentions built up in the form of hallucinations. With the use of self-empathy, I now have an effective deterrent against these behaviors.