Psychopathology of everyday life

I have been writing a lot about many different ways pathologies exist in personality and society. This interest of mine in pathological states and conditions didn't emerge out of simple curiosity; these are the practical questions asked by life itself to figure out. Since there is a spectrum of consciousness (that is, our consciousness is multilevel and multidimensional) it appears that there is also a spectrum of pathologies that can emerge at any stage of development and then progress through our being-in-the-world. Any kind of behavior, including pathological (with corresponding interior states), seems to be in some way an adaptive response of the mind-body system to certain circumstances in life. Post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, characterized by the dissociative defense mechanism seems to emerge in an attempt of psyche to chunk traumatic experiences in pieces so as to defend the structure of the conscious self from the experiences it can't digest yet.

In classical psychiatry there are "bigger" psychological pathologies that structure the entire life around them (psychotic to borderline) and there are "smaller" pathologies (neurotic) that, even though they affect the matrix of experience, allow one to live more or less adaptive social life to some point. Wilber and some other authors argue that the continuum of psychopathology isn't limited by the psychotic to borderline to neurotic sequence and there are also role/script pathologies, identity pathologies, existential pathologies, and various spiritual pathologies (each corresponding to the stage of development where it emerged). In fact, Wilber divides psychopathologies into three broad categories: prepersonal (psychotic to borderline to neurotic), personal (role/script to identity crisis to existential), and transpersonal (psychic to subtle to causal). The last category is still not well-studied in terms of its cohesive integration with the prepersonal and the personal which are more conventionally known levels of pathology; and Wilber's model of consciousness and its pathologies has been in its own development, so certain aspects of the transpersonal category must be revisited (to my knowledge, no official work has been published yet introducing the last installment of Wilber's view on spiritual pathologies; the world is still waiting for the revised edition of Transformations of Consciousness, a book that Wilber calls one of his most important works, to be published).

In order not to distract us from the simple point of this post (those of the readers who are not interested in a technical psychological talk can skip to the next paragraph), I will just briefly mention here that, since there has been a new understanding that we can speak of vertical and horizontal development, with the former being a structural (structure-stage) development towards higher altitudes of consciousness and the latter being a state (state-stage) development that is characterized by an increasing access to various spiritual states of consciousness that can be occurring to some extent at any altitude of consciousness, what Wilber previously saw as pathologies in the transpersonal structures of consciousness (which are very advanced stages of vertical development) now can be seen rather as pathologies in the ways individual consciousness (being at any level of development) embraces spiritual states of consciousness. To my opinion this is very important because it leads to the conclusion (in a form of hypothesis) that in the worst cases one person can combine both structural and state pathologies. For instance, if a neurotic person undertakes meditation practice (such as, e.g., vipassana or Transcendental Meditation), is stubborn enough, and doesn't receive care from a really qualified teacher, he or she can actually succeed in adding a spiritual state pathology to his already emerged structure pathology of neurosis; and those ought to be treated simultaneously. Not to mention that his neurotic self will be interpreting all state experience accordingly to the already pathological (i.e. incorrect, false, lying) view of the self and others. It doesn't necessarily take a conscious spiritual practice, there can be spontaneous awakenings towards deeper states dimensions.

Now, what's probably the most important is that if structural and states pathologies can emerge simultaneously in one psychological system then they will be naturally forming a kind of interpenetrated unity, something like a states-and-structures knot, and it can be very hard to untie this knot and to hermeneutically make sense of it. I know of one case when a probably borderline/narcissistic individual, let's call him S., had a series of spiritual experiences that led him into thinking that he, and he only, was Jesus Christ and others ought to listen to him and follow his commands for he, and he only, came to save the world. S. was already wanted by Interpol for crimes he committed in a different country (in Russia; the European country where he resided gave him asylum because he was a citizen of this country) but he thought that since he was Jesus Christ himself he will not be arrested. This led him to actually attempting to leave the asylum country and travel to Russia; and, as one would rightly guess, right on the border he was arrested and imprisoned (this is where my knowledge of the story ends). This JC experience (which may or may not be considered a some kind of false satori) wasn't initially a part of the pathological phenomenology of this individual; it was appropriated by his borderline "self" (actually, it can hardly be said that there is any self in a conventional sense in a person with the borderline psychopathologies) later on.

This case seems to present a person with a psychopathic personality disorder (Hare characterizes psychopaths as following: "Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse") who for several years was able to create a kind of predatory/criminal business in Moscow based on lies, manipulations, and so on; and for a few years he had been a millionaire until he lost everything and had to flee the country which led him into a crisis of personal insignificance and an idea that if he prayed to God enough his previous life would return to him. For his self-sense it has been absolutely okay to lie, manipulate, exploit, betray, show aggressive/destructive tendencies, etc. without any remorse for most of his life. The series of mystical experiences that emerged in his attempts to undertake a spiritual discipline to recover from the shock of losing everything was appropriated by his pathological self and led to emerging of what conventional psychiatrists would call a delusional idea ("I am [i.e., my ego] [virtually] Jesus Christ; and you must obey me"), which, if that person were under psychiatric care, could pose a serious problem for differential diagnostics (e.g., he could be treated as a schizophrenic psychotic rather than a borderline psychopath that he probably was which are different diagnoses requiring different treatment modalities—and without this delusional idea, thanks to his well-developed social mask, he could be misdiagnosed as borderline-to-neurotic or even neurotic).

I recall as one of the people who knew that individual personally and suffered from his actions for some years characterized S., "You could meet him and speak to him for some time and think that he is a nice person who is worth your friendship; and then he would suddenly hit you in the back with a knife by stealing from you or framing you or betraying you in any possible way—or even attempting to actually beat you or kill you." The most peculiar thing was that from the exterior point of view for long time this person seemed to have no problem adapting to his social environment; and he could have been that rich John Smith living in a private house that you pass by while driving into the city suburbs.

And yet encountering such a person in life and communicating with him/her is no game at all because in order to survive in the childhood such a person had to develop a ruthless psychopathic personality that subsequently became effective enough to betray and manipulate dozens of people and get a house in the most expensive place in Russia—which is incidentally one of the most expensive places in the world (the notorious Rublyovka district in Moscow, where all leaders and large businessmen dream to live; perhaps, this district can be called a psychopathic paradise, a place where the densest and the richest population of psychopaths in the world resides because most of the people living there earned their capital through 1990s in the times when there was no law, only brutal force and deception reigned). He could literally ruin your life; especially if you are a lay person not familiar with a complex compound individuality of a psychopath you will not be able to correctly recognize a psychopath as such. Survival drives such people to developing sometimes a very charismatic personae system (system of social masks) so as to hide the dark passenger beneath the social mask from the world. (Dark passenger is a term from the brilliant Dexter TV series which are based on novels about a charismatic serial killer written by Jeff Lindsay.)

I remember when I tried to convey these my insights about psychopaths and how deceitful they can be for the first time I encountered a blank stare or even an aggressive response; and I have pondered what would that mean. And then I realized that since there is that spectrum of consciousness and corresponding pathologies it is actually very easy for all people to develop a pathology of their own. So almost everybody has a skeleton hidden in his or her own closet. In many cases such a pathology isn't severe, it can be a common neurosis or a script pathology; but since most people are not familiar with classifications of psychopathology they irrationally fear that the little shadow monster that they have been trying to hide in the depths of their psyche is actually a big scary monster, the kind of monster that, if revealed to people, would destroy their lives.

At some point in life almost every individual has to go through a process of coming out (initially, coming out was the term for revealing one's own sexual orientation but I believe it to be a much broader process relating to any system of self-experience that one tries to hide from oneself and others; in the broadest sense it could mean coming to terms with one's identity and the way it is interrelated with the social world). We think of our "huge" monster as of something to hide from everybody; but in most cases it appears that if we actually have this "huge" monster to come out of the closet we encounter that it is a small, cute, and perhaps a little bit angry boy or girl who is not scary at all; and, in fact, no one actually cares about your little boy or girl because everybody is so much obsessed with their own closeted boys and girls (that they falsely perceive as monsters), some personal problems of their own that are common to everybody, that they simply don't see you and build excessive systems of defense just to avoid the pain of a small girl being left home alone or of a small boy being yelled at by a parent.

We experience this closeted and alienated chunk of experience of ours as something disturbing to us so we do our best to be blind about it and not to see it or hear it or feel it. So any time I attempt to speak about this psychopath issue openly there is a chance that another person would projectively identify with the psychopath in question (even though he or she probably has just a little and harmless neurotic subpersonality) and sense immediate danger of one's own coming out. This results in prematurely shutting down of any kind of such talk and triggering all kinds of avoidance mechanisms.

The difference between a psychopathic personality and a neurotic subpersonality within a more-or-less well-adapted self-system, however, is that while the latter senses its neurotic symptoms as egodystonic (something in my own existence that is dangerous or inappropriate for my sense of self) to the former it doesn't even occur that his or her psychopathy must be cured (the psychopathological—psychopathic—structure is so embedded into the personality system and self-sense that it is completely egosyntonic); and it is actually totally okay for a psychopathic manipulator to stay a psychopathic manipulator for the rest of the life; and for a psychopath there would be no compliance (willingness to be healed) in regard to the core features of his psychopathology. It's as if these individuals say, "My psychopathy is who I am, doctor, don't you even dare to touch it, and I want to stay the way I am; what I'm interested in is why I have this headache and also why I get divorced three times, please help me with that." (But, actually, since psychopaths are so identified with their psychopathology they can't even say that because they are that, the exploiting/manipulative maniacs, and it is what they do for a living; it's not observable for them.)

The mistake that we all do in communicating with psychopaths is that we are so blinded by our little closeted monsters that we do our best not to see somebody who is a real monster and a social predator; and it seems that psychopaths tend to be extremely dexterous at using this blind spot of ours that we so carefully sustain. They are experienced masters of exploiting our weaknesses. When meeting another person we usually think that he or she thinks and feels the same way we do or deny ourselves of doing instead of putting ourselves into his or her shoes and hermeneutically understanding that this other person that we meet is a microcosm of its own. Thus, we tend to simplify other person's behavior and personality while overemphasizing the complexity of our own. Why we do it? One of possible explanations that I can think of is that in order to actually recognize the complexity of other person (not necessarily a psychopath) we have to empathically understand him or her, dialogue with him or her, and cognitively reconstruct his or her experience in our mind-body system; in turn, this could lead to our meeting with some closeted aspects of our own self (the same principle works within Gestalt therapy; and initially there is always resistance to letting go of one's habitual responses, scripts, and patterns which manifests, for instance, as an anxious struggle against doing the Gestalt dialogue and fighting against the therapist or facilitator who offers you to explore such an opportunity).

This seems to be one of the complex reasons why it is so hard for us to address difficult problems openly and honestly and directly. It simply causes anxiety; and we tend to be too serious about our experience, so we resist feeling anxiety and the truth beneath it.

Last point I would like to emphasize about psychopathologies is that they seem to be cross-culturally widespread (even though in different kinds of societies they can take different forms). My examples are not limited just to Russia; the psychopathic S. that I described above actually grew up in a European country; furthermore, this post itself was inspired by a news article saying that Rodney Alcala, an American serial killer and rapist, was "sentenced to death as police fear he could be behind 130 murders." The news article goes on describing this person as extremely smart and charismatic and seemingly socially adapted:

The photographer, who is said to have a genius IQ of 160, often boasted of his winning an episode of the American version of Blind Date. However, the woman who chose him later canceled their date because she found him "too creepy."

I strongly encourage you to read about the crimes he committed and his behavior in the court. See below a footage of his participating in a famous American TV show after he was already a psychopathic serial killer. Look him in the face. It is not necessary for a person with a severe psychopathology to be a murderer, he or she may enjoy pathological lying, emotional or sexual abuse, spoiling or tempting an innocent, and so on.  There are different types of personality disorder. He or she can be more or less dangerous than this particular case (it can be a historical leader figure like Stalin or Hitler whose actions and narcissistic struggle resulted in deaths of millions and karmic consequences for the entire planet).

The striking thing is that they will show no remorse. This is not that rare and far from your life; this could be your neighbor. This is what the real monster in a human flesh looks like (and this is where non-judgmental relativism ends). I am convinced that we have no luxury to continue being blind about difficulties of life and avoiding to take the darkest sides of the Kosmos into the fullest consideration that is only possible. We have to come to terms with difficult aspects of reality and how we can be compassionate even towards these poor souls and yet always keeping in mind the whole picture, including all the evils they do to others.

The writer's block?

In the mandala of our consciousness we are all in a sense artists. This is something that Alex Grey has recognized in his famous "The Vast Expanse" psalm:

Create perfection wherever you go with your awareness. That is why this teaching is admired by artists—they sense the correctness of the response to life as creative. Life is infinite creative play. Enjoyment and participation in this creative play is the artists profound joy. We co-author every moment with universal creativity. . . .

Artistic response (rather than conditioned reaction) to life is at least one-third of what we are as human beings. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber points out that virtually every greatest thinker in the history of humankind (from Plato to Kant to Habermas) acknowledged the Big Three, the triumvirate of perspectives—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the philosophy of Plato, for instance—to be the essential dimensions of our being-in-the-world.

Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the oughts and shoulds of what must be done by us so as to fulfill our destinies (moral). Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the truths and facts of coming to terms with the cruel reality—and not escaping from it into the vertigo of fantasies and illusions and false hopes (knowledge). But, as Kant argues in his concluding Critique of Judgment, without a cornerstone dimension of aesthetic response to life these other dimensions remain detached from each other. To embody our life as a play of creativity (as a form of art), as I see it, is a foundational component of a healthy and integrated existence.

Playfully writing one's own narrative of life and transcending a writer's block, the blockage that leads to copy&pasting of an old habitual storyline that we learned at some point and that makes us non-existent to ourselves, always looking for new ways of self-expression in the seemingly limited context of our life's framework, constantly searching for new tools for transcending that frame and finding new perspectives to it seems to be a way to balance the Big Three in one's own life. If I deny myself of this courageous creative response to life, I deny myself of life itself.

It is important to embody the Spirit's creativity in a canvas of the individual levels of our being, including the Soul, the ego, the adaptive personae, and the body. It is important to trust one's own artistic feeling that arises in the depths of the Heart. It is important to learn in action how to be a better artist of life than the moment before, to keep searching for new curves and touches in life, to keep looking for novel ways of self-expressing perfection while always already being a manifestation of the ultimate Stillness.

Otherwise life becomes a dull and in/efficient affair of a robot-like human mechanism that keeps self-replicating old constellations of patterns and occasionally passes the Turing test strictly by an accident.

And, as Elizabeth Gilbert wonderfully points out, when undertaking any form of art it is crucial to recognize that one's own creativity is not a private property or a selfish achievement, it manifests rather like a gift of Spirit. Even if your art is your life story (and it always is) the same writer's block rule still works; and you can get stuck, as we all do. Your life as a work of art doesn't belong strictly to your individual being, most certainly not to your personae or ego or even Soul, even though the latter comes closer to the essential Source. You can't force it, you have to let it grow.

P.S. And if you are forgetting both the dignity of being an artist and the humility of being a work of art by falling, e.g., into the dominance of either shoulds or facts I ought to wake you up by asking a simple question, the question that highlights the importance of your qualia or subjective joy of being:

"Why so serious?"

(A still from a highly recommended movie on the topic, The Dark Knight.)

The ground for conscious being

It is both fascinating and frightening how lost we can be in the world of apparitions due to subtle contractions and attachments of our psyche—the phenomena of which we tend to be unaware. We get used to a limited perspective on ourselves and on others; we develop some basic agreements with the world during the process of growth and interaction with the other, we co-create the worldspace where we live that includes our thoughts, things that we say, things how we say, our memories, visions, sensations, body movements, chronic energy fixations, and the totality of it all is our self which we present to the loved ones and the hated ones and the world at large.

It is dramatic that our self, as it constantly grows towards more maturity and embrace and experience and becoming more aware of itself by including more and more entities into its space of being-in-the-world, at earlier stages can learn and adapt to the world, construct the basic sets of its elements in a way that in the future would become self-evident as self-contractions and subtle attachments that hinder liberation and hide essential qualities of one's own human being, of one's own profound truth under limited adaptive masks or personae of which we are not aware for initially and genealogically these masks were developed in order to comply with the requirements and agreements that the other and the environment told us, showed us in the days when we were just starting to make first steps towards self-consciousness and conscious liberation. And these masks of which we are not yet aware, the shadow patterns of our co-existence contaminate our whole life and communion with the ones we love and prevent us from being fully and self-recognizably who we are, radiant blissful fluctuations of the Spirit's meaningful, passionate, unlimited unfolding, the unfolding that is personally embodied in the Soul, the ego, and the bodymind.

The Spirit is always present in our life as the very fact that we are aware. In fact it is the space of awareness, of consciousness that is aware of us and all our life right now. In this space the wisdom and compassion grow and stabilize as structures, as fractals, as flowers. Giving space to yourself the way you fully and deeply are in your true embodied nature means grounding yourself in awareness and putting everything that exists in life into this ground, washing with its liberating rain the basics presets of your tetra-constructed¹ being and knowledge of the world and how to engage with it. In the space of awareness the spontaneity occurs that breaks ice of the old and allows novelty to emerge, and the novelty brings new excitements and flow of life and the conscious awareness always liberates them from attachment, for the attachment per se is something of which we can become conscious in the space of awareness.

The names of attachments, fixations and repressions are Legion. They hide everywhere in your private and public worldspace and they cause you to develop a false concept of the self, a false self. You get used to move in a certain way and not the other; and you unconsciously consider these movements to be the boundaries that divide the territory of your self from the foreign land of not-self, the unknowing land that brings anxiety by its very existence. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in movements. You get used to have certain sensations and feelings in the body; and you may not even be aware of the fact that these are only sensations and feelings that emerged in the process of growth; and you just take them for granted. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you feel your body. You get used to have certain thoughts and preconceived ideas in your mind; and these ideas are always more limited than the mystery of the world and your self. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you think about yourself and existence.

You get used to hearing a limited spectrum of sounds, seeing limited things, enjoying limited moves, experiencing limited emotions, playing limited roles, having a limited diapason of dreams, and living a limited range of possibilities of life. And all of it in the totality of who you are you present as a total message of your existence to others. And others respond, both consciously and unconsciously, to this message as a whole with their being. Of course, you are responding to their message as well.

If I am so attached to these things that I don't even let them into my awareness so as to let go of them, how not to get lost in this vortex of apparitions and how to finally arise above the process of recreating the suffering, the suffering that is constantly shared with others? If there is nothing in my self that I can ground myself in, for it all is essentially a fleeting and constructed experience, what is the way to freedom? How can I free myself to being fully embodied and yet unattached? The ultimate way is to ground yourself in something that has no content and yet is always already present, in a presence that constitutes the basic undeniable dimension of the being-in-the-world that is closer to you than your self.

That which is always already present and yet has no content is the silent awareness, the very framework of attention, the very space of consciousness in which everything you are reading right now as you are sitting in a certain posture, feeling certain sensations and thinking ideas and making various micro- and macro-movements is arising moment to moment. This awareness is your best fucking friend forever. Ground yourself in awareness and allow yourself making new moves, approaching people in new ways, playing new roles, having a fresh taste of feelings in the body, no matter how silly you think those are, for these very thoughts of silliness are just temporary clouds in the sky of your awareness that come and go, come and go like flowing waves in the ocean cradled by the wind which is the Spirit whispering.

Ground yourself and help your beloved to ground themselves in awareness and then look into their eyes and make funny faces, scream and cry and move and liberate and dance together and give the full space to feelings in the body and suffering in the life for this is the path to healing and redemption and underneath suffering you can find profound happiness if you actually follow this advice, this practical injunction. Constantly remind yourself and others of this translucent awareness and the power of the present moment and the glory of all-pervading silence by being a living example.

The quietude is the Spirit smiling to you.

¹ Tetra-construction is the term that points to biological, psychological, cultural, and social factors of development and evolution. See, e.g., Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 2006.

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experientia fallax, judicium difficile

It is striking how ignorant you can be about the nature of your relationships with others. Especially with those who are close to you in some way. You can be in a very friendly relationship with somebody, a relationship that seems okay both to you and seemingly this other person, and yet, as, for instance, Freud noted, there is much more hidden beneath the surface of water; and the visible tip of the iceberg is just a partial and misleading appearance. Once you go deeper, once you dig up archeological remains of your past that resides in your life here and now and then, once you understand and appreciate yours and others' early traumas, you become both fascinated and terrified by what you have blindly denied, projected, swept under a carpet of your defenses.

In the early years life seems simple. There is Good, there is Evil, however you name it. The system you are identified with seems good to you, anything else is bad. People around can be good to you or bad to you. You define people through their relationship with you and your relationship to them. Psychoanalysis says it starts with the Mother: a caring Mother is the image of a Good Mother; a non-caring Mother is the image of a Bad Mother. The same mother manifests to you as two different persons: the one that is Good and satisfies all your needs, and the one that is Bad and doesn't. Sometimes this dichotomy seems to be able to follow you through life, perhaps dividing it into black & white stripes similar to a piano's keyboard.

Later in life the understanding emerges that not everything is about you, and your judgments are just judgments that can be right or wrong to some extent—or both, or neither. Some people are definitely more kind to you than others; some have a more negative attitude toward you; and most just don't give a shit about you. You look around yourself and can find no good, no evil in its absolute form. You still try to make judgment calls, but they don't seem solid to you. Everything looks relative, and you know you can be wrong, and you may even choose to look at things positively, to expect good from other people, and to blind yourself toward evil. This naivete can be very strong, until there is a crisis in your paradigm, the crisis of accumulated awareness regarding anomalies that don't match your expectations of being with others.

Everything looks relative, and yet there is human drama. There are no bad people, and yet the deeds of some of them are terrifying. In many ways, Hollywood has simplified it all extensively. Life is not a Hollywood movie, it is more like a Greek tragedy, it is more like the greatest play that could have ever been written by Shakespeare. In real life, in true everyday drama it is never obvious who your enemy is, for there are no villains with the letters E-V-I-L carved on their foreheads. (Well, some can have swastikas there… but this is just a sign; and the rest relies upon the one who interprets. Most are simply not fluent in psychopaths' language.) You can hardly make a definite judgment about the essence of a person, for human personality is so complex, paradoxical, and multifaceted. And yet once in a while your life depends upon your making a judgment call. It is not easy to know who are false prophets in your living, however "by their fruit you will recognize them." And, as I recently discovered, there is more to that advice than I thought before.

There would be no human drama, if everything were evident. If there were only the good, the bad, and the ugly, you would always know whom to shoot. But there aren't; and you don't. It is impossible for your enemy to betray you, you would expect that; and it would make no sense to call thy enemy's deeds "betrayal." In fact with an enemy you speak in terms of war, not betrayal. It's all quite sincere and straightforward. The very definition of betrayal is that it is done by those from whom you would never expect that. All human drama that directly involves you is created by thy neighbors. Look at the people who surround you. You would never see that coming, that is the point. Look in the mirror. Oedipus killed his own father and fucked his own mother, unknowingly. Stop fucking people close to you—or if you think you can't stop, at least do it consciously, sincerely, without deceiving yourself.

The very art of deception is in making you deceived. People are naturally two-faced, they tend to have many faces. Id, ego, and superego are just three of the most known subpersonalities. There have always been large amounts of data in clinical psychology on so-called manipulative and exploiting types of personality. All their life, from the early childhood (when this could have been important so as to adapt to a pathological social environment) these people have been trained to deceive others, to show them false appearances, to appear before you in sheep's clothing, to be your greatest friend, and to exploit you. In the field of human drama these are professionals. Such people consciously and unconsciously find your weak spots and use them, and one of the basic mechanisms for this is exploitation of transferential/countertransferential dynamics.

If one, for example, has an especially pathological narcissistic personality, that person will easily find ways how to make others serve him or her. Sometimes they do it unconsciously for their egos; in many cases, they learn how to manipulate their unconscious so as to create extensive networks of lies. They can build cults and/or businesses around it by being a "charismatic" leader and making other people do hard work for them through finding weak spots in their personalities. The transference-based deception may last forever, especially if you yourself have serious unsolved issues (such as victim patterns); but when you become aware of the transferential phenomena and break up the pattern, this person will instantaneously recognize the danger you bring to his or her system's stability; and you will be immediately discarded from it by the narcissism's immune system, without any mercy and self-doubt whatsoever. Furthermore, if that person, in addition to being narcissistic, is also highly dissociative, he or she may as well simply dissociate the entire narcissistic schemata, rationalize a sudden loss of a close one, and eventually maintain a good self-image (or at least persona).

How to recognize such a person? Look at the deeds of the overall self, not just the words of his or her persona or social mask. Look both closely and from distance. Look into yourself as well. See the relationship dynamics between you and the other, especially it relates to those who are most important to you. Feel into the body sensations and gestures that you engage in. Hear the words and the inner dialogue spoken. And finally awake to the pattern.