C. Terry Warner

It is difficult to overestimate the corrosive power of agitated feelings.

Learning the truth about a problematic condition in our physical bodies enables us to take steps to find the remedy. As they say, the diagnosis is half the cure. But with emotions and relationships, the truth is the cure. In the realm of emotions and attitudes, as we will discover in this book, honest self-understanding liberates us from our stuck emotions.

Being honest with ourselves is the key.

are seeking to understand the source of our troubled, afflicted emotions and attitudes and the way they foul our relationships with others. Here is a clue: those times when we feel most miserable, offended, or angry are invariably the occasions when we’re also most absorbed in ourselves and most anxious or suspicious or fearful, or in some other way concerned about ourselves.

Self-betrayal occurs when we go against the feelings I have just described—when we do to another what we sense we should not do, or don’t do what we sense we should. Thus self-betrayal is a sort of moral self-compromise, a violation of our own personal sense of how we ought to be and what we ought to do.

sin is anything you cannot do wholeheartedly

We lie with our emotions and attitudes (and often even with our moods) as well as with our words.

Living in the box means being convinced that other people and our circumstances are responsible for our feelings and our helplessness to overcome them. What we can’t see when we’re in the box is that the way the world appears to us is our projection, and that we are making this projection to justify ourselves in self-betrayal. We cannot see that it’s not others’ actions but our accusations that result in our feeling offended.

Only people who are doing something that goes against their own sense of right and wrong have to spend time and energy spinning out a self-justifying story.

The kind of people we are cannot be separated from how we interpret the world around us. “Adam is Adam’s world,” wrote the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Who we are is how we are in relation to others.