Maladaptive Behavior Quotes

The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated - if there's not pharmacological intervention - it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.

Conceived in anger, addicted to hate, the mutant child of a twisted state.

Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.

The addiction isn't your problem - it is what you use to cope with your problem.

When the pressures really mount, the neurotic must choose: Shall he have a good cry, or set fire to his neighbor's house?

That was my earliest maladaptive coping mechanism I forged when I was a kid. I found that my fists weren't going to do any significant protective work for me, so my mouth was it. Making my father laugh was a way to control him.

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: baby-doll. Pulling on a sweater, and in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words?

Whining about your own, others', or the world's failings is a main element in what we usually call neurosis.

If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be nothing more than a particularly awful psychological disorder.

I have a tendency to dip my foot in self-destructive behavior.

I get the strange urge to hit my head against the wall. Other people's sobs make me feel uncomfortable.

Every neurotic is partly in the right.

After living with their dysfunctional behavior for so many years, people become invested in defending their dysfunctions rather than changing them.

No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.

It's a universal experience to be compulsively doing something that's damaging your life.

Most people have two emergency modes. Fight and Flight. But Conner always knew he had three. Fight, Flight, and Screw Up Royally.

A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior.