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Summary

Are you entangled in difficult relationships or painful emotions? Do you suffer from abuse or trauma? Do you suffer from your parents' drama, your partner's demands, your boss's moods? We help people untangle their lives, enhance their maturity and reclaim their freedom.

What are negative emotions? Are they just feelings that you don't like? Guilt is a normal result of hurting people. Anger is an expected result of injustice. Fear often follows threats. Aggression is a normal response to unjust threats. People who are called paranoid often seem to be trying to make sense of unpleasant and confusing emotions.

We coach people to develop their emotional maturity and manage unpleasant emotions.

Symptoms of Paranoia

Following abuse, trauma, emotional stress or sleep deprivation, some people may describe unpleasant anxiety or aggression that may be called paranoia. Paranoid symptoms may also arise from denied guilt and hidden anger. Paranoia may also follow an accident, abandonment or betrayal. There is usually a reason for the unpleasant emotional confusion.

The main symptom of paranoia is delusion. This often appears gradually, with people first becoming irritable, suspicious, introverted, selfish, depressed, obstinate, jealous and bitter. Such people rarely acknowledge their own failures or faults, preferring to blame and criticize other people.

Paranoia often starts as suspicion, fuelled by anger and hatred. People may mistrust others, feel constantly irritated, be easily offended, cannot forgive, strongly react to perceived criticism and are preoccupied with conspiracy theories. They may fear being deceived, incessantly argue, change moods abruptly and act in self-righteous and perfectionist ways.

Paranoid behavior often involves exaggerated feelings of self-importance or persecution. People with paranoia may function and relate well in some contexts, however they are often isolate themselves from the world. Few people can relax around them when they show such emotions.

The fourth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", (DSM-IV) lists these symptoms for paranoid personality disorder:

• reads negative meanings into innocuous remarks
• preoccupied with unsupported doubts about friends or associates
• maintains unfounded suspicions regarding the fidelity of a spouse or partner
• suspicious; unfounded suspicions; believes others are plotting against him/her
• reluctant to confide in others due to a fear that information may be used against him/her
• perceives attacks on his/her reputation that are not clear to others, and is quick to counterattack

We recommend that inexperienced coaches and counselors refer people with symptoms of paranoid personality disorder to experienced helping professionals.

Are You Paranoid Enough?

Many people say they have healthy paranoia - referring to a suspicion of promotional offers that seem too good to be true, and to a perception that trusting unknown people is naive or stupid. Many people have a reflex distrust to strangers who call them friend. What they are selling? (If you walk around an open market, you may hear, "My friend ... my good friend!" from many salespeople)

Some people deliberately try to induce paranoia in others as a way to gain compliance. This may be done during induction into cults, cult-like groups and military organizations, and as preparation for interrogation. Programs to induce paranoia often precede company takeovers and invasions. See abusive relationships.

Paranoia, Manipulation & Identity Loss

Paranoid people are often obsessed about manipulation ... and they sometimes appear to be the worst manipulators ... often under a disguise of self-protection.

Paranoid behavior seems to be related to aggression, anxiety and guilt. We help people dissolve the unpleasant emotional consequences of abusive relationships and emotional incest etc, and integrate hurt parts or fearful sub-personalities, so that people with symptoms of paranoia may relax.

Such split-off parts or partial personalities are common results of abuse and trauma - we call this identity loss. Some behaviors indicating identity loss that seems to precede paranoia are:

• Guilt - person avoids happiness and pleasure
• Depressed - person is melancholy, purposeless
• Emotional swings - person is endlessly conflicted
• Aggressive - person is irritable, mean, wants to fight
• Dissociated - person is not there, preoccupied, withdrawn
• Anxious - person is fearful, worried, scared of ordinary things
• Psychosomatic - pains, dysfunction and paralysis without physical or biological cause

Paranoia & Victim Identification

Identity loss includes identifying with someone else. A common identification we associate with suspicion and mild paranoid symptoms is identification with a victim.

If you identify with a victim, you may feel and express anger that the perceived victim did not express. You may feel suspicious. You may evaluate each person you meet - if you decide the other is a victim - you may try to help that person. If you decide that the other is a victimizer, you may try to punish that person. Some paranoid people dedicate their lives to helping victims and punishing victimizers.

Some common signs of victim identification are tensed knuckles and flared nostrils (especially when remembering the alleged victimizer), abnormally large jaw muscles (from grinding teeth) and lines of muscles on the forehead. The eyes and lips may become increasingly narrow over time.

(Try this simple exercise ... tense your knuckles and flare your nostrils. Tense your jaw muscles and wrinkle your forehead. Narrow your lips and your eyes ... and note how these muscle tensions affect your thoughts and feelings!)

If you come to suspect that many victims are actually victimizers - you may feel confused at first, and then express anger to people that you consider to be manipulative victims (people who you believe pretend to be victims to gain sympathy, power or other benefits).

Identification with a victim, combined with dissociation following childhood abuse or abandonment, can comprise a systemic basis for symptoms that may be called paranoid schizophrenia.

Our coaching can help people resolve systemic imbalances and perceived injustices. We help people become free to rebuild their own identities, and to feel and express their own emotions.

Did you have to lie  and believe lies to maintain important relationships? Relationship bonds are like collections of beliefs. They may be called schema by psychologists, miasms by homeopaths, fixations by psychoanalysts and entities by the esoterically inclined. (In my first articles, I referred to these relationship bonds as thoughtforms.)

I and my colleagues often coach people to dissolve relationship disappointments, false identifications and limiting beliefs as we help people to define, plan and achieve their goals.

Consult a physician about any opinions about paranoia or other medical conditions.

Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1996-2011 All rights reserved. Soulwork Systemic Coaching was primarily developed by Martyn Carruthers
to help people dissolve emotional blocks, improve relationships and achieve goals. These concepts and strategies are for general knowledge only. Consult a physician about medical conditions and before changing medical treatment. Don't steal intellectual property ... ask for permission to post, publish or teach this work.