In my opinion, people want to be accepted and loved despite being flawed.  Whatever a given person perceives those flaws to be, to me, that’s THE basic human desire.   To try to explain, let’s look at someone I’ll call, “Joe.”  Joe thought, from an early age, that his parents favored his younger brother.  Joe wanted his parents to love him the way they loved his brother.  Joe began, over time, to feel inadequate about himself and thought there was something profoundly wrong with who he was.  He also began to resent and, almost, hate his brother.  These feelings developed a tendency in Joe, during later life, to be envious whenever anyone received anything he himself wanted.

Joe, although he may have at one point recognized his tendency towards envy, protected himself by thinking he was gracious and NOT envious of others.  However, Joe was known to say, “The reason he (or she) doesn’t like me is because he’s jealous.”  This is the projected mask that reflects the denial of Joe’s tendencies towards envy.  Down deep, he felt he flawed, denied those feelings of inadequacy, denied his envy, yet began to resent everyone around him on the grounds that they were all jealous.  The last straw for Joe was walking in on his wife having sex with one of his friends.  Her actions confirmed the worst Joe thought of himself and of life and that was just too much for him to bear.  He became sullen and death’s weapon, despair, enveloped Joe’s entire being.  He couldn’t make sense of his life; he couldn’t find a reason to continue and secretly carried a wish for death.  He turned to heroin to cope with the pain he felt from his isolation from love.

In order to treat Joe (who, by the way, I see as a low-functioner),I would involve one person who truly loves and accepts him.  I’d have this person write a letter to Joe that details the specifics about that love and acceptance.  That letter would become the soil from which Joe could learn, piece by piece, that he is worth of love and acceptance.  Joe would then need to come to see and accept his tendencies toward envy and acknowledge his own self-hate.  Otherwise, he’ll never be free.

To me, we are all the same in terms of the Collective Capacity.  However, if despair enters a soul, the last thing a person is capable of seeing is all that’s good and strong and beautiful.  That person becomes isolated and bound by self-hate and wishes for nothing more than death.  This is my framework.  Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to work…