​The NHS definition of hoarding demonstrates how badly understood the problem is:

"A hoarding disorder is where someone acquires an excessive number of items and stores them in a chaotic manner. The items can be of little or no monetary value and usually result in unmanageable amounts of clutter.
 
                                                                                                       It's considered to be a significant problem if:

• the amount of clutter interferes with everyday living – for example, the person is unable to use their kitchen or bathroom and cannot access rooms
• the clutter is causing significant distress or negatively affecting the person's quality of life or their family's– for example, they become upset if someone tries to clear the clutter and their relationships with others suffer."

 
Someone in a bedsit with this disorder is going to be dealt with very differently than someone in a detached, 8 bedroom property even though both people are suffering. 87 year old Mrs Appleton was evicted from her home because a housing trust believed her hoarding was a health and safety issue: the trust made her life safer by making her homeless.
 
It’s not news that the rich are treated differently from the poor. The Panama Papers are not news.
 
We know that a majority of rich people are obsessive about being rich. They have developed a mental disorder, a form of OCD, which has profound and blatantly deleterious effects on the people around them. It’s just that - unlike people who hoard newspapers and old toys who get upset when their family try to address the issue – money hoarders they don’t know the people that they effect. And they are never directly confronted with the effects of their hoarding. In most cases they’re surrounded by other money hoarders at best and parasitic sycophants who milk them at worst.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being wealthy, morally or in terms of mental wellbeing. Where prosperity becomes unhealthy is when a person identifies so profoundly with their wealth that it skews their version of reality. Just as the very poor person can justify burglary so the rich person can justify withholding money that they know helps fund roads, pavements, clean water, the sewerage system, railways, gas and electricity, things that they use every day. Rich people aren’t stupid, they know that poor people proportionately pay more in taxes than they do. Rich people who hoard money are mentally ill.
 
By no means am I suggesting that we feel sorry for them. I'm proposing that we watch out for similar behaviour in ourselves.
 
Excellent research shows that the more prosperous we feel the less we care about other people. This is repeatable in a lab-based rigged game of monopoly where players win meaningless tokens: we are hard wired to become increasingly self-centred the more affluent we feel.
 
There’s a lot to be said about the profound unhappiness of the rich. Many are brought up never to trust anyone because, “They don’t like you, they like your money.” Imagine what that does to a child. Just as eating too much good food eventually becomes toxic so having everything you want becomes poisonous, it’s called Ahedonia. And the smart ones know it:_
 
“You know, I thought the more money I made, that I would spend more. And that’s the opposite. The more money I make, the more I want to save. I didn’t think it would be like that and I’ve actually surprised myself.”
 
For many rich people life becomes essentially insignificant. Imagine how unwell a person has to be if contributing to the wellbeing, and in many cases the survival of other human beings is of no importance or interest . There but for the grace of god go we all.

Kids Company won’t be the first organisation to suddenly collapse in a flurry of gossip and panic and it won’t be the last.

At the time of writing there’s a real lack of clarity around what’s happened there but what the media has shown us seems to suggest that Founders Syndrome may have some part in this drama.

Most of us won’t set up a charity let alone a successful one. We won’t gather a group of people around us who are dedicated to our vision of how the world should be and how we can get there. It takes a certain kind of person – charismatic, passionate, endlessly inspired, dogmatic, tireless – to create and develop a project that other people will come to feel similarly about.

These are not ordinary people. A great deal of workplace whoopla extols us to develop traits that set Founders apart – every job description ludicrously requires applicants to be ‘passionate’ – but very few of us have the drive that marks them out.

Richard Carr Gomm was born into privilege and decorated for bravery. After WW2 he walked across Italy as a tramp, ‘to see what it was like,’ and discovered how very differently a person is treated, not because of who they are but because they look, sound and are forced to live the opposite of prosperously.

The experience inspired him to leave the army and become housekeeper to four elderly, impoverished people whom he invited to live in one of the Bermondsey houses owned by his family which he and a group of volunteers renovated. The model was a success and, surrounded by growing numbers of enthusiastic volunteers, he opened five more homes, creating the Abbeyfield Society which now provides accommodation for 8,000 elderly people. But just 8 years later Carr Gomm was forced out of Abbeyfield ‘ accused of power complexes and egoism.’

So he set up the Carr Gomm society, a similar housing concept for people under 45, and then the Morpeth Society for people who could afford luxurious homes but were lonely.

Richard Carr Gomm was a doggedly determined man with unending energy. If he thought something was worth doing he put everything he had into it and inspired others to join him. That force of will is vital to launch a project through the sheer weight of disinterest at best and, at worst, hostility that greets most new philanthropic models.

Here are some of the symptoms of Founders Syndrome:

·       The organization is strongly identified with the person or personality of the founder.

·       The founder makes all decisions, big and small, without a formal process or input from others. Decisions are made in crisis mode, with little forward planning. Staff meetings are held generally to rally the troops, get status reports, and assign tasks. There is little meaningful strategic development, or shared executive agreement on objectives with limited or a complete lack of professional development. Typically, there is little organizational infrastructure in place, and what is there is not used correctly. There is no succession plan.

·       Key staff and board members are typically selected by the founder and are often friends and colleagues of the founder. Their role is to support the founder, rather than to lead the mission. Staff may be chosen due to their personal loyalty to the founder rather than skills, organizational fit, or experience. Board members may be under-qualified, under-informed or intimidated and will typically be unable to answer basic questions without checking first.

·       Professionally trained and talented recruits, often recruited to resolve difficulties in the organization, find that they are not able to contribute in an effective and professional way.

·        The founder responds to increasingly challenging issues by accentuating the above, leading to further difficulties. Anyone who challenges this cycle will be treated as a disruptive influence and will be ignored, ridiculed or removed. The working environment will be increasingly difficult with decreasing public trust. The organization becomes increasingly reactive, rather than proactive.

 

When a person is in this situation it is almost impossible to see beyond it.  But it’s a matter of self-preservation that they do. The real issue with Founders Syndrome is that because their working model is a crisis model the Founder and their inner circle can easily believe that they have to remain to resolve the crisis, which creates more crises. I would guess that this is precisely what is happening with Camila Batmanghelidjh.

She has become the structure, the energy source, around which Kids Company has formed. Without her and despite the endless policies and procedures that it would have had to have to pass all the inspections and audits that it has, Kids Company felt unable to sustain itself, and collapsed. There was no one – more necessarily, no group - to hand over to. In similar situations people within the organisation who are concerned about how indispensable one person has become are treated with suspicion and hostility – and it’s often difficult to find the right words to be clear that it is concern for the individual and the organisation rather than resentment or jealousy.

Too often, Founders become badly burned-out martyrs and the people who take over feel superior that they’re now modernising and rationalising and streamlining and implementing efficiencies. In a Channel 4 News interview during yesterdays Kids Company march to Westminster a member of staff said, “We never turn a child away,” and the reporter shot back too quickly, “Perhaps you should.” To remain effective, Kids Company should have turned desperate children away. Which children? The homeless children? The malnourished children? The children who are being abused? The children whose parents are being fed by Kids Company?  For me, that’s the issue. Kids Company has needed crisis management because children’s services have never been out of crisis.

In this mire of accusation and counter accusation thousands of children and families have not been able to twist themselves into shapes that satisfy statutory services. Now, those vulnerable people have once more been abandoned. Let’s hope that another inspired, inspiring, passionate, indefatigable person emerges from this mess to offer new hope. And lets wish that they have excellent friends, colleagues and Trustees around them rather than disciples.

I had to stagger in to work today, feeling like hell and dosed up on Lemsip. If you’re self employed, as I am, you’ll be aware of the pressure to choose between staying in bed and paying some bills, and today I just had to get on with it.

That said, I was also able to come home two hours later and sleep, then continue to do a little bit of work from the comfort of my sofa. That’s a blessing. For the previous two days I’ve done nothing at all even though there’s a never ending ‘must do’ list. There always is. A few days away from it won’t kill anyone.

One of the questions I ask most of my clients is, “What’s the worst that will happen if you don’t go in to work?” Their response is usually to smile, look sheepish and say something along the lines of “Nothing much.” The pressure to keep attending work is astonishing. Just having your body in the office seems to be the single most important aspect of employment, rather than any work you might do. One of my clients* left his employer after a review where he was told his work was, ‘Exceptional, we can’t fault it,’ but he mustn’t listen to the radio on headphones. Why? Because his employers need for control was poisonous.

For this client, after finally realising that he was being bullied every day handing in his notice a couple of days later was the right thing to do. He had the backing of his family and enough savings to see him through 6 weeks of job seeking. For him, it was worth visiting his GP to get signed off, taking a week or so to rest and recover from an absurd work environment, and then get on with finding a new job.

The ideal way of dealing with a job you hate is to find a new one while letting your current employer pay your wage. What makes that difficult for many people is that they won’t admit that their employer is toxic. We tend to bitch and moan about work without doing anything about it, whether that’s looking for new employment or talking to a Union, and wait until something so preposterous happens that things begin to spiral out of control. I’ve had a number of clients who’ve denied anything was wrong until they’ve been assaulted at work. Denial is not just a river in Africa.





*Identifying details have been changed.

Back in July ’14 I wrote about compulsory therapy for people with mental illness on benefits. This policy idea was not based on any research – which demonstrates that making people go to counselling is counterproductive – it was a kite-flying exercise to test public opinion: just how much cruelty are we prepared to accept?

Something similar was floated last month this time seeing if the public will accept enforced major surgery. Just like the compulsory therapy business forcing obese people to have surgery perversely ignores all the research:

“ . . . any mandated program should have a strong evidence base for success.       Unfortunately, diet and lifestyle interventions have restricted, often transient, benefits due to biological adaptations, that act to sustain high bodyweight. It is therefore important to ask whether requiring people to participate in weight-loss programmes, despite a high likelihood of failure, is acceptable from the point of view of an individual, provider, or society. Although there is some success with pharmacological treatments for obesity, the only treatment for obesity that has been proven to be successful for substantial long-term weight loss and improved quality of life in a high proportion of people is bariatric surgery."

"It is not fair to ask hardworking taxpayers to fund the benefits of people who refuse to accept the support and treatment that could help them get back to a life of work." This is the standard announcement to persuade people who pay tax (and many who don't earn enough to pay tax) to agree with policies that provably worsen medical problems. 

We all know people who pay tax and don’t work hard. Sometimes it’s us. Whenever I hear “Hard Working Tax Payer” I hear the Shadow echo, “Idiot” because that’s how this term is in fact being used.

At the end of Downfall, a dramatisation of the last days of Hitler’s life, a boy is shown returning home to find his mother lynched by the Greifkommando. This paramilitary group murdered ‘cowards and traitors’ – old men, children, women – to create a climate of terrified compliance. In the film a civilian in a typically Bavarian hat is part of the Greifkommando: he’s not a soldier, he won’t be court martialed or shot if he doesn’t murder people, he’s just along for the pleasure of instilling terror and, if he gets the chance, killing people weaker than himself. He uses his righteous love of country as justification.

Some of us succumb easier than others to this psychopathy. We can’t deal with complexity. Immigrants are bad: it used to be that immigrant simply meant non-white but now we’ve broadened the term to include people from Eastern Europe. People on benefits have always been sneered at but now the disabled are also Scroungers. We can’t cope with the fact that the highest proportion of benefits - 47% - go to pensioners so we ignore that. We’re comfortable with Them and Us where They are something to be despised and therefore so much easier to devastate. 

This is simply human nature. Germans didn't suddenly go bonkers in 1938, any more than Rwandans, American settlers (AKA the British) Cambodians, former Yugoslavians, Turks or any other group of people who lost their sense of humanity. Part of all of us, myself included, loves to hate. Our job is to resist that, to retain our empathy and intellect. Because apart from anything else it might be you who is cut from the herd next.

Once again, our attitudes are being assessed to see just how far down that road Hard Working Tax Payers have gone. Are you happy to force someone to have major surgery?

Are you?

Part of my training as a nurse was to spend time on a mental health ward so in 1983 I was sent to what was genuinely a bin. One of the women there had arrived as a child when the building had been a Work House. There was an elderly man with Alzheimer's, a 16-year-old young woman with alcohol problems, several young people with learning difficulties and about 20 other people with diagnoses that I knew nothing about.

Young doctors practiced electro-convulsive ‘therapy’ on the elderly woman. Every couple of days the elderly man was dragged naked and shouting through the ward and made to stand in a bowl by his bed where water was poured endlessly over him as he became increasingly distraught. The 16 year old young woman was sedated every time she challenged the staff on the basis of what she was actually feeling, which was often. In retrospect she was being punished because the staff felt threatened by her obviously splendid intellect. One of the young women with a learning difficulty was offered voluntary work at London Zoo but the staff laughed at her, saying that the idea was as stupid as she was and they prevented her going. All the women were sexually assaulted by some staff and some patients.

Aged 18 and stuffed with the high moral ideals of my nursing school I imagined that this was an urgent problem. It was only because I was a gobby teenager who didn’t know better that anything got done: none of the managers and just one of the (very senior) teaching staff took me seriously. The school of nursing protected me and two members of staff were sacrificed. Nothing changed. I kept banging on about it until one of my teachers said, “What do you want? Blood?” I was flabbergasted that the alternative to dealing with grotesque abuse was perceived to be killing someone and at that point began to learn to shut up.

News that staff knew about Jimmy Savile’s abuse of patients shouldn’t come as a surprise. We know that people - often very senior, generously paid people - find it easier to punish less senior people than to take whistle-blowers seriously. We know that whistle-blowers are treated with absolute contempt and ill treatment, not just by managers but also sometimes by relatives of abusers.

DBS checks are a waste of time and a horrific waste of money. What actually protects vulnerable people is a culture, not of suspicion but of openness and transparency where every person from the most senior manager to the youngest student are expected to speak out about what they see. That culture is supported by a policy that has to be followed if someone alleges abuse: it's a statement on the poverty of where we are now, that a policy has to drive people towards transparency. 

I wasn’t the only student nurse on that ward but when I spoke to my peers about what we were seeing I was told that we were only there for 6 weeks, that it wasn’t that bad, that the staff knew what they were doing, that they didn’t want to risk a good review, that they were frightened. Just a kind of non-specific, generalised fear. As if the sky might fall on their head.

Every sphere of employment is full of bullies. Often, those bullies are out of their depth and anxious because they’ve been promoted on the basis of ticking some boxes in a selection process rather than because they are actually suited to their role. How many of us would admit that, turn down the big wage and move somewhere where we might be happier? But that’s their business. What is our business – your business too – is to ensure that we safeguard people who are weaker than we are. It’s not just in healthcare; it’s in offices where you have the power to make someone’s life worse.

Don’t.

The energy that you will have to use to protect yourself from knowing that you have made someone live without heating, without a home, without dignity will exhaust you. The people around you need to tell you that you’re doing the right thing because they’re doing it too. If this kind of behaviour makes you feel uncomfortable, take note. Leave if you can’t change the culture. If it makes you feel powerful, if you’re just following orders, you really do need support to stop. 

Psychiatry has often been used as a tool of state control. People who have been inconvenient or low status or cost too much to care for have been brutalised for centuries, so last weeks 'kite flying' announcement that people who are unemployed and mentally ill may be forced to attend some kind of therapy or have their benefits stopped has precedent.

Throwing an idea out without a formed policy behind it is called 'kite flying' because the people proposing it want to see how such an idea might fly. Will we rejoice that unemployed people are being further required to perform more hoop jumping or will we boggle at what a ludicrous bit of nonsense this is?

Ethically, it's a non-starter. When we begin compelling adults to have medical procedures we enter the world of ethical committees and High Courts: particularly because psychiatry has been used to abuse people compulsion in it is treated with enormous caution. This is not to say that it doesn't occur but when it's used it's almost always in a situation that is considered life threatening. People who are not sectioned but who are so depressed or anxious that they cannot work are not a threat to themselves or others.

We have evidence of what happens when we put a government agency - ATOS - between a patient and their GP. The suicide rate increases and the financial cost of appeals outweighs any savings made. The emotional cost to patients and their families is often catastrophic. There's no reason to believe this new scheme will be any different.

Therapeutically, counsellors know that a person who has been sent to therapy by a spouse, employer or parent is unlikely to do well. Therapy should never be a punishment or way of controlling someone, it has to be freely chosen. Yes, offenders are often compelled to attend therapy and what happens is that a majority learn the language of contrition rather than positively learning much about their motivations and their effect on victims.

So we know that compelled therapy is ineffective. We can also add that if this dreadful idea was ever to be implemented it would be limited to six or so sessions, which is barely enough for someone who is mildly unhappy let alone someone with a mental health diagnosis. The waiting list - already enormous for NHS and most agency therapy - would make it unmanageable and we can guess that, just as with CBT, many of the people trained for this project would not actually be therapists at all, but technicians on a budget and under pressure.

So what might the purpose of this dreadful scheme be? Would people compelled to have therapy be removed from the official numbers of the unemployed? This is what happens to people who are compelled to join other unemployment schemes so that the numbers of unemployed and particularly long term unemployed fall, on paper. If ministers wanted to help people with mental illness back to work they need to give appropriate funding to existing mental health services and reopen the services that closed because of reduced funding.

But we live in a period of time when it's not quite acceptable to throw stones at the mentally ill, yet we are encouraged to pour scorn on them if they are also unemployed. If the public mood likes the idea of punishing people who are so profoundly unwell that they have resigned themselves to living on around £100 a week then this will no doubt happen. At the very best, it will offer therapy to people who have not been able to access it. At worst it will offer dreadful non-therapy from ill-trained, ill-motivated non-therapists.

This idea slunk off in shame in 2009: there's no good reason why, 5 years later, it shouldn't slink off to die.

The strangest headline I’ve seen in relation to Suarez has to be:

Bruce Springsteen on Luis Suarez: 'Biting has no place in sports'

All the World Cup means to me is that the streets suddenly become silent and I can enjoy an evening with the windows open. I don’t understand the hysteria and I know there’s nothing to be done about it – the urge to take sides and pour all the passion a beating heart can muster into a game is too primitive and hard wired, and there are worse ways of blowing off steam. But the Suarez hoo haa has been so big that it’s reached even me.

I’ve heard other psychs discussing why and how and what Suarez can do to get help and frankly they all end up as flabbergasted as everyone else. No, an adult man biting other adult men is not an oral fixation. No, he does not have a split personality, whatever that may be. He may well have been humiliated as a child but which of us has not?

Suarez is not losing control, he is absolutely in control. He expertly measures the distance between him and the person he intends to assault then makes a series of highly calculated moves in order to get his teeth around a part of them, and then he assaults them. He doesn’t run around biting people randomly, he chooses someone to assault and then he assaults them. If a man bites you while you’re waiting for a bus you call the police, the man is arrested, gets a psychiatric evaluation and a criminal record. I’m not sure why this isn’t the case with Suarez, who has done this 3 times now.

Perhaps that’s where the answer lies. He’s got away with it 3 times and he’s being rewarded for it. He’s trending on twitter, he’s in all the media, he’s getting a massive amount of attention, so much so that it’s entered my football-free world where Gary Lineker is a nice man who likes crisps. Bruce Springsteen is talking about him. It’s a safe bet that more than one ad agency is swiftly creating a commercial for Suarez to sell something with ‘bite’ in it. * Biting is his trademark, he is rewarded for biting.

Apparently he’s had ‘anger management’ for his previous assaults. It hasn’t worked. For it to work the person going to anger management therapy has want to stop being angry. He has to feel shame, humiliation and a pressing desire to stop acting out. Why on earth would Suarez feel that? He’s getting loads of attention and being paid for it.

Why hasn’t he spent at least a night in a cell? You would, if you bit someone in the street. If the police were able to curb their excitement at having a famous footballer in their charge and treat Suarez as they would a vagrant who had assaulted someone (or like Mr Tribble up there in the picture who was held for rather longer without bail.) it might bring him down to earth with a bang and he might start taking himself seriously. The chances of that are infinitesimal.

Instead, he’ll still be paid huge amounts of money that he can spend while he’s banned, and the attention won’t stop and he’ll be handled with the kid gloves that rich, famous people get. He’ll have therapy and it won’t work though it may educate him in the language of contrition. In the long run he may even stop biting but he won’t stop being violent in other ways, because there are no meaningful consequences for his violence.

If you place bets, put one on Suarez biting someone again within 12 months. There was 28 months between his first and second assaults, 15 months between his second and third. It’s his trademark; people are waiting for him to do it again. Why would he stop? 




* Specsavers, McDonalds, Nandos and Snickers got there within 4 hours.

A few evenings ago I was with a group of business managers who wanted to talk about how domestic violence affects their work. I spoke with any number of individuals and every single one of them said something along the lines of “It’s such a shame that you have to frame the subject around profits and losses. Shareholders don’t care about human suffering, and the moral aspect of people you know being assaulted has become redundant. In this room it’s only you and I who think about anything beyond money.”

People said they felt isolated, paralysed, disgusted with their employers and themselves. I was able to say, “You’re not as alone as you think. I’ve had this conversation with lots of other people in your situation,” and was pleased to see their surprise, but then a veil of caution came down and the conversation took a turn towards inaction.

Being responsible for other people’s wellbeing is a big deal. Many professionals enjoy the human contact and problem solving that HR and line management can bring, particularly when good polices and attitudes exist to support and contain that helping instinct. But austerity has brought with it cynicism, hopelessness, fear and a disturbing insularity. Increasingly we – particularly people in their late teens and twenties - are looking for someone to blame, whether that’s recent immigrants, asylum seekers or people who are unemployed, basically anyone that we perceive is costing us money.  Even if it’s not our money at all.

A person who is assaulted by a stranger gets a huge amount of support compared to someone who has to take time off work because their partner has attacked them. We blame them for staying. We blame them for putting up with it. We blame them for leaving and depriving the kids of their father. We blame them for making us take up the slack when they can’t work. We blame them for not coming out with us after work. We blame them for being hospitalised. We ask how they contributed to their own death.

Feeling powerless and hopeless at work is debilitating: sometimes you can do something about it and sometimes that’s only going to cause you grief. But if you feel strongly about something ethical at your workplace the likelihood is that you’re not alone, and if you feel it’s dubious to seek connection with peers who might feel the same there is likely to be an organisation that will support you.

Here’s CAADV, the Corporate Alliance Against Domestic Violence, with membership that includes BP, KPMG, the Corporation of London and Diageo amongst many others. They recognise the monetary loss to business of domestic violence. What really motivates them is the human cost.

The majority of my clients come to me with very similar stories: “I have too much work, my boss is either very nice but doesn’t support me or is unpleasant and doesn’t support me. I’m working way over my contracted hours and achieving very little of actual value, but as long as all the boxes are ticked that’s all that matters. I like my work but the kind of stuff I’m expected to do now has really worn me down. I don’t see my family. Secretly, my children have become a burden, they get in the way of my work.”

In some cases coaching helps the client to break down what looks like an enormous pile of never ending demands into smaller, more manageable tasks and attention to relationships, and whilst this can be very valuable it is not the whole answer.

Whether we like it or not the UK is now in the grip of a fantasy approach to life where a lack of hard work is the only thing keeping you from success and the unemployed are all workshy scroungers. I read an article in Forbes yesterday that partly drove me to write this blog entry: “Mentally Strong People: The 13 Things They Avoid.” What really chilled me were the comments, 65 pages of “Thank you so much, this really made my day, this is so amazing and I can see where I need to do more work on myself.”

So many clients are being told that they have ‘the wrong attitude’. Almost always what this means is “You’re not doing what you’re told to do fast enough and you ask too many questions.”

Our concept of success makes us all feel like failures. It may be that a person has to be single-minded to increase their income but the actual facts show us, again and again, that being male, remaining in full time employment and the income of the family you're born into are better determinants of not living in poverty than either hard work or ‘attitude’.

While some of the points in the first article are valid and good advice, for a moment let's turn the rhetoric on its head. Emotionally Damaged People: 5 ways to understand them.

1. Emotionally Damaged People don’t seek insight. They have learned that their feelings – and the feelings of others – are unimportant and they're disinterested in concepts of fairness or integrity. They have been trained to ignore their feelings and to treat harsh life lessons as something to be grateful for, as a matter of personal survival in an incredibly brutal environment. When a situation turns out badly they cannot bear to examine why, or who may have been affected.

2. Emotionally Damaged People don’t care about people who are less powerful than them. They couldn’t care less about criticism or advice from people they perceive to be beneath them. If the criticism comes from people they believe to be more important than them they are trained to be grateful, even if that criticism is persecutory. They can only function in a hierarchy. And they strive to be as high up as possible in that hierarchy, whatever the cost to their family or to themselves.

3. Emotionally Damaged People ignore the costs that instability have on them and on others. Emotionally Damaged people are not interested in how bereavement, low pay, illness, children, elderly parents or anything else affects anyone. They perceive themselves and especially other people as things.

4. Emotionally Damaged People are not interested in the causes of problems or how to alter anything for the better, other than the manner in which their betters perceive them.

5. Emotionally Damaged people are desperately lonely. They've been told from childhood that they are entirely alone in the world. They know that they will not be supported by anyone and they’re not interested in supporting anyone else. If their culture includes being seen to be supporting others via charity or mentoring they will become involved in these activities in order to be seen to be compliant. They have learned that human nature punishes failure and non-compliance, even if that’s the failure to be born in a prosperous family, and the emotionally damaged person is resigned to this situation. They have learned that it is better to stand on other people than to be trodden on.




Genuinely successful people know that relationships are what matter, not status or income. Having enough money to remain healthy, pay the bills, eat and sleep well, spend time outdoors for pleasure and relaxation and with people who contribute positively to their wellbeing is important – having more is nice but not necessary.

Here’s another piece of research: 1 in 5 British workers have taken time off due to stress.

“According to the study difficult deadlines, management pressure and a lack of support are the main reasons for workplace stress and 6% and 3% of stressed workers resort to unhealthy practices to cope, smoking and drinking alcohol respectively.”

Look at your attitude. See who you're trying to please, and why, and what you genuinely want from life.