Acting out

When someone is acting out, what is the benefit? The guilt, the shame, the fear!

The payoff is the guilt—we get high off the guilt as well as off the high itself.

The physiological response to guilt involves the same stimulants being supplied to the brain.

Histrionics and euphoria cause the same neurotransmitters to be released.

The amends are not what are most important—what matters is not performing the action and not having to make the mistake in the first place.

Boys blame; adolescents explain; men change.

You have to become self-possessed of your emotions, intellect over emotions.

It is not what you are doing that is the problem and it is not you who is the problem.

It is your thinking that is the problem.

As long as you are in the laboratory of your mind and observing, you are no longer controlled by it.

Everything happens in the mind.

Awareness: when we are acting out, we are choosing a pony over a jet.

We have to choose between character-building and comfort.

We do not have a character defect problem. To have a character defect, you have to have character.

We have to want to develop and build character above all else, whatever the personal cost.

Or we can live in sin, frustrating our potentiality.

If the archer pulls the string, he will shoot the target.

If we’re missing the target, it means we’re blind: we are on automatic pilot.

What you think about becomes what you do, and that becomes your character.

Father Prado says you have to be careful not to wake the flesh—we need a spiritual awakening, not a physical awakening. What you get from the body is a pseudo-awakening. A sexual awakening belies a craving for a spiritual awakening.

Man's real search is for God. He may feel that it is something else, but he finally finds out it is God he is after.

In the end: suicidal, depressed, angry, and alone—that is where you end up when you look for God in all the wrong places.

Once something changes on the inside, everything changes on the outside.

We help others by providing them with the information through identification to choose the jet over the pony.

(Joe M.)