Living With Proper Measure

Attaining the mean and harmony—then heaven and earth are set in their places, and all things are nourished.

— Liji, Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean)

A person living in this world must have a qi of centered harmony. "Zhong" means not leaning to either side, being neither servile nor arrogant; "he" means peacefulness. Only a person who can be "centered" can be harmonious. To be centered is to place oneself correctly: neither underestimating nor overestimating oneself, neither disparaging others nor looking up to them in awe; then a sense of peace rises from deep within. Peace means neither envy nor hatred, neither comparison nor anxiety; we sincerely praise what is good in others and do not harshly condemn what is not. We handle every matter calmly and unhurriedly, live in harmony with the outside world, yet need not flatter it in order to survive. Thus we are at peace both with ourselves and with the world.

This is a very simple state, but unfortunately, for many people for various reasons it is hard to attain in a lifetime. Either by innate sensitivity or by problems in their upbringing, from early childhood they cannot place themselves correctly. They evaluate themselves too low or too high, or swing back and forth between the two. Toward others they are also prone either to disparage or to look up in awe, forever swinging, with no stable self, and their perception of others is equally unstable.

Without a stable self there can be no stable emotions; without stable emotions there can be no stable relationships. People often mishandle their interpersonal and intimate relationships for exactly this reason; collectively we call such people patients with personality disorders.

The greatest problem of personality-disordered patients is that they cannot live in the world with proper measure. They are narcissistic, arrogant, inferior, paranoid, cold, or ruthless. In short, they are either out of step with the people around them and with society, or very good at bewitching and manipulating others. Their personalities are shaped by both inborn genetic factors and acquired environmental factors.

Generally speaking, a child born basically normal, given sufficient love and reasonably proper care by its parents between ages 0 and 6, with normal responses to its needs for love, objective and fair evaluation (neither belittling nor overpraising), and little violence or emotional coldness—such a child will, on growing up, easily form a stable and peaceful personality. Such people carry their own qi of peace: tolerant, kind, brave, self-confident, hard on neither others nor themselves. This is a state of centered harmony.

Though we always say all men are born equal, this is wishful thinking. In fact, each person inherits different genes and grows up in a different childhood environment; these determine large differences among people in every respect. People with balanced, stable personalities are more likely to achieve greater things over a lifetime.

For people with various personality disorders, merely living like a normal person already takes all their strength. They spend their whole lives fighting their own emotions and moods, and rarely know an inner day of peace. To expect them to study and work with the total focus of a stably balanced personality is very hard. Their ability to make a living is therefore weakened. They mishandle their interpersonal and intimate relationships, often meeting abandonment, divorce, and betrayal, and are wounded throughout life; the underlying tone of their lives is bitter. Worse still, those such as antisocial personalities go on to break society's rules, violate criminal law, and end up arrested and imprisoned.

Excessive disparagement is dangerous, and excessive praise is equally dangerous; the former breeds inferiority, the latter arrogance, and neither is conducive to forming a stable self. Parents and teachers should therefore evaluate children with proper measure, not lightly negate a person; affirming and accurate evaluation helps a child understand himself correctly. Some parents either belittle or gush over their children; both excesses ultimately produce personality problems. A person who cannot evaluate himself correctly easily goes to extremes.

Excessive attention to a young child is dangerous, and excessive neglect is equally dangerous. When a toddler has emotional needs, a parent's caresses, smiles, and affectionate behavior give the child a sense of security. But excessive attention and excessive neglect both lead, on growing up, to poor self-reliance and self-confidence, with difficulty in independent living and stable emotions.

After age six, a person's initial personality is formed and hard to change. Hence the Chinese saying: "See the child at three, see the adult at seven"; a person's lifelong achievements are largely set by age seven. In adolescence children rebel, and parents must yield, leaving enough room for growth; only then will the child grow up enterprising. If at this stage we block children from doing what they themselves have chosen, they will tend, on growing up, to be emotionally and moodily unstable.

Large-scale American statistics show that a person's performance in high school directly determines his lifelong achievements; which university he later attends is largely irrelevant. This is because by high school our personalities are largely formed. By then some personality traits are already fairly obvious; after high school there is little plasticity. And a person's ultimate achievements are determined by personality.

Personality-disorder problems usually do not show themselves when young. In adolescence and late adolescence, most people are lively and active, constantly interacting with friends, easily influenced by their surroundings, and readily turning red with the vermilion and black with the ink; their personalities are unstable. At this point we may see that some children are forming certain traits, but whether those traits will develop into personality disorders is still uncertain.

The great majority of personality disorders appear after marriage and childbirth. At that point people must handle parent-child and intimate relationships, and the personality disorder becomes an obstacle in their dealings with family, colleagues, and friends. These contradictions accumulate and, by midlife, become the fuse of family crises, leading to family breakup; some severe personality disorders even trigger mental illness and criminal behavior.

Once a personality disorder has emerged, repair is very difficult; patients usually lack insight into their own disorder. They have deeply ingrained behavior patterns clearly deviating from the norm, which cause repeated conflict with those around them and, in severe cases, trigger various mental illnesses. Common personality disorders include paranoid, schizotypal, schizoid, antisocial, impulsive, borderline, obsessive-compulsive, histrionic, and other less common types. Many patients have several at once.

By learning about personality disorders and recognizing the unreasonableness of their own behavior, people can improve their condition. But some types—schizoid, schizotypal, paranoid, and others—are not easy to change. If our family contains members with whom communication is difficult, we should learn some personality psychology, understand how to get along with personality-disordered patients and how to help them recover; this can improve their quality of life and ours as well.

For a personality-disordered patient to recover fully requires the care and love of family members, and also their learning about the condition. For some particularly affected patients, family members may even need to provide long-term financial support, because the disorder has disabled them mentally, so they cannot work and earn like normal people.

Personality-disordered patients are a group not easily understood; their inner world seems mysterious, and they lack insight into their own problems. Outsiders easily clash with them, which means they rarely get the help they need. For their recovery, understanding, care, and help from family members are crucial. Personality-disordered patients also easily inflict harm on their families without knowing it; some families live in great pain. We cannot help our family if we ourselves are not well, so family members of personality-disordered patients must also look after their own physical and mental health.