A Ramble About Mentally Ill Environments

     When your baseline of behavior is mental illness, the psychologically healthy person appears mentally ill. When you grow up in a family where mental illness, abuse, dysfunctional relationships, and abnormal behavior are all that you see, normal, healthy behavior appears like mental illness, abnormal, or like there's something wrong. Anyone who has grown up in such households and families, and then has tried to transition to functioning outside of them, will know exactly what I'm talking about.
     In a dysfunctional, mentally ill environment, we're taught to ridicule normal, healthy function as dumb, insane, or just plain naive. "There's something wrong with those people. They're just not right." when someone's life appears to be going well, and they have a strong family support system. We don't understand it, how it works, or even why it's there. Meanwhile, we and our families are self-destructing around us, or at best, just trying to get through each day broken without being completely shattered.
     Secretly, we want what those relationships that healthy families and people have. We fantasize about it, but we would never tell anyone in our immediate circle about it for fear of ridicule. Secretly, we want things to be "better," even if we don't know what that really should look like, or how to accomplish it.
     This is true of nuclear families, church and religious group families, and, honestly, the human race as a whole. Our human family, Adam's family, is mentally ill, dysfunctional, abusive towards one another, and broken. the biggest problem is that none of us really grow up knowing any differently. We don't see the problem, because we haven't experienced a normal, healthy baseline of comparison among our own kind. We can look to other animals that are psychologically healthy, and have healthy, normal relationships and behaviors, but we believe ourselves so much superior to them, that we would ridicule any notion that they might be the healthy baseline, and we the unhealthy.
     Jesus Christ was a normal, healthy human being. As a result, we see Him as abnormal, either positively or negatively depending on who did the viewing. The early Christians who chose to follow His path were on the road to normal, healthy function. Their behavior went from broken to whole. As a result they were branded as strange at best, and dangerous radicals at worst.
     In order to reach normal, healthy behavior and function, we have to first identify what that looks like in practice, and accept it as both positive and something we want to do and be. Further, we have to accept it as an achievable goal by some means. By relegating this normal, healthy behavior to only a select, special few we close ourselves out of it. By saying that it's only for the Saints, or the most holy, then we keep ourselves from embracing it. By believing that only a special few (not us) can succeed at treatment and therapy, we make sure that is the case.
     The first step to being delivered from an unhealthy state is believing that it can be done.