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In the past twenty years, I've had numerous setbacks. Yet, these have been less severe than the setbacks of the preceding twenty years. The more recent ones did not include the need to be an inpatient at a psychiatric ward. My most recent inpatient stay (which was due to going off medication and becoming acutely psychotic) was in April of 1996. Additionally, most of the more recent setbacks have been caused by the actions and speech of other people. I haven't sabotaged myself very much in a very long time. 

When too many things are going wrong at once, it takes a toll. This piece is about how the brain is adversely affected by environments that are excessively demanding, stressful, and/or traumatic. When numerous things go wrong at once and when all of them must be addressed, we don't really have a choice about dealing with them. The effect of this may be residual damage to level of function. 

Sometimes it seems as though people are intentionally doing things to sabotage my progress. Yet, this belief borders on being a paranoid delusion, because I don't have direct evidence of the truth of this belief. I do know that life circumstances seem to heat up when I am on the verge of making substantial progress in the quest to improve my life conditions. 

Damaging environments tend to include a need to address several problems at once. If the environment did not incorporate the need to respond, then we would merely have a stimulus that we could learn to ignore or tune out. When you are up against hard things, and when there are several of these at once, it can cause a person to become overextended. When overextended, it creates vulnerability to deterioration in mental 'code'. 

The human mind has content in it. This is not a simple thing. The content of the mind comes from multiple sources and determines a wide range of functioning that a person manifests. Content determines what we say and how we say it. It determines how we regard pain and/or pleasure. It determines our decisions. It determines our behavior. 

If a computer is like the human brain, the code in that computer is like the content that the human brain carries. And, in my meditations, I sometimes use the term "code" to denote the material in my mind that I want to guard and maintain. 

Being pressured is not necessarily an illusion or a delusion. In some instances, the pressure originates from within. However, life situations can happen in which the pressure stems from difficulties in one's environment. Multiple pressures combined with exposure to bad code can allow bad programming to be installed. 

In some instances, a very difficult situation occurs, and in the mind, I've told myself negative, cursing things about someone or some thing. This is where my own mind, in an effort to cope and release energy, programs in bad code. This bad code then adversely affects how I function in later dealings with that person, place or thing. 

In other cases, you could be dealing with someone else's contagious toxic words, that do have an effect. For example, if you are in a job that demands use of most of your mental resources, and if, at the same time, a coworker is being a pill, it could be a lot harder for you to filter their stuff. It doesn't matter whether you believe the coworker is full of bull. Your mind could generate hostility toward the individual--and you could develop code that reflects your anger toward that person. And this doesn't readily go away. 

People who are incarcerated in California are in a very demanding, very pressured situation. At the same time, the prevalent content is the message that human beings, especially prisoners, are worthless. This can ruin an inmate's chances of success in life upon being released. And this includes those who've been wrongfully convicted. 

The mental health treatment system is not nearly as bad as incarceration. Yet, its environment still affects us. In the mental health treatment system, by means of "milieu therapy," patients are exposed to the belief that we can't work, that we can't think as well as counselors, and that our perceptions aren't valid. 

Mental health counselors use invalidation as one of their methods of managing people. Counselors want well-behaved patients who do not do anything that poses an inconvenience. When we are rendered impotent, it is easier to supervise us without as many difficulties. The code that reflects this is the product of repeatedly being told that what we think, believe, and perceive, are inaccurate and a product of us being mentally ill. False compliments are used to gain our trust. Additionally, the beliefs of helplessness and of being a victim are fostered. 

Medication makes consumers more suggestible and less mentally agile. When we make a dissatisfied assertion or a complaint, counselors invariably ask for supporting examples, and/or they will turn it around into an analysis of the things in the person's past that made them feel that way. It circumvents accountability of the counselors. In reference to 'specific examples' these may be hard for some consumers to furnish, because medication interferes with being able to vocalize this. In the case of delving into past experiences, the consumer fails to see that they are being manipulated by this process. 

Environment affects code. Code determines what we say, how we behave, and many other things about us. We don't have to take this passively. With enough insight into our own thought processes, we can decide to have better code than that which the environment or other people would like to put into our heads. This requires some amount of alone time, so that we can look at and edit our own thoughts. 

However, we should not become totally isolated. Doing that could expose us to our own creation of bad code, which could lead to getting acutely psychotic. 

I need to add an extra bit to this: The experience of getting very stressed out and then recovering from it, if you handle it well, can, in the long term, cause greater tolerance of stress, and can make you a more able person. The saying "What does not kill us makes us stronger" is only true some of the time. Too much stress can either be bad or good for us in the long term, and we won't know until it happens.