Have you ever met someone and felt that there was something intrinsically wrong with them? In other words "Damaged Goods"
What does the mean and how does it happen? What it means is that someone, at one time had relatively normal behavior, (see how I define what is not normal in previous posts) has had some kind of traumatic experience in their lives and that experience severely colors their thinking, reactions, emotions and every other experience in their lives. They have a restricted fixed relationship to one or more ideas.
Now we all have earth shockingly disappointments in our live from time to time, but eventually we are able to integrate it into our lives and move on with a bit more caution, but still open to new experiences. Maybe we do some kind of therapy and find completion. There are even some things that will still stay with us, but we adapt it into our lives.
But some people have a traumatic experience and no matter what amount of therapy they get, it doesn't take.
It is easy to see this with let us say food poisoning: You eat some favorite food and get food poisoning. So for a while you might avoid that food, but since it is still your favorite food, you eventually eat it again, with a memory and tale to tell. But lets say it is a new food that you never tasted before and you had food poisoning; chances are you will never even consider trying it again, even though it is usually a wonderful dish.
It is easy to see this example because most people can relate to this. But lets take the example of "Belief."
A person has a strong belief and then something happens that shatters that belief and forever more they are never going to even consider any other ideas that even come close to the first ideas of the belief system, even though the ideas in the second situation can yield beneficial results.
There are actually two aspects to this situation that equate back to one core idea. The fist one is that you have a strong belief system to begin with. That in and of itself closes off and colors your mind to things outside that belief system. The other aspect is that if that belief system is shattered in one way or another, then that colors and closes your mind to things similar to that original belief system.
The irony is that in both case, and this is the unifying principal, they are both "Belief systems." Like whether you believe in God or you are an Atheist. The first believes in God the second believes there is no God. But the mechanism of belief is still in play in both situations. As opposed to being Agnostic and open to any possibility until there is a direct way to verify anything.
So to have strong beliefs about almost anything is setting yourself up to be Damaged Goods, because your are skewing things in that direction, no matter what happens, pro or con.
As Founder and Director of Mindmavericks.org, I run into this situation quite frequently. I try to explain to someone what we do and immediately they jump to a comparison to something they have seen or have done that is similar in part, but in fact is can yield a completely different result in the end and a different actual process.
I have some friends in the past who shared a common experience in a group with me and we all had a shocking turn of events regarding that experience. Even though I left the group and that experience, I still developed my understanding of that experience, separated the ideas from the person who was distorting them, and took it to a new level, removed all the junk from it, as well as other profound experiences after the fact that I learned and created Mindmavericks.org.
When I try to discuss what I am doing now with my former friends, they shut their minds to seeing what I am doing and automatically associate some of the things I am doing with the person who distorted the former experience, which in reality is nothing like what I am doing. They not only do that, but they try to convince me that what I am doing is the old stuff, wrong, not worthwhile and live in a sea of confused values and clouded assumptions. This is in light of the fact, that what I am doing is very clear in my mind and has yielded real results in many, many people, that have gone on to do some amazing things.
When this kind of thing happens like what happened with my former friends, it is a good example of being damaged goods. This happens with relationships, jobs, religion, groups, allegiances etc. But this why it is important to not believe things, to question them all, many times over and over and then be less likely to be traumatically damaged from the experience.
In the case of my former friends, even though they we warned in the beginning of the former group to not believe anything, verify everything, then went ahead and believed every word the leader of the former group said and then were profoundly shocked and damaged to the point, that their inability to see similar things to the first situation and not go off the deep end of drawing negative conclusions and associations.
BTW, there are a few friends that have not done that, do get what I am doing, and don't have those skewed conclusions.
To finish, and this is the most important part: Many people have a bit of damaged goods in them, by virtue of their imaginary picture of themselves, who they are, what they believe as to what they can do and what is possible.
What Mindmavericks can do for you is give you the tools to make some profound changes to your benefit, in a very clear step by step accelerated way and keep the damaged goods part, far away from the process.
