Reader: My pastor says I’m a peacemaker, a good thing. My friends and doctor say I’m a sponge for stress, a bad thing. How could making life easier for others be wrong?

Dr. Schmidt: Is physical pain a good thing? It doesn’t feel good, but it does good. It draws our attention to the problem that’s causing it, and motivates us to get it fixed. Without pain, we’d all die of infection.

Stress works the same way in the mental/emotional realm. Carrying stress in a relationship is like being IT in a game of Tag. Unless you can solve the problem, (and many problems you can’t solve), you have to run around exhausting yourself until you can touch somebody else with the awareness that it’s their problem.

Say a man you know has a quick and nasty temper—he gets furious at the drop of a hat. He has a problem, you’d say. Yes, but not if he can get you to feel the tension, to worry about not setting him off. Then it’s your problem, because you’ve taken it on. The feeling of stress is the tag of "IT" on whoever is carrying the problem.

Some people are masters at downloading stress. Maybe they bring it on themselves with self-generated expectations and bogus beliefs of entitlement. But if they can get others to even be lilent while they bark out their complaints, they never have to solve their problems, or even realize where they came from. And whatever group or family they’re in will always be awash with distress.

Unless somebody sets a boundary, and says things like, "I’m sorry you feel that way" or "Your anger is not my problem," and walks away without blaming, worrying or stressing themselves. Then the stress stays where it can do some good, at its source.

So who needs stress? The person(s) creating the problem, because otherwise, problems will continue to be carried around by the people who didn’t cause them, and thus can never solve them. Worse still, the people generating the problems and the stress sleep like a baby so they can generate more distress again tomorrow, on a clear conscience and a full head of steam.

Sometimes when we want to talk with someone, we assume they wouldn’t understand, or worse still, wouldn’t listen. Maybe they’d even fire back some criticism at the messenger so they didn’t have to deal with the message. So we send our message through a third party.

This is called a ricochet message, or a bank shot, but these terms imply it just happens once. Usually messages keep coming this way, and so it’s more accurate to call this form of communication a triangle. It creates talks about third persons who aren’t there.

This form of communication isn’t very effective-- problems hardly ever get solved this way. Actually they get enlarged, because triangles are always an insult to the person being talked about.

Not all triangles are unhealthy. When you find you can’t talk with someone directly, arrange to have a third person mediate a new 3-way meeting. Ask him or her to uphold not one or the other of you, but your relationship, and the open and kind communication it needs.

One of the best descriptions of this mentally healthy triangle is Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18: 15-17. Businesses would do will to put this procedure into their policy manuals. It would cut way back on gossip, backstabbing, the fear of same, and so it’s great for team spirit and morale.

Most triangles are harmful, behind-the-back. One especially tricky triangle involves a victim, a villain (victimizer), and a rescuer. Psychiatrist Stephen Karpman has taught that when this situation doesn’t get resolved, and a person keeps being drawn into these roles, it feels a lot like the Bermuda Triangle. This is variously called trauma repetition, repetition compulsion, or trauma bonding, but policemen and counselors call it a Karpman triangle.

When someone gets traumatized and tries not to think about it, research shows that the trauma victim will keep feeling victimized by other things, and keep calling in others for rescue and to punish those perceived as abusers. Sadly, the drama doesn’t end—it keeps repeating itself.

And the roles keep changing: once you enter it as a rescuer, you often become a villain to one or both of the others, and the original villain often feels like a victim. You then feel like a victim, and may look to one of the others to bail you out, thus launching another round of Karpman Hades.

All the characters are drawn into the triangle by identifying with the victim in another, and before it’s over, you will all feel victimized. The only way for you to get out of a Karpman triangle is to detach from the game without emotion, realizing you’re neither victim, victimizer, nor rescuer.

Blame no one including yourself, and accept that both of the other two may continue to see you as a victimizer/villain. Realize they need to bond with that victim role more than they need to bond with you, mental health, or reality. You can only pray they will someday work through it.

Research shows that there is a much higher incidence of Karpman triangles in the lives of not only trauma victims with repressed memories, but also alcoholics, drug addicts, and behavior addicts like sex and gambling addicts, bulimics, etc. Why? Subconsciously, if something once upon a time came into them to hurt them, they keep looking for something else to come in and take the hurt away—a pill, a bottle, a Twinkie, a lottery ticket, or yes, a villain and a rescuer.

None of course will give more than temporary relief. The game must repeat itself, until the trauma is uncovered and healed in therapy, and the grip of the addictions are broken.

We all know that the food, drink and pills you take in through your mouth determines more than anything else how healthy your body is. Likewise the beliefs, expectations and responsibilities you take in through your relationships mostly determines the health of your heart, min and soul.

Your happiness depends even more upon your soul diet than your physical diet, and the key to health is setting healthy boundaries. Your boundaries are the promises you make to yourself and others when particular situations or problems occur.

For example, with a child in the home, a boundary might look like this: "Whenever you throw a fit like that or say you hate one of us in this family, you’re going into time out until you get a hold of yourself and apologize. (With teenagers, you put their cell phones, computers and iPods into time out.)

With a spouse, healthy boundaries may sound like this: "The next time you buy something expensive like this that you don’t need without my approval, I’m going to get the money back for us by selling some thing things you don’t need without your approval." Or, "If you ever cheat on me (or hit me) again, I will leave this house until you make a good start in counseling to straighten yourself out."

Here are some suggestions for setting healthy boundaries that will in the long run produce healthy relationships, personality and lifestyle.

1. Draw a boundary for yourself whenever you sense a need to protect your physical or mental health, or the welfare of folks you care about. This would include when among other issues any of the following are threatened or damaged:

health and safety

personal property or finances

respect for one’s gender, sexuality or body image

self-esteem or public reputation

time and energy budget.

2. Remind yourself and others that the purpose for setting your boundaries is to show that you respect and care about all the parties involved. Your boundaries should promote the welfare of all people affected by the situation at hand, so they help protect anyone from becoming exhausted, insulted, overindulged or overprotected.

3. Healthy, effective boundaries dictate your behavior, not someone else’s. This most important rule for setting boundaries is also the most commonly broken. You can issue a command if you want, but it usually doesn’t help as much as it hurts.

For example, saying "You will not talk to me like that!" doesn’t work as well as, "If you talk to me like that again, I’ll stop talking with you for a good while, and stop trying to make you happy." Better still, go positive: "When you assure me you are sorry and won’t speak to me like that again, I will resume talking about what you want from me." With teenagers and adults, demands hurt by inspiring them to rebel and prove the point, "You don’t control me."

4. Make no promise you aren’t prepared to keep. No idle threats or promises—otherwise you’re showing you don’t respect yourself, and you inspire others to do the same. So if you say you’ll stop talking, you have to be willing to take the high road of silence out of harm’s way, by letting the other person have the last nasty word.

5. Avoid double standards. Don’t expect others to treat you any different than you treat them, or than you treat yourself. And don’t treat one child or parent with a very different tone, response, purpose or principle than you would use with another in the same situation. Boundaries don’t protect people when they consistently favor one person over the other (email me for an old column I wrote on double standards in marriage).

6. Honor your promises, except when you can see a better way to fulfill the fair and beneficial purposes defined in Why to Draw the Line above. Be careful not to change your response just because someone gets their feelings hurt, or acts like they feel insulted. Your objectives don’t change, just your ways of reaching them.

For example, if someone in your home continues to interrupt or insult you, you could pull further back from them. If it’s teenage children for example, you could stop washing their clothes, providing them transportation, allowing them access in your house to their music, TV programs, cell phone, iPod, or computer.

Or, if a spouse or small child had not responded to such pulling back, you could draw your boundary closer in, giving them more of your attention, affection, admiration and appreciation, all the while giving more of these psycho-nutrients to yourself through other people so you don’t get exhausted.

You can and should change the way you defend your boundaries when they get violated over and over again, whenever people are consistently being disrespected. Also change the response you have promised to make when your behavior legitimately injures, insults or exhausts someone involved, including yourself. So what injuries and hurt feelings are legitimate? Only change your boundary if you believe any healthy person in that situation would likely feel harmed or disrespected by your response, and when an objective observer would likely agree with your judgment.

Finally, remember that your boundaries define who you are, and how much you will take away the responsibility (and learning opportunity) from other people when they are having problems. Don’t set boundaries that define you as a chump, a loser, a wimp, a bully or a fool, or as someone who is helping to create such a person. Be a winner whose boundaries show others that you respect and care about them, and yourself.

At most family gatherings over the holidays, there will be an alcoholic, a nicotine user, or a drug abuser present. The table likely plays host also to a few non-chemical bad habits that threaten the family. Nearly every family has folks who have an eating, work, sex, gambling, or spending disorder, or have abusive or violent tempers.

As damaging as these chemical and behavioral addictions are, they don’t mess a family up nearly as much as people having strongly different views of the addictive behavior. When the house is divided by different narrow-minded solutions, the addict is excused for indecision and the addiction has free reign. When the family agrees, they can all grow stronger with each relapse of the misbehaver, whom we’ll call the addict.

Let’s look at six different views one could take about what is wrong and what is needed. The first view is usually the first approach loved ones take: denial. They look the other way and pretend nothing is really wrong. He just had a rough night. She’s a victim of circumstances. It’s just a phase he’ll outgrow someday. At least she’s not pregnant, and she’s still in school. He’s still got a job.

This is the view addicts take of their own misdeeds, and they are good at charming others into agreeing with them. The problem is that this view and behavior almost always fuels the addiction and helps the addict slide further into gradually more outrageous misbehavior.

Don’t be in denial. A behavior is an addiction if it does most of the following: it hurts people, wastes time and money, becomes an obsession, produces withdrawal symptoms, takes more and more to satisfy over time, and defies the addict’s efforts to quit entirely, or even to set and keep her behavior within limits for a given episode.

A second view is that addicts have personal problems they need to solve. Maybe the problem is emotional, mental, or relational, but whatever, they should get better with counseling, because it’s just a bad habit. This is my profession, but our cure rate for addicts in psychotherapy alone is poor.

A third approach comes from religion: addicts are lost children, and like all sinners, they need to give their lives over to God. The medicines they need are prayer, Bible study, worship, forgiveness, and good morals. The healing institution is the church, and its pastors are its healers.

A fourth view is the medical model: addicts have a disease. They need medicine and the structured environments of first a hospital and then an intensive outpatient treatment program. Doctors and hospital staff bring healing through medicines that reduce the cravings, and treatment programs that are mostly educational.

A fifth approach is the self- help movement. Its gurus are celebrities with books, CD’s, DVDs, and seminars. Each one has new angles to sell, and new stories to tell. This method is by far the most popular for combating over-eating. This approach’s Achilles heel is also its curb appeal, that it requires no submission to an institution or organization. Like a good American, you get yourself over your own addiction.

A sixth approach is the best at overcoming denial, and it combines the best elements of all the other four views. Research has shown it to be clearly the most effective at producing long-term abstinence, bringing serenity, and avoiding new addictions to replace the old one. It is twelve-step recovery, and next week I‘ll explain how it works and how it can be over-used. I’ll outline how to work a good program, and how to tell if a loved one seems to be doing it right.

What exactly is a 12-step program? It is the people, principles and practices of recovery from addiction that was started by Alcoholics Anonymous back in the 1930’s. To work a program successfully, you need all three—the people, principles and practices. You can’t just read and learn at home, just go to meetings and call your sponsor, or just change your ways. To recover you need to do it all.

12-step programs are being used by many to recover from addictions to substances like alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and even lip balm(!), and addictions to behaviors like gambling, internet pornography, overworking and overeating.

You start new recovery behaviors in order to change the thoughts, feelings and situations that

used to trigger relapse. To insure change, much repetition is built into "the program." Certain things are repeated verbatim at each meeting, like reading the 12 steps of recommended problem-solving tools. What are they? Here’s the gist of them in five pieces:

1. Admit you’re powerless over your addiction, and that your life is unmanageable by you alone. Admit you need "a higher power."

2. Entrust your will and your life to the care (not control) of God "as you understand

him." If you’ve been burned by organized religion, you can make your higher power to be the spirit of the program, the wisdom of the Big Book (AA’s collection of stories and advice for staying sober), or whatever works for you until your understanding of God grows.

3. Examine your past behavior and motivations. Take inventory of your moral strengths and weaknesses. Look at your problems and ask, "What was my part of this? How do I clean up my side of the street?" Confess what you’ve done and why to God, another person, and yourself.

4. Make amends to yourself and others for the mistakes you’ve made. Pay back the money, self-esteem, truth, etc. you have taken from other people, "except when to do so would injure them or others." We go tell people we are sorry, and make every effort to restore what we have taken.

5. Give back to others and to the program what you have received. You give service to your groups by telling your story, chairing meetings, helping newcomers, and cleaning up. This keeps you growing and avoids relapse.

Meetings usually begin by reading also the 12 traditions of how groups manage their affairs. The 12 traditions keep groups from owning property, competing with each other, or taking stands on controversial issues like politics and religion. To make sure they keep the focus on principles not personalities, they emphasize protecting the anonymity of its members. They have "no leaders, just trusted servants."

The program grows "by attraction, not promotion," so 12-steppers don’t make public statements about whether they are in a program like AA or not. They grow only by people noticing changed lives, and deciding to come try 12-stepping for themselves, because "I want what you have."

All this makes 12-stepping different from religion, which encourages its churches to own property and its members to lead groups and do public witnessing. But AA encourages religion, praying and seeking the guidance and protection of God, but it endorses no particular "sect or denomination."

Like the self-help movement, people are encouraged to be in charge of their own program, and grow at their own pace. They decide for themselves if they are an alcoholic or gambling addict or whatever, and they choose their own home group, sponsor, etc. A home group is the one you go to most regularly, usually every week, and it’s usually where your sponsor goes.

Your sponsor mainly teaches you how to work the steps, how to apply 12-step principles to your own situation. Sponsors don’t so much give orders as direction, by sharing their "experience, strength and hope." This one-on-one relationship with weekly check-ins makes it seem somewhat like psychotherapy, but like everything in 12-stepping, it is free.

Recovery is also like the medical model, in that it teaches that the addiction is a disease. Alcoholism for example is portrayed as a physical allergy and a mental obsession, and medical treatment and hospitalization is encouraged as an adjunct to any recovery that needs it.

In conclusion, as I understand it, 12-step recovery teaches that "anything you put before your recovery you will lose," including your job, your health, your family, and your faith. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that if you follow the 12-step way of life, it is free, and it makes everything else in your life better. You get not only sobriety, but serenity. As they say, "it works if you work it."

How come most efforts to reform addicts work in reverse? Because addictions work on people like hypnosis does. Although I’m not a skilled hypnotist, I know they can hypnotize virtually anyone, especially people trying the hardest to resist. Their secret is that they know how to make your efforts to resist hypnosis work in reverse to stimulate the trance, and to wear themselves out by pushing against themselves to the point of exhaustion.

In just the same way, the most natural and common ways loved ones try to straighten out addicts serve to enable even more addictive behavior, excuses and cover-ups, and they wear the loved ones out to the point of exhaustion and surrender. And like hypnosis, this all works out under cover, with loved ones thinking they’re helping when they’re actually playing right into the hands of the addiction.

Here are eight of the most common enabling behaviors to avoid:

Collusion: participating in or excusing the addiction to stay connected to the addict

Denial: making believe the problem isn’t very real or large

Creating drama: keeping oneself and others in emotional turmoil as a distraction

Manipulation: using logic or persuasion, making deals, feeding information

Mental preoccupation: doing the addicts thinking for him, playing detective

Hyper-responsibility: taking over the addict’s duties, including her recovery

Moral compromise: dulling or defying one’s conscience to appease the addict

Blame and punishment: shaming, hurting or getting even with the addict

So what does work to help loved ones recover from an addiction?

Tell the truth. Consistently but briefly, say that their addiction, excuses, and lies disgust you, and make you want to leave them alone. Tell others the truth about the addict too—stop covering up.

Withhold whatever they abuse. Take away the money, housing, vehicles, jobs, responsibilities, privileges, and loved ones you can’t trust them with. It’s all been fueling the addiction anyway.

Leave them alone. Stop paying attention to them. Don’t spend time with them. Don’t let them see that they tick you off, just that they turn you off. If necessary, kick them out or separate from them.

Take better care of yourself. Most enablers don’t know how, and so they benefit from counseling, and/or from the 12-step program for enablers, Al-Anon (www.al-anon.alateen.org).

If you’re feeling bad about yourself, you might as well do it up right. Make something good come out of it. You can do it three different ways, and though they all feel pretty much the same at the time, the way you think and talk to yourself determines whether you end up feeling better or worse in the end. Let’s look at three ways to do guilt and shame, each with its own self-talk approaches.

Shame. "I’m a bad person. I always seem to do bad." People who think this way were usually raised by parents who put them down: "Bad boy!" "Bad girl!" "You’re a spoiled brat!" "You stupid, lazy, good-for-nothing kid!" Kids who hear these remarks usually come to believe these words, and so they acted accordingly as children, and often still do as adults.

Bogus Guilt. "My (spouse, child, loved one) has been unhappy and has messed up. This situation must be my fault. I must think and try harder now to help them feel better and do better." These are the thoughts of people whose parents were not very responsible for themselves. Some of these irresponsible parents may have been addicts, lazy bums, habitually helpless, or maybe they just never had to grow up. Often such people manage to get their parents (and later in life their spouse or children too) to be overly responsible, too conscientious. These enablers overcompensate and overprotect the irresponsible person by making excuses for them, lying for them, or cleaning up their messes.

If one of your parents was an overly responsible enabler who overprotected or overindulged, chances are that irresponsible people in your life today sometimes get you to feel and take responsibility for their feelings and choices. So when they feel bad or make bad choices, you somehow feel and believe these must be something more you can do to help them. That feeling is bogus guilt.

The more you trust that feeling and act on it, the less self-esteem, self-discipline, and wisdom your loved ones will show. That’s why I call this guilt bogus, because problems just don’t get solved this way.

Healthy guilt. "I’m a good person, smart enough to make good choices. I messed up there, but this will teach me to do better." You hang onto the guilt feeling as motivation to help you figure out where you went wrong, what you did wrong, what you should have done (and hope to do in the future) Once you’ve said all this to those you’ve harmed or disappointed, and taken actions to earn back their trust and make up for what you did wrong, you have no more need for the guilt as a teacher.

Your new motivation is love for others, love for yourself, and if you’re a believer, love for God. You don’t need to feel the guilt anymore. Save it for later, to motivate more character-building repair behaviors the next time you goof up.

In a nutshell, shame says "I’m messed up," bogus guilt says "Because you messed up, I’m messed up," and healthy guilt says "I messed up but I’m cleaning up my mess." Only the last one solves problems and leaves the world a better place.

Perhaps you’ve got someone in your life that year after year you just can’t get along with. Let’s call this person "Pat". You might want to ask yourself these questions:

1. Do other people have the same problems with Pat? If some people do not, find out how they get along with Pat, and imitate their approach. If you’re related to Pat as a spouse, a former spouse, a parent, a child, or a business partner, you have special needs of Pat. Your problems are probably more complicated than this column can address, but the insights here may well apply.

2. Do most people who try to get close to Pat (boss, coworkers, customers, parents, spouse, children, friends) have the same type of relationship troubles with Pat? If so, Pat has some kind of psychiatric disorder.

If Pat doesn’t have the symptoms of another type of psychiatric problem such as a psychosis, brain damage, mood or anxiety disorder, or behavioral addiction, he likely is the one person in five who has a "personality disorder." Like the term implies, folks with personality disorders have "an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture."

We keep expecting them to feel, think or act the way most other people do, but they are different somehow. What makes them different is their "character style", their habitual way of relating to people and emotions. They began to use these coping styles earlier in life to protect them from the full and to them very painful experience of human emotions and close relationships.

They don’t want to get close or feel vulnerable, and they are better at this game than we are.

The first key to getting along with them is God’s answer to our first request in the Serenity Prayer: we learn to accept these character styles that we cannot change.

One type of character style is the Addictive Personality. Folks with this way of relating to life will tend to overdo something, some chemical or activity that gives them a rush. If they shut down or enter recovery for one addiction, they are likely to soon pick up another.

A close relative is the Narcissistic Personality. Like addicts, these folks have an image of themselves as a special person, with some deep expectation or feeling of entitlement to special favors and privileges, like being the center of attention, or getting what they want at others’ expense. They use or manipulate people to get what they feel entitled to.

These addictive and narcissistic types tend to attract and produce another type of personality disorder, the Dependent (or "Codependent") Personality. These folks tend to play the roles of chumps and suckers who are so preoccupied with the feelings and needs of their significant others that they neglect their own. They draw way too much of their identity, purpose and direction from those they take care of. We keep expecting them to "get a life," but they don’t feel they can or should until first their significant other feels totally fine.

Three other pairs of personality disorders tend to attract and produce each other. (I won’t define them all here, but you can Google them.) Paranoid, Asocial and Avoidant Personalities (too much fear of closeness) tend to attract and be attracted to Histrionic (hyperdramatic, hypercheerful) Personalities, who have too little

Aggressive, Defensive, Explosive and Anti-social Personalities (too much anger and too little guilt) tend to attract and be attracted to those with character styles that are Self-defeating (too much guilt, too easily scape-goated) and Passive-aggressive (too little anger and assertiveness).

Overly rigid Obsessive-Compulsive Personalities (too much structure and deliberation) attract and are attracted to folks with too little: Impulsive Personalities who are not motivated to outgrow lifestyles which mimic the symptoms of ADD or ADHD.

Next week I’ll write about ways to get along with these people that don’t aim at changing them but rather at just holding them more responsible for being the way they are. I’ll show you how to keep their personality or character style from getting you down, and avoid the all too natural habit of beating your head against their walls.

This column and the previous one are for people who are deeply frustrated with someone at home or at work. If most other people have the same problems getting along with this difficult person, your first step to making your peace is to understand your enemy.

Last week I explained how during hard times growing up, we all develop a character style. That’s the characteristic ways we’ve developed to handle feelings and relationships, to keep us safe from rejection and abuse. Extreme and inflexible character styles are known to us shrinks as "Axis Two", "personality disorders", or simply "PD’s".

Last week we looked at four pairings I often see when opposite disorders attract. With FEAR, POWER, ANGER, and RIGIDITY, those with too little are often attracted to those with too much, and the attraction works both ways.

This pattern of opposite extremes attracting is seen at all levels of life—human, animal, plant, cellular chemistry, and even way out there with astrological physics. Human relationships pair weak and strong, rich and poor, high IQ and emotional IQ, drunks and teetotalers, shy and outgoing, even healthy and sick.

The second step in making peace with difficult people is to realize you can’t change them. Accept your powerlessness over them. Stop beating your head against their walls by trying to rescue, appease, punish, or reform the difficult people.

The next mantra to repeat is accepting them: "I can accept them without approving of their behavior." "They have a right to act that way if they want to." If this is hard, it’s likely because you’re trying to skip to step four, which won’t work without the first three.

Now step four: choose a moderate emotional distance for your relationship. You can’t afford to get too close to PD’s, and if you want to get along with them, you can’t scoot too far back either. Stay close enough to where you both still need each other, but far enough back where you don’t need each other too much.

Step 5 is the most important, with the most potential for your coming to actually enjoy difficult people. It requires a good grasp on the first four. Hold them responsible for their selfish behavior by making your responses to their actions realistic, an accurate portrayal of how any normal person would react.

Imagine how a future roommate, coworker, boss, spouse, or neighbor would treat them. Look at how the healthy people you know deal with them, and you follow suit. The idea is to teach difficult people that in dealing with you, they will get exactly what they pay for.

I said this step of changing your reaction to hold them accountable is important, but anyone who’s tried it can tell you it’s by far the most difficult challenge in making peace with these people. (If you want to know more about particular strategies for "Coping with Difficult People", I wrote a book by that title a generation ago, and though it’s out of print, you can get a used copy on Amazon.com. for next to nothing.)

When PD’s show us too much or too little of a certain behavior, our natural tendency is often to counterbalance: If they are irresponsible or unkind, we tend to be overly responsible or kind. But this only makes it easier for them to justify being difficult, so I’m saying counter your tendency to counterbalance (to go to the opposite extreme. Don’t go to any extreme.

Look for your tendencies to do too much of a good thing and cut back. This will round off your own rough edges of too much helping, analyzing, excusing, coddling, lecturing or punishing. If taking care of them keeps backfiring, take better care of the caretaker (that’s you!).

Do you see how this rounds off both your rough edges and theirs? It reduces friction between the two of you, and puts the rub where it belongs. The friction is felt inside each one of you, challenging you to be a more well-balanced person with smoother relationships.

When you become a more well-rounded person, you will soon discover a wonderful exception to opposites attracting. Well-rounded people attract other well-rounded people. The fellowship of the embittered losers will back away from you, and you will get more support from upbeat people. Take it and enjoy!

In conclusion, research has shown that opposites attract: unbalanced people with bad habits draw and are drawn to other losers at the opposite extreme. And winners attract: well adjusted folks are attracted to other healthy people. As many times as I’ve seen this work out in the lives of folks I work with, you can’t tell me there’s not a higher power somewhere trying to inspire us to grow up and get along with each other better! --Dr. Paul Schmidt