NGESI

These days I'm seeing a lot of patients who are feeling as though they aren't good enough. My wife and I had invented a word called NGESI. Often our language fails to describe reality. So we need a new word. Its derivation is from "Not Good Enough Soul Injury". It is a fairly serious condition. We saw this as a developmental issue which results in a pervasive personality issue. People with NGESI suffer in childhood with degradation that impairs the development of proper self-image. They see themselves as inadequate in all of their interpersonal relationships. They filter reality with a bias towards their own imperfections. The concept has helped with my understanding of people.
Now there is a new nuance. Perhaps it's a NGESI variant. There are several different types of multiple sclerosis. They have a different clinical course and a different presentation. Then, there is transverse myelitis. This involves demyelination that occurs in the spinal cord. But it happens only once. So it's seen as entirely different from MS in which there are multiple demyelination events over time and are not limited to spinal cord but involve brain as well. Still, they share the similarity of being demyelination events. So they're the same but they're different.
I'm seeing people who likely didn't have a childhood onset NGESI that came from upbringing that involved creating poor self esteem (it's usually the result of the childhood abuse-neglect complex). They are developing "late-onset NGESI". Perhaps it is "LONGESI". I'm not sure. These people were doing reasonably well. But the disease that they developed has changed them. They are uncomfortable with being "an ill person". They see themselves as inadequate, because "ill people" are not "good people." Of course, "good" isn't really the same as "healthy". It isn't the potentially synonomous nature of the two concepts that generates the loss of self-esteem, though. It's the essence of our judgements.
In our world it is acceptable practice to judge ourselves and others. We work hard to prove that we are better than this person or that one. We talk about how that person isn't really such a "good" person. We create criteria that determine who is and who isn't "good". Our religions tell us that some people are good. They tell us what determines this.
Yesterday, a colleague told me about his experience working at a Catholic hospital. They had a contract with a very large insurer who required abortion services (it was state mandated) that the hospital couldn't turn down. Turning it down would mean fiscal insolvency. So they agreed to sub-contract with a group at another facility to perform their abortion requests, and they were to pay them directly. This way, they could pay another person to perform the abortions, and it absolved them of any wrong-doing. So they created a distinction between performing an abortion (makes you a bad person) and paying someone else to perform an abortion (makes them a bad person). There are also those who know that people who don't accept Christ as their God are going to hell. That's because they believe you can't be "good" unless you meet this criteria.
There is the western secular world that belives (pretty much, with a few nuances) that those who are wealthy are "better" than those who are "poor". There are advertisers who claim that if you use their products you are "better" than if you don't. It's not that they sell good products anymore. It isn't even that they're selling something that will make you happy. It's actually become that their product is necessary if you want to be a good person. So, conversly, if you don't have that product, you aren't a good person.
This has, for most of us, become a way of life. It is even a "purpose" or a meaning for life. People are dedicated to being "a good person". They work very hard to figure out what that is, and how to be that. They have developed a very complicated set of rules and behaviors that apply. So becoming ill can affect this. It does so by changing our abilities. "Good people" are largely the result of their abilities and performances. There are some other criteria, of course. But our productivity and our capability determine a great deal (for most of us) of our "goodness" as people. If we lose this, we lose our value and our "goodness". This is the nature of the late onset NGESI.
It's a very dangerous, very pervasive delusion that some people are better than some other people. It isn't a reality. People are all people. I've yet to meet a perfect person. The imperfections in people are all about the same. People are wonderful things, though. Everyone of them has a wonderful nature about them. They are just as wonderful as dogs. Some say that's not the case. But I think they are. I think we're a good species.
We don't spend a great deal of our time creating criteria for a "good cat" and a "bad cat". When cats are imperfect, we see that it is their nature. Cats sometimes scratch things. They just don't know that a furniture leg is not good for scratching. It's their nature. Dogs bark. That's their nature. When they awaken us at 2:00 am to bark at a threatening fly, it isn't that they're a "bad dog". (I have heard people tell their dog that it's a bad dog, though. I think they're mistaken, of course.) We can't tell the difference between a good dog and a bad dog. We can't tell the difference between a good cat and a bad cat. We can't tell a good anything from a bad anything: spider, ant, butterfly, cat or dog.
Mice are like people. We can tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones. When you buy mice to feed your pet snake, it's a bad mouse. When you buy a mouse as a pet for your child, it's a good mouse. A homeless mouse (or wild mouse) that wanders into the home accidentally (no doubt looking for food due to hunger that came about from our destruction of its environment) it's a bad mouse. So we can tell good mice from bad mice. And we can also tell good people from bad people.
Anyway, it turns out that when people are ill, they are bad people. They may have been good people before. That doesn't matter once they are sick, though. Then they are bad people.
Sometimes these crazy rules can upset me. Then, I remember that they were made up by these imperfect people. It's their nature to come up with all sorts of delusions. Sometimes, their delusions can come back to harm them. So they suffer with NGESI. Even so, they're all good mice.