When you are suffering PAIN, whether that pain is purely physical, purely emotional, or a combination of both as each feeds into the other, you would easily have lost the power of SELF.  You may have felt violated by the demands or rejections from the world, empty and lonely because of personal neglect, or in pain that compromises your ability to function with dignity.  You may try to manage or achieve a state of balance using support systems, and they may have failed.  Or you may have simply been left drained by the impositions you faced.

The common concern is that you have lost SELF - your dignity, confidence, composure,  focus, determination, or even purpose.  And in your attempts to save face, keep your dignity, you may have used aggression - defending yourself by attacking the opposition, showing irritability, anger, hostility or jealousy in your attempts at survival.  You may have run away from the pain and become addicted to the substances or activities that have allowed you temporary relief and eventually engulfed your very soul.  You may have endured the PAIN, suffering undue anxiety, panic, physical and mental anguish, or exhaustion.  Or you may have begun to feel inherently inadequate, unworthy, or inappropriate, suffering burnout, depression, self loathing, loneliness, or emptiness from the discovery.

Regardless, you would have realized that your Personal or Emotional Integrity has been destroyed, violated, or treated as insignificant.  This could have been the result of depletion from the inordinately large stresses imposed on you .  But, you can also recognize that something cannot be destroyed unless it is destroyable in the first place.

The Fragile SELF-IMAGE

True, inordinately large stresses can overwhelm the strengths that define anyone.  However, they can only destroy you if your definition of yourself is tied to those things they can destroy, that is, if it is flawed.  The definition of a SELF can be flawed if it is undefined or undeveloped.  But it is also flawed if its definition is based on physical attributes that are themselves vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life.  Finally, the definition of SELF can be flawed if it is propped up or protected by material , social, or ornamental assets that are themselves vulnerable to the activities of our inconstant and perpetually changing world.

If you have any of these effects, you can easily be led into a never-ending path of trying to cure the problem instead of understanding and solving the cause.  Then, you  are just "filling the bath tub with a large hole" when you should be looking at closing the hole. The hole in this case is the underlying frailty of your SELF-IMAGE or fragility of your emotional strength.

Prometheum Institute's Approach to Fixing a Fragile SELF-IMAGE 

We use the Understanding Change approach that is is primarily about SELF-IMAGE.  The whole idea is that anyone has the ability to feel good about self.  It is how we keep that feeling when there is disruption, when others appear to reject us, when we are overwhelmed by too much stress or the threat to our survival or when that feeling does not stay long enough to keep us focused that problems ensue.  At Prometheum Institute, therefore, our focus in on defining, building and securing SELF-IMAGE, but also about doing that when hope seems to have been lost or when you already seemed to have destroyed your health, compromised your freedom, lost your loved ones, or jeopardized your career by your defensive actions or sultry moods.