SOBERING. How our brains interact with a pleasure-pain balance is super interesting. It helps to better understand how we react to pain, how our brains seek out pleasure. It gives a lot of stories of people who have major addiction disorders that dont seem to be very general or normal, but the principles remain. It makes me scared to ever let myself become addicted to anything, or anything like it - addiction is a prison of our own making. Although, we do have the keys out the prison, its a very painful process and lost of damage done in trying to break addiction - damage to ourselves and those around us. Using the intentional application of pain to treat pain.

Radical Honesty - how does telling the truth improve our lives? Kids start lying at 2 years old, normally the smarter the kid the more likely they are to lie and the better they are at it. Since adults have the ability to plan and remember their lies can become more sophisticated and designed to cover themselves and at least intended to harm less people.

Sooner or later, lying will create a burden of guilt, life is so much easier and more peace filled if we tell the truth. Telling the truth takes worry out of our life. Integrity brings us freedom.

Honest brings us closer in our connections to others, it deepens our relationships - and the opposite is also true, dishonesty and deception isolates us and creates boundaries and distance.

Radical honestly promotes self accountability. If we have a habit of honesty we are better able to avoid self-deception.

Speaking about the importance of avoiding victim mentality in the process of healing the author, a psychotherapist, stated "we as mental-health care providers have become so caught up in the practice of empathy, that we've lost sit of the fact that empathy without accountability is a shortsighted attempt to relieve suffering." Powerful. We must take responsibility for ourselves, our mistakes, our lives, our stories to ever hope to experience real healing.