I don't want you to be like this

This is a thought from love. It is what a parent might think if they thought their child was miserable. It was what a compassionate person would think if they knew someone else was miserable.

It is also the beginning of defining normal and acceptable behaviour if looked at with a very different lens. It is hard for me to put this concept across, the one that from this form of compassion or love comes an unacceptance of this. If the misery meets a clinical diagnosis then the desire is to remove the symptoms of the misery.

This is an incredible bad way of trying to get across two paradigms of understanding of what is exactly the same action or event but looked at in different ways. Another example might be the creation of the asylum system: an act of great compassion that decided to see the unwanted and 'socially ugly' as "mentally ill" to be cared for in the psychiatric institutions of the day, or the Great Confinement where the mad were treated like prisoners (or worse) and hidden (and forgotten) by society.

A CBT practitioner might simply this to be a debate about "is this glass half empty or half full?" and in someways they'd be right however with their mode of thinking the person who is incorrect is the person who sees the glass as half empty. It is my belief that there is 50% water and 50% not water in a transparent silica-based vessel...but existing in seeing the duality (and in paradigms of mental health it's more than a duality) is very difficult as is maintaining that clear lens that sees both the good and the bad in everything and everyone. I think what I'm talking about is objectivity in a subjective world.