During the ’70s and ’80s, there were several different paperback books that my dad, as a family doctor with a private practice, would order cases of to give out to his patients.

One was called Super-Nutrition and detailed the benefits of certain vitamins and foods. Another was Fasting: The Ultimate Diet, which extolled the health virtues of routine fasting. The third book was Psycho-Cybernetics and dealt with emotional well-being.

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Written in 1960 by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, at the time regarded as one of the world’s most widely known plastic surgeons, Psycho-Cybernetics is a treasure trove of advice for happiness and success, quoting widely from the Bible and famous men from history.

In one great passage, Maltz observes, “The person with an inferiority complex invariably compounds the error by striving for superiority. His feelings spring from the false premise that he is inferior. From this false premise, a whole structure of ‘logical thought’ and feeling is built. If he feels bad because he is inferior the cure is to make himself as good as everybody else, and the way to feel really good is to make himself superior.

“This striving for superiority gets him into more trouble, causes more frustration, and sometimes brings about a neurosis where none existed before. He becomes more miserable than ever, and ‘the harder he tries,’ the more miserable he becomes.

“Inferiority and Superiority are reverse sides of the same coin. The cure lies in realizing that the coin itself is spurious. The truth about you is this: You are not ‘inferior.’ You are not ‘superior.’ You are simply ‘You.’

“ ‘You’ as a personality are not in competition with any other personality simply because there is not another person on the face of the earth like you; or in your particular class. You are an individual. You are unique. You are not ‘like’ any other person and can never become ‘like’ any other person. You are not ‘supposed to be like any other person and no other person is ‘supposed’ to be like you.

“God did not create a standard person and in some way label that person by saying ‘this is it.’ He made every human being individual and unique just as He made every snowflake individual and unique . . .

“Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘God must have loved the common people for he made so many of them.’ He was wrong. There is no ‘common man’—no standardized, common pattern. He would have been nearer the truth had he said, ‘God must have loved uncommon people for he made so many of them’ . . .

“Stop measuring yourself against ‘their’ standards. You are not ‘them’ and can never measure up. Neither can ‘they’ measure up to yours—nor should they. Once you see this simple, rather self-evident truth, accept it and believe it, your inferior feelings will vanish.

“Dr. Norton L. Williams, psychiatrist, addressing a medical convention, said recently that modern man’s anxiety and insecurity stemmed from a lack of ‘self-realization,’ and that inner security can only be found ‘in finding in oneself an individuality, uniqueness and distinctiveness that is akin to the idea of being creating in the image of God.’

“He also said that self-realization is gained by ‘a simple belief in one’s own uniqueness as a human being, a sense of deep and wide awareness of all people and all things and a feeling of constructive influencing of others through one’s own personality.’ ”

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Obviously, as a Christian, it is Christ’s mind that is to be our mind and His life inside us is to be lived out through us for others to observe our “conversation.” (Editor’s note: I wrote on this in my last entry)

Along these lines, here are some thoughts from Jordan, taken from a seminar he gave several years ago, on how to relate to others as well as with yourself for a happy, productive Christian walk:

“If you’re willing to spend and be spent, you’re willing to say then, ‘I’m willing to love you and I’m willing for you to take advantage of that because that’s my commitment.’

“And if you’re not willing to get there, you’re always going to live at a level that’s real shallow because it’s that ‘into-me-see’ (intimacy) that opens you; opens to you that. The verse there in Colossians is, ‘Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him:’

“David, when he was confessing his sin, he said that, ‘God desired truth on the inward parts.’ Give your (loved ones) permission to tell you the truth no matter what. You teach each other to lie when you identify areas that when you tell the truth, you get whacked.

“If you’ve taught someone to lie to you because they know there are areas where they can’t tell you the truth because of fear of punishment. . . . I don’t just mean physical; I mean psychological punishment, the shame the rejection, the demeaning, the ridicule, the anger. They’d rather not tell you the truth and brood over it than be open to you because of the reaction.

“Today, tell yourself, ‘It’s more important for me to minister to them than it is to be ministered to.’ Grace allows acceptance; it’s the only thing that does. With performance systems you’re always going to fail.

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“Now, there are four negative interactions that will poison your relationship if you let them run rampant. I call them the Four Horsemen in reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who, in Revelation 6, go out and bring destruction in the earth.

“They are typical strategies…can I tell you I can list them for you because they’re so common. It has nothing to do with anything unique about you. They’re common to your old sin nature and they’re typical strategies that NEVER work. They destroy; they don’t build up. And yet they are a part of our arsenal; almost instinctively by nature because our ‘taker rule’ expresses itself with them.

“They are: 1.) Selfish demands. 2.) Disrespectful judgments. 3.) Angry outbursts and 4.) Independent behavior. You’ll see them in any person; any Believer who’s in reversion.

“They’ll be making selfish demands. They want it their way. When they don’t get it, they’ll be making disrespectful judgments. Blaming someone else. It will escalate into anger. And then it will seemingly resolve itself. It doesn’t resolve itself, but it brings a modicum of peace and withdrawal.

“Instead of searching for mutually acceptable solutions, abuse wants to impose a solution to the other person’s disadvantage so we can have our advantage. And, friend, the only issue there is control. You just want to be in control—behavior, attitudes, opinions.

“Again, a perpetrator rarely acknowledges it. You hear all kind of excuses, all kind of justifications. But when you hear them, something that’s justifying one of those Four Horsemen—your taker self starts talking you into believing that you have a right for it, you’re looking out for the interest of the other. You think, ‘Really they’re to blame anyway; I’m innocent.’

“If you’re the other person, just don’t believe that stuff. Just say, ‘By faith, I know that ain’t true!’ and don’t buy into them.

“Put off selfish demands. I mean, who wants to live with a dictator anyway?! Boss you around?! Here’s a definition: ‘Commanding someone else to do things that would benefit you at their expense with the implied threat of punishment if refused.’ Do you do that?

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“As a way to solve problems, selfish demands sure make sense to your ‘taker rule.’ And if your (friend or loved one) is in ‘the giver mode,’ you know what they’re going to do? They’ll reward you because their rule is, ‘Make you happy even if it makes me unhappy.’

“So if you’re in ‘taker mode’ and the other one’s in ‘giver mode,’ WHEW! You’re going to get what you want so demands look like they work. That’s WHY they seem to work so often! And they’ll work often enough that they’ll become a habit. And it’s a habit that’s almost impossible to break.

“So think about how do you ask others for favors? Do you just tell the other what you want them to do? Do you just order them? ‘You should do this!’ or do you say, ‘Could you do that?’ See the difference between should and could? Just changing one word in your vocabulary? You think about how you do it?

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“The instinct of making demands when you’re frustrated, and the habit of making demands when you’re not frustrated, makes them real difficult to break. Now if your (friend or loved one) is in the giver mode . . . but what happens if they’re in the taker mode? Whoah! World War VI breaks out because your (loved one) isn’t ready to quit.

“They say, ‘You want what you want; I want what I want,’ and you go to war. But you know the fight that results won’t stop your ‘taker mode’ from making demands the next time. Why? Because your ‘taker mode’ lives by the rule, ‘I need to be happy, and if I’m not happy, make (the other person) make me happy,’ and you take whatever you need to take to be happy.

“So if I got to fight someone else’s ‘taker mode,’ well, then, ‘I just need to be a better fighter than they are,’ so I develop skills—not at solving problems, but at winning wars. You think that’s gonna work?! When it comes to fairness, you can never trust your ‘taker mode,’ so what do you trust?

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“I suggest that in Philippians 2 there’s what I call a ‘Grace Policy of Joint Agreement.’ I’m going to tell you, you need rules to force yourself into confronting these things and making choices. Faith is an action you take out of a positive volition. It’s a positive choice and there’s time in your life when you need to have situations that force you to make choices so that when you come to that, you’ve caught yourself; you’ve checked yourself.

“The habits aren’t just mindlessly flowing through your life. ‘Boom, here’s a choice!’ and you can consciously bring yourself back under control. It’s called ‘a belt of truth.’ That girdle of truth Paul talks about where you take truth…the soldier’s robe would flow out but he put that belt on and got it all under control. But you can’t just carry (the belt); you got to put it on and cinch it up.

“Philippians 2 says, ‘Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.’ WHOAH!

“Proverbs 13:10 says, ‘Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is wisdom.’ So don’t let anything be done by strife or vain glory just to get your way. That is lowliness of mind.

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“Where’s your mind work? In your emotions or . . . ? What are you doing? You’re esteeming. You’re developing a value system that tells you how you think and how you make decisions. And what is it? ‘I’m going to esteem others better than myself.’ Now does that sound like the taker or the giver? Who is it really? It’s the new creature!

“But see how close the giver can be to that? But when the giver does it, why is the giver doing it? So he can feel good about doing good? When the new man does it, why does he do it? Verse 5. ‘Let this mind be in you which is Christ Jesus.’

“You see why it’s so much of a catch-thing there? And the reason why that is, is when you fail, what does your new nature do? It doesn’t cast you into psychological guilt and shame and rejection. It says, ‘Wait a minute.’ You get objective guilt. You says, ‘I made a mistake; it was wrong and now I can fix it because the Cross has equipped me to.’

“You can successfully deal with failures under grace, where with the giver mode, all the giver mode does is what it did with Adam and Eve back there. It sends you into all the psychological guilt. Things that paralyze you and make you unable so now your taker mode takes over because the giver mode—he comes to his/her rescue to say, ‘Come on, I’ll take care of you. I’ll make you happy.’

“And when you put off all that thinking process, it becomes, ‘I’m going to esteem others better than myself because that’s what Christ teaches me to think.’ ”