I work in a rehabilitation hostel where many of the residents have a chromosomal disorder that makes them prone to certain kinds of obsessive behavior. Even though only a small proportion of the population actually have this syndrome; it has often been the case that when I work with these residents I realize that the issues we are dealing with can affect people without the syndrome as well. Therefore, I am writing this because the techniques that I use for these people can sometimes be applied to you and me; and to other people we know.

Yesterday I was working with a young woman in her early twenties. She was feeling very bad because she had lost herself in a spiral of self-defeating behavior and its consequences. The most recent incident had begun because she had not felt very good about herself; and neither had she dealt with her feelings properly. Instead, she had allowed herself to indulge in a certain kind of obsessive behavior which affected her adversely. As a result, she felt even worse. This triggered her to engage in another kind of obsessive behavior which totally disgusts people and also disgusted her, even while she was engaged in it. The consequence of that was that people were repulsed by her and she felt much worse than she had in the beginning.

As I spoke to her my attention was drawn to something that applies to all of us: When we feel a bit low or depressed, we can find ourselves doing things that are not in our interests. We usually know objectively that something is not the best thing to do, but when we're down, we have a tendency to ignore that knowledge.

The situation that people sometimes get into is that the self defeating behavior - which may be subtle - becomes a habit and feeds their negative self image. Now they have a "reason" to feel bad about themselves and they even start to identify themselves as "perpetrator" of the situation, forgetting that there is a way out.

If G-d forbid, a person continues down a path that is destructive; not only do they feel worse, but they are in danger of disconnecting from their feelings and from their intellect. Once they do this, they also disconnect from their capacity to improve the situation.

Yesterday when I worked with this young woman, my aim was to help her to overcome the following problems: feeling bad; feeling helpless to change the situation; feeling alienated from the knowledge that certain behavior would make it worse; feeling as if she

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