Pine — Bach Flower Essence for Overly Conscientious People

”It serves me right, it‘s all my fault.”

”I will be paying for this mistake for the rest of my life.”

It sounds familiar, because it is a common human experience — placing blame on ourselves. It is a tendency to treat our mistakes as sins. However, there is a big difference between error and sin.

Human beings, imperfect by definition, can only make mistakes for three reasons:

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1. Lack of intelligence — when, because of a limitation (not on purpose), a person is unable to recognize or grasp the rules and ends up acting against them, i.e. making mistakes.

2. Lack of experience — when a person has enough intelligence, but lacks experience in certain situations and because they lack skills (not on purpose) they end up acting against the rules, making mistakes.

3. Overwhelmed by emotion — when a person is intelligent enough and experienced enough, but in that situation and at that moment, is acting in affect, meaning that they lose self-control and because of this (not on purpose), they end up acting against the rules, against expectations.

Sin implies intent to hurt someone or ourselves. Despite signals indicating despair or some other fatal consequence — we continue down the same path, to the end.

Feelings of guilt are considered to be hindering and destructive negative feelings (not all negative feelings are destructive). It is a difficult feeling to bear, one which does not help us avoid the next mistake. Exactly the opposite is true!

Guilt increases the likelihood of us making a mistake. Trying to get rid of that feeling, we end up becoming submissive and too soft towards the person we have wronged. We attempt to justify and redeem our actions but instead we cross over to the other extreme — and again make a mistake.

One everyday illustration of this vicious cycle would be a situation when a parent punishes a child and then, cannot come to terms with their actions and attempts to make amends by allowing the child to do what it wants or buys them something to cheer them up. What mistake is being made here?

The child receives the message that there was no reason for punishment, that Mom made a mistake and not them. That is how the child receives mixed messages — what is allowed and what is not, creating opportunity for yet another mistake. This can go on forever.

Pine is a remedy for people who blame themselves for their own and other people’s mistakes. These people claim responsibility for others‘ actions, for the actions of loved ones or those around them in specific situations. They accept others’ responsibility as their own.

It is for people who cannot come to terms with their omissions or failures, for people who cannot get over something, even if it was something insignificant. These are overconscientious individuals. When they go too far, they are rarely satisfied with their actions, always trying to end what was not good, or not good enough.

”I could have done a better job” or ”I could have done more.”

These are people who are constantly apologizing and justifying themselves, even when in fact no mistake has been made. Since the feeling of guilt is toxic, these people need a remedy to recover and get out of that vicious cycle.

When a person has a tendency to accept someone else‘s responsibility, the remedy should be given to help them see things in a realistic perspective, to see how things really stand, in order to assess how far their responsibility reaches and what is the responsibility of others.

Continue reading and find more about the remedies, dosing, characteristics, methods of use, emotional and mental states in the book: The Bach Flower Remedies: Floral Pharmacy in Psychotherapy, Description of Emotional and Mental States https://goo.gl/DtmJvs

Psychotherapy and Bach Flower Remedies

Written by

Milena Kostic — Clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, Bach Flower Remedies Practitioner

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