The author calls the mechanism behind this behavior "The Comfort Zone of Self-Belief." The comfort zone governs how much pain and how much joy one can sustain. The "feeling" scale contains the following elements into which all our experiences fall: Unacceptable Pain, Acceptable Pain, Neutrality, Acceptable Joy, and Unacceptable Joy. The size of each region is determined by the amount of childhood trauma a person has suffered, the degree to which the person believes his or her parents intended that suffering, and the degree of failed differentiation from parents. Another element in the mechanism is the range of emotions one can comfortably experience. People live their lives trying to stabilize their experiences with their comfort zone of self-belief: feeling what they believe they deserve to feel, attaining what they feel they deserve to attain, and failing at what they believe they should fail. They are continually caught in a conflict between their desire to differentiate versus their desire to be loved and protected, their desire to do what they want versus their desire to make their parents happy, and their desire to do what they want versus their desire to make their parents unhappy. These are both the key conflicts in people's lives and the roots of those conflicts. Failure to differentiate is a constant reinforcement of low self-esteem. Therapy should have as its aim the breaking of childhood mystical bonds with parents. It should also increase the areas of acceptable joy and unacceptable pain while decreasing the areas of acceptable pain and unacceptable joy people are willing to accept in our lives. Finally, therapy should change the range of the comfort zone so that people exist, as much as possible, in the areas of acceptable joy and neutrality, while helping them minimize the pain they believe they deserve and are routinely willing to endure. 4 figures and 4 references