What are some of the symptoms of integrity deficit disorder?

A person who is afflicted with this disorder knows what's right but doesn't follow through and do what's right. He or she makes a promise or commitment, then fails to keep it. Thus when you meet a person with integrity deficit disorder you're never quite sure if you can trust that person or not.

A second symptom is also one of the causes: people who have integrity deficit disorder live from the outside in rather than from the inside out. They let their feelings and emotional responses of the moment govern their behavior more than doing what's right regardless of their feelings of the moment.

To put it another way, people with integrity deficit disorder are reactive rather than proactive. Reactive individuals base their decisions and actions on the outward circumstances of the moment, what's going on around them. If someone is rude to them, they are rude in return. They are affected by their social environment. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them. They let other people decide how they are going to act.

In addition, reactive people are often affected by the physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn't, they let it affect their attitude and their performance. Worse still, reactive people blame whatever happens to them on someone or something outside of them. They rarely take any responsibility for what's happened to them. It's always the fault of someone or something else.

Proactive people, on the other hand, carry their own weather with them. Whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value driven and if their value is to produce good quality work it isn't a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not. Proactive people also do not let the social environment control their actions or decisions.

That's where integrity comes in. Having integrity is about behaving in the way you promised to behave even though the mood in which you made the promises has changed or the environment outside you has changed. If you have integrity it protects you from your changing moods, desires and feelings. It even protects you from the changing moods of other people. It protects you from saying you are going to something and then not following through.

One day Jesus told a story designed for people who have integrity deficit disorder. His target audience were people who claimed to be the most religious.