Psychology Has It Backwards
We're offering mental health professionals a fresh look at the fundamental cause of stress and distress, and the fundamental source of cure. It's simpler than it has seemed, and the result is sustained mental well-being. Psychology has had it backwards.
Episodes
Who are we, and why are we so passionate about our work? We are mental health professionals and we have seen results for more than 30 years.
Psychology has been treating all the outcomes of insecure, misunderstood thinking as though they were the problems. The one underlying problem is what creates insecurity.
We see resiliency and mental health as our "starter kit," the essence of our being that cannot be lost, only obscured. We see our misunderstood use of thought as the way we obscure it.
The essential capacities of mental health practitioners are the ability to listen, not for our checklist of symptoms but for the heart of our clients, and then to have no fear of speaking from our own insights and pointing out our clients' insights.
When people understand their power to think, and their capacity to allow thoughts to come and go, they get in touch with the Innate Health that is their essence, and they discover the wisdom that arises through their own uncluttered thinking.
We've been referring to Principles underlying our work. Here's a deeper description of the three Universal Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought.
When we feel mental distress, we seek help, just as we do when we feel physical distress. We get a diagnosis of our presenting problem. Is that diagnosis a long-term label, or just an observation about a temporary, misunderstood state of thinking? What if diagnoses are descriptions of the many ways we thinkers can get distressed and insecure and, without meaning to, start to use our thinking against ourselves?
Many people think experiencing trauma dooms us to long-standing psychological pain. No doubt, trauma results in horrible memories that are distressing when they come to mind. But with an understanding of how the mind works and what the past really is, we can allow those thoughts to come and go, and move on with life.
Anxiety is a frequent mental health complaint that escalates in difficult times. It always looks like something "out there" is causing it and anxiety is the only and inevitable response. We address the question whether anxiety is a natural response to external events, or an outcome of the way we think about external events. Is it possible not to be anxious, no matter what is going on? We say yes.
Many people consider a diagnosis of depression a sort of "character trait," a lifelong problem. But depression is a product of negative thinking taken seriously over time, and it passes. Like all misunderstood thinking, it's temporary.
It's easy to get worked up, or bummed out at times when life isn't going the way we want it to. It's tempting to listen to bad news and predictions of suffering and take them to heart and lose our bearings. But it's not necessary. We have the innate resilience to make the most of anything, and find our way through change and challenge.
There are many diagnoses that are treated like inescapable conditions. Depression and Anxiety, for example. Once we understand Innate Health, we realize that nothing can break the human spirit. Our spiritual nature is untouched by the habitual thinking that we sometimes fall into that makes us feel hopeless or broken. Mental well-being is always at hand.
Addictions are a symptom of unrecognized, habitual, insecure thinking. When we think a lot about troubling things, we seek relief from the pressure and negativity of our own thinking. We become "addicted" to whatever we found that gave us relief — substances, food, sex, work, exercise — anything. When we catch on to our own thinking and the power of thought, we can let addictions go.
As we see the way we hold and use our own thoughts more and more clearly, we recognize addicted thinking sooner and sooner in the process. We find we have the power to let thoughts pass and the "need" to do something or use something to get relief from them disappears. We see that urges are just signals that we're starting to feel insecure. We're always just one thought away from dropping insecurity.
Our thoughts always appear real and right to us, even when they are contaminated by an insecure state of mind. If we act on thoughts we have without any understanding of our state of mind or how Thought works, we are "innocent" because they looked like our best choice at the time. We can forgive people, and still not forgive deeds. That leads to accountability without suffering and blame.
With an understanding of the Principles, we can find forgiveness for ourself and others, and still maintain accountability. When we see psychological innocence, we see how people get trapped in insecure dysfunctional thinking that makes sense to them at that time. Once we understand that cycle, and learn to take such thoughts as warnings to slow down, forgiveness makes sense.
Analysis is an overuse of personal thinking, and keeps us stuck with what we already think and know. Reflection is the opening for wisdom and insight, and allows us to rise above our past thinking and circumstances and create anew. Unfortunately, most of us have learned we need to analyze our problems to fix them, and we innocently hold them in place. Reflection brings answers and a change in direction.
Looking at "fixing" the past, or behaviors, or outcomes to help people find happiness is really like suggesting to a sad dog that he just wag his tail and he'll feel much better. The Principles suggest a new direction; solve the underlying misunderstanding of how Thought works and how we function psychologically, and we don't need to fix anything. We see how to operate from understanding and leave the past behin...
Insecurity is a thought-created state of mind that creates feelings of self-doubt, suspicion, anxiety, alienation from others, discomfort... all kinds of negative feelings. It dissipates and resolves into increasing levels of security as our awareness of the role of thought increases. We all live in up and down feelings of security and insecurity, but as our understanding deepens, insecurity passes more quickly without engaging us.
This is an expression that describes where we are in our recognition that our experience of life events is created by our own thinking about them. As our level of consciousness rises, circumstances have less and less power to affect us. We know that we can look away from our personal, often insecure thinking about them, and quiet our minds to allow our wisdom to surface. As we come to count on wisdom, we gain confidence that we &qu...
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