Translator: Gabriella Patricola Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Let me ask you a question.
If you were having a nightmare,
but you suddenly became aware that it was not real,
just a nightmare,
and that you could wake yourself up and get out of it,
would you choose to wake yourself up?
So, just imagine for just a moment
that you're in a deep sleep,
and you suddenly find yourself in the woods,
and it's dark,
and you can barely see the outline from the trees,
from the moonlight.
And out from behind a tree comes this half-crazed man,
and he begins chasing you,
and you're running,
and you're screaming,
and you're terrified, fighting for your life,
yet you're stuck in this nightmare that you can't get out of.
But what if you suddenly became aware that it wasn't real?
How many people in this audience, raise your hands,
would choose to wake yourself up and get out of that dream?
It would seem obvious that we would.
But there are people here today,
there are people in our lives,
there are people everywhere,
who are today, in fact, stuck in a nightmare.
Worse yet, not aware that they're there,
or that they have the ability to wake themselves up and get out of it.
This reminds me of one of my case studies.
This young girl
who was left to the mercy of two very ill-equipped individuals,
she was abandoned by her mother and father.
And these two ill-equipped individuals were ill-equipped to raise a child,
to love,
to care,
as they projected their own self-hatred onto this little girl.
And this young girl
would deal with, would suffer through these daily abusive rituals
that would often include being accused of just any random act.
In which case,
the only way she could survive the abuse was
to admit, each time, to something she hadn't done.
So, she found a way to end her suffering,
but now she's forced to lie.
But she really had no choice,
because until she did,
her suffering would only continue.
But what becomes of a child who's taught to tell a lie?
Because we are told and taught to tell the truth.
And while she moved on, eventually, beginning her own life,
she struggled with this reality,
because as a result of what happened,
her perception became skewed, and that skewed reality became her norm.
How do we know what is real,
versus what is the nightmare?
Because the event had ended,
yet she still felt like she needed to protect herself.
Now it was just an illusion of something that had happened,
yet it wasn't happening anymore.
As a licenced psychotherapist, an EMDR specialist,
and a dedicated researcher on the study of being, existing, becoming,
and reality,
I've had the opportunity over the last ten-plus years
to treat a wide range of clientele,
ranging from very highly successful entrepreneurs
simply seeking to remove mental blocks,
and get to the next level in their business,
to very highly dissociative clients,
just simply seeking to gain control
over the amnesia that robs them of their everyday life experiences.
When you think about dissociation, if you don't know what that is,
dissociation looks like a movie screen that plays all day long,
and there's a split right down the middle,
and you've got the past movie playing,
and the present.
And when you have dissociation, it's very difficult to distinguish
which one is real.
But it was specifically with
the dissociative clients that I worked with,
that I was able to see just how far these illusions from the past,
how far we can align with them,
and lose touch with our sense of identity,
with time,
and with definition in the world.
But just as for the young girl,
she struggled to identify who she was, her sense of self,
and she really struggled
to understand truths and lies.
This understanding reality is a concept of Sigmund Freud.
It's a psychoanalytical theory called "reality testing,"
in which the ego, the mind, has the ability to recognize
between one's external world and internal.
And it has the ability to see a situation for what it really is,
as opposed to what someone hopes or fears it to be.
Ego psychology says in order to do this,
to have that ability, to see something as it is,
that its primary task is to integrate parts of the mind,
integrate parts of self, as they call it.
Scientists show that 95 per cent of all of our thoughts, feelings,
actions, behaviors,
all come from the activity outside of our conscious awareness.
So, 95 per cent of your life reflects your subconscious mind.
In essence, your life reflects your unconscious.
Now, this was quite reflective in my dissociative clients
because in their case, they didn't have the ability,
as I said, to distinguish between what was real,
the past and the present, they somewhat collided.
But as mentioned previously,
I was also treating very highly successful entrepreneurs,
Type 'A's, doing great in their life.
They just wanted to do better,
they wanted to get to that very next level.
What was interesting
is that the symptoms of dissociation weren't there.
Yet, they too had an inability to distinguish
between the illusion and what was real.
So, they didn't have the ability.
They had the logic.
So, with someone with dissociation,
your logic tells you that the past is real.
They had the logic,
but their logic was dismissing what they knew to be true.
That was the question I had: Why are they dismissing their own logic?
If the literature says that an integrated mind
allows us to distinguish what's real,
why are these non-dissociative clients
behaving,
thinking,
believing,
just as the same as those that were dissociative?
My mission in life
is to help people to identify their truth.
To help people, support people, to identify what's real in their lives.
And in a sense,
to help them to wake up and get out of the nightmare.
The question is,
do we really want to?
Because, you see, while most of you raised your hand
when I asked if you would choose to wake yourself up
and get out of the nightmare,
the reality is that most would choose not to,
even upon becoming aware of the logic behind it,
they're still accepting these illusions that are simply made up of lies
because they're not happening, and they're not true,
and they're still accepting them as truth.
Why are we so driven to accept the illusion?
Well, if you think about a mirage, if you're in the desert,
and you haven't had any water for ten days,
you need to believe
that there's a body of water that lies up ahead.
Because that's your hope.
That's what is going to help you to survive.
We need to be safe.
We need to find a way to matter.
We need to find a way to be good enough.
We are, however, disillusioned by our illusions.
Yet, we shape our lives around them.
And how different is this than what is the very nature of dissociation?
So, this was my assumption,
as I'm seeing this happen across the board with all of my clients,
is that it might not have been as obvious to the eye.
It seemed as if everybody on a grander scale
was in some sense, dissociating.
It seemed as if everybody was accepting these illusions
despite what they knew to be true.
And because everybody was doing this,
I decided to secretly
start treating everybody as if they had a dissociative disorder,
and coming from a psychoanalytic perspective and self states.
And what was really amazing,
was that everybody was getting better, fast,
in a remarkable way,
in a dramatic way.
This is what inspired me to share what I have found,
and my passion behind what I do.
It's no secret that we all have illusions,
both good and bad.
We need them for our survival.
The downside to these illusions that we hold,
these illusions that aren't true,
is that while we embrace them in our lives, we remain always surviving.
It's a catch-22,
because we gain a sense of safety but at the cost of our freedom.
So, how do we know what is real?
Well, reality, as you well know, is subjective,
it's based on what we believe.
Okay, so what determines our beliefs?
Truths and lies.
And I know a little something about truths and lies.
Because, you see, I was that young girl in this case study.
And I had two defining moments in my life.
And the first defining moment
was this awareness, because I could never figure out
why my truth was constantly rejected,
until I realised,
it's not that they don't believe me,
it's that they want me to lie.
And they can force me to lie,
but they couldn't force me to believe it.
And in that,
I gained a tremendous amount of power, power over my circumstances and strength.
As a child, your reality is shaped for you by others.
So, you can imagine my reality was pretty skewed.
But through all the lies, I've found the truth,
and it's the reason that I've survived today.
The thing is,
is that even though I'd left home,
and even I got through all of that,
and even I found this little golden nugget of information,
that as long as I knew the truth, I had power over them,
and I learned how to survive,
that's the problem, is that most of us have learned how to survive,
but very few have ever learned how to live.
Our reality is shaped by us and for us.
But the truth has to be our own.
There's nothing wrong with having thoughts, or opinions,
it's a matter of believing in them.
So, how do we do this?
People often ask me, "How do I get out of survival mode?"
"How do I learn how to live?"
By letting go of the illusions.
Always challenge the authority of your mind.
Always question your thoughts.
Always ask yourself:
Is what I'm thinking, is what I'm feeling
is this the truth? Is this real?
Because nightmares are only real if you believe in them,
but nobody can force you to believe in the lies.
Fight the lies,
find the truth,
and here's to living.
Thank you.
(Applause)