I'm gonna begin this episode by calling out the major shadow
of those people who work in the mental health field.
Nobody just wakes up one day and decides to be a psychiatrist,
a psychologist, a self-help expert or a life coach with no provocation.
We arrived at this place because of mental and emotional suffering ourselves.
A Major Shift That Must Occur in the Mental Health Field
The way that we dealt with our suffering, was to try to "figure it all out".
Most of us thought and felt things as a result of our own life experience,
that caused us to feel confusion and to doubt our own sanity.
And so we needed to secure our own sanity,
find out the truth and get firmly grounded in reality.
Knowing the what and the why helps us
to feel grounded in that reality
and in that sanity that we reached for like a buoy
in the middle of a sea that was trying to drown us.
And we try to rescue ourselves through others
by helping everyone we come into contact with to find that buoy.
We help people to come into that stable construct
that we see as sanity and reality and truth.
Even though some people in the mental health field
will tell you that they got into this
because of somebody else in their family who had issues,
I can guarantee you
that having somebody else in your family that had issues,
made you yourself feel confused and unstable,
which is why you really had an interest in it.
Trying to help everybody to find this buoy is a noble enough cause.
The problem is, is that this very strategy which we use to help people,
can also be the very thing which does the most damage.
And it can be the thing which prevents us
from catalyzing genuine healing in somebody's life.
When people come to us and we can very clearly see
how what they're thinking what they're saying and what they're doing
is out of alignment,
with the reality that we ourselves are seeing.
Now after putting years of study into it,
we have arrived at what we think reality is.
So, it's obvious to us, then,
how what they're thinking saying and doing is out of alignment with
objective reality.
Which we've already decided is our own.
After all, our entire career is based off of having that truth
and having that reality and knowing the answers.
Therefore we can easily see where the things
that they are thinking saying and doing are out of alignment
with what is right, true and real.
But this is where we go wrong.
The way we try to help them is to get them, often in an oppositional way,
to join our reality.
I want you to imagine that all people live inside their own
individual bubble.
That bubble is their own subjective reality.
And what people in the mental health field try to do,
is to get people to come out of their bubbles into our bubbles.
The reason we want to do that
is because it's obvious when being inside somebody's bubble,
which is their subjective reality,
is the thing that is causing them trauma and pain.
But using this strategy,
the attempt to get somebody into our bubble, is the very thing which makes
healing impossible for us.
Because of the following;
1. We are unwilling to accept that our subjective reality
is not necessarily the objective reality.
What objective reality is,
is the amalgamation of every subjective reality.
So if you added every individual perspective into one thing,
so that they were all combined,
and the truth that arose out of those combined subjective realities,
would be the objective perspective.
We all know the danger of mistaking our subjective reality
with what objective reality looks like.
We've all seen those movies.
Movies like Powder, or K-pax, or The Butterfly Effect,
or The Secret Garden,
or every movie featuring medieval medical practices,
where the person who is assisting someone's process towards health,
is so limited by what they've decided is real or true
that they end up doing more damage.
When you're watching these movies
you can clearly see how their subjective reality is limited as hell
and they don't actually have what's right and what's true.
But they don't see that about themselves. Do they?
The sad truth is it never occurs to any one of us, that we might be that person.
We have to be able to stretch ourselves far enough
to accommodate for the reality, that we may not be
the one who is currently in the right,
and who currently has our finger or a pulse on what reality actually is.
Because none of us on this planet earth,
no matter who we are, can escape from the fact that we don't know
what we don't know.
2. We don't really understand parallel perceptual realities.
Most of us only experience a parallel perceptual reality
or the awareness of it, when we go through something like grief.
When we lose loved one or something else happens, that causes us grief,
we're sort of in this parallel reality. Aren't we?
Our life stops.
time seems to stop for us.
We can't feel happy.
Our perspective about life is completely changing,
and when we interact with people who aren't part of that reality of ours,
suddenly, they're talking about their vacations,
they're talking about how frustrated they are at their job,
They're trying to get us to join them at the bar
and it's like we may as well be in two different realities,
even though our bodies are occupying the same space.
The worst part is, they don't even notice.
Because people don't often notice
what conflicts with their own personal reality.
When we talk or interact with somebody from inside our own bubble,
our own perception of reality,
we may think we're doing and saying things that will help them,
when in fact, we're just proving to them that we don't see them,
we don't hear them, we don't feel them,
we don't understand them at all and they're completely alone.
We are reinforcing that they have a different reality
and that they are alone in it.
What we do and say comes across as Invalidation and ignorance.
And we make the mistake of thinking it is good to invalidate someone's reality,
if it's causing them pain,
but all this does, is to solidify their reality in fact.
We fail to establish rapport enough to say or do something
that will actually change their reality or should I say,
make it pliable enough to accommodate other realities
than the one that is causing them pain.
This is why we do so much damage to people who are mentally ill.
When we approach them from inside our own bubble reality,
what we're doing is making them feel more and more and more and more crazy
and more and more and more and more alone
until their condition, in fact, escalates.
For example, let's say that you tell a paranoid schizophrenic
that their reality isn't real.
The people they think that are watching or following them
aren't actually there and aren't actually following them.
Do you think that actually causes this person to go:
"Oh, maybe that's true, nobody's following me."
No!
What happens is, either, they become completely distrustful of themselves,
feel completely insane and then terrified of themselves,
or...
Suddenly you're in another parallel reality
and you're not joining them in actual reality
and now they can't trust you.
You cannot get anywhere
when you are fighting against someone's subjective reality.
You have to work with someone's reality,
in order to create any playability to the structure of that reality.
People's perceptual realities function like Oobleck.
I know you guys have played with this,
probably when you were in elementary school.
If you take Oobleck and you resist it,
the harder you resist it, the harder it gets.
To understand more about parallel perception realities,
watch my video titled:
The Most Dangerous Parallel Reality
3. Let's just be honest,
most of the people who are in the mental health field
are so terrified of losing touch with their own subjective reality.
They are so terrified of seeing what other people see,
feeling what they feel, hearing what they hear,
coming to understand what they understand.
They are terrified of dis identifying
with whatever caused them to feel stable.
And getting into someone else's subjective perspective.
Here's the thing though,
we love to come up with all kinds of justifications for this terror.
Professional justifications,
like, if you validate the perspective of someone who's mentally ill
you will only make them more mentally ill.
Or if you mentally and emotionally explore death with a person
who's suicidal, it will cause them to commit suicide.
Or if you let yourself get swept up in the person's mind and emotions,
you'll lose your capacity to hold space professionally for that person.
Psychologists in psychiatrists are literally taught
to keep this professional distance.
In many cases, even legally threatened to do so.
But what this does, is it dis-allows them from exiting their own
individual subjective perspective
and taking on the perspective of the client that they are working with.
It encourages them to keep this distance so that instead of seeing
through the patient's eyes like from first-person perspective,
what they're encouraged to do,
is to witness like an observer who is fixing from the outside.
I want you to imagine that somebody who's suffering
mentally or emotionally is underwater.
Now, if any of you have scuba dived
or even watched programs on the planet,
the underwater experience or world
is quite different of the perspective, than what's happening above water.
Now what the majority of people in the mental health field do
is to stand on the dock,
above that water, and yell down
anything they think might help a person down there.
Maybe throw down ropes sometimes.
But, do you see the problem or the limitation here?
Because the world is so different under the water than it is above water,
half the stuff we're saying to do doesn't even make any sense.
Basically when this is the approach you take, standing on the dock
trying to help somebody out of the water,
all you're doing is guessing at what will work for them.
And let's just be honest, the shadow of the mental health field today,
is just that. It's guessing.
I'll never forget a movie I watched once,
it's called: The Doctor, starring William Hurt.
All you have to do to understand this limitation
within the healing field is to watch this movie.
He plays the self-centered doctor with a terrible bedside manner.
He's always teasing and looking down on his colleague who is the opposite,
until that is, he himself gets sick.
Being quite literally forced into the first-person perspective
of his patients, changes his entire strategy,
with regards to how he helps people from that day forward.
When we refuse to disidentify from our own subjective perspective,
in order to get into somebody else's perceptual of reality,
we quite literally can't see what's going to work for them.
We're gonna say all kinds of things thinking that it's helping,
when in fact, it is most likely doing the exact opposite.
When we are unwilling to do this,
we're unwilling or actually incapable of seeing the truth at hand.
And this truth includes the fact, that there is no such thing as self sabotage.
In the mental health field, we have this attitude,
like what people are doing, is mostly self sabotage.
It doesn't exist.
Basically, you have no grip on the positive intention behind these thoughts
and behaviors that we are judging is all negative.
And when we judge it in this way,
there is no way to create actual resolution.
To understand more about this, I want you to watch my videos titled:
Fragmentation (The Worldwide Disease),
There Is No Such Thing As Self-sabotage,
and, The Octopus Technique
When you get into the first-person perspective
of the person that you are trying to help,
it will change the strategy with which you go about trying to help that person,
100%.
It will change your understanding about what they actually need,
about what you actually need to do,
about what you could say to actually shift
the way that they're thinking or behaving
And also to be honest, when you get into first-person perspective,
sometimes you see that instead of it being your client
that needs to change to the perspective you hold,
it's you.
But let's be honest with ourselves, shall we?
What makes us so terrified about getting in the first-person
perspective of the person that we're trying to help, is that
we are absolutely terrified,
of losing touch with that sense of reality and that sense of truth,
that we have held to, like a buoy in the middle of that ocean.
This major shift that must take place in the mental health field
is that we must be willing to disidentify from our
individual and limited subjective perspectives,
so as to accommodate the reality of our client's or patient's subjective reality.
We have to be able to get into first-person perspective,
as that person, in order to know what we need to do.
It is only by doing this, that we can accommodate both
their reality and our reality.
And it is only by accommodating both realities, that we can build a bridge
between a perceptual reality that would provide the healing they are wanting,
and the perception of the reality they are currently stuck in.
We need to be brave enough and be willing to feel
and see and hear and understand enough,
to get our hands messy
in other people's first-person perspectives and experiences,
so as to see what would actually work.
We need to own our own shadow.
Which is the fear that we can't do this.
Where we disidentify from our own subjective perspective
attachment to reality,
so as to get in the first-person perspective with another person,
without becoming emotionally unstable, immeshed,
and losing a sense of our minds and our rationality.
We need to stop disguising this extreme distrust
that we have in ourselves.
And this belief that we don't have the capacity to expand ourselves
wide enough to accommodate all subjective realities,
as professionalism.
We need to see that it is only our willingness
to stretch in this way,
that will cause us to arrive at the actual objective reality.
Because objective reality is the truth that arises
as a result of accommodating all subjective perspectives in a given scenario.
And we need to do this fast.
Because we are not doing this, people are dying every day.
Because we are not doing this, people are getting injured every day,
but by the overwhelmingly prevalent pharmaceutical approach
to mental health or lack thereof.
Because we're not doing this, every day
we continue to be frustrated by not really understanding
what it is that we can do to help someone.
By not doing this we continue to convince ourselves every day,
that a person is simply too mentally ill,
or incapable for some reason, to adopt our estimation of reality.
Have a good week
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte