Igor: Good morning Adam, it’s nice to see you again.
Adam: Hello. Good morning Igor.
Igor: Are you ready to dive into the next question?
Adam: Yes, I am.
Igor: Do you mind if I ask you if you’ve ever met someone that totally shifted your perspective
about life or people or even what you are capable of? Have you ever met someone like that?
Adam: Hmm. Yep, there were many people but one comes to mind and started it in a very direct
way. I remember when I was in the psychiatric clinic when I was 16.
There was this person that cared for the people that lived there and his name was Mr. Schmidt.
Igor: Okay.
Adam: There was another one called Mr. Brown and those two shifted my thoughts fundamentally.
Igor: Okay, tell me more.
Adam: Mr. Brown was incredibly warm and caring, and he was one who really understood me, so
when I did not have my emotions, I didn’t feel anything and was dead inside, he was the only one
who understood me. The others tried to challenge me to anger to feel something, which didn’t work.
Igor: Right.
Adam: You know what, come with me. We went to the dancing therapy room
and we were alone there. The sun was shining. It was a roof and the sun was shining in and one side
of the room was in sun and the other half was in shadow. We tried a little Kendo at first and
he taught me about Kendo and we did a little choreography which was amazingly cool because
he gave me two sticks. We worked with the two sticks on the ground like standing up,
going down. I think it was a preframe for always raising up from a challenge.
He said, imagine your life to be like this room. This is your way. You have the sun side and the
dark side, where do you want to go? I said of course I want to walk in the light and he said go
ahead. So, I tried to walk on the light side but there was a wall in my way. I could not continue
that way, and so I thought well, maybe I chose the wrong way. He said no you didn’t.
He said well you see, the thing is, you cannot only walk light or dark,
you have to do both. It doesn’t mean you’re evil just because you have some dark times.
It doesn’t mean you are super pure just because you’re never in the dark.
Your life is in the middle and you need both. And the power to walk this walk by knowing what
you can choose, you can rest in the light sometimes and sometimes you need to prove
yourself in the dark, but you walk in the middle. That helped me understand so much because I was
always pending between extremes, like always going back into the dark. This helped me tremendously.
Igor: That sounds like a really powerful metaphor.
Adam: It was incredibly powerful, especially because it paved the way
for the massive change that the second caretaker sparked.
Igor: Please, go ahead. What happened there?
Adam: The second one, Mr. Schmidt was called ‘the king of games’. This guy,
I respected the hell out of him, because you could always strike a deal with him
as long as you kept your word. He trusted you to keep it. If you broke it you lost
all privileges and it took time to get the privileges back. But, he told us you can go
out but you may not be in the rain. Somebody went in the rain and lost their privileges.
Igor: Right.
Adam: But you could always ask him for something and he was the unbeaten king. He never let you
win. It was so weird because it didn’t matter if it was chess, checkers or like mau-mau.
Just a pure luck-based game and he always won.
Igor: Amazing.
Adam: It was completely, and even this table soccer, I was pretty good at that
and I had a strong grip and he shot a ball with his goal keeper through the field and I
held it but it burst my hand away and it went into the goal. This guy was a God at
games. Nobody ever has beaten him in any game before. I made it my mission,
I challenged him. Whenever he was here, I challenged him repeatedly.
Igor: Right.
Adam: He always defeated me and didn’t give me any slack, so whenever he could he devastated me.
He destroyed me and I thought, well, I can give up like everyone else or I can walk the middle
path. I can see what I can learn from this. If I get defeated often enough, I will improve and
so I started challenging everybody to the games, especially checkers. I really challenged everybody
and some others were also very good but soon I overcame them, but Mr. Schmidt was unbeatable.
On the last day, literally the day I left I beat him fair and square.
Igor: That’s amazing.
Adam: Yeah. I beat him completely and everybody was like holy fuck how did you do that?
I asked him, you didn’t let me win? He was like, do I look like I let you win, yes you’re right.
That feeling with what I learned, walk the middle path, you can always make something
out of it. You just need to find a way where you are, you always learn and you can overcome
even the most tedious of challenges if you just keep on it, improve and learn.
I would say those two led the way for massive growth and change in me, which allowed me
to even think about expanding my knowledge, to think about where
maybe… hey I learned this but I still have this weakness what if I could deal with it?
That was incredible. I think it was the most valuable part of the therapy.
Igor: That is amazing. They sound like amazing men, both of them
and it really sounds like both gave you a very powerful life metaphor. Did I catch that right?
Adam: Absolutely.
Igor: I also have a sense that this was just the beginning of a lesson that you took out
of the world and somehow incorporated into your life and it really helped you
deal with day-to-day things. Am I taking it too far or did I get close to being right?
Adam: You are right.
Igor: Can you give me an example in some way in which it’s helped you and made you
more successful, resilient, happy or something like that?
Adam: So, for example, this is when I think back now, I think this was the starting point, the seed
that made me become a very dedicated, avid learner as soon as it’s something that helps
me improve. School I didn’t love so much, but of course the school system is broken,
but as soon as it was hypnosis or anything else, I started becoming obsessed. I wanted to become
the very best in the shortest amount of time to be sure I can take what I learned to the next level.
I always wanted to be able to inspire someone else as those two men inspired me.