I sat at my desk, unaware of anything on that day but the simple fact that for two years I had been trying not to rock the boat and now the boat was sinking! Something had to change. I was not clear about what that something was, but a sense of despair and impending disaster haunted me.
I had reached a point of no return. In the past, it had never gone that far. All of a sudden I was in touch with what was at the very core of my being, beyond the boundaries of my personality and the day-to-day social concerns that are the domain of logic. I became aware that the greatest joy I derived from my current job came from working with people and that it was only a matter of time before I would have to make a change. Those two realizations catapulted me out of a fourteen-year business career and the financial security it provided.
Compelled by a persistent sense of urgency, I enrolled in a graduate program for counseling at the University of Colorado. Over the next three years I completed the course work at night, and in 1986 I received a master’s degree in counseling. During that time I realized that the world of business and the world of counseling were worlds apart! Whereas business stressed results, counseling emphasized the process itself. Success in business, often measured as profit and loss, was quantifiable. Counseling, on the other hand, was difficult to quantify in any concrete way, and the process could take years before results were apparent. Yet I loved it.
As I grew as a therapist, I found myself not always agreeing with the business philosophy of just doing whatever it took to achieve success, yet I was equally disturbed by the overemphasis on the process of psychotherapy, with so little attention being paid to achieving results. This widening schism forced me to look outside my university training for more results-oriented approaches to my future profession as a psychotherapist, a search that led me through a myriad of alternative therapies such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), hypnosis, Educational Kinesiology, Touch for Health, Reiki, and a plethora of other contemporary and ancient healing techniques. I read countless books, attended numerous lectures and workshops, and listened to the best and the worst of the self-help gurus. Out of this primordial soup of therapeutic approaches I eventually arrived at the conclusions I share with you in this book.
Finally, in 1986 I left the business world to begin a private practice in psychotherapy, struggling for two years to find better ways to help my clients make positive changes in their lives. I was frustrated by the limitations of the old counseling formula of Insight + Willpower = Change. Many of my clients, up to their eyeballs in insights about how and why they had become the way they were, were still not experiencing the satisfying lives they sought. I helped them develop mental and behavioral strategies for moving beyond their current limitations, yet the problems persisted despite their motivation and efforts to change. They knew the right things to do, yet they weren’t doing the right things. Something was missing. But what? I did know that just using insight and willpower alone seldom resulted in real and lasting change. I believed my clients deserved a better return on the time and money they were investing than I was capable of offering with the techniques I learned in graduate school.
My search for synthesis finally came to fruition early in December 1988. I remember that day clearly. I was putting together a marketing flyer for a workshop I had done several times before. With money tight and Christmas shopping in full swing, I was counting on the workshop to ease the extra expenses of the season. I took the master flyer I’d prepared on my computer to the local printer. I drove home and began to fold them for mailing when I noticed the dates of the workshop were missing: 150 flyers and no dates! I considered hand-correcting them, but my sense of perfectionism would not permit it. So the only option was correcting the master copy and going back to the printer for more copies.
Home again with dates in place, I began the folding job once more. When I was halfway through the task, my eyes caught the registration section. I couldn’t believe what I saw-or rather didn’t see. I had left off the times of the workshop. In disbelief I stared at that flyer for five full minutes, thinking maybe if I stared long enough I could make the times magically appear! I had never made that mistake on the flyers before. Soon I went from being stunned to being angry-deeply angry. I was faced with the same dilemma of correcting the copies by hand or starting all over again. I had already wasted 150 flyers, yet couldn’t bear the thought of sending out anything that looked unprofessional. Furious with myself for being so careless, frustrated by the economic pressures of the Christmas season, and plagued by an ominous feeling that something or someone other than just myself was sabotaging me, I went out to the backyard to let the December air cool the rage in my flushed face. Still fuming, I sat on a half-frozen lawn chair and closed my eyes. Through clenched teeth I said out loud, “Okay God, if you don’t want me to do what I am doing, what do you want me to do?”
I sat in silence, not really expecting an answer. But, to my astonishment, within minutes the details of a pattern for changing subconscious beliefs showed up in my head. I could barely believe what I was experiencing. When the information stopped coming, I jumped up, ran to my computer, and feverishly began typing. In a matter of a few minutes the information in my head was gone and I was reading what I had typed: thirteen paired belief statements and the complete instructions for their use!3 Even though certain components of the pattern were recognizable as ideas with which I was already familiar, most of them were new. In fact, the entire format and sequence of steps was completely unique. This experience was remarkable, to say the least! It became the first in a series of patterns I received in a similar manner over the next several months. These unique processes constitute the body of work I call PSYCH-K.
As you can see from this example, PSYCH-K was created more out of inspiration than perspiration. It wasn’t a laborious, intellectual process of discovery, but instead arrived in a series of “intuitive flashes of insight.” In reality, years of experiences, personal research, and hundreds of books had prepared me for those ”intuitive flashes.” Over those several months, the belief change components that make up the total PSYCH-K process came to me in separate “packages” of insights.
I was skeptical at first. After all, this new way of changing broke every rule I had been taught in graduate school about counseling. It violated the assumptions of mainstream psychology that had prevailed for more than fifty years. So before using this new approach with my clients, I experimented with these new patterns using willing friends and myself as test subjects. The results were often dramatic and life changing. Eventually, with a proven track record, I began to use the processes with my counseling clients. The successes continued. With PSYCH-K, I was able to facilitate many changes with my clients in just a few sessions. Changes that took months or even years to achieve with traditional methods were happening in just three to six sessions with PSYCH-K. Eventually skepticism yielded to evidence and experience. It was working. It wasn’t long before I had arranged the information into a workshop format and was teaching it to others. It was gratifying to see how easily people of all ages and walks of life were learning and using this new approach to personal change. What’s more, it seemed so effortless!
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3 This information is called a Core Belief Balance and is taught in the Advanced PSYCH-K Integration Workshop.
Chapter 2
When Getting There Isn’t Half the Fun
No pain, no gain.
–Myth of Western Civilization
Letting Go of the Struggle
Let’s face it: Most people live in a “try harder” world. It has been the prevailing paradigm of Western civilization for the past millennium. True, it is possible to experience tremendous satisfaction in overcoming obstacles and challenges with sheer willpower and effort. That’s the kind of satisfaction athletes get by becoming the best in their field through extreme physical training. It’s the rush of the mountain climber when he or she reaches the peak of a difficult climb. It’s the feeling of accomp
lishment when a performer enjoys a standing ovation after years of discipline and practice. It’s when getting there is half the fun that effort and willpower are desirable agents in achieving our goals in life.
However, when you are faced with the debilitating reality of self-defeating behaviors, habits and thoughts that just won’t yield to flapping your wings harder against the windowpane of life, then getting there isn’t half the fun. Willpower and determination are fine if they can actually move you through an obstacle to the freedom waiting on the other side. Unfortunately, most habitual thoughts and behavior patterns don’t change with more effort. Willpower and determination become a misdirected and often painful struggle. They become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
If what you need is a caring, compassionate listener with the ability to help you develop insights into the cause of your problems and create new strategies for improving your life, then a good talk-therapist is ideal. He or she can provide a safe haven from an otherwise hostile world or provide understanding and support during difficult times. However, when it comes to helping clients implement strategies and insights, the statistics for talk-therapy are less than spectacular. For example, studies to determine the overall effectiveness of such therapies concluded that approximately 30 percent of patients treated for depression showed lasting improvement using insight-based talk therapy.4 In my private practice, those percentages held true for other behavioral and emotional problems as well. Other studies showed that given enough time, about 30 percent of patients overcame their difficulties without any psychotherapy whatsoever!
I found this level of effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) to be unacceptable. My business sense was demanding a more effective rate of return on my clients’ counseling dollars.
How Many Psychotherapists Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?
This joke emphasizes how important effort and determination are in the standard talk-therapy approach to change. Jokes like this one usually contain a kernel of truth. That’s what makes them funny.
So, “How many psychotherapists does it take to change a light bulb?”
“Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change!”
People seeking psychotherapy usually do so after exhausting their personal efforts to overcome the problems they bring to a therapist. In other words, they have already tried hard to make a change. They are looking for some other tools to achieve their goal, besides the “try harder” model. The problem is that insight, even combined with action and willpower, is seldom sufficient to make lasting changes. Knowing the cause of a problem seldom changes its effect.
The Limitations of Insight
My experience in practicing insight-based talk-therapy was fairly typical of other practitioners of the art. After weeks or even months of talking about the problem, gaining new insights into its cause and specifying new behavioral strategies, little change took place. Put another way, after all was said and done, more was usually said than done.
The fact is that mainstream psychotherapy has been looking in the wrong place for the answers it needs to solve the problem.
Looking for the Keys
Do you know the story about the drunk who had lost his car keys at night and was looking for them under a street lamp?
A passerby notices the man crawling around on his hands and knees. He stops and asks the guy, “What are you doing?” The man replies, “I am looking for my car keys.” The passerby asks, “Where did you lose them?” The drunk replies, “Over there in the alley.” Surprised, the passerby asks, “Why are you looking under the street lamp if you lost your keys in the alley?” The drunk replies, “Because the light’s better over here!”
The keys to meeting the challenges of the human mind aren’t usually found where the light shines the brightest (at the conscious level of insight). Although insight may shed light on the origins of a problem and provide some constructive strategies for redirecting your life, it seldom changes the situation or the dysfunctional behaviors.
In the dim alley of the subconscious mind is where the real keys to lasting change can be found.
Shedding Light on the Subconscious Mind
Because the subconscious mind has more often been thought of as a frightening rather than a helpful place to visit, it is important to rethink the true nature of the subconscious in a more “user-friendly” fashion. If you think of the subconscious as being more like the hard drive in your personal computer, a place for storing past memories, rather than Dante’s Inferno filled with evil demons who have unthinkable desires just waiting to destroy your life, you will find it a more inviting place to visit. (Some people do seem to have an actual computer hard drive that is like Dante’s Inferno!) If you suspect your subconscious mind is like Dante’s Inferno, keep reading. It’s not as bad as you think.
Sometimes I AM My Own Worst Enemy
Everyone has been his or her own worst enemy at one time or another. You notice it when you set a goal and can’t seem to achieve it, because you keep sabotaging yourself. It happens when you know you need to get a job done, but you continually procrastinate. It happens when you know you should keep your mouth shut, but can’t seem to stop yourself, so you blurt out something you regret later. You become aware of it when you hear yourself saying, “I just couldn’t help myself,” after giving in to a habit you have been trying to quit. These kinds of situations usually result in further feelings of frustration and humiliation.
Most people overidentify with their conscious mind. It is the part of you that represents the “I” in most personal statements, for example, “I feel happy,” or “I want to go to the movies.” In fact, the “I” of the conscious mind provides the source for affirmations, positive thinking, and willpower. By understanding some key differences between the conscious and subconscious minds, you’ll be able to see why the results you had hoped for by using these and other conscious approaches often fall short of your desires and expectations.
Here are some of the key differences:
THE CONSCIOUS MIND
Volitional: Sets goals and judges results.
Thinks abstractly: Likes new, creative ideas and activities.
Time-bound: Is past and future focused. It often looks for new ways to do things based on past experiences and future goals.
Short-term memory: About 20 seconds in the average human being.5
Limited processing capacity: Processes an average of 40 bits of information per second6 and is capable of managing just a few tasks at a time.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND
Habitual: Monitors the operation of the body, including motor functions, heart rate, respiration, and digestion.
Thinks literally: Knows the world through the five senses (seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling).
Long-term memory: Stores past experiences, attitudes, values, and beliefs.
Timeless: Focuses in present time only. Uses “past” learning experiences to perform “current” functions, such as walking, talking, driving a car, and so on.
Expanded processing capacity: Processes an average of 40 million bits of information per second7 and can handle thousands of tasks simultaneously.
As you can see, the two parts of your mind are quite different. Both are necessary for you to be fully functional. However, both are specialized in their capabilities as well as the way in which they process life’s experiences. As is apparent from its processing capacity alone, the subconscious mind plays an important part in your life and represents a major opportunity for accessing and changing old habits of thinking and behaving.
Notice the processing capacities of the conscious mind at 40 bits of information per second and compare it to the 40 million bits per second of the subconscious. If the conscious mind desires a goal the subconscious mind disagrees with, guess which mind usually wins the contest! Imagine you are the fly in our story at the beginning of the book. You (your conscious mind) are flapping your wings against the windowpane (your subco
nscious mind) in order to move in the direction of your goal. You are a 40-bit processor pitted against a 40 million-bit processor. The odds are clearly stacked against your conscious mind achieving its goal without the cooperation of the subconscious.
Because of the extraordinary power of the subconscious, it’s easy to think of it as your enemy when it seems to be sabotaging your goals in life. In actuality it is more like a well-meaning but misguided friend who is just trying to do what he or she thinks is best for you. You know the kind of friend I mean. The one who tries to play matchmaker for you too soon after the loss of a spouse or romantic love interest. Or, the aunt who sends you her homemade fruitcake at Christmas because it is her favorite cake, and she is just sure it will be yours, too!
Another way to think of the subconscious is as a computer hard drive with some outdated programs. It’s not that the subconscious is actively trying to keep you from being happy or successful, as an enemy might do. It is simply running old programs that produce that effect. It is doing so out of ignorance rather than spite or revenge. Depending upon how you approach the problem, you can try to make the subconscious conform to your wishes using willpower, treating it as your worst enemy-the fly on the windowpane approach-or you can learn to communicate with the subconscious in a user-friendly way it understands (the path of least resistance) and make it your best friend.
Turning the Window (PAIN) of Life into a Window of Opportunity
Without effectively communicating with your subconscious mind, you may feel like Sisyphus in the Greek story, where he is condemned to pushing a rock uphill and never quite making it to the top, only to have it roll down the hill where he must begin the process all over again. The resulting feeling is one of pointless effort and meaningless labor. Getting up in the morning becomes all about pain, struggle, and disappointment. By making your subconscious your best friend instead of your worst enemy, you can make your life feel more like a self-fulfilling prophecy than a day-to-day struggle.
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