 My name is Steven Philip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and you are watching Shrink Rap Hawaii and today I'm delighted to say that I brought back my guest Christine Heath. Welcome Christine. Thank you. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha. So for those that haven't seen our last show, tell us a little bit about what you do and how it's different than most other psychological approaches to therapy. Okay. We work from kind of an understanding that's generally called the three principles. So what we kind of discovered was what are the fundamental principles that are the same for every person in how they create their experience of reality. And in doing that, we're looking at people as being mentally healthy and using their thinking in ways it wasn't designed for. So we're looking at helping people to see how to recognize how thought works, how their feeling is coming from their thinking, and how to live in a state of mind that's quieter and calmer, more peaceful, happier, more joyful. And that's kind of the goal of our therapy is really to help people to regain that state of mind. So if I hear you right, what you're saying is that it's not about what's happening to a person, it's what they're creating from what's happening to that person. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. So somebody is going through a difficult time in their life. How would the three principles techniques differ from somebody that walks into a typical psychologist office? Well, one of the things that I think is really different is, and I used to be a more traditional therapist. So when people came in, I would talk to them about all the problems in their life to see how many they had, how long they had it, kind of like, and then start analyzing why they were the way they were as a result of those things that happened to them in their life. So it was a lot of problem solving, and it was a lot of analysis. So people, and myself, I did the same thing. I analyzed why I was the way I was, which was very interesting, but I wasn't happy. And so it's looking at not so much analyzing and problem solving, because we would look at that as kind of being the byproduct of the state of mind you're in. We look at helping people change the state of mind that they're living in, to help them get back to that natural, easy state of mind where we're able to handle life as it comes rather than being stressed all the time. Right. So somebody comes into my office and I can tell they're stressed. They're living in a very anxious, maybe a paranoid, to be extreme, state of mind. How do we get them to change that state of mind? Well it's not about, really, you don't have to do anything to change the state of mind. You have to just stop doing what you're doing that creates that more insecure state of mind. Yeah, but that reminds me of the old Bob Newhart. Do you ever see the Bob Newhart where he goes, just stop it? Yeah. Well, it's two things. One is it's recognizing, being able to kind of step back to see how is my thinking creating my experience. It's like whatever we're seeing, feeling and experiencing is coming from the inside. We're not reacting to the outside world so we're not like a photographer taking pictures of our life. We're more like a movie camera and what we're seeing in our life is coming from what we're thinking. So it's an inside- But the movie camera is taking pictures of what's happening in the outside world. No, no, I'm watching a movie. So we're watching what's coming from it. And so like that's why when you watch a movie with somebody else you're really watching two different movies. That's right, that's right. That's right. And that's why when you start thinking about something you start to see it everywhere. So if your wife gets pregnant then all of a sudden you see all the other pregnant women. Everybody's pregnant. Or if you buy a new car you see that car everywhere. So it's looking at really how does our experience get generated and then applying that to psychology or to counseling. So if we look at people as being born within an eight state of mental well-being that kind of natural writing ability that fuels the resilience in people then we're pointing people towards that rather than pointing them to what they've created already with their own thinking. And that's kind of what analysis does is we're looking at first of all people would come in and talk to me about how they saw life and I took that as kind of fact. Instead of recognizing that what they were telling me was frequently coming from a state of mind that they weren't. So when people were in a really low state of mind they'd come and tell me how awful their spouse was. And then the next week they'd come in they'd be in a better state of mind and suddenly all those things weren't a problem anymore. And I didn't understand that. It seemed to me like I'd problem solve with people and we'd talk about things and then I'd see them the next week and they didn't do any of the things we talked about and they weren't in any better place and now they had a different problem. So it was kind of always looking at why they're creating that. So what we do now is when somebody comes to see me I listen to them I really hear like what their experience of life is like. Not what I make of it but I really try to hear that and then help them to see how to quiet their mind and when we quiet our mind we naturally kick into that natural state of mental health. So how do we get them to quiet their mind? By listening. It's like when we listen there's nothing to do to quiet your mind that's the problem. So those of us that like to think a lot tend to try to figure out how to be not thinking and that's of course ridiculous you're thinking about your thinking then. So it's just a matter of seeing that's a natural reset that's in us. So when you like focus on get people to just listen and quiet down as they do now part of the thing is that I have to be coming from a calm state of mind. If I'm anxious if I'm doing a lot of thinking if I'm really stressed out in the session I've got nothing to pedal. Right so then how do you do that for yourself? Well I really have been learning how to go deeper in my own understanding of the principles to live in a state of mental well-being. Like I used to be so stressed out that I was going to get out of the field. I thought you know people would get better but they weren't happy and I wasn't happy and none of my colleagues were very happy and so I thought you know this is a bunch of crap really kind of what I thought and so I just happened to go to this training and I felt so much better after I went to that weekend I thought well if it doesn't even if it doesn't work any better with clients I feel better and so I've got to do a better job of helping people but you really can't teach people about mental well-being if you don't know how to get there yourself. So if I'm depressed I can't really tell somebody else how they can stop being depressed because otherwise I do that for myself right. Right and it's interesting because we got together on Sunday and we chatted for a while right and then afterwards I was talking about it with my wife and I said yeah she's great but I think the problem is what I often run into with people who are great therapists it's not about the theory it works because there's something about her there's this calmness and this almost hypnotic state that I feel like when I'm with her and like you're saying you can't teach that. But you know before I learned this I wasn't like that I was absolutely maximum type A personality I worked 80 hours a week people were afraid to talk to me I was very angry I was very stressed out I was waking up every hour on the hour all night long I was not that person but what happens to everybody not me just me but that's the deal is that when when a person is that state of mind then what happened to you happens to clients but it I make it really clear I'm not doing that to them. Yeah but if I I'm with some other therapists it's not happening so it must be you. No it's it's it's me but only because it's what I understand what I've learned about. See if I hadn't learned this I'd be that crazy person again I probably would have been out of the field by now. So then you're coming back again to the three principles. Yes. Now is it a secret are you going to share with everybody with the three principles? I will sure yeah it's three principles are mind thought and consciousness and so mind is the energy that creates all things so in order to have a psychological reality you have to be alive you have to be connected up to the energy that creates all things that's why in the way I talk about it is that it's spiritual but in spiritual I'm talking about understanding how the formless nature of life works through us so first of all you have to be alive right and so mind provides us with that natural state of mental well-being so when babies are born they cry and then they get a bottle and then they go there's a natural reset that kicks in so they move back into that state of mind then as we're we're in a sense mind is what turns on your brain so it's like without being alive your brain doesn't think by itself Steve so some mind is just energy yeah okay yeah with an intelligence behind it that we would call like in animals we call it instinct in plant information we call it plant information but it's that that intelligence of the universe if you will okay and we're all a part of that so that's what we get people to listen to is that knowing that they have the answers within them and I don't have the answers for that so mine then breaks down into thought and consciousness consciousness is the ability that we have to see that we're thinking and that we're spiritual creatures it's awareness the ability to be aware of this room to be aware of an experience so when you've had a like a surgery and they put you out you come out of the surgery and you know something happened but you don't know what it was because your conscious level was so low at that point that you usually people say did they do it yet right that's right that's right so consciousness is what kind of takes your life and your thoughts and breathes life into them it it and in fact that's what creates our feelings it's your thought is another spiritual gift because thoughts are these invisible things that we see the evidence of but we can't see them except in our mind's eyes so consciousness and thought work together and they create our experience moment-to-moment so you said consciousness part of what consciousness is anyway is the knowing that we're thinking that caught me because I work a lot with sometimes with people with severe mental illness and the biggest problem is something they call I don't know if I ever say this right Anna's Ignosia which is the fact that most people with severe mental illness like schizophrenia bipolar disorder schizoaffective disorder do not have a awareness that the mentally ill so that they don't have an awareness that the voices in their head are only in their head and without that consciousness is really hard to help anybody or for the person to get help means somebody wrote a book about it it's called I'm not sick I don't need help which is the first book that I usually give I run a support group for people who are the loved ones of those who are mentally ill here on a wall and I give everybody tell everybody get that book because their loved one is fighting with them all the time saying I'm not sick I don't need help I'm fine you're crazy right so I'm sure that that's not only true with people who are seriously mentally ill it's true with most of us is that we don't have the consciousness that our thinking is not right that I don't have to wash my hands a thousand times a day right that that's just a product of the way I'm thinking that you know if you don't you're gonna get sick but but changing that consciousness is no no no you can't change consciousness consciousness just is but you can step back and understand how does it work what's it doing how does what's happening to me so when you do that you start to see that consciousness is working with thought so if you tell somebody that the voices in their head aren't real they're gonna tell you your nuts because they can hear them but if you tell I can hear this guy he's telling us we need to take a break even though it's in my head we'll be right back to see you with my dear what are okay research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development and you're doing that now oh yeah this is the starting line read aloud 15 minutes every child every parent every day welcome to sister power I'm your host Sharon Thomas Yarbrough where we motivate educate and power and inspire all women we are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. and we welcome you to join us here at sister power aloha and thank you welcome back to shrink wrap Hawaii I'm still Stephen Philip Katz and I'm here with Christine Heath and we were talking about the voices in my head yeah see what happens when a person is has an audio hallucination like that what happened is those thoughts get very real consciousness makes them real and they're in such an insecure state of mind such a stressed state of mind and the way that thought and consciousness work in those states of mind is that that's kind of what happens people are not aware that it's coming from them at all right so what what I would do with that person is help them to see how thought works not tell them that they're thinking wasn't happening right I'd help them to see that all that was was thought and consciousness was taking what they were thinking and making it come real and seem accurate and the more they think about it the more real it gets so then they try to manage their thinking and that doesn't work right see it's like you get a shift in in your awareness where you see that you're not your thoughts all right this is just a it's kind of like I often think of it as like in fact we were using Siri to get down here today okay and and she said you know take H H1 and I was like well that's ridiculous we're going to take Nimitz and so you know she kept saying no go back to H1 go back to H1 and I often think that that's like the thinking in my head it's like we just get this idea in our head and then it seems like it's like written in granite somewhere the truth coming through us with a capital T yeah yeah and and that we're right and that and when people get very attached to their thinking so by the time somebody is having hallucinations frequently they've been having a lot of they've been doing a lot of thinking they've been very insecure about their thinking and so by the time it gets to that point they don't feel like they have any control over it but that's just because they're trying to manage it after they think it but are you saying that what they need to do is to prevent the thinking in the first place well if you change the state of mind you're in your thinking changes without effort right but then how do you do that well you start to teach them how the principles work okay and so you're talking in a really impersonal way you're talking in a way that and and I'm usually clients actually pick it up faster than therapists because they're not they don't have all these ideas already about how thought works or about what you should be doing what it is but you know for me I did a lot of negative self-talk in my head and it felt to me like it was God-talking like somehow those thoughts were more credible they were more accurate they were more truthful and so I would listen to that I would listen to my thinking now when I get those thoughts I like oh I'm in kind of a low mood right now so when you say more accurate more truthful what do you mean more accurate more truthful than what than any positive thinking than the opposite of the only thing you can believe is the negative stuff right yeah and I sometimes I tell clients that that in a way some of that negative stuff were hardwired with like if somebody says to you like if I say to you that's a beautiful jacket you're going if you're like a lot of people you're gonna just take it in and let it go you know for whatever reason it's like maybe but if I say to you who who did your hair you're never gonna forget that I said right yeah till we die yeah and now even now even though I just made that up right yeah probably I think oh was he serious yeah but you're won't because you have this background but somebody once told me that the reason that we do that is as animals we are much more attuned to threats than we are to compliments which are harmless right and he the metaphor he uses if there's a whole bunch of sheep and some other sheep walks by the flock people might say we'll give you goes another sheep but if the wolf walks by is like everybody's on high alert for good reason because people that give us negative comments are a threat and we are hardwired to pay attention to threats well the thing is is that what you're seeing as a threat is coming from how you think about that but sometimes a threat you know just because your parent doesn't mean nobody's following you a wolf is a threat a wolf would be a threat right what actually what happens when we react from genuine fear like my life is being threatened at a different feeling right then when we're anxious yeah like the example I gave you the other day where like somebody almost crashes their car into your car right first we get scared then maybe if you're like me you get angry and then what well then either keep thinking about it and stay angry or you stop thinking about it and right think about something else so mostly that's what I do but some clients don't right they relive it and relive it because most a lot of people don't know that everything they think isn't a good idea a lot of people don't know that everything they think isn't true I mean like I have I get the wrong thought frequently a lot of times I'll think like oh I should go do this and then it turns out to be like no I shouldn't do that I should do this so everything we think of isn't like it's not God talking to us it's not like our higher intelligence this is our brain and our brain is to me is like artificial intelligence is only as good as it's been programmed and so whatever you've picked up along the way whatever you've programmed in whatever you've thought along the way that becomes the the information that you're using to tell yourself about life so client comes in I'm having a lot of problems with my wife it's really gotten horrible and every day I wake up not knowing if I should go or if I should stay what do you do as a therapist well I would probably tell that person that I didn't know what they should do and but I did know that if I got help them to get in a really good state of mind where they were really at peace and in a very loving place that their wisdom would direct them on what to do that I would also probably talk to them about how they're trying to figure out what to do and their thinking is probably what's causing what they see as problems in their life so they're going to the same thinking to figure out the problem that's creating it so my teacher told me once he said Chris it's kind of like jumping back in the shower to dry off you know so it's like people do this all the time they go on vacation they clear their mind and then they see things differently right they have new insights so you get a good night's sleep you get a good night's sleep and your mind resets and you're in a better state of mind and you see life differently right so that's kind of the deal is we're helping people to see that they can see life differently yeah and when they do that they'll have their own wisdom and their own ideas about what to do because I mean I really don't know what anybody else should do I I'm I have lots of thoughts about what they should do and frequently I think they're good thoughts but I really don't and it's not my job to tell people how to do their life it's my job to help them get into the optimal state of mind that they can be in from which they make the decisions in their life so meditation is very popular now is that one way people can get into a better state of mind sometimes they can I mean I've worked with people that meditate a lot and they're still pretty bad so you know it the thing is it's it's like when we meditate and we take the opportunity to quiet down the reason that people are drawn to that is because they either know they're thinking too much and they know that the answer to that would be to quiet down or because it they can feel that when they do it they feel better so again that's why when when when people go fishing or they play golf or and they get into this really beautiful state of mind then they unfortunately frequently will blame it on what they're doing but if you can teach a person that that's who they are that's what they are so you can find that state of mind anywhere it's not about the outside world when you say that's who they are you mean the person that they are when they're fishing or playing golf or going for a walk yeah that's your well if you get into a state good yeah you can do those things and be totally nuts but the thing is is that if you get a good feeling from it right if you get that calm peaceful secure feeling is that it's hard to describe it but people know what it is I know what it is yeah okay so that feeling is innate in all of us and the only thing that happens is we just stop processing our life we stop going on and on about what's wrong or what we're gonna do or what we're afraid of and when we stop doing that kind of thinking we automatically move into a healthier state of mind so you gave the example of the happy babies before but I'm thinking that anybody that's had kids or been around kids know that some you know people come out differently yeah you know with somewhat of a personality does that matter well I mean the way I understand this I mean I haven't had a conversation with anybody higher up than me in the spiritual ladder but I just think that that people come out at different levels of awareness so so some people come out and they're more negative they're more insecure they're doing a lot of thinking and and then they frequently have parents that do that and so that's where we learn our thinking from right so we kind of move into that same world and and that becomes familiar to us but we could still I mean apply the three principles but you can change you can you can anybody can live in a healthier state of mind everybody can can yeah because almost all of us sometimes are in a healthier state that's right even people with the most severe diagnosis right sometimes they're better that's right so it's teaching see the thing is we usually with people like that we take those times to tell them they have a chronic illness I'll never get over so the deal is is to show them no matter how few those moments are that they can live there more of the time right so then the process is learning to stay in that state of mind more of the time starting to recognize how thought works to take them out of that state of mind how their own insecure thinking just tricks them see thought just creates an illusion that the outside world is causing how we feel but how we feel is only coming from the thinking we're doing so consciousness and thought create what we call feelings feelings aren't like little environments that run into your skin come out they come from my thoughts right it's just really you are feeling your thoughts and so whatever you're feeling is just being brought to life with consciousness so I don't know if you can feel it but they just told me that we're done okay and we could go on for six hours I'm sure so thank you for joining us at shrink wrap Hawaii we'll see in a couple of weeks or whenever you want to watch it again bye bye