Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctors week show where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Greetings. Thank you so much for tuning in. It's a calm night here by the Pacific ocean. I've got my cup of ginger tea, and I'm going to tell you a story. So sit back and enjoy it's about Clara, which of course is her pseudonym. One of my clients who had a powerful experience with a gorilla that's right. She came to my therapy practice in Switzerland, diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She was a 22 year old university student and she told me she'd received her diagnosis and medication from her psychiatrist, but hated the side effects of the drugs. The doctor had tried various meds on her and eventually said the side effects or mild enough to be acceptable.
Speaker 0 00:01:10 I laughed when she said mild enough. I said, mild enough for who she smiled. And then we started working on our process. She told me that she goes back and forth between lying in bed, in a depressed stupor for three or four days, unable to function and thinking about suicide and then suddenly a cloud lifts. And she feels super high and goes out partying for days on end. When she's in party mode, she walks around Zurich imagining, and sometimes even believing she's the most powerful woman in the world. Then she realizes it's all just a fantasy and she gets depressed again. I asked her what it's like to feel depressed. And she described it by saying, quote, it's like a thousand pound gorilla sitting on me. She said it paralyzes her and makes her not want to live. I thought her image of a gorilla was fantastic.
Speaker 0 00:02:11 I said a gorilla. She said, yeah, he's a thousand pounds. And he's crushing the life out of me. I said, Whoa, tell me more about him. She said, I don't know. It's just an image that came to mind. I asked her what it would be like to be a thousand pound gorilla. She looked confused and said, uh, I don't know, is this important? Yes. What would it be like to be a gorilla? She giggled and then said, I don't know. I'd be big and hairy and move like this. And she swayed back and forth and put her arms out to the sides. Then she covered her mouth. I asked her what just happened. I wanted to know why she covered her mouth. That gesture usually means the person has crossed an internal barrier that breaks some sort of taboo. I asked her if she was embarrassed about something she nodded.
Speaker 0 00:03:11 Yes. And after pausing, she told me she'd grown up in a strict family where women and girls were supposed to act proper and stay in the background. Her dad was a Swiss banker whom she described as quote stiff. He had conveyed to her. The typical sexist conventions look pretty speak quietly, and don't be expressive or weird or challenging. Her mom followed these rules without any qualms. So the message to Clara was clear. Repress yourself. If you want to be loved and accepted, I said, I promise no one will ever know. And I totally support you. So let's stand up and be gorillas. She laughed, but shook her head. She said, I can't, are you sure? Yes. What would happen if we play acted being gorillas, she got a fearful look on her face and said, I don't know, I'd get in trouble. But that sounds crazy.
Speaker 0 00:04:15 I said, yeah, you won't get in trouble. You might even learn something again. She shook her head is this therapy. I laughed and said, yup, it's dr. Zweig therapy, but seriously, your imagination of a gorilla may help us with the fearful expression still on her face. She took a deep breath and courageously stood up out of her chair. At first, she was painfully hesitant, but after a few minutes of me encouraging her, we began walking around the room, pretending we were great apes, making funny movements and sounds. Now you might be thinking this young woman has a serious problem. And you're walking around your office with her pretending you're gorillas. That's right. The gorilla. Wasn't my idea. It was an image that came from her. It's a picture of something happening in her psyche, acting out the image is the way to amplify and explore it in order to discover its meaning.
Speaker 0 00:05:22 Okay. So we did this for a good 10 minutes. And at one point she walked toward me raising her arms, above her head and growled, like a monster ready to devour. Its prey are Whoa, what are you doing? I said, what's it like for you to do that? She looked at me with wide eyes. Like I'm the powerful one. Powerful one. Yeah. I'm the queen gorilla. Awesome. Do you normally feel this powerful? No. I usually feel like a weakling. Well, unless I'm high, this is fun. I said, imagine feeling this power all the time. What would that be like again? She covered her mouth. Oops. I asked her what happened there. She said, I don't know, like this isn't allowed, right? Your father says a woman. Shouldn't be powerful, but you are. Imagine, always feeling like this. She smiled from ear to ear and said, if I always felt like this, I'd feel like I can do whatever I want in life.
Speaker 0 00:06:33 Like I wouldn't have to follow my parents' rules and plans for me. I could do what I want in the world. Right? You'd be a powerful woman in charge of your own destiny. How's that feel? She said, it's a high. I asked her to say more. And she said, it's like when I party, but not stoned or anything, just super strong. Next I role played her father saying the typical sexist things to her. And she dialogued with me using her power to push back against him, be a proper Swiss woman, stop acting crazy. And she said, fuck you. I'm the queen of the apes. I do what I want. We went back and forth for a while and it was really powerful. She left a session on cloud nine in subsequent sessions. We worked further on her power as a woman versus this internalized negative father who wanted to keep her down.
Speaker 0 00:07:36 It was a process of waking up about her own internal oppression of her power. After a few months, she had no more crazy mood swings or weird delusions and has remained that way. Ever since I still talk on the phone with her every once in a while. Can you understand what happened instead of trying to get rid of her depression, which she visualized as a gorilla, I helped her amplify and become the gorilla. Her psyche expressed her problem in an image much the same as a night dream uses imagery to represent unconscious feelings and experiences. If you want a firsthand experience of this, just make a picture in your mind of something you feel. For example, if you feel calm and relaxed, maybe you visualize a peaceful nature scene. If you feel angry, you might visualize a volcano exploding. If you feel sad, you might see a gray sky or even a sad and lonely child.
Speaker 0 00:08:42 It's a simple translation of a feeling into an image. The content remains the same only the form. The sensory channel changes from feeling to seeing. So in Clara described her depression in visual terms. She gave me the template to begin to work on her problem. Normally I'd stay in the visual channel for a while and have the person look closer at the image they see, but pretty quickly she changed sensory channels again, by translating her image of the gorilla into moving like a gorilla. Remember when she put her arms out to the sides and swayed back and forth to show me what it looked like. We went from her feeling, her depression, to an image of it. And then to its expression in movement, the content never changed. Only its forms of expression changed when she swayed back and forth, her psyche was showing me that the way to process her depression was through moving embodying, acting out, physically experiencing the image of the gorilla.
Speaker 0 00:09:54 Now using imagery and movement weren't interventions that I came up with. They didn't come from some kind of program. I follow. They came from her. In fact, I don't apply any methods. I derive them from the client's process. The methods are in you. I simply observe and facilitate them. This is totally different from most approaches to therapy and self-help which apply a program of interventions, regardless of how your psyche expresses your process. All the theories and methods are in the textbooks for the practitioner to simply apply. Of course, they're somewhat tailored to the individual, but they're still super imposed over someone's process as opposed to being organically derived from it. It's as if the practitioner already knows what you should do before he meets you. This is why a lot of therapy and self-help are hit and miss. If the therapist or method happens to click with your process, you're in luck, but sometimes it doesn't, or it clicks for a while and then it doesn't anymore because your process changes.
Speaker 0 00:11:09 This is why it's common for people to do a particular kind of self-help work for a while and then stop. Again. My methods came from Clara. I didn't approach her. Like I had the answers to what she should do. In fact, I have no answers. I just trust that if I follow someone's process closely and empirically and help them unfolded, it will show us the way normally practitioners aim primarily to help you reduce your symptoms and get rid of your problems. I did the opposite. I amplified her experience through the channels. She expressed them in feeling vision and movement. Now, if you're trying to get rid of a problem or heal an issue, why the hell would you want to amplify it? Doesn't that just make it worse? Well, this is the way most people think. And it's why many of us use the medical model of suppressing symptoms. When we deal with life issues, how can I get rid of this problem? Or at least how can I reduce the symptoms? How should I manage my mental illness? All these questions are based on the disease model of mental health, but this model is deep
Speaker 1 00:12:25 Plea flawed. It misses.
Speaker 0 00:12:27 This is the whole reason we have problems, which is to catalyze our personal evolution problems are logical and meaningful. They're not random meaningless disorders, but how does amplifying your problem? Change it amplifying or magnifying. It transforms your confusing, mysterious, irrational, painful, impossible, seemingly random symptoms and unsolvable issues into conscious information. You can process. It makes inaccessible information accessible. Think of it like this. If you want to see a cell in the body, you use a microscope. It makes visually inaccessible information accessible. The same is true. If you use a telescope to see objects that are far away, all you're doing is amplifying images or here's an even simpler example of amplification. Say, I'm playing you a song with my amp on less than volume one. If you're standing far away, you might not even be able to hear anything. So you call me on the phone and you say, swig, turn it up.
Speaker 0 00:13:42 Then I turn it up to 10 and suddenly you're covering your ears because it's rocking your brain. I'm playing the exact same thing I was before, but we needed to amplify it in order to make it accessible to your hearing. These examples, microscopes, telescopes, and guitar amps, show how we can amplify images and sounds, but you can also amplify other types of sensory information. You can amplify a feeling by feeling it more. This happens naturally when you close your eyes and focus on your body and suddenly notice aches and pains, you didn't realize were there even just focusing on something, amplifies it to a certain degree. You can also amplify movements like I did with Clara. She only made a quick millisecond movement when she put her arms out to her sides, that would have been the end of it. But that kind of movement signal is always the beginning of a process.
Speaker 0 00:14:45 So I had her stand up and unfold, the whole movement experience by acting out the gorilla. You can also amplify relationship issues. Although this is a bit more complex since there are two or more people involved, I'm going to show you how to do all of these things in future episodes for now, what's important is this problems contain their own solutions. The mathematics, the equations are right there in front of you. If you know how to make them accessible by amplifying them, there's nothing about you that you need to fix or change. There's only your inner process to discover and make conscious connecting these intrinsic solutions. Not only transforms the problem, but also gives you directions, awareness, vision, and creativity that transforms a deeper or bigger issue in your life. When you may not even know about, in other words, your problem is really only a gateway to the real issue, which involves who you are in a deeper and more holistic sense.
Speaker 0 00:15:55 For example, a Clara was super depressed and manic, and this was her identified problem. Her psychiatrist only saw this and tried to mask it with meds to relieve her symptoms. But when we processed it, she discovered the real issue, which was her need for self-empowerment as a woman, this wasn't something she'd been conscious of at all beforehand. Her depression was simply a vehicle for her to discover her deeper process. Your identified problem is trying to get you onto your true path of growth and expansion in a way that will change your fundamental being and further your conscious evolution, personal growth and healing. Aren't only about fixing things they're about increasing your awareness, expanding your identity and changing your attitudes and beliefs. So what Clare teach us about this so-called mental illness known as bipolar disorder. The two parts of the bipolar equation, depression and mania are opposite sides of the same coin.
Speaker 0 00:17:07 They're two extremes compensating for each other, but have a crucial missing element awareness of the process. The reason Clara's depression and mania went away was because she discovered this missing element by identifying with her power as a woman, she integrated the Kirila, the image onto which she had projected her strength and was no longer a depressed victim of its power. She also didn't have to fly off into delusionary manic episodes imagining she was the most powerful woman in the world because she actually became a woman, the loss of touch with reality that some bipolar people exhibit isn't a meaningless random symptom of craziness. It's the psyches attempt to free itself from something oppressive, believing she was the most powerful woman on the planet sounds loony. But when you understand that it was simply an unconscious attempt to connect with her power. It makes perfect sense.
Speaker 0 00:18:15 Psychologists and psychiatrists want to sound like they know what they're talking about. Even when they don't. And to this end, they say things like this. Here's one of the classic quotes, the exact cause of bipolar disorder isn't known, but a combination of genetics environment and altered brain structure and chemistry may play a role. Well, guess what? I've read hundreds of psychological and psychiatric research reports on this topic. And every single one uses this kind of qualifying language may be, is thought to be, could be, might be it's a pasta size to be. Whenever I read this kind of study, I talked to the journal paper or my computer screen and say, get back to me when you've got something real to show me, pudding might be and could be into the results section of a scientific study, especially when it's about a topic that affects people's lives is irresponsible and often ends up in a slow spin over time.
Speaker 0 00:19:25 Where could be mysteriously becomes is all it takes is one writer to change one or two words. And a whole new reality is created with very real consequences. In fact, this is exactly what the pharmaceutical companies do in their advertising. They conveniently spin hypotheses as established facts. They know the public is largely science illiterate and that they can get away with using this method to pull the wool over people's eyes. In a future episode, I'm going to tell you all about how psychiatry and the drug and insurance industries do this. The fact is the disease model of mental health is based on two things. Well meaning, but misguided ignorance and powerful financial interests. It's not in our best interests. Whatever's going on with you. You don't have a disease. You have a powerful process of change and growth trying to happen, and you need the right tools to facilitate it.
Speaker 0 00:20:33 That's what this podcast is all about. Clara transformed her so-called bipolar disorder by tapping into her inner gorilla. This spontaneous image she had of her when amplified and unfolded, led her to discover an unborn voice within herself, the voice of her power, the power to stand up against the inner and outer sexism that tries to keep her and all women down a problem is an unborn voice trying to express itself because it's an unconscious process. It frequently manifests in disturbing, dark, oppressive, and even evil ways. It needs your conscious awareness to intervene in an uncover. What is trying to express. It needs your help to give it birth. On Friday, September 18th, 2020, I'm going to release a song and video called unborn voices that speaks to this process. Here's a sneak preview of the song.
Speaker 2 00:21:42 <inaudible>
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