Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's wig show, where I show you how bad states of mind and difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it.
Speaker 1 00:00:27 Greetings people. How are you today? I hope you're doing great. And aren't unbelievably addicted to your phone and computer <laugh>. I mean, isn't everyone nowadays. That's why I often purposely do an entire weekend with zero tech. I don't want it to become one of my appendages so that I'm a cyborg. I was born a natural human and I'll die one. That's my ethos. But here I am broadcasting you my low tech manifesto over the tech waves. What a hypocrite <laugh>. I mean, I'm sitting on my wooden bench. I built I'm drinking organic ginger tea made for my garden. So I'm a bit natural, but I'm also a modern man. I don't wanna just play wooden music on my acoustic guitar. I wanna plug in and rock and I don't only want ancient wisdom because it gets static. I want modern wisdom too. I wanna evolve.
Speaker 1 00:01:32 So let's go further down the digital pipeline to learn about using technology, to increase consciousness, solve problems, and grow in episode 56. How to apply your inner wisdom to a problem. We used video to gain objectivity toward yourself. We amplified your capacity to see yourself clearly by accessing your inner wise observer. This enabled you to watch a video of yourself from an objective standpoint, rather than trying to understand yourself while entangled in an emotional mess. Video is a great technological tool. You can use to see yourself in a new way, but you have to combine it with inner work that frees you from your habitual ways of perceiving and interpreting yourself and others. Otherwise the part of you watching yourself isn't objective and can actually make things worse. One of the most common ways this occurs is that your inner critic does the observing, oh my God, I look so weird.
Speaker 1 00:02:41 I'm fat. I'm unattractive. My voice sounds awful. I look so dumb. <laugh> it's like throwing your critic, a juicy steak, feeding it content. It can have a heyday with the exercise, uses a method for accessing your inner wisdom to get you out of this critic and into a part of your perceptual awareness that has a degree of objectivity. Most of the time, we're just lost in the flow of our experiences. And we can't see ourselves clearly at all, but everyone has a wise inner self and enlightened observer. That's outside of our psychological and emotional entanglements. This rather godlike part of ourselves is archetypal. It exists in all of us at all times, although it's not often made conscious it's the seed for our enlightenment in the inspiration for the mythological hero figure, the wise man or woman who's free of everyday problems and can lead us to the promised land where objective truth lives.
Speaker 1 00:03:50 Our unrealized wise inner selves are also the prototype for our religious icons. Jesus Buddha, Muhammad, and enlightened figures throughout history represent our deepest yearnings for an innate capacity to transcend our problems and connect with the core of life. They were probably real people in the world, but they're also projections of our own inner enlightened parts. Accessing your inner wisdom is a step toward this higher self and enables you to observe and study your own behavior in a supportive and insightful way. The exercise hits the problem of NONOBJECT toward yourself on two fronts first, by holding up a mirror and having you stand back and observe. And second, by helping you to observe from a perspective that's outside your usual subject of complexes, being objective about yourself. Isn't easy. You think you're being objective, but you're entangled in the whole system. That's you, which includes you.
Speaker 1 00:04:59 The observer, it's tricky to be objective. You need a method to both separate yourself from your inner processes and facilitate them in a neutral way. Easier said than done and psychology doesn't help the problem. It pretends to be a science, but it's so not a science <laugh> in my doctoral studies, I had to read hundreds of research papers, and I never found one where the researchers didn't inject their own philosophical prejudices and subjective viewpoints into the hypothesis, design and conclusions. It felt like a million miles from a mathematical precision. I was used to from studying biology, chemistry, and physics. My experience of this was confirmed recently when an international team of experts repeated a hundred experiments published in the top psychology journals and found that they could only reproduce 36% of the original findings. Psychologists in the us wanted to respond to rising concerns over the reliability of psychology research.
Speaker 1 00:06:11 And they reached out to 270 scientists on five continents and ask them to redo the experiments. Fail. So much of psychology is junk science, but of course the public doesn't really know the difference. Even the questions researchers seek to answer often come from totally subjective assumptions. The classic example is the fact that from the 1950s to the 1970s, the psych diagnostic manual had a gay disorder. And there was lots of research done, millions of dollars worth to enter the question of how to cure gay people of their illness. So shameful, but it also shows the pseudo scientific basis of so much psychology and psychiatry. These kinds of false subjective assumptions, driving research continue to this day, everyone, including psychologists is caught in their own inner systems of thought and perception. Psychology is unique among the sciences. Not that it's science <laugh> in that subject and object are one in the same thing in biology, chemistry, physics, and every other science, the subject you or the scientist studies, the object, whatever you wanna observe, but in psychology, the subject is your or the scientist's own mind.
Speaker 1 00:07:42 And so is the object. The mind is studying the mind. It's a closed system fraught with science busting subjectivity. This happens in clinical work too. You go to a therapist to get some kind of objective understanding of your life, and you may get this, but oftentimes, and sorry to be so blunt, some therapists just put their subjective stuff onto you. They sort of train you in their philosophy instead of helping you to discover your philosophy. They try to get you to be a certain way, instead of showing you how to find your way objectivity is scarce. Everyone's got a horse in the race and wants to impart their way instead of being reverent toward your process. So how can we be objective about ourselves first? I'll tell you what not to do, and that will lead us to the answer. You won't get true objective knowledge about yourself by starting with an end in mind, starting with the end is a great tool for accomplishing something, but a lousy one for knowing yourself.
Speaker 1 00:08:57 If you've already decided that you should be calm and centered or revved up and determined or spiritual or centered in the present moment or locked into your visions of the future or rational or pragmatic or any other predetermined image, you strive toward all your perceptions and interpretations of yourself will be colored by this idea, deciding in advance, which parts of you are good and acceptable and which are bad and should automatically be rejected, will make you unconscious of your real process. It'll skew all your perceptions toward pure subjectivity. It'll make you automatically reject repress, marginalize and disavow important parts of yourself. You won't be able to tap into who you really are because you'll kill parts of yourself that haven't even been explored yet. You'll become who you think you should be. Not who you actually are following this one predetermined path, unless it's some kind of process approach that embraces many different ways of being many different paths will result in you growing in one way and marginalizing every other way.
Speaker 1 00:10:14 You'll become one sided in what you know about yourself. And we'll try to force this one way of being on whatever's happening in your life. The question is who says you should be this way? How do you know this is the correct way for you to be just because you think a specific path is the right way to be. Doesn't mean, it's your true conscious path to determine this. You have to go deeper than just your ideas about life. You have to work on your process, your imagination of what could be in your life can enlighten you, but it can also sink you. It all depends on your level of self awareness. And just because someone else says you should be a certain way, doesn't mean anything about what's right for you. And while comparing yourself to others is natural. It can totally mess with your ability to be objective about who you are and who you are meant to become.
Speaker 1 00:11:17 Okay? So how can you be neutral and objective toward yourself? Simply observe yourself. Name, what you observe using the simplest forms, amplify, what you observe and unfold. The process. For example, say you're having a panic attack, which by the way, is scary as shit takes the world out from under you. No joke, whether you're a psychologist, a psychiatrist, or just someone at home having a bad night, you'll probably go through this whole self-defeating checklist. You'll decide right away that you need to feel calm and not anxious. You'll think of how other people are calm and not anxious. You'll assume your anxiety has no meaning or purpose other than to terrify you. If you already have a way of dealing with it, medication or breathing techniques or going for a run or whatever, you'll fall back on this as your go-to method and assume there's nothing else you can or should do in short you'll view, your bad state of mind as inherently wrong.
Speaker 1 00:12:26 Now you've entangled yourself within yourself and have no objective relationship to your process. You'll eventually get out of the awful feeling and return to your normal self, but you won't have gotten the meaning or message from the experience. You just hope it doesn't happen again. So how does this method of objectively working on your process? Look in therapy. Here's an example of one of my clients, a 42 year old investment banker who suffered from frequent panic attacks. He came into the session having a full blown episode. He said it started on the freeway on the way to therapy. He was sitting in traffic and started to feel claustrophobic. A few minutes later, he got hit with a panic attack and felt like he wanted to climb out of his skin. He felt terrified, but had no idea why. The first thing I did was have him do some slow, deep breathing to help him get centered and focused this wasn't to get rid of his anxiety as if this would heal the problem.
Speaker 1 00:13:37 It was just to inject his awareness with focus in some situations like with mild anxiety, you can actually reduce it way down simply by doing breathing techniques. This can make you feel better in the moment, but it misses the whole point and just sets you up for the next episode, feeling better right away. Isn't always good for you. It's more effective objective, transformative and satisfying to get to the meaning and message of how your anxiety wants you to change something in yourself. This is true. Self-awareness healing and growth. After a minute of breathing, I asked him to observe and describe his experience without judging, evaluating, or interpreting it. Forget all your preconceived ideas. It's your brain disorder, your childhood trauma, God punishing you. It's the boogeyman. Just give me your bare bones. Observation, your neutral report communicated in the simplest form. He said he feels scared.
Speaker 1 00:14:47 I asked him to describe it to me so I could feel it and said, he felt like the cars and the world were closing in on him. And he still feels it. He said, he feels abandoned like a ghost with no ground in himself. Now there's already a lot of information there directing me how to process his anxiety. When I work with people, I don't need to apply a method or tell them what their goal should be, because I organically derive both of these things from their process. The methods are in your process, not in the practitioner's program for you. Next. I wanted to amplify his neutral observations. I asked him what he wanted to explore. First, the cars and world closing in on him or the abandoned feeling. And he said the abandoned feeling. I asked him what being abandoned felt like. He said, it felt like being unseen, unloved, unwanted, and not allowed to play and have fun in life.
Speaker 1 00:15:54 He said, the world felt like an overwhelming, serious monster. Suffocating him. I suggested he play act this world monster. And he got up and towered over me, sitting in my chair, glaring down at me. I told him to study his experience. And the first thing he noticed was that he not only felt like the abandoner, but also like the world closing in on him. He had described, I play, acted him and said, why are you doing this to me world? You're scaring me. I feel abandoned. I wanna be seen and loved. I wanna be free and supported to play and have fun as the abandoner. He said, no, no playing for you. You have to work. Work work 24 7. Then he paused and started crying. I waited for him to compose himself. And he said, the abandoner the world closing in on him was actually his father who he said was powerful and oppressive and wanted him to only work.
Speaker 1 00:17:03 He never recognized my client for anything but working hard, no acknowledgement of him as a human being with feelings and needs. I asked him how he dealt with this. And he said, by just working, then he opened his eyes wide, having an aha moment. He realized that he is his father abandoning himself, not supporting himself to have fun and enjoy life, not recognizing his own feelings and needs by choosing to only work. He became the world closing in and crushing the life out of his own humanity. I continued the dialogue saying, no, I don't wanna work. I wanna play. Love me for just playing as the father. He said, no, you're lazy work is the only valid thing in life. Then I suggested we switch roles. I'd play the father and he'd be himself. As the father. I said, get to work. Next thing I knew, he stood up and physically pushed me.
Speaker 1 00:18:12 <laugh> I said, what are you doing? You're not allowed to push your father. You're the son. You can't stand up to me. I'm in charge. He kept playfully pushing me and said, no, I'm in charge. I decide when to work and went to relax as the father, I said, no way I say work. And that's what you have to do. Next thing, my client gently threw me onto the ground. He got on top of me and pretended he was punching me in the face. Then he started laughing. He stood up and jumped up and down yelling. Yes, yes, fuck you. I can play. When I want, I have the power. It was a life changing revelation for him. The remainder of the session was spent on amplifying it and exploring how he could apply it. By this point in the session, his anxiety was completely gone over the next few months.
Speaker 1 00:19:13 It came and went. But when it happened, he knew what was going on, that he was falling into his old pattern of becoming an oppressive father to himself. Then he'd do something to energetically, pump himself up and claim the power for his own feelings and needs. He was slowly transforming his inner father by taking its power and using it to support himself in deciding when to work and when to play. It was a classic anxiety process in which one splits off their own power. And it creates a spooky fear filled mood that scares the crap out of you. The solution is to take back your power. This example shows an objective way to work on a problem. I didn't need to add anything to his process or direct him toward any kind of predetermined goal. I just had him report his observations, amplified them, and we followed where it went by doing this.
Speaker 1 00:20:17 He arrived at a new inner wisdom awareness and objectivity toward himself. The exercise doesn't take you through this exact process, but it gives you a simple way to tap directly into the wisdom that already lives in your psyche. So you can use it to objectively observe yourself on a video. Speaking of tapping into your why self in order to see more clearly playing music is a fast track into this experience for me. I remember the exact moment I woke up to music as a teenager. It happened in an instant. I heard a song on the radio one day and it zapped me into an altered state of heightened clarity. I didn't know what was happening, but it was an incredible feeling. Suddenly. I felt like someone else for a few minutes. I wasn't 13 year old, Adam Zig in Canada with his family and school and friends and hockey team.
Speaker 1 00:21:17 I was someone else who had an outside awareness of all these things. It was like stepping out of a mist for those two minutes. Instead of being a normal teenager whose part and parcel of everything and everyone in his world, I stood separate and could see it all. It was a euphoric experience. Like I was floating above the earth. Also, I could hear every nuance in the music and I decided right then and there that I was gonna be a musician. I didn't yet know what a psychologist is so that didn't enter into the equation for the time being. I had an afterschool job and managed to save enough money to go to the pawn shop and buy a cheapo guitar. From that point on, I was a different person with a new identity music showed me another world. I hadn't ever known each band.
Speaker 1 00:22:13 Each artist, each song told me stories about life. I remember hiding under the covers at night with a tiny transistor radio listening to far away stations on one super clear star. Winter night, I was with my family at a cabin in the Canadian woods. I turned on the radio and through the static, I heard sounds I'd never heard before. It was a live concert. And in between songs, there was a commentator. At one point, he said something like coming to you from the great city of Nashville. And I was blown away. I didn't know exactly where Nashville is, but I knew it was in the us far from where we were. It was the grand old Opry and my first exposure to what we'd now call old school country and bluegrass. I remember experiencing the words as being so plaintiff and real and how they felt similar to the blues music I'd been listening to.
Speaker 1 00:23:18 I started to feel that songs are more honest than the people in my environment. It was the beginning of my passion for learning what we as humans really feel and think and what our true potential is. It wasn't until college that my mystical relationship with music found its counterpart in science and psychology. Over the years, music, science, psychology and spirituality have become almost indistinguishable in my psyche. They're each just different modes of inquiry into the same thing. Life. They all have the potential to uncover. What's hidden from my view and connect me with a deeper awareness and understanding of my process. See you next time. Stay aware. You can follow me on social media at Dr. Wigg and you can sign up on the mailing list at Dr. wigg.com while you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise, weekly personal growth tips and locks more be well.
