Something is wrong.
Something is very wrong in the world we live in today.
When I was young, I was depressed… depressed my entire youth. I went to a therapist in university hoping it could help. I sat for an hour and talked… He listened. He asked the odd question. And when 50 minutes was up he said, “Well, we’ll have to stop for today.”
I was STUNNED. Are you kidding me? I thought. I just told you all that for nothing? Talking about it was not a solution. I looked him in the eye and asked, “Aren’t you going to give me something… a strategy… something to help…?
He gave me a book. The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Brandon, a world leader on self-esteem. I read every last word. In that whole book there was not one thing I could do to feel better or think differently. The entire book was theory. I was no better off.
Most psychology is all theory, no practice.
I cannot tell you how many people have come to me with the same story about psychology. “I went to see a psychologist. He just wanted me to talk about my past and it didn’t help.” I hear it again and again. I cannot tell you how many people went for therapy and told me, “I understand why I have a problem… but I still have it.”
Sometimes is a case of thousands and thousands of dollars to paid to talk about a problem they still have.
An entire field of people who believe that the way to help people now is to talk about things that happened 20 years ago. Or to talk about things now as if having a shoulder to lean on will free us of our most consuming problems.
I don’t know about you but I don’t know anyone who went for therapy, talked about their past for an hour a week and then suddenly said, “I’m cured.” Instead we live in a society ridden with problems. The number of cases of anxiety is unbelievable. How many people have to stop working every day? How many people are incapacitated by depression, burnout… and how many people decide suicide is the only way out?
I talk about this more here:
Psychology does not work. If it did, we would live in a much better world.
The question becomes: Why do people still use an approach that doesn’t work. Something is very wrong.
Why? Because they believe it is the way. It’s what the books said. It’s what they learned at school… and if you get conditioned to believe something through 4 years of university, it’s not so easy to give up.
But if you had a business that wasn’t working and you brought someone in who said, “Let’s talk about the company’s past. After hours and hours of talking you’ll understand and suddenly the business will be transformed,” you’d call the people in the white coats. It’s insanity that we let something so ridiculous remain a standard approach to helping people.
Why? Because we have real problems today in a real world today. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHERE THEY CAME FROM. What matters is how we get rid of them and how we can live the experience we want.
People accept the establishment. They think that since there is an order of psychologists and since they have a piece of paper and they sat through lots of school and wrote lots of papers they must know how to help people. But my mechanic can get better results with people.
Quebec medicare pays for treatment with one psychoanalyst in Montreal. Psychoanalysis is some two hundred years old, there is ABSOLUTELY ZERO scientific evidence of any effectiveness whatsoever… and Quebec medicare will pay for it. That really makes me wonder – do the people running the show even care if we have problems? Do they even want us to be able to get help?
I went to the CLSC once after a breakup long ago. I wanted help. I needed help. I poured my heard and soul out to the woman there. I was hurt, broken, I couldn’t function. For a whole hour she wanted to play “pin the name on the emotion.” Whatever I said, she would respond with, “Oh, there is a lot of anger there…” “Oh, there is sadness there, isn’t there.” As if this was supposed to help. I left there feeling no better off that when I came in.
We live in a world that teaches us to look for the solution to every problem in a pill. If you are depressed you need a pill. Don’t even think about solving the REAL problem, just buy a pill and be done with it. If you have anxiety, just get a prescription. Don’t find out what’s really going on that is creating anxiety. Learning disability? Take a pill, and make sure we don’t help teachers learn how to teach better. Give the kids the pill and let’s still use a 19th century school system.
We brush problems under the rug while we nurture the cause. We look for the quick fix instead of solving the real problem.
Who wants us to believe religiously in medication? Pharmaceutical companies. Who else? They love this mentality we have bought into because it makes them BILLIONS. Every day researchers scrambled away to create the next pill. They are looking for a pill to treat compulsive gamblers and addicts and everything else because everything is a biological problem. That is what they tell us, and when we believe it, they cash in.
When new methods that promise to be able to cure problems come along, the establishment says, “Oh it must be hocus pocus if it can actually cure something.” If your doctor said that about a medical treatment you would find another doctor.
What is missing from the field of psychology is an absolute dedication to finding what works and to stopping doing something if it isn’t working.
Something is wrong and we have been led to believe a lie. I believe it is a lie that we cannot cure our most common problems. I meet people all the time who were able to crush their own anxiety, beat their own depression and do incredible things.
Almost everyone feels that inkling inside that we are capable of so much more… But we have bought into the conditioning of society… A conditioning that is slowly dying with the cultural shift.
One day a number of years ago I got lucky. I met a woman who was called a “Meta-Coach” and told me about something called “coaching.” She said it was about the how in psychology instead of the why. It was doing instead of talking… and so I decided to try it.
The day after our session I felt amazing. I felt free. I felt empowered. What the $%#@? Could this really be true? It was the first time something had worked… I could not believe it. I had struggled for years to find this… And I knew then that I would dedicate my life to this. Then I found countless other methods that worked as well… and that no one knew about!
Did you know that electric shock therapy is still used in placed in North America? Think about that one for a while. It blows my mind.
What is going on in our society?
Most people still suffer because most people have not found what works. They have not looked for what works and they have not looked for what works for them. They have blindly accepted what they were told by someone who didn’t really care or didn’t really know.
Shopenhauer said that “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” This is precisely what will occur in psychology until the current generation is replaced by a younger generation of people who believe in the human spirit, the human will, and the human mind.
Some therapists and psychologists are brave enough to defy the establishment. They look for what works, they do what works for each client, and if what they are doing is not working, they change. They have evolved with the times, learned from what they did and what others have discovered, and I commend them for having the strength to truly fulfill their calling.
But society still believes a lie. What are you going to do about it?
