We usually think of distractions as something bad. We value our ability to focus on tasks without interruption. When we can’t concentrate we assume something is “wrong.” Enter the “ADHD” epidemic. ADHD (originally called ADD) was first conceived in the early 1900s but was a rare diagnosis until the 1980s when suddenly everyone seemed to have it. It’s no accident that this happened at exactly the same time that new medications to treat it came to market. More often than you might imagine, medications for so called “mental illnesses” often precede wide spread diagnoses.

ADHD is a fabricated “illness.” The problem is very real and painful, however, the disease entity is a made-up label that simply describes misunderstood behavior. It’s referred to as a “neuro-developmental disorder” despite the fact that there are no neurological studies demonstrating this in a cogent way. It’s a hypothesis, not an established scientific theory. The insurance companies won’t even pay for brain scans for this supposed disorder because they consider it to be a behavioral problem, not a neurological problem. The fact is, an inability to concentrate is a meaningful psychological process that can be worked with and transformed.

Instead of viewing your lack of focus as a pathology, approach it as a growth process. Not being able to concentrate happens due to unidentified, unprocessed problems needing immediate attention. In addition, embedded within your propensity for distraction is unused creative energy that must be consciously integrated. Your mind doesn’t function in a random way; it’s structured by your psychology. Your attention automatically gravitates toward whatever reflects your psychology back to you. The symptoms of “ADHD” don’t constitute a “disease”; they’re trying to bring your attention to your deeper story. They need to be processed and transformed, not suppressed. Doing so leads to healing, personal growth, happiness, and well-being.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

Everything you experience aims at making you more aware. Feelings, moods, symptoms, problems, dreams, events, relationships, and trivial things in your environment that irrationally hook your awareness and take your attention, all carry meaning and purpose for you. They’re trying to spark your attention, light a fire under you, take something out of the shadows of your psyche and place it under the spotlight of your awareness.

Your mind functions according to two things—your conscious intentions, and your subconscious processes. The things in your environment that catch or disturb your attention (an event, object, shape, color, person, sound, sign, song, etc.) aren’t random; they’re structured by an internal honing mechanism in your subconscious that seeks to make itself conscious by intruding into your awareness. It continually searches for something that can reflect your process back to you. The world is your mirror. 

In this episode, I show you how to use whatever catches or disturbs your attention as your path to healing, change, and personal growth. This will help you begin to transform issues such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit, trauma, relationship problems, and other common troubles.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

The conventional view of life obstacles is that they serve no purpose other than to irritate and frustrate you. They’re seen as a problem that must simply be eliminated. Therefore, you should do everything you can to immediately overcome them. This is a shallow understanding.

Even though problems are painful, they contain essential information meant to guide you in the right direction. An obstacle is your traffic director; it shows up to illuminate the way. Don’t just kill it. In fact, welcome it. Process it. Sometimes this means pushing through the block to connect with your strength, but other times an obstacle appears in order to push you to change your direction. Always begin by approaching it as meaningful and purposeful, not as meaningless trash in your way.

This is a paradigm shift—from pathology to process. Instead of viewing your life as a fight to overcome your inner and outer demons, approach everything as a process that carries an important message for your growth and development. Always remember that what stops you is there for a reason, and you can tap into it and transform it the issue. This episode focuses on processing your blocks to extract and integrate their inherent wisdom. Doing so leads to inner strength, growth, healing, wellness, and success.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

Somewhere in your psyche you have an image of yourself at your full potential—an intuition of who you could be in your inner life, relationships, work, and spirituality. Your greater self is always present. But there are inner and outer obstacles that prevent you from living it. These obstacles are so pervasive they can block you from even knowing your potential. 
 
Being disconnected from yourself in this way can lead to depression, anxiety, attention deficit, and many other problems. In fact, every life issue is a result of some type of disconnection from an essential part of who you are. Therefore, it’s vitally important to identify and process the things that hold you back. Today’s exercise shows you how to accomplish this. Doing so leads to inner strength, freedom, wisdom, healing, and happiness.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

An inner critic can cause depression, anxiety, attention deficit, mood swings, and other problems. It isn’t just a negative internal thought process full of nasty content; it’s a part of your psyche that has its own personality. It communicates to you in a specific way by making you the recipient of a particular kind of energy, vibe, and style of communication. This is the HOW instead of the WHAT of your experience. 

In psychology, it’s called “process” vs. “content.” We tend to focus solely on the latter but it’s often difficult to transform a problem without working on the process level. Your experience of the critic as powerful, relentless, and cold is a way of being you need to integrate in a positive, transformed way.
 
To do this, you must identify and describe HOW your critic acts upon you—by being aggressive, bold, strong, etc.—and transform these qualities into a constructive force you claim for yourself. This takes away the critic’s power. Doing this work over time transforms it from an oppressive part of your psyche into an inner strength you can use for healing, growth, inner strength, wisdom, and success.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

An inner critic can lead to many life problems, both inner and outer. If you’re aware of your inner negative thought-voices you’re ahead of the game because you have content you can process directly. Unfortunately, many people have an unconscious / hidden critic that they’re controlled by without realizing.They’re psyche reacts with depression, anxiety, attention deficit, delusions, relationship problems, and many other painful issues.

The first step is to become aware of your negative thought-voices and visualize this inner talker as a character. Then you can process it. The critic has two aspects: One is WHAT it says to you; this is the content of its speech. The other is HOW it talks to you, how it delivers that content; this is its energy and personality. We usually focus on what the critic says and overlook the fact that it has a specific and unique way of delivering its message. This is crucial to become aware of. Why? The way your critic talks to you contains a basic human quality that you actually need! I’m not talking about its negativity but rather a certain hidden power that you must take out of its negative context, claim as your own, and use in a positive, constructive way. This exercise shows you how to do this. Doing it daily will lead to healing, personal growth, wisdom, and success.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

Psychology and self help teachings have it wrong by viewing the inner critic as a purely negative feature of the mind, something to try to get rid of by silencing. Since it leads to depression, anxiety, and other problems, it’s seen as a poison of the psyche, a pathology of the soul, a sickness of your psychology. But this misses the fact that the critic’s hurtful words are just its surface manifestation; behind it is something completely different—your guide to growth! The critic is only the seed, the impetus, the painful poke from your subconscious calling you to action—the beginning of a meaningful and purposeful process that’s designed to spark awakening and transformation.

If you simply try to silence the critic, you miss the whole point. You mistake a “symptom” for your growth process. By drowning it with drugs you kill this growth, and by only using mind tricks like positive or rational replies to the critic you spend a lot of time and energy “managing” your problem.

Your critic is your crucible—your painful birth into the positive process of individuation. You must learn how to process your negative thought-voices, not just try to get rid of them. Doing so will lead to healing, growth, inner strength, wisdom, and well-being.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

Do you ever criticize yourself? If you don’t you’re a rare breed; most people do it all the time. Conventional mental health practice aims to “silence the critic,” and to this end teaches people methods for rationalizing and ignoring it. Not only is this ineffective much of the time, it misses the whole point of having an inner critic—growth. To connect with this growth you must process, not “silence” your critic.

But why process this hurtful inner voice or thought pattern? Why give negativity any attention at all. Wont’ that make it worse? Why not just try to ignore it, or think positive thoughts, or go to the gym and sweat it out, or smoke pot, drink a beer, watch a movie, take a Xanax, surf the internet, eat cake, work, talk, sleep...?

These distractions can help you in the moment but they won’t transform this part of your mind, and they won’t help you discover the hidden gold in this negative experience. Processing the self-critical part of your mind means engaging with it in a way that uncovers its true message and purpose; this begins the process of transmuting it from an attacker to an ally.

Your inner critic is your crucible, your calling to transformation and expansion. It’s not a meaningless, negative thought pattern that must simply zapped away. It’s a raw, unprocessed voice from your subconscious that’s part of a larger story, and it’s calling you to process it as a meaningful expression of your growth. Instead avoiding your critic or just trying to think positive thoughts, you can engage with it in a way that not only transforms it but changes your whole sense of self, as well. This will further your personal growth and lead to healing, inner strength, and wisdom. Today’s episode guides you through an exercise to begin doing this.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

What’s the first thing you think of when you feel affected by depression, anxiety, attention deficit, loneliness, trauma conflict, etc? If you’re like most people, it’s, “I wish I could just rid of it.” But this reaction is all wrong. It’s based on a false assumption about why we have problems. It assumes your life issues are personal ordeals with no purpose other than to make you miserable. The origins of this way of thinking come from the age-old belief that pleasure and freedom from stress are good, and difficulties are bad or evil. It’s an instinctive, unconscious way of interpreting experience, and most people still live with this mindset.

Science and technology have improved our lives by applying the scientific method to the idea that problems are purely negative and should just be eliminated. Yet in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and self-help, this demonization of our difficulties makes us impotent to really understand and transform them. It misses what they actually are: Unrecognized personal growth and change trying to happen.

A problem is a meaningful and purposeful process designed specifically to make you develop as a person. This isn’t something arbitrary where you get to decide which of your troubles relate to personal growth and which don’t. Everything you struggle with is meant to force the evolution of your consciousness, expand your identity, and increase your self-awareness. Each issue you encounter aims at a specific change you need to make, a transformation of your awareness in a highly targeted area of your life. The details of your difficulty contain information that’s trying to point you toward a new way of being.

A life issue has a goal, and despite the fact that pain is awful, suffering isn’t its goal at all. Pain and suffering are alarm signals calling you to yourself, bringing your attention to the hidden directions trying to happen in your life. Just wanting to get rid of what bothers you without getting its message, is understandable; nobody wants to suffer. But it’s an attitude rooted in a simplistic understanding of life — and it’s ineffective.

Your troubles are signposts pointing to essential changes you need to make. When you avoid, suppress, or just try to get rid of your distress without getting its message you throw away vital information. What feels bad and wrong actually contains an intrinsic wisdom aimed at positive change and growth. In fact, the very issue you wish you could just zap away contains the holy grail of your life in this moment! Learning how to process it instead of suppress it leads to profound healing, change, and growth.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig

Why is music so popular? Why is it that practically everywhere you go in some countries you hear it being broadcast? Music bypasses the mundane in us, it circumvents consensus reality and touches directly into our hearts and souls. Music is magic. It can change your mood in an instant or amplify your emotions to give you better contact with them. The latter is why sad people tend to listen to sad music; it’s therapeutic because it exaggerates and supports the feelings one needs to experience and process.

Music opens up your feelings and thoughts in ways everyday life usually doesn’t. So does psychotherapy (if it’s done well). In fact, music and therapy are really the same thing. They both tap into the unsaid, unfelt, unintegrated parts of your psyche. The artists and songs you’re drawn to are those that help you access feelings and ways of experiencing life that are already in you but aren’t fully conscious.

Today’s episode explores how music is therapy and therapy is music. If you experience issues such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit, trauma, phobia, relationship conflict, etc., you can benefit from learning how the music you like and dislike reflects your inner process. It’s a mirror you can use to reflect back to yourself what’s happening in your psyche.

drzwig.com - instagram.com/drzwig - youtube.com/drzwig - facebook.com/drzwig