The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz

In this bonus episode of The Possibility Podcast, enjoy my appearance on the All Together podcast from Life Science Labs.

In this interview with host Dina Sargeant, I talk about the possibly fading relevance of marriage, and what that might mean for committed relationships.

I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

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Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a guest on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit. Of course, your anonymity will be respected if that’s your wish.

MEL: Hello everybody and welcome to the Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

DINA: Hey everyone and welcome to Altogether, the family science insights podcast produced by LMSL, the life management science labs. We are champions of life management science, providing structured insights informed by science and inspired by practice on key aspects of conscious living. Each week we bring you scientific and practical insights on each element with the expert knowledge of professionals in the field. I’m your host Dina Sargent. Let’s get started.

DINA: Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode. The marriage is a really tricky thing for a lot of people to really talk about as there are always different expectations on either side as to what their marriage is supposed to look like or what it can look like. Our guest today is here to talk about a new way of marriage can go and rethinking the idea of marriage. He is a psychotherapist, a two-time TEDx speaker, marriage counselor, and author. Please welcome Mel Schwartz. Thank you so much for joining me, Mel.

MEL: It’s my pleasure to be with you.

DINA: Now how did you get into wanting to be a marriage counselor and sort of helping guiding a lot of couples throughout their journey within a marriage?

MEL: Well, hold on to your seat for the answer.

DINA: I’m holding on.

MEL: I went to graduate school to learn my practice and my trade, not early in life. I was 40 years old. Upon graduating, I was going through a divorce in my life, which had a profound impact on me. I had two young children, and I realized that relationships, marriage, we start them with the best of intentions, feeling in love, cheerful, and optimistic. The fact that in the US, half of marriages end in divorce, what it is in Australia. But I wrote in my first book, the fact that half of marriages end in divorce, that’s not the issue. The real problem is that the majority of intact marriages, some years down the road, aren’tall that happy. In other words, the success rate of marriage and committed relationship needs to be about happiness, not just the barometer of divorce. So if only a small percentage of relationships and marriages thrive, it’s insane to keep playing by the same rules. If marriage were a corporation, it would be bankrupt. We’d never tolerate that failure in business. Why do we tolerate it in our lives? So that revelation prompted me to write my first book, which is called The Art of Intimacy, in which I said, the problem is that we receive no education in relationships or marriage. Unless you are fortunate enough to have parents who ideally model the role for us, then you know, we got no training. We just went into it. You have to pass a road test to get a driver’s license, but you don’t have to be educated and literate to engage in marriage and have children. We just stumble our way through. So there’s such a crushing weight of despair and the feeling of, I’ve done something wrong, you’ve done something wrong. In most cases, nobody’s done anything wrong. We just need to learn the lesson. So that’s what really motivated me to come to understand the intricacies of relationship and to be able to look at it and see how I can help people. That was my motivation.

DINA: It’s a big motivation because when you’re talking about the idea of divorce, it must come a lot to come to that state from two people really being in love and wanting to build a life together to end up being like, okay, this isn’t working. Instead of working it out, we’re just going to have to completely call it quits and end it and sort of go through that. There must be some really big issue. And I know there’s so many different reasons for divorce. I mean, one of the biggest reasons I know of is the financial parts of it where money is always a big problem, always a big thing that couples are always fighting over. So I’m excited today to talk about the different areas as to how we’re talking about rethinking marriage and how we’re trying to align ourselves to what makes us happy, but also what makes a better couple sort of align together.

MEL: Well, the first thought in that regard is if you meet at any point in life, but let’s suppose you meet and become a couple at 20 or 25 or 30 years of age or 35, the presumption is that we’re going to either continue to grow in a parallel path or both go to not grow and remain parallel. The system of marriage has to allow for change and growth. So if two people grow in parallel ways, then there’s a greater chance the relationship working out. But to evaluate that, to start with before marriage, we should be asking each other challenging questions, but we don’t. We put our best foot forward. If you think about putting your best foot forward makes no sense because you’re not putting your true self forward. It would make more sense to put your genuine, authentic self forward and find out how do you feel about me for who I really am, not who I’m pretending to be. Because that’s what’s going to be revealed months or years down the road.

DINA: That’s very true. And you sort of forget that when it comes to, I mean, when you talk about being young and in love, you sort of forget, okay, but this is the best part of each other. This is the best that we’re showing each other. When it comes to the worst, what’s going to happen, what the situation is going to be. So yes, I’d love to dive into that even further. But before we do, I’d love to get to know some of your interests and some of your recommendations as well, possibly by playing a little icebreaker that we like to call have you met Mel. So to start off with, do you have a favorite book that you could share with us?

MEL: Well, my favorite book is a book called Thought as a System, written by a late Nobel physicist, quantum physicist named David Bohm, B-O-H-M. And that book was very, very inspirational for me in understanding the nature of thought and how we think, which impacts everything.

DINA: Yeah, that’s really interesting. What especially about it have you really learned from reading that book?

MEL: Well, Bohm makes a distinction between thought and thinking. And he collaborated with Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher in that regard too. Thought happens. We have thousands of thoughts a day. Most often we’re not aware of what they are. But when we are aware, the thought tricks us in that it’s telling us the truth about something. That’s called literal thought. And that’s why people have a hard time to change, because we keep having the same old literal thought. Thinking would sound like this. You know, when you asked me that question, I had a thought come up. Here’s what my thought was telling me. See the difference there? There’s a me having a thought. My thought is telling me something. That is thinking. The separation between thought and me. So I’m sovereign to my thought, not imprisoned by my thought. If the planet was taught this distinction and taught how to think and to see thought, we’d be living in a different world.

DINA: No, that is amazing. I never really thought of it like that, especially when it comes to—that’s an irony from that. But no, I love the idea of the fact.

MEL: So it was quantum physics that informed me. And my recent book was called The Possibility Principle, in which I go into great detail as to how to understand the nature of your thought, the ability—it’s like creating a muscle memory so that you can see the thought and then decide whether to go for it or not.

DINA: Wow. That’s an amazing distinction, actually. You never really think of it being that deep as well, to sort of separate you from your thoughts because you always think that you’re not, like you said, imprisoned by your thoughts. You’re sort of stuck in, okay, you’re deep in thought, but you’re not really—there’s other things that you can be thinking about at the same time, as well as that deep thought that you’re also having in your mind.

MEL: So a quote of mine from my book, all of reality exists in a state of potential. In a nanosecond, everything is possible. But in that nanosecond, if we keep having the same old thoughts, we never reach new possibilities.

DINA: This episode just got a whole lot more mind-blowing for me when talking about that idea, because it’s so far out the spectrum of, okay, I’m just having a single thought, or I’m just having a single moment where I’m sitting here and I’m wondering or I’m thinking. But there’s so many thoughts that you have in one day or in one moment that it depends on which thought that you want to be thinking about at the time that you’re thinking about it.

MEL: And thought and feeling work in tandem. So the moment you have a thought, that thought summons up the accompanying feeling. And that’s why we finally go into moods and swings of feeling up or feeling down, because thought provokes the accompanying feeling. Later on, we can talk about how this approach can help us navigate relationships in a much more healthy way. Even saying to your spouse, you know, I’ve got a feeling or I’ve got a thought, let me share with you what it is. They’re open and receptive, but instead you have the thought, you become the thought, you point a finger at them and you’re saying, you always do this or that. It goes nowhere.

DINA: That’s very true. And I think you knew exactly where I was going to lead on when it comes to going into the relationship part as well. So that’s great. Now, thank you so much for answering those questions. When it comes to family, I know that everyone has a very different definition, a different idea as to what family is. So either personally or professionally, do you have a definition for family that you could share with us?

MEL: Perhaps I can give you a description rather than a definition. The reason I say that is definitions are temporary. When I was a child, the definition of the solar system was that we had nine planets in our solar system. But that definition changed. We now have eight planets. So a fact suggests that something’s unchanging, that everything’s changing. New perception, new discovery. So I’m getting a little long winded as to why I’m saying it’s not a definition, it’s a description. I would say my description of family is not limited or confined to spouses and blood relatives and extended families. I think the dear, cherished friends with whom you have great affinity can not only be family, in some cases they can be closer family than even your nuclear family. So my description of family is those with whom I feel safe, loving, and loved.

DINA: No, that’s a good definition. I think we sort of forget that as well when it comes to what we feel about certain people, especially when it comes to relationships. We’re always really thinking about, okay, what’s the description that sort of creates a family? What’s the description that creates friends, different relationships that come about? And then when it comes to marriage as well, there’s that whole idea of, okay, they’re now family. They’re now people that you consider family. And they’re now people that you can trust as much as you trust a family. And I think it’s a, we can easily get into philosophical discussion about that because the whole idea of marriage and family and sort of now having a second family where it’s now your partner’s family also joining in is also another great discussion.

MEL: Certainly.

DINA: So some of the key challenges that a lot of couples face when sort of rethinking their approach to marriage, what are some of the big situations that can come up when they’re trying to figure out what defines a marriage or what sort of comes up within a marriage?

MEL: A number of years ago, I was attending the wedding of a relative, cousins, their children. One of their children was getting married and I watched them exchanging wedding vows, two young people, so in love. And I listened to all of these great thoughts about their splendid future together. But there was a naivety there. It’s very naive, which is, these are our hopes and aspirations, but what do we have to do day in and day out to achieve that and to have a love that can endure? Because a love, a marital love that endures is sadly the exception. It doesn’t have to be, but it is when we don’t learn the lessons we need to learn. So I think it’s absolutely essential that we become realistic. Say, if the goal is to continue to honor, value, love each other and to keep passion alive, it’s not going to happen simply of its own accord. In rare cases, it will. So to open up to realism whereby we need to understand how are we going to learn the things we have to learn. I think premarital counseling is an exceptional idea. I’ve had any number of couples come to work with me before they got married because they were already open and receptive to the idea that they needed to do a lot of learning to be able to succeed.

DINA: Yeah, no, that’s very true. And I think especially when it comes to, everyone sort of comes along into a couple with different baggage where it comes to the family is not there, is not together or where the parents are split up. There’s always comes the idea of, okay, their view on marriage is also going to be very different to their partners because there’s a lot more things that they feel can go wrong within a marriage. And there’s a lot of things that can really hold back from also wanting to talk about it. I mean, when you think about a couple, it’s two people who are coming together who are two different ideals, as much as they say that they’re the same, there’s still going to be two different ideas as to how they’re going to be thinking about marriage and how they’re going to be understanding what each other person is supposed to do, what the other person is supposed to react to, how they’re supposed to behave. And there’s always that challenge of, okay, are they going to react to situations in a similar way that I’m going to react to them? Are they going to, if issues come up when it comes to money or finances, for example, are they going to react in a way that, okay, let’s go solve the problem or are they going to go and blame the other person for the issue or blame each other for things? There’s a lot of things that come up within a marriage that we’re not really thinking about because like you said earlier, we are young and in love going into a union that is completely unprepared.

MEL: And there’s typically a replication of what you experienced in your own childhood and witnessed with your own parents. So that repetition complex or repetition compulsion continues unless we become mindful and aware. When parents have, when a married couple have issues around different parenting philosophies, typically what’s happening is the fault line is each person thinks that their children should be parented the way they were parented. That’s where the argument breaks down. So Ted and Helen have an argument about how to raise their son, Billy. Well, Ted thinks he should be raised the way Ted was raised. That’s not surprising. Early in a relationship, I would say probably well before marriage, I think it’s important to create a shared vision statement. A vision statement that’s not just the ideal but the practicals so that we can see if we have a reasonably shared vision, we have shared expectations, we should be talking to each other about children. What’s good parenting? How much discipline do you believe? What do you believe in? How do you feel about punishment? Do you believe in punishing a child? What does that look like? How do we express anger with one another? When I’m really upset with you, is it okay for me not to talk to you for two days? That’s the way I express my anger. That’s the way my dad did. I’m not yelling. What’s the issue? Well, she says, well, you’re not talking to me for two days. It’s controlling. Controlling? How can I control you? I’m not saying a word. You see all these things play out. We don’t truly know each other yet. So before the commitment of marriage, we should be having those challenging conversations with each other.

DINA: Yeah. So we were talking a little bit earlier about marriage counseling prior to going through marriage. What is the usual questions that sort of can come up when it comes to the preparation for marriage?

MEL: In marital counseling? In pre-marital counseling?

DINA: Yes.

MEL: Well, how do you feel one will ask the other? They may have conflicting ideas about how much time can we spend apart from each other? Can we take separate vacations with our friends? What’s the importance of our friends in our lives now that we’re married? Very often it’ll go to children. What age do we want to have children? Where do we want to live? What’s the quality of our life? But most fundamentally, what I will open up the couple to is how are you going to navigate your disagreements, your hurts, your wounds? The measure of a good relationship or a good marriage is not how good is it when it’s good. The true measure is how do we handle ourselves when we’re not feeling that good about each other? That’s the measure of a relationship. Can we still be communicative and respectful even though we’re upset or hurt or angry? That’s the litmus test.

DINA: So you’re talking a bit about a contract kind of idea as well or a statement as to how both sides will react to, okay, if we’re going to discipline a child, how are we going to be disciplining them? Are there benefits to sort of having that contract or that sort of prepared statement between the both of you in order to create less arguments throughout when that situation does come up?

MEL: Well, I don’t think contracts work because contracts are set in stone and they don’t change. A contract is written, signed, sealed, and delivered, but we’re human beings and hopefully we’re going to evolve and grow and mature and gain insights. So it needs to be more of a participatory understanding, which is right now, this is what I think and believe, this is what you think and believe, and if and when we change our perspectives, we’re going to have open discourse with each other because there are going to be times where we’re going to have to negotiate and compromise. We have to be realistic. But it’s really more about developing a philosophy for life, a philosophy for our marriage. The problem in life in general is we just go into life without a life philosophy, which is what is going to give us and be able to sustain happiness, fulfillment, meaning, purpose, joy. We aren’t taught this. We assume it’s going to happen from earning enough money, falling in love, and having two and a half children.

DINA: No, that’s very true.

MEL: That’s not the answer.

DINA: No, no. I think we sort of lose sight of that as well, especially when it comes to films and TV shows where they sort of show a marriage and they show the progression of that marriage in such a positive way where arguments rarely happen or if they do happen, they last probably, what, one episode and then they’re solved within that episode. And our idea of, okay, the marriage is the main thing, when you have married, you have kids, you deal with all those situations as you go along and nothing is a really big deal. But in real life, you sort of forget life does really hit you hard. You’re not going to be the TV show character that you sort of want to be within that.

MEL: Well, not only that, but the couple who was very much in love and passionate and have children, are in for a stark change in their lives. Their romance, hopefully, will still take a back seat and will still be a romance. But all too often, that doesn’t happen. It falls apart. So when I’m working with a couple, let’s say a middle-aged couple or a couple with young children and I ask, so how often do the two of you go out together, have dinner, meet friends, have a date night? And if they look at each other and they can’t remember, that’s where we start. You’re not honoring your relationship with each other, then what would you expect? There’s an expression that everyone’s heard of, which is passion dies. It doesn’t have to. I equate it to a fire in the fireplace. If you don’t stoke the logs, the fire goes out. If you don’t do anything to stoke the passion, the romance in the relationship, the romance is going to fade. The passion will wither. And that’s an important part of a relationship. When I say passion, I don’t simply mean sexual passion. I’m talking about that intense energy you have for each other. You have to nurture that throughout the marriage and through having children.

DINA: Yeah, and I think especially when everyone’s lives get busy as well, when you’re talking about two kids that are here, constantly having to work, both of them working nine to five jobs throughout the week, it’s hard to have that time for each other or to grow together in a sense that I still understand you and you still understand me. So when it comes to that, how can couples really cultivate that mindset for wanting to grow together and I think adapt to the new version of their lives, but still sort of be in that relationship?

MEL: So that’s an excellent question. I think that what gets in the way is too much routine and too much predictability. If you think about meeting and falling in love, it’s an adventure of uncertainty. Oscar Wilde wrote, uncertainty is the essence of romance. If that’s so, then predictability would be the death knell of romance and marriage in most cases becomes so predictable that you’re sleepwalking through it. So what do we do about that? We’ve learned to become curious. Instead of saying at the end of the workday, how was your day? Okay, how was yours? Okay, what conversation? So how can we say that differently? So tell me about your day. We have to ask new questions and someone shares an exchange, you say, how did you feel about that? What does that make you think? With curiosity, we evoke uncertainty and that’s not a dangerous uncertainty. It’s a sense of wonder. Falling in love is about a state of wonderment. Now the contract of marriage eviscerates that state of wonderment. That’s the problem. Use the word contract before the contract of marriage. In the US, I think currently there may be as many committed relationships unmarried living together as there are married couples. There’s a trend here in the States toward more and more committed relationship, but choosing not to marry, interestingly, and having children.

DINA: It’s a really interesting idea because when you talk about marriage, that’s usually the huge commitment between each other. But still a lot of couples are having, especially in this day and age, a lot of couples are committed to each other, but without legally binding or without the whole idea of marriage sort of being… Because I think the idea of marriage, and I think this is what this episode is based on today, is the fact that marriage adds that pressure to each other. It adds too much of a weight on to how we understand each other and how we understand relationships because, I mean, like we said, the divorce rate for marriage is really, really high. So when we think about that, if we have that idea of, okay, if we get married, there’s an idea that we could get divorced. What’s the point of getting married then if what we’re doing is working for us?

MEL: Well, I think the problem is around the term commitment. People get married and they’re committing to, I’ll love you forever and I’ll never cheat on you. Good luck. That doesn’t work out more often than it does. We’re committing to the wrong thing. We can’t commit to outcomes if we committed to the process, which is to achieve those goals. What’s the process we have to commit to? Two people have to continue to learn and grow. If they do and they’re committed to the process and learning what they have to, it might work out, right? But we can’t be static. Again, that’s why I’m saying it’s not a contract. Committing to the outcome makes no sense at all. Commit to the process. A marriage or a relationship, we call it the relationship or the marriage, but it’s about his relationship with himself, her relationship with herself, at least in the traditional marriage. It’s the two individuals. Their relationship with themselves, their family history, their hurts, their wounds, their traumas, and then we call it our relationship. But nothing is separate from anything. And so we need to approach it differently. And one of the things that gets in the way is the tendency, the default of right or wrong. Notice I’m working with a couple and they’re in steeped in great argument. Awesome. Time out. Would you rather be happy or would you rather be right? No, give me the correct answer. No, we’d rather be happy, but they go right back. Now if I need to be right, that means I have to make you wrong. How is that possibly going to work out? It can’t. See, it’s just the very way we think needs rethinking, right? There’s a rethinking for you, which is I have to move past right or wrong if I share instead how I feel. Now feelings aren’t right or wrong. So if I say to my spouse, I have to tell you how I’m feeling about something. I’m feeling ignored. I’m feeling not valued. And they say, well, how could you feel that way? I am doing this, not easy. Time out. You say you love me, then you need to care how I feel. So if we express our feelings and the other person learns to validate your feeling, which means they care how you feel, then we have the heart center of a relationship. But instead of doing that, we get into arguments about who’s right and who’s wrong, and both people get invalidated and devalued. That doesn’t work.

DINA: No, and I think we lose sight of that as well. Especially when you have a couple where the way that their parents fought were very much like you said that, you saying this, I’m saying this, and it’s never really getting resolved. And that’s the whole idea that creates the view on marriage, creates a whole view on relationships, is because we’re turned into how our parents react to marriage and react to arguments and all the yelling that can come about. How can a lot of couples deal with that and not aim to bring the echo of their own parents’ marriage into their relationship?

MEL: Well, I employ certain techniques. I developed a strategy. I call it the 5% rule. When you’re in a disagreement with each other, the natural instinct is to refute what the other person is saying and prove that you’re right and they’re wrong. We know that’s mutual suicide in the relationship. So what I propose is listen for something, arbitrarily some 5% to 10% of what they’re saying that you can agree with. Now instead of arguing or refuting the 90% you don’t agree with, surprisingly affirm the 5%. Validate 5% of what you heard. Now what does that do? That shifts the energy of the discourse, which is your partner now feels listened to partially. Now they’re in a position to take care of what you have to say. See a relationship is about energy. It’s not the things. If we’re feeling good about each other, everything navigates well. And when we fall into a state of being disconcerted, think about the word concert. In concert, like an orchestra, in harmony, relationships in concert works well. But it falls into disconcert, disconcert, disharmony, all the DIS words, when we break down into argumentation. So you say you love me, if you love me you have to care how I feel. So the method is to share feelings, not facts. Feelings speak to the heart. Facts never change the heart. Heart doesn’t change because of facts.

DINA: Yes, no, that’s very true. I think in another sense, for another example, how if one person in the relationship is very argumentative and can really say their piece, the other one doesn’t like arguing and always backs down whenever an argument comes in and just sort of agrees with the other person. Like we said earlier, those are two very different ideals and two different ways of communicating, sort of coming together. How can couples remain sort of in their individual thought, but still where one person, both people are being heard and the other person doesn’t feel like they have to back down in order to resolve a situation?

MEL: Well, the other person you’re referring to who has to back down, they probably learned that behavior from one of their parents. So that person would sound like perhaps they were codependent, passive, and their job is to make peace. Now when I work with a couple, I tend to see them individually as well for just that reason. If I can see two people and get to know them individually, their strengths and their struggles, and I can help them with those struggles, then they can show up in the relationship the right way. So the person who is passive and avoiding confrontation has a life issue. If I can assist them with that life issue, then they can start to input the marriage differently.

DINA: So how important is, especially when it comes to the two of them sort of communicating, how would you recommend sort of dealing, especially if you have to mediate, how would you sort of go about making sure that both individuals are heard in terms of their communication?

MEL: This is deeply complex and it would be inauthentic for me to give you a simple answer to a very complex process, but I’ll give you an idea of what it looks like. In other words, the answer is there’s no shortcut. I would be working with both of those people, the person who was aggressive and argumentative as to why they need to overpower the other person with their feelings and their thoughts and their need to be right. So it sounds overpowering. Would you care about what they think and what they feel? You say you love them, don’t you want to hear from them? So I would work to break their tendency to dominate and the other person who probably has a fear of being assertive and that’s why they’re passive. As we’re saying this, I am, I’ll acknowledge I’m thinking of the aggressive one as a man and the passive one as a woman. I’m stereotyping. Now of course, and it’s not always that way, but that’s why it’s important to unravel our own childhoods, our own experience of our own parents because those became normative. Whether we like them or not, it became our norm. So it’s complex. Complex doesn’t mean complicated. Complicated is hard. Complex means we have to look at it from a lot of different ways. Like a diamond has many facets, it’s complex. A relationship has an infinite amount of facets. Going back to the right or wrong argument, how conflict happens that way, the world as we know it with few exceptions oversimplifies. We break things down into right or wrong, yes or no. It’s called either or thinking, which came from Aristotle. When I am asked an either or question, I’ve trained my mind not to answer it because either or questions create two created false realities and you have to choose, but they’re not real.

DINA: Yeah, no, I think we sort of lose sight of that in a marriage as well. From what I’ve seen about marriages at least, there’s that whole idea of, okay, if I’m dealing with a situation, I’ve learned to deal with things on my own. And sort of I’ve learned to deal with, okay, if I’m having a bad day, I’ve personally learned how to deal with it on my own. However, when my partner comes into the conversation, it’s now like I’m having to find a way to communicate how I’m feeling that’s not just like, oh, I’m feeling upset, I’m feeling angry, I’ll be fine, let me deal with it. And that’s the way that I’m so used to dealing with things as I’ve grown up, sort of going through life on my own. But now with him, I’m forced to find ways to say, okay, I’m feeling a little bit more than just upset, but I don’t know how to describe it. And it’s a very interesting change of pace to deal with communicating. How would you go about sort of enhancing the communication aspect, especially if it’s a couple that’s been dealing with it for about 20 years or going 20 years into a marriage?

MEL: So growth, personal growth or relationship growth always comes somewhere beyond our comfort zone. So we avoid what’s outside the comfort zone. Yet we may do physical activities, we may work out, we may do a lot of things sports-wise, we allow ourselves to get uncomfortable, but we don’t do that in new growth. So when you were describing how you’re feeling and you deal with it on your own, it feels challenging to have to communicate it and look at the nuances. That’s where your growth lies. First of all, it’s being able to share with your partner how you feel. That is emotional intimacy. Now emotional intimacy is the ability of two people to let go of their guardedness and their privacy and to reasonably and in a healthy way, share their feelings with each other. That’s emotional intimacy, which leads to emotional intelligence, which is the whole heart of communication. I was working with a couple many years ago and they were having an argument that went like this. She said to her husband, you have no idea how to be intimate. He got very angry. I have no idea how to be intimate. All I want is intimacy, it’s you. I said, time out guys, I introduced the concept which I call shared meaning. Shared meaning is we’re arguing about this thing of intimacy and I don’t even know the two of you mean the same thing by the word. So you’re having an argument that makes no freaking sense. Now what do you each mean by intimacy? Well not surprisingly to me, he meant physical sexual intimacy. She meant emotional intimacy. We need to slow down. And remember I said to you before, curiosity. Curiosity is when you’re using a word to say, what’s that word mean to you? I want to make sure I’m tuned in and I’m getting what you’re saying. Words mean different things to each of us. That is emotional intimacy. That’s how I would proceed with it. Remember a relationship is either going to evolve and grow and flourish or just remain stable which is fine, no value judgment there, or degenerate. You have to choose the kind of relationship and the marriage that you want. The ideal of a relationship or marriage is to enhance your life. At least that would be my ideal. We have to be honest with ourselves and say, to enhance my life, I need to take on this thing about new insights, emotional intelligence, emotional intimacy. I have to be able to lay myself bare and not defend myself.

DINA: Yeah, no, that’s very true. And I think defining what different words mean to each person is I think is a really big tip that I’m so thankful that you shared that as well. Because when you talk about intimacy, my first thing is going into emotional intimacy and going into sharing thoughts and sharing feelings and communicating and dealing with situations together. And, you know, anyone who’s listening could have a whole different idea as to what intimacy is to them. It could be physical intimacy, it could be just holding hands or being expressive and things like that.

MEL: One question. You ask yourself or one another, the question is, how did I come to my beliefs? We all have beliefs, but somehow we don’t see those beliefs, they become the truth. So in negotiating a marriage successfully, instead of falling into that default of right and wrong, the truth, because that’s the barrier, let’s go back to a question about not agreeing around parenting, punishing a child, you’re in disagreement. You’re wrong, you shouldn’t do that. Don’t tell me I’m wrong, I know exactly what you should do. Time out. How did you come to the belief that that’s the right way to punish or not punish? How did you come to that belief? Well, everyone knows that. I don’t know that. How did you come to the belief? Well, that’s how my parents raised me. Oh, so if you had been my sibling in my family, you’d have a different belief because my parents raised me different. Now we’re at a starting point of a real conversation, a real communication. So I think that we take what we think is the truth that we do battle and argumentation and we turn it into a belief. So how did you come to that belief? Because beliefs don’t have to be weaponized. We weaponize the truth.

DINA: Yeah, no, that’s a very good point. So would you recommend that couples really sit down and just try to go about this prior to really being in that situation where they’re having to turn it into an argument or they’re forced to create an argument out of it?

MEL: Yeah, it’s the way to avoid the argument is in the words we choose. Remember what I explained before about thought?

DINA: Yeah. Right. Okay.

MEL: So we don’t see the thought and instead we exclaim, you’re wrong. It’s very different than I’m having a thought that I would do that differently than you let’s talk about it. We don’t see the thought. You’re wrong. You’re never right about that. You’re always wrong. When thought is running around wildly without ownership, good luck. So I think that’s the way to penetrate it. There are techniques where you share my feelings, my thoughts, but you have to use those extra words. You have to say, let me tell you how I feel about this or here’s a thought that I have about that. That is not adversarial or competitive or hostile, but we drop those words. We just go into you always, you never, I can’t. It gets lost in the communication.

DINA: So it becomes instead of a blame game, it becomes a debate between two people as to how their approaches are different.

MEL: Well what the goal is, it’s not to debate, it’s to understand. Can we still love and respect each other and understand that in some ways we have differing beliefs because we’re different people and we were raised differently. We come from different families and could we still value and love each other in light of that? It’s a reasonable question, isn’t it?

DINA: Yeah, no, that’s a very true question. When it comes to sort of talking about these situations beforehand, is there a certain time in the relationship that you should be talking about this? Should it be, I mean, listen to this now, a lot of couples will be listening and be like, okay, this probably is practice that we can do now within 20 years of them being married, but is there an ideal time that they should be doing this? Is it prior to being married? Is it after marriage? Or is there a certain extra time?

MEL: The ideal time is yesterday.

DINA: Okay. Okay, well, that’s a fun date night.

MEL: Do you see what I’m saying?

DINA: Yeah.

MEL: Sooner is better. I am still, after all these years of practicing marriage counseling, shocked about how much each person does to share with their partner, about thoughts and feelings, about hurts and wounds and resentments, and it goes unshared. So that requires emotional and verbal intimacy. So ask the managers as soon as possible, without delay. We only have today. The day you’re in this today, do it today. I don’t care if it’s you’re getting married next month, or you’ve been married for 20 years, do it today.

DINA: Okay. So it’d be a good date night activity for couples to really sit down and discuss their views on different situations.

MEL: Certainly. It would be alive. It would be real.

DINA: Yeah, no, that’s a very good point. I love that. I’m going to test that to my partner tonight and see what he thinks about that.

MEL: Okay, give it a shot.

DINA: Now this links us really well into the open mic section of the show. This gives you a chance to talk about anything that you are passionate about that we didn’t get into talking to today, or a place that you could also talk about any upcoming work that you’re wanting to share with us today. So in the last minute, I’d love to give you the floor and yeah, share what’s on your mind.

MEL: Well, I’m very influenced by what I call a different worldview. My last book, which I mentioned, is based upon a new philosophy of life and of relationships based on quantum physics. So I’ll just briefly share this, quantum physics reveals that reality is inseparable. It’s one seamless whole. There is no separation. We experience separation because it’s the illusion that we’re creating within ourselves. So in a relationship or in a marriage, if we’re operating from the illusion of separation, that is going to destroy the relationship. So my passion is that the goal is not to fix the marriage. The goal is to allow marriages and relationships to thrive. And to do that, we have to come into a sense of oneness. Oneness is if I can impart loving, kind energy to you, the energy of our relationship can shift. I can’t wait for you to do it first to me. Why wouldn’t I go first and do that? So it’s a whole new spirit, a whole new energy of relationship. We have to invest in love.

DINA: That’s a really great way of really looking at it. Because I think we sort of get so focused on the fact that we have to build something that we just, we lose track of the fact that we really have that step made. We already have that viewpoint of how we want to see each other and how often that we want to be around each other. But we’re just so focused on building something that we lose track of the present moment.

MEL: Think of it this way. If you want to build a house, you have to build the foundation first or the house will crumble. That’s what I’m getting at. We need to build the foundation first. Foundation is communication. Communication is the heartbeat of a relationship.

DINA: That is definitely my favorite metaphor when it comes to the house building and the foundation because I think I use that in so many different scenarios. So this is definitely one of them as well. So thank you so much Mel for coming on to the show today and for talking about the whole idea of rethinking marriage and also suggesting a great date night activity that couples can sort of take part in and talk about with one another and have that emotional connection that maybe some couples have lost sight of. So thank you so much for suggesting that today.

MEL: You’re very welcome. Thank you for having me.

DINA: Now if our audience would like to know a little bit more about you or maybe find some of the books that you’ve written, is there a place that I can send them to to find them?

MEL: Certainly best place is my website which contains everything and it’s my name melschwartz.com.

DINA: That’s perfect. I’ll have that down in the description down below for everyone who’s wanting to find out a little bit more and definitely go look at that book. I’m definitely going to look at the book that you suggested a little bit earlier because that sounds like a really interesting conversation about thought and sort of separating our minds from what we’re thinking about. So thank you again Mel for coming on to the show today and teaching us a whole lot of things that a lot of us have lost sight of when it comes to relationships.

MEL: Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation.

MEL: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #138 Bonus Episode: Mel on the All Together Podcast first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In The Possibility Podcast episode 137, I share my approach for overcoming anxiety, fear and distress cultivated from principles of quantum physics inspired initially by the book The Turning Point by Fritjof Capra.

By learning to embrace uncertainty fear dissipates and we can become free to experience the wonders of life.

I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

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Hello everybody and welcome to the Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring the phenomenon of anxiety, what this word means, what the experience is like, and how you can do far more than cope with it or manage it, but overcome it. When I hear people speaking about coping with anxiety, I feel very frustrated. It is not a condition that you have to remain stuck with. And simply treating it with meds is not the answer. Although the meds may give you some relief from the deep distress of anxiety, they also create a reliance and a dependence whereby you come to think that the only way you could treat your anxiety is to medicate it, to remove from the surface the great distress that you’re feeling and the fear that you’re feeling. So ironically, although the meds give you some temporary or instantaneous relief, it kind of cements you to the problem.

Let me begin by sharing my first experience of significant anxiety. I was recently divorced. I woke up one beautiful spring morning and went for a bike ride. My sons that particular day were at their mom’s, which was unusual because they live full time with me. So I headed out and thought I’d have a great bike ride and enjoy my day. After a few minutes into the ride, I begin to suffer from anxiety. In fact, it was a full-blown anxiety attack. I had fearful thoughts about my future, what different aspects of my life were going to look like. They were unknown and I was engulfed in fear.

I turned the bike around and headed back home, not having any idea what kind of relief that might provide me with. As I got back into the house, I pulled a book from the bookshelf that I had never read before and it was called The Turning Point. I should say aptly called The Turning Point. I began to read about this paradigm shift. By the way, I should mention that The Turning Point was written by Frijof Capra, a quantum physicist. So Capra spoke of this shift in worldview of paradigms, of how we see reality operating. He described at great length how we had lived under a Newtonian 17th century view of reality, which pictured life and reality as a giant machine. We became that machine. We became the cogs in the machine, separate and disconnected from one another, which absolutely destroyed our ability to have any sense of meaning and purpose in life. It was what was called a deterministic worldview. It required outside force to create change. We were inert, stuck objects in this machine. No meaning, no purpose, no sense of humanity, a very inhospitable place to live.

But Capra started to describe this emerging worldview, which had been coming at us now for 80, 90 years. It was born in the hard science of quantum physics. So quantum physics described a reality altogether different. This picture of reality, the quantum picture, was one of thorough, total, inseparable interconnection. In fact, interconnection is the wrong word because the word connection speaks to a separation. There was no separation. Reality was one seamless, inseparable whole. And we were part of that reality. So that was rich with meaning and purpose because everything we did or didn’t do impacted the whole. It was what quantum physicists referred to as a reality-making process.

Another important aspect of this worldview was that it was full of absolute potentiality and teeming with possibility. I noticed that within reading just a few pages, perhaps a chapter, that my anxiety was gone. It had retreated. Not only was it gone, I was feeling intrigued and excited. Well, that process for me has set off a process of inquiry and development and approaches and methods toward improving the human condition that have gone on for decades.

So going back to that particular day, my fears retreated and I felt emboldened. It was for me, just as the title of the book suggested, the turning point. My turning point. I changed my beliefs and my thinking to conform and align with this new worldview. It led me to write my book, The Possibility Principle. It allowed me to integrate this new way of thinking and believing into my therapy practice and to assist all those who come across my path.

So let’s turn now to this word, anxiety, and get a sense of what it means. By anxiety, I don’t simply mean stress. Stress is normal in our hurried lives. When we adapt to challenges, it produces stress. Stress can be exhilarating. Stress is the result of our deeper engagement with life. It can lead to growth, new learning, and productivity. But when stress turns to distress, or think of that as fear, it impedes our ability to live well, to thrive. It takes us out of being present in the moment. Distress calcifies and becomes anxiety. It turns what should be innocuous moments into calamities, whereby our thoughts tend to catastrophize situations which are really not alarming. It robs us of a joyful, well-lived life.

In the United States, one in four people suffer from anxiety. At any given moment, 40 million people in the United States are suffering from anxiety. And worldwide, that number would be hundreds of millions. This is a staggering rate of affliction. The problem is we’ve adapted to this new norm. We’ve normalized it. This is a place of mass disquiet. We’ve become habituated to this, and we’ve adapted to an epidemic of anxiety. If 40 million people in the United States became suddenly ill without cause, the Center for Disease Control would be working overtime looking at it.

You see, as a culture, we look superficially into the cause, and we focus more on the treatment, once again, managing things through medication. We need to do better. In fact, we can do much better.

So the question remains, why do we suffer from this avalanche of anxiety? I find its roots in that old-world view of mechanism. And I’ll get to that in just a moment.

Here’s what I’ve learned by looking deeper into the phenomenon of anxiety, and particularly through the lens of my therapy practice. Anxiety at its source is due to our relationship with our thoughts. Anxiety is actually the process of our thought attaching to something fearful. These are often thoughts that are trying to know the future. They’re seeking certainty. We want to know what the future will bring and what the consequences of our decisions will be. But of course, the future is unknowable. That’s why we call it the future. And it’s our nature to ward off the unknown, the uncertain. That tendency to push away and ward off uncertainty and the unknown is, in my belief, the major cause of anxiety, which is my focus during this episode.

As a result, we’re not in the flow of life because we’re trying to hold back the future. People with anxiety feel stuck as they try to fight change, all the while wanting desperately to change. There are other sources of anxiety. Low self-esteem, which we’ll be discussing in a following episode, post-traumatic stress disorder, our tendency to analyze too much. Let’s pause. Ask yourself right now, take a moment, ask yourself, what causes me anxiety? Does it have something to do with your fear of uncertainty, of the future, of what could go wrong in the moments that lay ahead of you?

Let’s look at an example of this dread of uncertainty. I recall working with a middle-aged woman. I’ll call her Mary. Mary was mired in a very unhappy marriage. They went for couples counseling, which is unsuccessful. And as a couple, they experienced no joy and had little in common, no interest in common. She felt that her marriage was a drag on her life. The good news was that she was financially independent and had no children. So I asked her what for me was an obvious question. Why was she remaining married? And she said, I don’t know who I would be as a divorced woman. There it was, her fear of the unknown, which by the way, would offer her new possibilities. But it was the fear of the unknown that kept her imprisoned with anxiety. She was choosing to stay stuck in the known rather than open to the uncertainties, which could actually benefit her. So the known was miserable, but she preferred the known to the embrace of the unknown. The question, who would I be, froze Mary with fear.

We’ll come back to that question in a little while. Another client, whom I’ll call Tom, came to see me for help with his anxiety. Tom was a mid-level executive and supported his family well, but he had no peace of mind. Tom was constantly deluged with fear about what the future might bring him. His need for certainty overwhelmed him. If Tom was preparing a presentation for work, he would worry excessively about how it would be received by others, what questions might be asked of him. These concerns actually had a negative impact on his work. So you see, the very thing he feared, a mediocre performance, he was actually creating because of his fear. His anxiety impacted him at home as well. He was constantly questioning whether his wife would always love him. Tom’s addiction to needing to know the future blocked him from being present. It literally robbed him of joy, of connectedness with his family. He wasn’t present. And so I began to share some techniques I had developed regarding embracing certainty. Tom decided to take a break from therapy and work on them. We’ll get back to Tom in a bit.

Of course, there are places in which we do welcome and look forward to uncertainty. Sports is a great example. The thrill of not knowing the outcome keeps us riveted to the action on the field. Movies, why do we have spoiler alerts? Don’t ruin it for us. We want to be fully engaged in the uncertainty. The thrill of not knowing fuels part of the gross national product. But in our personal lives, we become choked by predictability and certainty. In my book, The Possibility Principle, I demonstrate how this stunts our relationships, our curiosity, and our total engagement with life.

Oscar Wilde famously said, uncertainty is the essence of romance. You may have heard me speak to or refer to this previously in different episodes or in my book. If you think about it, that quote is seemingly and arguably true. The experience, the romance of falling in love is steeped in uncertainty. We don’t know. We’re welcoming the uncertainty, the excitement, the not knowing. That’s what the connection is like. We’re not finishing each other’s sentences. We’re present and thrilled by the possibilities that await us. But once we secure the relationship, romance and passion tend to wither because we succumb to predictability. What begins as a spontaneous connecting, full of wonder and enchantment, falls from grace as we turned it into a predictable, formatted engagement. Romance, love, passion do not have to die, but we have to stop becoming wed to predictability. Newton’s 17th century worldview.

So how did we become addicted to this fear about the future? Tom’s fears, Mary’s anxieties, my anxiety attack, and millions of people in the United States and hundreds of millions throughout the world, they’re all informed by this old 17th century operating worldview. So the roots of our dependence uncertainty go back more than 300 years. Newton theorized that if we had enough information, what we today might call data, we could reasonably predict future events. Think of a billiard ball striking another ball and causing it to carry them off the side of the pool table. You know, with precise calculation and control of all the variables, you might be able to predict the outcome. But living life this way is dehumanizing. We aren’t objects. We aren’t cogs in the machine. We aren’t balls on the pool table. We are human beings.

This level of determinism sets up an arrow from past to present to future. Living life this way causes us to lose so much of what it means to be human. Our consciousness becomes subverted to being the equivalent of the billiard ball as we try to predict the future. Now determinism has benefited us in many ways, no doubt, but at the extreme, it leads to pathology. It leads to anxiety and it leads to depression. And it sets up a loss of wonder and curiosity. Look at how wonder and curiosity have become devalued in our world, our culture, and our lives. We live our lives as though we’re playing a chess match.

You know, when you play chess, you sit back, detached, calculating as you analyze the next move. We might worry about making a mistake, so we analyze more. The fear of making the wrong choice strangles us. We spend so much time engaged in the fear of making a mistake, it blocks us from our engagement in life. Fear of making mistakes preclude possibilities. This is imprisoning. The fear of making mistakes forecloses our possibilities. So we don’t move forward as a straight jacket of fear blocks us from joining in the flow of life. We worry so much about the consequences of our actions, but we pay so little or no attention to the consequences of our inactions. We don’t think about what will happen, what will the consequences be if I don’t act? What would the consequences have been for Mary if she remained married? The things that we don’t do have as great an impact on us as the things that we do choose to do. Too much analyzing speaks to our fear of making a mistake, and too much analyzing is a derivative of anxiety.

Do you feel anxious about making decisions? Then you’re probably seeking certainty and stuck. I remember working with a straight A college student attending an Ivy League college, but in his sophomore year, Andrew became immobilized when he had to select his major. He became so worried about making a mistake that he actually took a leave of absence from school rather than endure the risk of choosing the wrong major. His need for certainty, his acute analyzing about the right major caused him to lose his own inner voice and his own intuitive wisdom.

Okay, so that’s all the bad news, but let me pivot now and share the good news. Let’s go back to the turning point, the new game plan for life. Quantum physics stipulates that uncertainty is the norm of the universe. This came to us from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which shares that nothing is fixed or inert. Reality is flowing, interconnected, unfolding, participatory, rather a magical looking universe. We can be a part of that universe. This means that nothing is certain or predictable. And that my friends is great news.

You see, this reality is bubbling with potential and possibilities. And so we can jump into that new reality. We can participate in the reality making process that quantum physics describes. We can participate in constructing our own reality. Reality is creative and flowing and we can be too.

Think of it this way. Uncertainty equals possibility. Certainty precludes possibility.

Let’s get back to Tom. He came back into therapy with me after taking that hiatus. He couldn’t have been more excited as he shared his progress. I asked him how he accomplished it. He smiled, he was beaming, and he said his best friend was now uncertainty. His password on all of his devices was embrace, as in embrace uncertainty. You see, when you embrace what you fear, the fear dissolves. When you struggle with worrisome aspects of your life, ask yourself, how is my fear of the unknown getting in the way of my change process? Imagine yourself embracing and welcoming uncertainty and you’ll feel self-empowered. You’ll free yourself from the grip of anxiety and fear.

Going back to Mary, I created a visualization. It went something like this. I had Mary close her eyes and envision that she was standing by the banks of a river. I said, Mary, look at the river and let’s contemplate that the river metaphorically represents the flow of life. Mary, I want you to walk into the river and join in the flow of life. Few moments passed and I asked her where she saw herself and she says, well, I’m in the river now, Mel.

I said, what are you doing? She said, well, there’s a big boulder in the middle and I’ve grabbed a hold of it.

I asked Mary, why have you done that? And she said, well, the river bends to the right up ahead and I don’t know where it’s going so I’m grabbing a hold of this because I’m afraid of the unknown.

That was exactly the problem. I said, Mary, you’re not supposed to know where it’s going. That’s your future. You’re staying stuck in your hapless marriage, clinging to this boulder. You need to embrace the uncertainty and get into the flow of the river.

By the way, once you’re in the flow, you’re free to navigate. You’re not hapless. You’re not a victim. The victimhood is from holding on to that boulder.

We’re going to turn to a caller right now. Hi there. What’s your name?

Hi, Mel. My name is Liz.

Nice to meet you, Liz. What is it that you would like to discuss? I think it’s something pertinent to anxiety.

Yes. I’ve listened to a number of your podcasts and I find what you’re saying very thoughtful and provoking. So I’d like to dive into my own issues with anxiety and ask you some questions.

Please jump right in.

I find that from my day to day life, I am constantly thinking about the future and I get lost in my thoughts because I’m constantly thinking about the next day and what needs to be done. And it becomes overwhelming to me where I have 10 to 15 different thoughts flooding into my head at once. And that causes me to get out of breath, feel like I can’t breathe and start to have a panic attack.

Liz, are these fearful thoughts, I’m assuming? In other words, I wouldn’t think that these are joyful, happy thoughts about tomorrow that wouldn’t cause you distress, would it?

No, it would not.

So can you give us an example of the type of thoughts about tomorrow or the next hour or next month? What is the quality of those thoughts?

Very negative. What if something happens to my health? What if something happens with my heart? What if I have somebody get upset with me over a project that I did for them? What if someone’s not happy with something that I’ve done? What if I don’t get this all completed in time?

So your what if questions seem to set up the problem. You know, we can ask what if questions which are positive and optimistic. What if I do a great job? What if I fall in love tomorrow? What if I win the lotto? But your what ifs are joined or trained toward negativity, maybe calamity or catastrophe?

Absolutely, catastrophe.

Liz, do you have any idea of what has occurred in your life that aligns your fearful thoughts about the future? Do you have any sense of where that all started?

I think so. I’m a little unsure though.

Well, please share whatever idea that you might have.

Sure. So, you know, my father was sick for most of my life, and I constantly saw him struggle. And it was kind of one thing after the other. And I was kind of always waiting for that next thing to happen, which it did. And you know, I think it has something to do with the fact that I went through all that for years. And it was the same type of thing over and over again.

So this is this had an enormous impact on you. I don’t know if you’ve read my book or not, but I refer to these as wave collapses. Wave collapse refers to an event in your life, which constrained or blocked your possibilities, your state of potential. Some people have wave collapses that are just a moment in time, something traumatic. But what you’re describing would be a chronic wave collapse that you are dealing with your father’s health and fears about his well-being for how long, Liz?

Since I was in seventh grade, and I’m 35 now, so quite a long time.

Is your dad still alive?

Yes, he is. And he’s better and well.

So you experienced a chronic recurring of wave collapses as you worried about whether he will be okay?

Yes, correct.

So arguably, if you hadn’t had that kind of experience, you might not be talking to me now. You set up a groove in your thoughts where your thought seeks fear. And in this case, your thought sounds like it’s making things up. It’s making things up again in a somewhat catastrophic way, whereby a future event that you’re worried about is going to turn negative. So there are two things happening. As I have been sharing throughout this episode, fear of uncertainty creates anxiety. Now the uncertainty that you’re talking about and we’re discussing could be calamitous, but there is no way that we can ascertain the future with confidence. All we can do is be present in the moment. And in the moment, things sound like they’re relatively okay to you, aren’t they?

Absolutely.

So the problem is your thought is going off and trying not only to calculate the future, but it sounds like your thought is actually conjuring up bad results in that future, aren’t they?

Yes. Now, have you had any success in any of the methods that I’ve spoken about,

I have, but not enough. And you were the one who introduced me to it.

Okay. So it’s actually a muscle memory whereby when I encourage people to do this, they may come back into a session with me or a phone call and they say, you know, I tried it 50 times. I saw my thought 50 times, but I haven’t succeeded. Well, it may require 500 times. Nobody can really determine how many times must you see the thought and separate to actually break free and have success. So all I can say is it sounds like you have cut off the process prematurely. In other words, until you succeed, we don’t want to stop. So just continue to see the thought. Some people actually put their forefinger vertically over their lips and just go to the thought. It’s just a thought. That thought is causing you immense apprehension and anxiety, and it’s not allowing you to actually remain present in the moment. So as you know, as well as I do, you’re having an incalculable amount of wasted moments in your life worrying about the future, which thankfully doesn’t play out the way you’re worried about. Does that sound accurate?

A hundred percent, Mel.

Okay. So Liz, what you need to do is say to yourself, the more I can see my thought and stop and not become the thought, the more that you can do that, the farther along you’re going to be in this process. You further the process by seeing it and releasing it. So you may recall from having heard previous podcasts or reading my book that when you can see your thought and not become the thought, that’s what I call thinking. There’s a moment when you’re thinking and you see the thought that you create a space for a new experience. So let’s imagine in a moment you have a worrisome thought about tomorrow. You stop, you pause, you say to yourself, ah, old thought, fearful thought, not going to go for the bait, not going to become that thought and pause. Let that space of possibility wash over you. Now new thinking would be that old thought is not going to do me any good. I don’t want to rob the moment I’m in. I’ll deal with whatever happens tomorrow, next hour, next week. When things happen, I’ll deal with them. But why do I want to waste my time and corrupt my life experience by contemplating fearful things that very often are never going to happen? Start your day, Liz, just practicing your thought and not just fearful thought, any thought that will enhance your ability to develop a muscle memory and also recall your insight. It’s your childhood experience around the illness of your dad that set up this worrisome feature. You don’t need that anymore. It doesn’t serve you any longer. Does that make sense to you?

Yes, Mel. Thank you so much.

Liz, one more question. Do you have anxiety around something that is not based on the future moment? That’s a tough question. In the present moment that you’re in, do you fare well in that present moment?

Not all the time. No.

So can you see your thoughts driving you toward negativity and fear?

I can.

Have you tried that method of seeing the fearful thought and just saying to yourself, shh, I don’t need you? Or saying to yourself, old thought, don’t judge the old thought. Don’t judge the fearful thought. Just see it. Let it pass over you and watch it drift away. And just try to recalculate so that your experience of being in the present moment grounds you.

Great. I would love to try this method, Mel. I remember I tried this a few times and then kind of gave up because I got agitated that it wasn’t really working. But I think I need to continue to practice. As you said, it’s a muscle. So it needs to constantly be worked on.

By the way, and it’s not a start and finish process because as you achieve this and accomplish this, you always want the ability to see your thought. So as an exercise, say to yourself, when you become aware of a fearful, anxious thought, say to yourself or out loud, if you’re alone, say to yourself, I’m having a thought. It’s an old thought. And my thought is having me fearful or worried about tomorrow or next week. Actually say it that way so you can see that thought is representing something fearful. It’s not in actuality. It’s your thought presenting fear. So stay with it and I’m sure you will succeed.

Thank you so much, Mel. This was wonderful. I appreciate your time and assistance.

My pleasure, Liz.

So folks, we can see that if reality is uncertain and you continue to seek certainty, you will become dysfunctional and anxious. So paradoxically, we must embrace uncertainty. After all, why is the word uncertain a negative? Think about that. For Mary, uncertainty about her future would be far better than certainty about the present. The very fact that uncertain has a negative aspect to it speaks to how our cultural indoctrination keeps us stuck in certainty. But how do we accomplish this? Let’s roll up our sleeves and take a look now at how we move forward.

Reality constantly flows, but we don’t. This new picture of reality, which is flowing and possibility laden, how do we join in to embrace uncertainty? We need to change our relationship with our thoughts. So how do we make this shift? Beliefs and old thoughts keep us stuck. Some of you may have heard me say this before, and I will reiterate it. The most important relationship you will ever have is not with your children, your parents, your spouse, your best friends, your partner. The relationship that will impact you far more than any other relationship is with your thoughts. But we never learned how to master our thinking and our relationship with our thoughts.

So let’s move toward how we get unstuck. We have to develop a muscle memory which allows us to see our thought. You see, if you don’t see your thought, you become your thought. In this case, we’re talking about fearful thought. But if I can see my thought, that’s what I call thinking. And if I can see my thought, I don’t need to become that thought. Take a moment and envision a fearful thought that you have often that brings up anxiety and fear. Now look at it and imagine saying to yourself, saying to the thought, shh, quiet down. It’s just a thought. That is thinking. Thinking is the moment of freedom that separates you from your thought. Developing this muscle memory, being able to see your thought is an exceptionally essential tool in breaking free not only from anxiety, but frombeing able to master your life. Throughout the course of your day, try an exercise whereby you simply check in and ask yourself what was the last thought that I had. Don’t judge it. Don’t evaluate it. Just see it. Develop that muscle memory. And then think to yourself, I am the thinker of that thought. That allows you wisdom.

Again, see the disturbing thought, in this case, fear of the future, anything setting up anxiety and distress, and just quiet the thought and say, shh, and release it. Envision it going down that river that I spoke of earlier. Those old fearful thoughts, no different than Liz had described in her phone call to me, they keep knocking at your door. But when you hear someone knock at the door, you don’t have to answer it. Now the technique for doing this is to be able to start to language it differently.

You see, thought is literal. It tricks us into this telling us the truth. What we want to do is see how the thought tricks us. And so you might say to yourself, I’m having a thought and it’s telling me. For instance, Mary, I’m having a thought which is telling me I don’t know who I would be as a divorced woman. She has separated from the thought if she says that. She’s having a thought. And then we could say, okay, here’s a different thought. I know who I am as a miserably unhappy married woman. Anxious thoughts trick us in that they are literal thoughts. They are telling you the truth about something, but it is not the truth. And the old thought does defend its territory. So you may be having the thought right now, this sounds hard to do. How do you know? Have you ever tried it? That is an example of old thought defending its territory.

Look at the thought, don’t become the thought. Now you may have another thought which is, this is not as easy as Mel is saying. Well, many of you go to the gym, work out, perhaps strenuously. You embrace the discomfort of working out physically to get the benefits for your body and for your health. What if we did the same in our lives? What if we embrace the discomfort to break out of our old familiar zone so we could grow? That creates possibilities. Quantum physics reveals that reality is in the state of perpetual potential. Everything is just waiting to potentialize and all possibilities are waiting to be summoned moment by moment.

I had a thought years ago, the same is true for us. In the nanosecond between our thoughts, we exist in a state of absolute potential. But if we keep being blinded and habituated to the same old thoughts, we can never reach those new possibilities. If you’re feeling anxious, fearful, pause and ask yourself what thought you had that set up that feeling. Thought and feeling operate together. My belief is that thought precedes feeling. So you can track back and find the thought and say, it was just a thought. Many people think that we’re hardwired. Again that comes from 17th century Newtonian thinking. We are not hardwired. Our thoughts and our feelings leave their imprint on our brain. It’s not the other way around. You can learn to get unstuck by embracing uncertainty. If everything in reality appears to be in flow, in perpetual movement, we must flow too or we will dysfunction. When we analyze too much, live in life again like we’re in a chess match, get lost in measuring or fearful thought, we are not in the flow and we are not present. We miss the magic that life can offer.

So I’m proposing a new game plan for life. One based upon the new sciences. One in which we embrace and accept with relish the reality of uncertainty instead of avoiding it. You cannot ride the waves of change at the same time that you try to avoid change. Everything is in flow. The old rule book for living causes us to lose wonder, enchantment and curiosity as we get stuck in the groove of certainty. I took all of these principles from quantum physics and I applied them to my life and to my work and I’ve had tremendous results.

Few last thoughts on this. We often have an intention to make change. Around the time of the new year, we may even set intentions and make new year’s resolutions. Why do they not succeed? Well intention is not enough. We need to have what I call willful intention. Imagine that you’re out on a sailboat at sea and the mast is down, the sail is down, but you want to move so you hoist the sail. That’s your intention to move. But you’re not going to move without wind. In your own lives, the willfulness is the wind. The wind in this case is your embrace of uncertainty. So think about it. Would you rather remain in a reality that pictures the universe as cold, deterministic, disconnected and inhospitable for us? Or would you rather open up to a wondrous, connected, possibility-laden adventure of life and live your life as an adventure without fear? Choose your worldview and you’ve chosen your life experience. This embrace of uncertainty frees us from the harness of anxiety, lets us join in the flow of possibilities. To envision and actualize the future you long for, you must re-envision uncertainty and turn it into your ally. How you choose to experience the next moment is your choosing, not reacting. You see, once you’re no longer a victim of your thoughts and imprisoned by them, but the thinker of your life, this allows you to be present and to evoke possibility. You can make this a defining moment for you.

Now the work and commitment to proceed with this is right in front of you. The four takeaways from today’s episode are, embrace what makes you feel uncomfortable. Two, welcome uncertainty. Three, watch your old thoughts and see how they defend their territory. And four, embrace the new thinking. Quick fixes don’t work, but making a bold statement to yourself that I am choosing to overcome distress, anxiety, and fear, and I will follow a new path forward and commit to it, will allow you not only to overcome anxiety and distress, but to thoroughly flourish in your life experience.

We’ll be discussing anxiety some more in future episodes as we look at different aspects, low self-esteem, too much analyzing, the tendency of our mind to fracture a wholeness, or all other important considerations.

Wishing you a full embrace of uncertainty and a reaching of the possibilities in your life. Until next time, be well.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #137 Overcome Anxiety first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz 136, I ask: can we stop measuring, quantifying, comparing, and rating our experiences?

Rating and measuring is another kind of judgement: judgement of others; judgement of ourselves. It helps us define things and maintain that safe, comfortable certainty that might seem beneficial… but what about curiosity? Wonder? Awe?

Let’s look at why an obsession with measurement and quantification is actually counter to our mental and emotional help, and talk about some alternatives ways of living and thinking.

I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a guest on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit. Of course, your anonymity will be respected if that’s your wish.

Hello everybody and welcome to the Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello. A few days ago, I was meandering down the streets and alleys of old historical Charleston, which is where I’m currently living. And every 50 or 100 feet, you’ll come past a remarkable old home with some signage up front commemorating the history of that home. Who built it? Who founded it? Who handed it down to whom? What was their relevance historically during the era of the American Revolution? Sometimes before that time, sometimes shortly after.

And I began to think about it, how different it was to walk past these homes and look at the history. Imagine what it was like to live there, to live those lives. What a feeling. How different it is than walking through other neighborhoods in this country. Many of those neighborhoods I used to reside in.

Well, when you walk past a home, the conversation was, what do you think it’s worth? What would it sell for? What did they pay for it? What do you think the profit would be? When we look that way, what we’re doing is measuring and quantifying. We’re not looking at the historical significance, considering the lives of the people who live there. We live in a culture now that so prioritizes that which we can measure, that which we can quantify. It actually overwhelms the way we think.

Quantifying, think about rankings. You’re going to choose a new restaurant to eat in or perhaps visit a new doctor. We look at the Google reviews. How many stars did they get? What’s their ranking? What’s their rating? How much is a quantification?

Children, kids in school, what are their grades? What will those grades enable them to do in terms of what colleges they will get into? What were your SAT scores or ACT scores?

Our health of course is quantified by lab results and I understand that we need to do that, but there’s no quantification. There’s no measurement for happiness or for love. You see the really important things in life are things we can’t quantify. The quantifying is often about winning or losing.

Many years ago I was working with a young man who was a nationally ranked tennis player. I should say nationally seeded tennis player. I was curious and I asked him if he had played any other sports and he said no, never did. And I asked him why not? He said well I wasn’t good enough.

See there’s the measuring. I wasn’t good enough to play other sports. How about the enjoyment of playing other sports even if you’re not good? I shared with him that when I was young I loved playing baseball. I was average, maybe slightly above average. If I were living his life where everything is quantified and measured I never would have played baseball. What a loss that would have been.

How good are you at it? How are you measuring yourself? In my therapy practice I have at times counseled people who are really focused on their tennis game and what gets in the way of their enjoying that tennis game and actually paradoxically gets in their way of improving is their measuring of themselves. You can’t be in the flow of an activity and measure yourself. So the irony is to excel you need to be in flow. You can’t be in flow if you’re measuring yourself.

This adage in our culture that we always need to do our best. Always in the word always. If you always need to do your best that’s a compulsion. It’s a pathology. Shouldn’t there be times when you don’t have to do your best? Doing your best is a measurement isn’t it? Why do you always have to do your best? Why do you always have to measure yourself? Should you always do your best and feel neurotic about it? What would the sacrifice be for doing that?

The measuring of yourself does harm to yourself. Now I am not proposing that we shouldn’t set goals for ourselves and try to improve and succeed but the inner measuring of ourselves can be destructive because we’re both the measured and the measure at the same time. In other words it causes us to fragment from our own self measuring ourselves.

Let’s come back to the culture as a whole. The measuring is so pervasive. We look at polling as we are coming upon a new presidential election and I understand we need to look at polls to get some sense of value around where things are headed but there’s this pervasive measuring good, best, better. How much money have I earned this year? Am I earning more next year? Is my net worth increasing, flat or decreasing?

Often we want to know those things but to get lost in the measurement is to lose the flow of life. What are the goals in life? Health, happiness, joy, thriving in relationships? Those values have nothing or little to do with measuring. So my argument here is that this perverse measuring, quantifying of everything removes us, it diverts us from the true joys of life. The quantification of life. Life becomes a game to win, challenges to transcend and overcome but the quantification of our lives leaves no space for our heart, for our soul, for our well-being, for compassion, for empathy, the values that make lives thrive and provide connections with one another.

I might also suggest that we lose our connectivity to nature and we lose our connectivity to one another when our thoughts are constantly quantifying and measuring. Go out for a walk, I find myself doing this, I’m measuring how fast am I running. I get why I want to achieve, I want to get my heart rate up, I want to build my physical resilience but could I ever just take a run for the joy of taking a run? Could I ever not turn on my devices and measure how well did I do?

There needs to be balance and that balance in some ways requires our being aware of our measuring and quantifying everything or too much, taking a step back and saying to ourselves stop measuring and just start being.

Let’s reach a balance between the necessary pieces of measurement, quantifying and those pieces that are excessive and not necessary. Being at one with yourself, being present, being truly present in the conversation with another requires no quantifying and no measuring. So just think about it, try to notice your thoughts tendency to measure and quantify and step back and think to yourself I don’t need to go there that often, I can go there selectively but to go there in a compulsive way where my mind is entrained to always measure I lose myself, I lose my connection to wonder, curiosity.

Think about wondering curiosity, there’s no measuring there. When we have conversations with others do we often ask or think to ourselves I wonder what they meant by that, do I ask? Probably not, you see wondering curiosity have been subordinated as a value and they’ve been replaced by predictability, determinism, measurement, quantifying.

You know you’ve heard me speak so much about determinism and seeking certainty, there’s a measuring in that. If I can collect enough data I can predict the future. Well good luck with that, you can but even if you can it means you’re not present, you’re off trying to predict the future event when you ever really hear. The wonder being present, there’s no measurement in there.

So I hope some of the thoughts I’m sharing with you today can provide some insights, some new framework, a shift in the way you think and quiet down that rambunctious noise that makes us measure far too much.

Until next time embrace some uncertainty, seek some possibilities, quiet your measuring and be well. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #136 Stop the Measuring! first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz 135 looks at the term “codependence.” Can we agree on a meaning of that word?

“Codependence” is a made-up word, as are all terms related to psychology and mental health. But “codependence,” in particular, has entered the vernacular to such a degree it may have drifted from its originally intended meaning.

So, what do we mean by “codependence?” Can we reclaim the word and associate it with positive, balanced interpersonal relationships?

All this and more in this episode! I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a guest on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit. Of course, your anonymity will be respected if that’s your wish.

Hello everybody and welcome to the Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello everyone. This episode is entitled, What in the hell do we mean by the term codependence? What triggered my thoughts, perspectives on this term codependence came from reading an article in The Atlantic Magazine recently called “The Myth of Codependence” by Elisa Strauss. I do recommend reading the article.

Codependence is a term no different than narcissistic is a term. We tend to use these terms in generalized, nonspecific, and wrong-minded ways. The term just takes on a life unto itself. It enters as a meme, a regular piece of our capillary, and it loses all meaning. Remember my position always is we make these words and terms up to start with. It’s really essential that we ask each other and ourselves, what do I mean by this term? Otherwise we’re just throwing around labels, creating more confusion and more disorientation.

So let’s begin. Codependence is not a diagnostic term in the DSM, the psychiatric Bible of diagnosis. Does not appear. Narcissism does appear in many different forms. Codependence, let’s look at the term at its basis. Aren’t we all codependent? We are dependent on any number of things, but we’re talking here about relationships with each other.

What does codependent mean? Well, love is codependence, isn’t it? If you love one another, you kind of beat as one, at least to an extent or a healthy extent. You’re not okay if the other one isn’t okay. Is that a healthy codependence? Well, love wouldn’t exist with that healthy degree of entanglement or engagement with each other. Otherwise we’d be separate objects. There wouldn’t be love.

Now, the way we use the term codependent varies. I believe at the heart of the term codependence is the notion that you may be too dependent. And if you’re too dependent, you’re out of balance. You don’t have a sufficient sense of your own self, or there’s been a loss of your own self or a marginalizing of your own self. So people who see themselves as being in a codependent relationship often see the other, their partner, their spouse, as too controlling, too manipulative. So it requires a balancing.

By the way, codependence doesn’t require a romantic relationship. There can be friendships that are out of balance and they’re codependent. Familial relationships, the whole aspect of codependence may have had its roots in our sense of attachment or lack of attachment in childhood. A baby, a child, a young child is of course codependent. That’s an attachment, a healthy attachment. And only through a healthy attachment and progression through it do we move on to the place that Carl Jung referred to as individuation, which is as young adults, we may love and care for our family and our parents, but we move out into the world okay on our own. It’s a sense of being autonomous.

But in relationships, romantic relationships in particular, there’s this sense of my other half. We’ve talked about this. I’m a half moon. I meet with another half-moon to complete myself. Well, that certainly is a codependence. I’m not okay on my own.

I wrote an article many, many years ago entitled, Are You Independent, Dependent, or Autonomous? I made these terms up in relation to one another. An independent person isn’t sufficiently vulnerable or present to engage in a really intimate relationship, an emotionally intimate relationship. A dependent individual will of course be codependent. They’re only okay if they feel loved, appreciated, and liked by the other, which means you’re sabotaging your own sense of self to elicit the feelings you need from the other.

At the heart, that speaks to me of codependence. The goal is to reach the third category, autonomous. I’m good with me. I’m working on me. I am an evolving human being, and I am fully available and prepared to relate deeply and intimately with another. Two autonomous people are safe from concerns of being codependent.

But ask yourself this, do I try to fix other people’s problems? Why do I do that? Well, with all things, it’s the measure and the degree. If I care for people and try to help them with their problems, that sounds healthy. But if I need with a capital N to fix other people’s problems, I’ve set up a kind of reverse codependence. I’m only okay with me if I’m helping you. People in relationships with or who have family members who have addiction may suffer in a codependence. How are they doing with their addiction? Are they doing better? Does it look like there’s success on the way? Of course, that’s going to impact you. You see, it’s all about balance between self and other. Again, go back to that visual of being on a seesaw. It’s okay to be slightly higher or slightly lower as long as we’re vacillating and there’s a middle ground.

But relationships are enmeshed. They are about a shared energy. We should be impacted by each other, but not to the extent that the impact knocks us out of balance with our own self and that we’re trying to elicit or solicit certain feelings who make us okay with our own self.

Don’t use the term codependent. Instead, explain how you feel. I’m feeling unloved or I’m feeling needy of your love. Don’t label yourself or the other person. Labels turn everything into a dumbing down conversation. Remember, love is a feeling of oneness. But in that oneness, you are two autonomous individuals who have emerged and merged into this feeling of love and oneness. Don’t confuse oneness with a lack of self, with a lack of individuation. A healthy loving relationship requires two individuals who have individuated successfully so they feel at one with themselves.

Now, there is an aspect of codependence, the term codependence, which has very much to do with the traditional role of the woman in our culture, which feminism brings to light. You see, if you don’t love me and I want to feel loved, am I then codependent? And do I need to look at the relationship through that filter? Or is there a fear of abandonment? And at the heart of that is also the question of, am I lovable? Now, the shift in the feminist archetype has been that a woman is no longer solely responsible for the children and the home. The feminist mystique has moved into the archetype of autonomy. And this has created a shift in the traditional roles between partners.

Another way of looking at codependence is the term mutual reliance. What do we mean by mutual reliance? Well, we are reliant on each other for different things. But how deeply reliant, reliance can slip into dependency. I’m reliant. I have an expectation that you’re going to be honest and truthful and supportive and available for me in a reasonable way. And you of me as well. That’s a mutual reliance.

But again, the word reliance can slip into dependence. So ultimately, the question is, are we healthy, autonomous individuals? And if we are, that sets up an interdependence. I am okay with me. You are okay with you. And we impact each other. There’s a shared energy. There is an interdependence. If something happens to our relationship, that may cause grief, fear, upset, but we will both be okay.

So again, the takeaway for this conversation around codependence, let’s be cautious about using these terms. Let’s not use them in a literal way. Are you codependent? Where there’s an objective reality. Instead ask yourself, do I feel codependent? Do I hesitate to share how I feel out of a concern for how I’m going to be seen by my partner, my lover, my daughter, my father? Do I feel free to express myself notwithstanding how the other person may respond to me? That’s a healthy autonomy. And that is very, very different than feeling codependent. Careful with these labels. Try to express yourself through subjective feelings and let go of the diagnostic terminology.

Well, until next time, be well, wishing you enlightenment and reaching all those possibilities that you deserve in your life. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #135 What in the Hell Do We Mean by the Term Codependence? first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

In The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz episode 134, let’s revisit the difference between our body, our brain, and our mind.

Are you your thoughts? Or are you your mind?

Can you learn to see your own thoughts in the nano-second before they become your reality?

Is there really a mind-body connection, or is the concept itself based on a flawed assumption?

All this and more in this episode! I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a guest on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit. Of course, your anonymity will be respected if that’s your wish.

Hello everybody and welcome to the Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello everyone. I want to speak with you today about the concept of mind, this word mind. As with so many words, we don’t really have a shared meaning. What does the word mind actually mean? You know, if we don’t come to a shared meaning about something, we’re speaking in a fragmented, incomprehensible way. You must stop and ask each other, what do you mean? A room full of people, even a room full of consciousness scientists probably couldn’t agree as to what they mean by the word mind. This concept of mind remains vague. We receive no education about it and so it remains elusive.

And this, which is arguably in my opinion, our most precious gift, our mind, it kind of lies fallow, uncultivated, because we don’t even agree as to what we mean. Mind, I believe, and all of my thoughts from here on in are my thoughts, mind is a magical vessel through which we shape and then form our identity, our own identity. And mind sets up our experience of other people and all that surrounds us. We take it all for granted as if it all exists independent of mind.

I propose nothing exists independent of mind. You know, the absence of an awareness of mind is like you’re born with your eyes shut, that we never knew those eyes could open. And so we went through life without seeing because we didn’t know our eyes could open. So we remain illiterate and unschooled in harnessing the power of our minds because we don’t explore the concept of mind. And as a result, our struggles with self-doubt, fear, frustration, anger, conflict, it all damages our ability to experience the serenity, the love and the harmony that could be our birthright because we have not come into a harmony with mind.

Living without a proper appreciation of mind leaves us shackled by ignorance. Mind constructs hatred, violence, failed communication, conflicted relationships. Mind created global warming and on and on.

What do I mean by that? Well it’s mind that conceived of exploiting resources in a grossly imbalanced way that would lead to climate change, to global warming. Mind creates war. Mind creates hatred. Mind creates love. Virtually every challenge we face in life is informed, influenced and impacted by our mind. The mind is the heartbeat of awareness and without a healthy understanding of mind, your mind, my mind, we simply cannot live life to its fullest. Learning to know and master your mind opens the gateway to navigate and thrive in your life.

So we begin with a shared meaning, a subjective description of what I mean by the words and terms that I’m using.

Let’s begin by my stipulating what I don’t mean by mind. Many people equate mind with your brain. I see your brain as biological organ, not the source for your potential wisdom from which you can navigate the course of life. The brain is where your thoughts and feelings leave their mark. The brain is not the source of your awareness. In my book, The Possibility Principle, I wrote, imagine walking at the beach, barefoot in the sand and looking behind you and seeing the imprint your foot left in the sand. Now think of the sand as the brain. The brain didn’t create the footprint. Your foot left its impression in the sand. Your thoughts and feelings leave their impression on your mind, on your brain. But mind is much more than brain. Mind is a biological organ which processes and gives us capacity for intelligence, for communication. Many people confuse mind with being the same as our thoughts. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Many thought leaders, motivational pundits, and best-selling authors offer little distinction between thoughts and mind, or even between thoughts and thinking. As I have pointed out many times, thoughts happen instantly beyond our perception. Without our perception, they inform us falsely of truth. Thoughts trick us in that they’re telling us the truth. They’re just thoughts.

Thinking is the ability to step back and see your thoughts operating, see your feelings operating and that allows a sense of me that is more than my thoughts and feelings. That’s a portal and an access to mind. How can we possibly move forward in pursuit of enlightenment and personal growth without actually clarifying what we mean by each of these words? It’s kind of like if you’re playing a game of Scrabble without agreement as to what letters constituted the word. That game wouldn’t go very far. It would get all scrambled up and lead to incoherence. That’s what happens with our thoughts and with our shared meaning.

Thoughts happen to us. They are impressions made upon our awareness that we may or may not be aware of. They are ancient in our own being. They are habitual. We have had similar thoughts thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions of times. We have thoughts nearly every moment. Most of them seem similar and if you really consider them or try to note them, you’ll find they appear commonplace, often repetitive. Thoughts tend to be old, even habitual. You may have a new twist on an old thought as circumstances change, but thoughts tend to tunnel in a common refrain.

Want to see your thoughts? Okay, pause and ask yourself, what is the thought you’re having right now? As I’m speaking in this moment, what is the thought you’re having? Notice what your thought’s telling you. Don’t judge the thought, just note it. Write it down. Come back to it later and see what the thought was telling you. Now thoughts and feelings are part of a continuum. One washes on to the other, like a wave unfolding onto shore and then tucking back in and out and unfolding as it goes back out to sea. Picture that imagery, the wave coming into shore. It becomes manifest. What David Bohm spoke of as explicate, explicate and manifest are the same. Then it tucks back in and unfolds and goes back out to sea and it’s implicate and unhidden. There’s a dance between the implicate and the explicate.

I believe the thought ordinarily precedes feeling. But of course the feeling slips right back in and then forms the next thought. They work as a continuum. And this pattern explains why we get stuck in particular moods. Learning to see your thoughts is a crucial first step in this journey toward the mind.

You may wonder where do these thoughts come from? They come from many places but in particular they come from your life experiences and your beliefs. They are the source of your thoughts. These beliefs, though so critically important in framing your personal reality, for the most part go unexamined and unquestioned. How often do you ask yourself, how did I come to this belief? Why do I believe it to be true? That is the essence of critical thinking. Once we step back and evaluate our beliefs and thoughts, we open to new experience, to new awareness. We can rise above the dictates of beliefs and thoughts, which then frees us to become the masters of our mind.

So mind lies well above thoughts and feelings. The difference again between thoughts and thinking. Thinking speaks to my learned ability to step back and see my thoughts occurring, to see what they are telling me. Thinking allows for a sense of me to arise that is larger than my thoughts and larger than my feelings. Learning how to see your thoughts and feelings frees you from becoming reactive. Thinking creates a space between your thoughts so you become sovereign above thoughts and feelings.

Some of you may appreciate what I’m describing right now as you notice your thoughts, but those of you who don’t, don’t worry, this is a process. You’ll get there. Our change process, real change, generally springs from thinking. Thinking activates new insights and deeper levels of awareness. As a culture, we have been trained since 17th century to see and think in a very fragmented way, seeing only small bits of the big picture.

For example, we speak of what people call the mind-body problem, which in recent times has evolved into the mind-body connection. Although this advances our understanding that separated parts, mind and body, are connected, we still see them as separate. But why would we think of mind and body as separate? You see the word connection, taking two things that are not separate, that we severed and split off, but we now found a connection that limits our mind’s ability to see wholeness. When our thoughts only see the separate, fractured parts and not the whole, they construct false truths and that blocks our innate, deeper understanding, our spiritual quest, our innate intelligence and our connectivity to other people. Thinking from wholeness is the portal into your higher mind. Your mind can then access the field of wisdom, which interfaces with innate connectivity. When you activate the power of mind, you tap into oneness with everything, with the universe and all of its infinite resources.

Mind describes the integration of our entire being, the eyes through which we see, the heart through which we feel, the wisdom that flows from joining with the universe and the innate knowing that awaits us. This is a journey into the power of your mind.

In our next episode, I will dive deeper into how to defragment your thoughts, defragment your mind and come into a coherence or wholeness, which is ultimately the most valuable quest that we can experience in my not so humble opinion. And that’s where love resides, romantic love, love for ourselves, love for nature, love for the planet, simply love.

Until next time, look at those fragmented thoughts that are desultory and trick us into false realities. Get to your thoughts, say shh to those thoughts and try to access a higher mind. We’ll go further with this in our next episode. Wishing you well-being and access to your higher mind. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #134 The Power of Mind first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz episode 133 is another bonus episode: a conversation you may not have heard between Christian de la Huerta and me at the Leaders Transforming Global Consciousness Summit 2022.

In this episode, Christian and I work through how the principles of quantum physics can apply to therapy, self-esteem, education, relationships, and every aspect of your lives.

I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a guest on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit. Of course, your anonymity will be respected if that’s your wish.

MEL: Hello everybody and welcome to the Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

CHRISTIAN: A few months ago, I was interviewed by our guest today on his show, The Possibility Podcast, and we had such an interesting, stimulating conversation that I wanted to share his work with you. So, without further ado, Mel Schwartz is a psychotherapist, two-time TEDx speaker, he’s the author most recently of The Possibility Principle, how quantum physics can improve the way you think, live, and love. He’s got a graduate degree from Columbia University, has written over 100 articles read by more than 7 million people, and is also a member of the International Society for Consciousness Studies. So, welcome Mel.

MEL: Well, thank you, Christian. I’m looking forward to getting back into the flow of consciousness with you.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah, yeah, we sure did surf an interesting time together on that interview. So you write that we cannot transform what we see as out there until we come to an inner ecology of mind, which I love the way that you express yourself and the way that you capture these principles. What does that mean to you, an inner ecology of the mind?

MEL: Well, firstly, I have to give credit to the great social scientist, Gregory Bateson, for coining that phrase. At least I believe he coined it. You may have had a book by the same title, An Inner Ecology of Mind, which struck me. You know, one of the problems that pervades our world and our consciousness is this sense of separation, or what David Bohm called fragmentation. How can we expect to have environmental sensibility and a healthy ecology in what is outside of us when in fact our mind suffers from the absence of an inner ecology? So what we see, what we think we see, what consciousness is thoroughly participates in creating what we call out there. I frankly don’t believe it’s out there or in here. These are false distinctions. But for the sake of rational communication, we still make those distinctions.

MEL: So here’s an example. I believe I cite this in my book. Decades ago, the FDA in the United States decided that a particular pesticide was too toxic to allow the sale of in the United States. The pesticides were carcinogenic. However, they had no objection to shipping the product to Mexico. Now, did it occur to them that this pesticide would be sprayed on the crops in Mexico and exported back to the United States? That’s the absence of an inner ecology of mind. But more fundamentally, our minds operate from this illusion of separation, which comes from 17th century thinking. And through that illusion or delusion, it drives mind to think it’s okay to exploit, to exploit resources, to exploit one another, to compete individualistically in this random breakneck way. So out of that exploiting of the other, whether it be a people, a nation, a culture, or nature itself, we have the ecological disaster. But it begins with mind.

MEL: Now we see in indigenous peoples, historically and still presently, an ecology of mind. Famously, the Native Americans’ tradition was that whatever action they took, they would think seven generations forward as to how it might impact their lineage and their world and their environment. That’s an inner ecology of mind. It’s thinking beyond the minute and the specific, and it’s rippling out toward the whole. That’s a brief summation of what I mean by that term.

CHRISTIAN: No, that’s great, and it’s stuff that we’ve heard before from a spiritual perspective, like as above, so below, as within, so without. But what I love about your work is that you’re actually weaving in these concepts of quantum physics to help us understand and relate to these what up to now have been spiritual concepts. So say a little bit more about the 17th century worldview, because if you would have asked me when that split happened, I would have thought it was before that, that the split between the physical and the quote-unquote spiritual, from which stems this relationship to ourselves and to our bodies and to the planet where we otherize it and we have this artificial separation from each other. I thought that started, you know, before maybe the beginning of the patriarchy. So what exactly happened in the 17th century that heightened that or intensified that?

MEL: Well, you might be quite right. It may very well have begun earlier. I don’t have expertise as to that, but it makes sense to me. When I speak of 17th century thinking, I’m referring specifically to Newton and Descartes. Incredible to me that in an era where people were not reading books and there was no dissemination of information through technology, with the thinking and writing of two men, which so impact the way we think centuries later. Brief summation, Newton described reality as a giant machine, otherwise known as a machine-like reality or universe. Mechanism is a reference to that. In this machine-like reality, it’s comprised of parts. A machine has parts. The parts are separate and distinct from each other, and they only interact through force, causality, cause and effect. There’s no connection, let alone the notion of inseparability.

MEL: So the objects are separate and distinct. Now over time, it is my belief that we became the cogs in that machine. We began to see each other through difference rather than sameness, through separation, which led to a loss of empathy and compassion, which require wholeness and oneness. Furthermore, Newton provided us with the notion of determinism. If we have enough data, we might reasonably predict the future. This reliance on determinism came to have us abhor uncertainty. Uncertainty is the opposite of determinism. So with determinism, we analyze things to death. Analysis paralysis is a term people use now. The fear of making a mistake. You know, if you’re playing a chess match and you’re sitting back and calculating your moves, that makes sense. But if you’re living life that way, it doesn’t work. So I’m fond now of saying you can’t be in fear and in flow at the same time.

MEL: Now coming back to the science, determinism created this need to predict. Now quantum physics reveals that reality is thoroughly uncertain, discovered by Heisenberg in 1927 and providing us with the uncertainty principle. So I want to share with everybody that I don’t understand science, and I was not even an average science student. It is simply these principles that profoundly impacted me. You mentioned the Society for Consciousness Studies, of which I’m a member. I do not belong in this society. They’re brilliant academics and scientists, and I have no idea what they’re talking about scientifically. But they look to me for the takeaway. Perhaps I’m a social scientist.

MEL: So I came to see that our addiction to certainty and predictability are the cause of anxiety. When we need to know a future which is unknowable, then that creates fear. Our thought attaching to fear, what will happen, results in anxiety. So I developed an approach and a method and gave a TEDx talk on the fact that if we paradoxically or counterintuitively embrace uncertainty, then we get to navigate change in our lives. We are, again, the word I’m using today, we are in the flow. Antithetical to Newton’s 17th century predictability and determinism.

MEL: Coming back to the machine-like universe, cogs in the machine, separate and discrete from each other, I believe that led essentially to the loss of oneness. It led to the loss of compassion and empathy, and the resulting exploitation of resources and people. The extreme of individualism, which becomes the credo of cultures, certainly American and Western culture to a large extent, which has decimated us.

CHRISTIAN: Yes, yes. And so in alignment with your teachings about uncertainty, if there’s anything that we can be certain about, it’s uncertainty. That life is going to continue throwing curveballs our way, that we just, there’s no way to predict, there’s no way to see coming, including a global pandemic that maybe, I don’t know, five people on the planet foresaw. And so yeah, that feels disempowering and scary. But here’s what I’ve landed on and what I weave into my teachings and my clients, coaching with my clients that, all right, so that’s a fact, right? Life is going to continue throwing curveballs our way. That we can do nothing about. And what we can do something about is how we show up in response to those curveballs. And even just with that slight reframe, it pops us out of that helplessness victim mindset, what life did to me, me versus the world. And it pops us more into our own agency and personal empowerment. So let’s talk a little bit into uncertainty. That’s one of the three core principles that you write about. Let’s talk a little bit about quantum inseparability, which you alluded to. But tell us a little bit more deeply what it is, and how can it be applied toward healing that fragmentation of the 17th century paradigm that you so eloquently write about?

MEL: So, as you refer to this sense of oneness, although I consider myself spiritual and have spiritual inclinations and beliefs, I came to this sense of oneness by coming to understand a famous thought experiment in the world of physics, which occurred in the 1930s. The two titans of physics were in a debate, Einstein and Niels Bohr. And without delving too deeply into the details, it was about what would happen if two particles, which were entangled, they were as one, if they were separated by a great distance, these particles would have opposite spins, one positive, one negative. And the debate was, if we change the spin of one, what would happen to the other? Both agreed the other would have to change its spin, because they operate as a pair. But how long? Now Einstein said, well, we can calculate that the message would occur, couldn’t be faster than the speed of light. And Bohr said, no, no signal will be necessary, no message, it is as one. They could be separated by half a universe, it would be instantaneous. Einstein makes famous proclamations, God doesn’t play dice with the universe. If this were true, I’d rather be a cobbler than a physicist. Finally, in 1983, the technology is available to test the theory. Einstein loses, he’s no longer alive, nor is Bohr. Since then, I believe without exception, with greater and greater efficiency of technology, it continues to prove out there is no separation.

MEL: Now the skeptic might say, well, that’s odd, but that’s only in quantum physics.

CHRISTIAN: Before you move on from that, is that what, I think it was Einstein who coined spooky action at a distance, right? Like quantum entanglement.

MEL: That’s exactly correct. That’s right, Christian. He said, it’s spooky action at a distance. Einstein was suggesting there’s something else happening, but he called a hidden variable that could account for this. He still was insisting on traditional cause and effect.

MEL: So moving forward now, as I was saying, the skeptic might say, well, that’s only in the quantum world. Increasingly, for decades now, we see these phenomena of quantum physics popping up in our macro world. Now, physicists have been striving for what they call TOE, the theory of everything. How do you correlate the different reality between quantum and our everyday macro life, between Einstein’s relativity and the macro world? And I’m going to humbly apologize for suggesting I could possibly have an answer to this. But sometimes in simplicity and stupidity, we can see things. And my answer is, well, what is it that intervenes between the quantum world and our everyday macro world? Us. Consciousness. Perhaps there is no difference, but it’s our consciousness that has constructed the difference and therefore sees the difference as real.

MEL: At any rate, in my work, I’ve delved deeply into matters of synchronicity, oneness in my practice as a therapist. I’ve come to understand the sense of oneness on personal levels, which is inexplainable through classical physics or classical science. I know it. I experience it. Others do. So this sense of oneness doesn’t only exist in the quantum world. That’s silly. That’s just in denial of human experience. What is love, if not oneness?

CHRISTIAN: Beautiful, beautiful question. Let me ask you something about synchronicity, because I love that word and I love the concept. Sometimes I’ll use the phrase divine choreography in place, because some of the stuff that happens that I’ve witnessed and experienced, there is no way that it could be just a happenstance. And that certainly my little mind could never come up with all the players and synchronizing all the schedules and all the incidents that had to happen in order for a certain thing to happen synchronously. So how do you feel about that?

MEL: So synchronicity excites me. I’ve experienced it profoundly, studied it. I was bold enough as to teach people how to experience it, what they have to do. Let’s give credit now to the originator of the term, which I believe was Carl Jung, the scientist who collaborated with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli toward synchronicity. Several decades ago, when the tsunami hit Indonesia, I was on vacation in Mexico, and I read a report in the Times that said there was no reported death of wildlife. The animals have a sixth sense and they knew that the tsunami was coming. So I went up to my room to write an article. And the article was, humans used to have a sixth sense before the age of rational mind, severed mind and body. As I’m writing those words, the window to my room is open, a bird flies in the window and perches itself on the armrest of my chair. Birds don’t do that. So this is spine tingling to me. It’s a synchronicity. My mind, consciousness, and the physical universe for a moment become as one. There couldn’t be coincidence of cause and effect. So I send an email off to a colleague who has written a book on synchronicity, sharing this. He writes back to me, says, great synchronicity, Mel. He said, but it goes further. He said, let me tell you what I was doing when I opened your email. I was reading a book called How Animals Can Predict Earthquakes by Rupert Sheldrake, a British biologist. So then I contacted Sheldrake and he and I ended up giving a joint lecture at Yale on this notion of synchronicity. So you see folding upon folding of synchronicity. That is an altogether opposing sense of reality to the fragmentation of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of separation.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah, I love that. And that is so similar. If I remember correctly, when I studied psychology in college, your experience with a bird gave me chills because it reminded me of, I think was the original inspiration for Jung, which wasn’t it a bug or a butterfly in his window or something like that?

MEL: Yes, he was working with a patient. I’m struggling at the moment to recall, but it will come to me. I’m sure the name of the bug, but she was, oh, she was discussing a piece of jewelry she had was shaped like a scarab, which is a term I was unfamiliar with, but that’s the type of bug. Jung was working with her to try to break her out of the confines of her rational mind. She was not open to wonder. She was strictly linear and rational. So as she’s discussing this jewelry piece in the shape of a scarab, there’s a tapping at the window behind Jung. He turns around, opens the window, puts his hands out, and it’s a scarab. He says, here’s your scarab. Purportedly that drove her past her rational mind and she opened up to wonderment.

CHRISTIAN: There it is. How else, how else the rational mind cannot explain that?

MEL: That’s right. It’s beyond logic. And you know, the problem is, Christian, when we simply say, well, that’s not rational, as though that’s the final word. Ration and logic, rather than being a tool in our toolbox, become our deity. Yes. How silly.

CHRISTIAN: Silly. Silly.

MEL: So often when someone may say to me, that’s not rational, I said, indeed, it’s not intended to be.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah, so you also write that in the nanosecond before you become your next thought, you exist in a pure state of potential. So let’s talk about that and the third element of potentiality and a little bit about your recent thoughts about the superposition of thought.

MEL: Well, what I’m about to describe is the superposition. So just to explain, superposition, term from quantum physics, superposition refers to the fact that everything is in a state of absolute potential until an observation is made. And physics that we refer to something called a wave collapse. Light has a dual capacity. It exists as a wave or as a particle. But when an observation is made, a person, a device, the wave literally collapses and becomes a particle. And the wave represents pure possibility, pure potential. Particle is fixed. So I had a thought in regard to this wave collapse. But something similar happens to us. In my work, I’ve developed an approach, which is that our primary beliefs about ourselves, limiting or positive, are due to wave collapses in our identity. We come into life as a soul in a state, notwithstanding issues of karma and past lives, we come into life in a state of pure potentiality. What happens to that potentiality? Huge or chronic wave collapses early in life. It could be a teacher saying to you, I can’t believe how stupid that answer was. And you carry that belief and burden with you. Or a comment from a mom who said to a client of mine, she told my client when she was seven years old, she said, my pregnancy with you wasn’t planned, you were an accident. At 45, this woman still struggled with, I’m not lovable. Primary wave collapse. So out of the primary belief come millions of thoughts that conform to that belief.

MEL: So I thought, from reading physics, and from reading some of the philosopher Alfred North Weizsäck, who honestly is far too brilliant for me to understand most of his work, is I get this notion of superposition. What if I could learn to sense or see my thought before I become my thought? And I played around with it and kind of just motivated myself to try to capture that nanosecond, that there was a stirring or a sensation of thought before it became a thought. And David Bohm was very instrumental in my thinking here as well, who makes a distinction between thought and thinking. Well, I stumbled around and I found a way where I could learn to see thought. Now if I can see my thought, and if I can say to you as we’re talking, you know, I just had a thought come up. Let me tell you what my thought is telling me, that I am not my thought. I am having a thought. That is where potentiality and possibility lies. I’m having a thought. My state of superposition, my state of potential, is in the moment before I attach to the thought. That’s when I’m in a state of pure possibility or uncertainty.

MEL: So coming back to uncertainty, to me, certainty and predictability forecloses on possibility. Uncertainty, which we typically avoid, I thought uncertainty equals possibility. I’m in. I want to ride the wave of possibility. I teach exercises and methods and approaches to experience that nanosecond so it feels like several seconds, so that we can see the thought. This is no different than athletes train themselves so that that moment elongates and it feels much longer. Same phenomenon, I create, I help people create a muscle memory. It’s not hard. All you have to do is want to do it. And it works. And that to me allows the window for insight or wisdom to occur because then I’m not on automatic replay.

CHRISTIAN: And it sounds to me like what you’re pointing to is both in the sports metaphor, an example, in our personal lives, what that takes is presence. And I love, what excites me about your work is that, I mean, we’ve heard that before, like from Buddhist teachings, Hindu teachings, we are not our thoughts. But I love that you’re combining it with the science, with quantum physics to really help us understand that in a different way.

MEL: I was always attracted to spiritual teachings, but I never delved in. They made sense to me at face value and I said, yeah, I’m in. But I didn’t dive in. I didn’t become a student of it. And it was at a turning point in my own life because of a matter of many personal crises that were occurring in my early 40s that I began to read this. And again, I don’t read the scientific formulas. That’s beyond me. I just read the principles. And my way of thinking, I know the theme of what you’re looking at here is transforming global consciousness in a way. I want to add another piece to that. There is a philosophy, a new way of knowing. I believe it was coming out of France several decades ago called transdisciplinarity. Edgar Morin, French philosopher, I believe is a leader in it. So we’re aware of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. They don’t go far enough. What I did, and not because I’m an intellectual, because I’m not, I’m an intellectual dilettante. I just poke around at what excites me, but I don’t delve in. So I’m reading physics and I’m reading philosophy and I’ll circle something in philosophy and I say, wow, interesting. Doesn’t completely make sense. I’ll get back to it. Something in physics. And then I take two different disciplines. I say, well, if this is so, and this is so, what happens when I bring them together and integrate them, and that’s when I have an explosion of creativity. That’s my alchemy. That’s what transdisciplinarity is. It’s taking these things that our mind divided, after all, mind made up, that philosophy and science are different. They’re just different labels we create. Our mind divided them. So rather than interdisciplinary, where we found a bridge or a tunnel to connect them, I’m saying I separate the divisions. I’ve trained my mind, continue to train my mind to not see separation, which is why I don’t use the word connection.

MEL: People talk about mind-body connection. I go, there is no mind-body connection. And they’re stunned. I said, the word connection implies there’s a separation. We have to watch our words. The reason we struggle, by the way, in making this shift to this new paradigm is we still use words that inform our thoughts, which keep us stuck in an old objective reality. I believe I’ve spoken with you before about the two be verbs, is, are, am, was, be. These are the only verbs that are inert and don’t move. All other verbs show movement. But we use these two be verbs in every sentence. They also speak of an objective separate reality. You are. There’s no participation here for me. You are, as opposed to removing the are and saying, may I tell you how I see you? May I tell you how I experience you? Now there’s a oneness. It’s perspective. It’s subjective. And objectivity is the death knell of relationship, because it brings us into battles of separation and right versus wrong and argumentation and no one listens. So I think these are at the core of the disasters we experience in the world. That’s where the shift of consciousness has to come from. And fundamentally, it means we have to start teaching this to the next generation of students, a new way of thinking. I don’t care what someone thinks. I care how they think.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah, yeah, I love that conversation about the verb to be because in Spanish, there’s actually two forms of the verb to be said. Yes, that said is a more permanent state of being like I am. I am Cuban. I am, you know, a man, things that are pretty much established. And then there’s a stat which is a more of a transitory state of being like, I am feeling blah, blah, blah, or I am currently, you know, I am doing a podcast interview or anything like that. And as a fellow intellectual dilettante, at a whole different level than yours is like your way, like some of the conversations you have with those philosophers is like, go totally over my head. But I love the concepts and I love the way that you’re translating them. And I also want to, for that burgeoning teacher or healer who might be still dealing with issues of self-doubt, maybe dealing with stress or anxiety, let’s bring it in a little bit more to the less philosophical, a little bit more practical. And so I wanted to acknowledge your TEDx talk. One of them is called Breaking Free from Anxiety, which has had, I think, more than half a million views. So you had what, 18 minutes to answer that on the TEDx?

MEL: That one, Christian, was nine minutes.

CHRISTIAN: Nine minutes. Wow. So can you do it in two or three? Like how do you break free from anxiety?

MEL: So I’ll give it my best. Anxiety is about our thought seeking fear. When our thought attaches to fear, the result is anxiety. We have a fearful thought. Now I’m not proposing that it’s all due to predictability and seeking certainty. I’m saying it’s fundamentally due to it. As an aside, lest I forget to say it, low self-esteem will lead to anxiety. If I say this, what will they think? Oh my God, would that be a mistake? Should I say this? That’s low self-esteem. But still seeking certainty, what will they think? There’s a correlation between self-esteem and certainty. But in the talk, I’m essentially saying, look, if thought becomes afraid because it can’t predict the future, and the future is not predictable, then what Krishnamurti called freedom from the known is something we should seek, which is, I don’t know that future. What we call the future is a moment in time that hasn’t happened yet. All I can do is choose to embrace uncertainty, which provides resilience, and navigate along the way.

MEL: The best example I can give is I was working with a woman who was very unhappily married. She had no children. She and her husband were financially independent. They tried counseling. It didn’t work. So I asked her curiously, why do you stay married? She said, I don’t know who I would be as a divorced woman. There it was, fear of the unknown. I said, well, you know who you are as a married woman, and that’s not working. As an unmarried woman, there’s awful possibilities. So I created a visualization for her, which I speak about in my TEDx talk. I had her imagine walking into a river, and imagine the river was the current of her life. I said, walk into the river. You’re not going to sink, and get into the flow. And after a moment or two, I asked her, where was she? She said, I went into the river, but I grabbed a hold of a boulder in the middle. And I said, why? She said, the river turns to the right up ahead, and I don’t know where it’s going. I said, that’s your future. Perhaps that’s you as a divorced woman. Let go of the boulder. That doesn’t mean you’re hapless. You can navigate to either direction that you want, but you have to get into the flow. So that’s a brief illustration about the concept of how you break free. Fundamentally, there are skills and tools that I teach and provide, which anyone can learn from going to my website and reading my book.

CHRISTIAN: Great. And so you also point us in a direction of one of our shared areas of passion and expertise, which is relationships. And in this new book, The Possibility Principle, you also get into how to break through communication impasses, which I write about in my book as power struggles. So talk a little bit about that. How do we break through these communication impasses?

MEL: This has very much to do with the shift in worldview, again, which is fundamentally, it is speaking in language of objectivity that is ruinous to relationship, because we engage in the battle over who’s right and who’s wrong. And we make objective statements. When I work with a couple and they’re in an argument, an objective argument, I say, leave the facts aside. Facts belong in the courtroom. Feelings are the foundation of relationship. And so I may say to the husband, do you love your wife? Of course I do. And I say to her, so instead of arguing the fact, tell him how you feel and ask him, do you care how I feel? And then we get to the heart of the matter. I teach couples and individuals to speak without using two V verbs, because if I say you are insensitive, focus on the word are, we know your reaction, no I’m not. So if I say, I really experience you as insensitive, may explain to you why, you might lean in. Other techniques, I created a method which I call the 5% rule, which is in a disagreement, the instinct is to have our thoughts prepared to repudiate or rebut whatever we’re hearing is wrong, contrary to your intuition there. Pause and look for some small percentage that you can affirm. It doesn’t mean you surrender. Just find something to affirm you can agree with and validate. Compare that. Now we’ve shifted the energy. We desperately want someone to know something different or see something different. But we have to take a moment and think, how can I do that? I need to have them leaning in, not back on their heels. Right versus wrong, objective debate, there’s nowhere. Leaning in is the key that I would share to a new approach to relationship and communication. If you’re being charged with something, lean in with curiosity and it has an entirely different direction.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. And I love that piece of wisdom of avoiding the to be verb. I would add to that too, what I would add to that too is avoid words like always and never, like you always, you never, hang it up, end of conversation.

MEL: Absolutely true. I mean, it’s completely distracting. But again, that instinct, the right versus wrong, it’s part of what I call either or thinking Christian, which I believe came to us from Aristotle. It’s attributed to him. Either or thinking, when I’m asked an either or question, so Mel, what do you think? Is this good or bad? I won’t answer. I can’t answer. I’m proud to say I’ve trained my mind to not accept the fragmentation, the lack of wholeness of either or compartments. So either or leads us to, if you’re right, then I’m wrong and how’s that going to feel? No, we break past either or thinking. I do that by what I call leaning in. You’re experiencing me differently than I think of myself. I’m curious. Help me understand how you’re experiencing me. There’s no right or wrong or battle there. These are keys. If only we were taught this in school.

CHRISTIAN: Yes, yes. My God, you know, with a psychiatrist father, with, you know, psychology, majoring in psychology, studying with the Jesuits for four years in high school, I never got any of this stuff. I never understood the ego mind and all its machinations and shenanigans. And it’s like, wow, how I wish I would have known that and all the stuff we’re talking about at a younger age.

MEL: You imagine if communication, emotional intelligence, a emerging worldview, were taught to kids in grade school. My God, what a world. We would be living in a different universe. So I do believe that the precipice or the only opportunity to transform consciousness, save the planet, create harmony is through education. But that begs the question, okay, how are you going to do that when most education is state run?

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. So let me ask you this, because you mentioned self-esteem earlier. And I believe, you know, my experience with working with people for 30 years at the core of most of our issues is that, is low self-esteem.

MEL: Absolutely.

CHRISTIAN: What would you like to share with us about building, how we build authentic self-esteem?

MEL: Another core one of my passions. In the US, all psychological diagnoses come from a book called the DSM, which is the Bible of psychiatric diagnosis. There’s no diagnosis for low self-esteem, regrettably, probably because there’s no medication to profit from the sale of. I can only speak to American culture. I believe the term self-esteem is not only misunderstood, it’s a misnomer. Because if you ask most people or a parent, what will give you children good self-esteem? They’ll say, oh, being popular, really good grades, being athletic. And I’ll point out, that’s not self-esteem. That’s actually what I call other esteem. What we do is we either seek approval from others, or we certainly avoid this approval. We judge ourselves and then project that judgment onto others. So we make other people our judge. I will say to people I work with, the only judge I have is the dude who works in the courthouse with a woman. Anyone else’s people with opinions, if I elevate your opinion to a judgment, I’m doing that. So we pursue other esteem. There are mythologies like act strong, never show weakness. Well, I write acting strong is acting that’s weak. Release your vulnerability, share your insecurity, and two things happen. Number one, you’re no longer hiding it, so it releases the insecurity. And two, by sharing your insecurity, you’re actually demonstrating to yourself that you’re not afraid of what the other person thinks. You’re coming into authenticity with yourself. This is the core of authentic self-esteem. But again, I don’t know in what cultures authentic self-esteem is intrinsic or taught. I’m unaware. All I can speak of is in Western culture, we teach the opposite. And there isn’t an individual or a couple that I work with over my 27 years of practice in therapy, so I’m now talking about countless thousands of people, that this doesn’t come up in some way. Self-esteem is ruinous to your relationship with yourself, to others, and to the universe as a whole. I mean, let’s look at Putin or Trump. People mistakenly refer to these people as having strong egos. They have the most fragile egos. They have no self-esteem. They’re completely in pursuit of other esteem.

CHRISTIAN: Yes. And over-concentration for poor self-esteem.

MEL: Right. So all tyrants, I shouldn’t make a universal statement there. I’m sure there are exceptions. The tendency is for tyrants to be in pursuit of greater and greater other esteem because there’s a fragility of their own self-worth. Hitler being a prime example.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, brilliant. I believe you’re offering a gift to participants who want to find out more about your work and will have a link to your website and how they can get on your email list. You want to talk a little bit about what you’re offering?

MEL: Certainly. I’m offering a copy of my book, The Possibility Principle, which we can deliver either as a hardcover or as a Kindle or an audiobook. So by writing to me at Mel at MelSchwartz.com and tell me which version you prefer. And if it’s a hardcover, of course, I’ll need the address, but just initiate the communication with me by email and we’ll pick it up from there.

CHRISTIAN: That’s great and incredibly generous. I had assumed that it was just the e-book, but it’s so much more easy and simple to handle. There’s something so beautiful about holding the book.

MEL: Me too. I can describe the book as well.

CHRISTIAN: Mel, thank you so much. Is there anything that you want to say to wrap up our time together? Either share about your work, any offerings, any new projects that you’re working on?

MEL: I’m looking forward to be offering retreats, one week retreats, moving into a realm of everything that we’re discussing, self-esteem, relationship, communication. And we’ll have a link to your website and from there they can access all your sources.

CHRISTIAN: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for taking your time and sharing your wisdom and your experience with us here at the Summit. And thank you for doing all that you do on all our behalf.

MEL: Thank you, Christian, and thank you for being such an enlightened seeker of consciousness and wisdom yourself.

MEL: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #133 Possibility and Quantum Physics first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz episode 132 is a bonus episode: an interview I gave Dwight Hurst on The Broken Brain podcast.

In this hour-long episode, we review how I came to my approach to therapy and cover self-esteem, uncertainty, anxiety and depression, education, and how quantum physics provides a metaphoric model for dealing with it all.

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MEL: Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

DWIGHT: Grateful to be here today with Mel Schwartz. Mel is a psychotherapist and also an author of The Possibility Principle and you have a very unique approach that I’m super jazzed to talk about in that you use principles of physics and quantum physics and combine those with psychotherapy. So Mel, thank you so much for being here today, first of all.

MEL: Thank you for having me, Dwight. Looking forward to chatting with you.

DWIGHT: Tell people a little bit about who you are. I always like to let people know how we got into such a seedy business as trying to help people. What happened? How did you get here?

MEL: I was approaching the age of 40 and I was living the life I thought I should be living. I was in business, not psychotherapy. I was making very good living. I was driving home from my office in Midtown Manhattan to my home in the suburbs and I had a thought. The thought was when I was in college, I promised myself I was going to have great meaning and purpose in my life. Now 20 years later, I thought, well, I’ve got the big house, the kids, the successful business, but you know what? The meaning and the purpose aren’t there. And I thought, I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life. By the time I got home, I said to my soon to be ex-wife, I think I’m going to close the business.

MEL: She said, what do you mean? What are you going to do? I said, I don’t know. But I was excited, excited by possibilities and I began to think about what I really enjoyed doing. What I really enjoyed doing is helping people think differently, get insights, you know, mixing it up. And I thought, what would that look like?

MEL: So by the morning I thought, I’m going to apply to graduate school and I’m going to become a psychotherapist. I can write books, I can give talks, but I didn’t know a thing about the field of psychotherapy. I had done a little therapy, but I couldn’t say it was a calling. But for me, fortunately it turned out to be, but I never followed anything they taught me in graduate school because I thought it was an outmoded way of thinking. It’s what I would call the 17th century reductionist thinking, Newtonian, about objectivity. And my new way of thinking was different.

MEL: I started reading quantum physics. And by the way, when I say quantum physics, I don’t get the science. I just mean the principles. The principles were reality is uncertain. And I thought, but in our lives we seek certainty, but we can’t succeed at that. So if we’re seeking what we can’t get, we’re going to be anxious. Ah, anxiety is due to seeking certainty when reality is uncertain. So I turned that around and I thought, well, if reality is uncertain, what if I learn to embrace uncertainty? So making that career shift was my first embrace of uncertainty, bringing a new possibility into my life.

MEL: So over time, I looked at these principles in quantum physics, inseparability. Reality appears to be one inseparable whole. There is no separation, even though our mind constructs separation. And I thought, wow, if inseparability is reality, then compassion and harmony and love would be second nature because we are actually all as one, just like the golden rule. So I took these principles and I started to apply them to my practice. And I’m writing an article right now, which is called asking how does that make you feel? That’s not enough. That’s what’s typically done in therapy, right? How does that make you feel? But I like to teach. I like to help people find a new way of a new game plan for life wisdom. So that’s what brought me here and a very long winded response to you, Dwight. That’s what got me where I am.

DWIGHT: No, no, no, not long winded at all. I appreciate the context for that because it actually hits a lot of the things that I feel like I talk about a lot on the show too, is we sometimes fall into in our industry years in mind, right? There’s these pitfalls we can fall into where we have this concept of just doing things that have always been done. I remember reading a research paper a long time ago that the title of it was doing what works instead of what we think will work. And the whole premise of it was it was about the time that there was this craze where they said evidence-based therapy, evidence-based therapy. And it didn’t mean anything other than it was a catchphrase really. You’d think it meant do something that seems to actually work, right? But it just became another, I don’t know, it was like, oh, use evidence-based CBT. And some of these acronyms have stuff in them that are useful, but to fall into the trap of just being like, well, this is what we’ve always done. That’s not a good reason to do something all by itself.

MEL: It’s dull. It’s unthinking. By the way, look at the term evidence-based as a short-sighted term because evidence is what we can see and observe. But we know the human psyche, the large part of it is unobservable. We understand the unconscious has a great gravitational force in our feelings and our behavior. So just the term evidence-based is horribly lacking, isn’t it?

DWIGHT: It leads to the kind of thinking to where there are people out there who feel like we could have AI therapists that would replace the need for therapists. Going back to that idea of how do you feel about that? How does it make you feel? What are your feel, feel, feel? And while identifying feelings is certainly a part of a therapeutic conversation, you know, no way around that, it’s not the end though. If anything, it’s very much the start. How do you feel? I feel this way. Great. Well, there should be something next.

MEL: So I command that from principle of quantum physics. And before going into the principle, maybe not getting into the principle, I’ve come to see and believe that usually thought precedes feeling. So if I’m feeling in a certain mood, let’s say exceptionally good or bad, I’ll ask myself, what was the thought I had to set up that feeling? I’ll track back and find it. So I see the correlation, the dance between thought and feeling. In quantum physics, we understand that reality is in a state of pure potential. It doesn’t exist until you summon it up, you make an observation. So I thought we too are in a state of potential until we attach to our next thought. So what if I could help people?

MEL: First I had to discover it myself. What if I could experience this so I could actually see the thought, slow motion, and not become the thought and it changed my life? Because if I can see the thought that I’m not the thought, then I’m free to change, to develop wisdom and great insight. So I actually developed some techniques to help people see their thought and see their feeling to then rise above it and then change and possibility become immediately accessible.

DWIGHT: So do you find that you embrace more of an idea of leaning in rather than pulling back or running away from, distracting from the…

MEL: Absolutely. I have a podcast. My podcast is called the Possibility Podcast. I have an entire episode on leaning in. I call it a martial art. When you lean in, you’re not defensive and you’re reactive. You’re not reactive. And it’s embracing a vulnerability, but I use the word vulnerable in a powerful way. So if somebody makes a critical comment to you, lean in with curiosity and say, ah, tell me about that. I didn’t see that myself, but that’s powerful. Instead of being back on your heels and saying, oh, that’s not true.

DWIGHT: You know, I, and I’ll say his name. I don’t mind sharing this because he shared it on the podcast, a colleague of mine, Mike Fitch, and he shared this story once about vulnerability of when he got into an argument with his father as a teenager. And so they’re arguing or whatever. And at some point, this, this, the heated discussion, he, he lets loose on his dad and it says a bunch of stuff. And he says like, I hate you. And he said that his dad totally shocked him by taking a step back and saying, well, that really hurts my feelings. And he said, all of a sudden that vulnerability powerfully diffused the situation where he could have said like, oh yeah, well, and which is very natural, right. To strike back when someone strikes out, but instead it was a vulnerable reaction. And that triggered a whole different conversation following that. Right.

MEL: You know, I think that speaks to the heart of the epidemic of low self-esteem in our culture. I coined a term, I think I coined it, perhaps someone else did, which is other esteem. As a culture, we’re taught that the way to attain self-esteem, it doesn’t really come from us. So if you’re a kid in school, if you’re a great athlete, if you get great grades, if you have a lot of friends that give you self-esteem, well, what if you’re not a great athlete and you’re not that popular? Attaining self-esteem comes from not operating from fear. Now acting strong, which in particular men are taught to do in our culture, acting strong is acting. It’s weak. The opposite is share your vulnerability. And that means you’re no longer worried about someone else being your judge. You set it up yourself. And I’ll say that the only person who can be my judge is a dude that works in the courthouse and wears a long black robe. Otherwise, we’re all people with opinions. Why elevate someone’s opinion and call it a judgment? So there’s this epidemic of low self-worth because culturally, we’re not taught and educationally, we’re not taught how to develop genuine self-esteem. And I think low self-esteem lies underneath a lot of disorders like anxiety and depression. But low self-esteem, as you know, is not a DSM diagnosis. So nobody is talking about it.

DWIGHT: No. And in fact, when we do, it becomes one of those things that is viewed almost as one of those cliche, hippie dippy therapist things, right? It’s like, oh, self-esteem, self-esteem. And it’s a little bit less out of now. When I was going to graduate school, though, there was a lot of talk about alternate ways of saying that because self-esteem is so whatever. And it was treated by a lot of people as something kind of froofy and hard to define. And this and that. And instead of what you’re describing is more bearing down on this and saying, no, this is actually an underlying problem that exists.

MEL: Yeah. Look, the primary relationship in your life is with yourself. What do you think of yourself? How do you feel? Can you navigate life without too much fear? So the fear of what I think someone else thinks of me. Notice what I said. People say I’m afraid of what they think, but we don’t know what they think. You’re afraid of what you think they think of you. How can that be a sensible way of living your life? So all this common sense that we follow doesn’t really work out. I’m working on the new book, which is called Uncommon Sense, because common sense, how’s that working out? There’s too much fear in our lives, fear of what other people think. But my genuine relationship with myself needs to be key. That doesn’t mean I’m insensitive or callous or uncaring about other people, but it means I’m not in a precarious place where I’m worried about what I say or don’t say. I’m true to myself.

DWIGHT: Do you see that, as you mentioned, pushback from people? As you mentioned, that doesn’t mean I’m callous just because other people can’t or I don’t want them to control and I don’t want to give that control to them. Do you find that people push back on that in the sense of like, oh, well, if I didn’t care what people thought, then that would be a dull collapse or something?

MEL: Yeah. So what I’m trying to do, what I try to teach people in that case, is that I don’t say you shouldn’t care what someone thinks, but you shouldn’t subordinate yourself out of fear of what they think. You see, it’s more nuanced than that. Please, I’d love to hear what you think, but that doesn’t mean I’m afraid of you thinking critically of me. You have the right to think critically of me, just as I have the right to think critically of you.

DWIGHT: I like to think of it sometimes as we try to do the communication work for other people when we project, right? When we project and we say, oh, I think they think this and I think they probably want me to do this, so I’m either going to try to do that or I’m going to rebel against it or all of a sudden I’m making decisions based off of the thing that I think they think. The tricky bit is that as we get to know people pretty well, we’re probably right quite a bit of the time. And when we’re right often, we think we’re right always. And when we’re right often, we also assume that it matters. If I think you think this, then it, oh, I’ve got to react to it. When as a matter of fact, even if you think it, you haven’t told me, I’m doing your job for you.

MEL: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely correct. And that’s a really, really important insight that you have there. We operate from assumptions. One of the skills I’ve developed that I enjoy is really around what I call shared meaning. So I will socially be with a couple of people and they’re having a conversation with each other and I realized they think they’re talking about the same thing, but they’re not. Their conversations actually derail. They’re talking about two different things because they don’t have shared meaning. Shared meaning is she says to him, you don’t know how to be intimate. So he should be saying, well, first before I respond, tell me what you mean by the word intimate. So we’re on the same page. Instead, I don’t know how to be intimate. You’re kidding. You’re the one with the problem. They’re off to a battle. No one is defined the word we need shared meaning and shared meaning is respectful. So if you say to somebody, you know, you’re such, so judgmental and critical of me, it really hurts my feelings. Okay, please help me understand what do you mean by critical? What does that look like? We need shared meaning in communication.

MEL: When I look at communication today amongst people, politicians, or talking heads on TV, it’s bereft. There is no congruent shared meaning. It’s like whack-a-mole, you know, but there’s no meaning coming out of the, out of the discourse

DWIGHT: With the biggest difference being actual whack-a-mole is a lot more fun. And at least get those little tickets. And if you get a million of them, you can get a mustache comb or something. I’m curious your thoughts on tying what you’re saying now to this inseparability and how if I understood you correctly, that the sort of our natural state is more of a communal kindness reaching out. That’s more of where we want to be. And yet at the same time, we have those struggles. Is that just a breakdown of the way we relate to ourselves? Is it anxiety? Is it fear? What kind of things make us?

MEL: I think this is singularly a vitally important point that you’re raising. I think the most of the harm that it does us as a species, as human race, is we live in the illusion of separation. Now call it the illusion. It comes from 17th century thinkers, Sir Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes. So Newton told us that reality is like a giant machine. Descartes said it was a giant clock comprised of separate discrete parts. Well, we became those separate parts in the machine, but separate, it requires force to get the parts moving. Quantum physics discovered particles when they have a shared state, they’re called entangled. They are as one. The thought debate was if you take those particles and you separate them by a great distance and you change the spin of one, what will happen to the other one, half a universe away? The other one will change his spin because as shared particles, they have opposite spins. But the question is, how long would it take? Einstein says, well, a signal will be sent, but nothing travels faster than the speed of light. So we calculate. Niels Bohr says no, no signal. Reality is as one. There’s no signal necessary. Einstein says, if this was true, I’d rather be a cobbler than a physicist.

MEL: In 1964, the technology, both of these men have passed on, the technology is finally available to test it. Einstein was wrong. The universe appears as one. There is no signal in between the particles. They are as one. Further evidence is that this exists not just in the quantum world, but in our world. So it’s similar to Eastern mysticism, oneness. Now how do you have the illusion of separation? We compete, we try to win, we try to defeat because we see the other is different than me. It’s called a relationship or marriage. What tears a marriage or relationship apart? The need to be right. Would you rather be happy or would you rather be right? Well, I’d rather be happy, but I’m going to get into a fight. I need to win. If I have to be right, that means I’m going to make you wrong. How’s that going to work out for our relationship? The relationship is oneness. So this sense of oneness, which quantum physics reveals, then compassion and empathy and generosity as opposed to greed. Greed is a product of separation, competing, winning, exploiting. That all comes from the 17th century point of view of we’re separate cogs in the machine. There’s nothing to do, play the game and try to win.

DWIGHT: If I’m on the bottom of the rung, and what you’re suggesting, the extension of that logic would be the ladder itself is just an unhealthy creation in a way, the hierarchical way. If I’m on the bottom, that means I need to get to the top or at least as high up as I can. And then we all could say what that leads to. I mean, we all see what that leads to. We talk about it in a way, it almost sounds like we talk about the epidemic of anxiety and self-esteem problems. It’s almost like just an epidemic of like extreme burnout as a person.

MEL: Well, because the most important question we can ask ourselves is what’s my philosophy for my life? If you start a business, you drew up a business plan, but we go after life without our own game plan for life. So people think that they will be happy when they meet and fall in love. Okay, then I’ll be happy when I get married. Well, I’ll be happy when we get our dream house. I’ll be happy when I have children. I’ll be happy when the kids are old enough to sleep through the night. All of a sudden you’re at retirement. What happened to happiness? Things don’t bring happiness. Happiness can only exist being present in the moment. We hear terms like being in flow, but you can’t be in flow and be in fear at the same time. You have to choose. The leaning in concept that you spoke about earlier, that’s being in flow. It’s leaning in. Rethinking what will bring happiness. So achievement and wealth can be seen as the icing on the cake, but not the cake.

DWIGHT: When you had that realization, going back to that drive home, the very eventful drive home you mentioned as a feeling of mostly excitement and this idea of putting aside some things that weren’t meaningful, chasing after meaning. The excitement came before you even knew what the answer was. Has that always been part of your own approach or personality, or was that a shift in the way you approach life?

MEL: Well, yes and no. I was always a person who would think, why can’t I, as opposed to why I can’t, but there was something in this process that was profound for me. So within the day or two after I decided to go to grad school, I of course had reasonable considerations. How am I going to support my family? What are the changes going to be in our lives? And I did what we usually do. I hesitated because I had a fear of the consequences, but then in a very insightful moment in my life, I thought, but I should have a fear about the consequences of not doing something. If I don’t do this, I could become depressed. So as a culture, we fear the consequences of what we do, our decisions, that fear just constricts us. I should have a fear of not doing something that has consequences. So I started to realize that I could learn to think differently. And in my practice, my development, I never read anything in the field of psychology ever. That doesn’t excite me. I only read books that I don’t sufficiently understand to begin with, because that’s my learning process. So I’ll read quantum physics, I’ll read philosophy, I’ll circle this and I’ll circle that and I’ll underline this and I’ll say, well, if this is true in philosophy and that’s true in physics, what happens if I combine them and I do that? And it’s like an alchemy for me. It’s a creative process. So for me, I don’t believe in separate disciplines. Separate disciplines are just our thought made this stuff up. History, social studies, economics, they’re all different aspects, but they’re not truly separate. When we separate things out, our mind tricks us. So I’ve learned since the age of 40, because I was not like this before. I was a regular guy. I was an average student at best. I didn’t run deep. And all of a sudden, wow, something happened. So I realized possibilities that we are not imprinted in a certain way.

MEL: So I was given a talk shortly after I became a therapist. I had written my first book and I was invited to give the talk at Yale. I was feeling pretty full of myself. And I’m sitting there after the talk, my mother comes over and she’s quite an elderly woman at that point. She has tears in her eyes and she says, I don’t understand how did you become this person? And I thought it’s all about potential and possibilities. We don’t know. We restrict ourselves. And even in terms of intelligence, I’m not suggesting I have a superior intelligence, but I always thought I was average minded, but I wasn’t. I removed my own restrictions and said, what if you see, we’ve lost a sense of wonder in our culture. We don’t wonder anymore. You show me someone who has wonder and curiosity, they won’t be depressed, but we don’t honor wonder anymore.

DWIGHT: Well, that’s the part that can sometimes be hard. I think that’s one of the reasons why you see people with more creative personalities, artists and performers and people who do whatever they do to create art and things. The reputation is that that type of personality lends itself to extreme moods, to depression, to those kinds of things. I think it has more to do with what you said. It’s the shaming and the lack of value we place on that, that teaches people that it’s not okay to be the way you are. If you draw a picture when you’re a little kid, hey, great, good for you. And oh, wow, it might even be quite good. But then if you start drawing something later on, at some point it’s like, well, I mean, a lot of people would look at that and say, if you haven’t monetized it, and heaven forbid you want to do that for a living or something. And there’s just all these things that the shame starts to pile on. And I think that being shoved into the expectation of a non-creative or non-artistic or non-whatever it is that we are, or even if we’re in a field, and I’ve known tons of people, I’ll use, let’s say someone who’s an accountant. An accountant can be quite creative. Now they don’t want to be too creative in certain ways because they go to jail, but they can be creative in how they solve problems and approach things. But what are people in that line of work told again and again and again is they’re not a creative, right? So we’re shoved into some of these boxes. That’s where I think some of that depression comes from is the rejection of the core self of who we want.

MEL: Yes, I agree with you. And so we’re shoved into boxes and we compartmentalize ourselves. But the problem is the way we operate as a culture, which is a curiosity. Could you imagine a classroom where the students weren’t graded for getting the right answer, but the students were graded for asking the best question. The teacher asks a question, you think you have the answer, the kid’s hand goes up. It’s boring, it’s dull. Imagine grading kids by asking the best question. The best question doesn’t have an answer. It gets us all thinking. We have to embrace not knowing. We have to embrace confusion. But you see, there is shame in our culture about not knowing. People avoid it. They think they’re fearful. What will they think of me? I’m stupid. I’m ignorant. Not knowing is the pathway to knowing. I have to embrace not knowing to break through and know.

DWIGHT: Is that why you were excited when you knew that there was going to be a change, but you didn’t know what it was yet? You were already starting to feel the excitement of not knowing?

MEL: Very much so.

DWIGHT: I see.

MEL: Thrill is the right word. But I knew, probably based on my personality type, that I was not going to be content being a traditional therapist, so to speak. I needed to find another way, a way that resonated with me. When people would ask me, where were you trained? I’d say, trained? I’m not an animal in the zoo. Why would I want to be trained? I want to keep my mind as open as I can. Training is a singular narrowing of the mind view. No thanks. I want my mind open. And I want to be able to rethink and reconsider and change my mind.

DWIGHT: Valerie Probst-Field is a therapist who does some podcasting and things, too. We just had a recording a little while ago, so it’s kind of fresh in my mind. She does a lot about motherhood, and she used this specifically with motherhood, but it applies to all kinds of roles in our life. Do we look at a role as a noun or a verb? Is it like, oh, and in our industry, it’s rife with this. I’m a therapist. That’s my identity. And to me, it reminds me of the role you play being a verb. I’m doing therapy. And how do I do therapy? It’s not like, oh, I am this thing, and then all of a sudden, there’s weird expectations that maybe come with that, instead of being like, yeah. And I think it’s great to draw inspiration from lots of different sources, particularly because a lot of the information that is really, really helpful, take somebody who wants to learn about mindfulness, yeah, you Google it. And I can share a lot about mindfulness with a client, but they can Google it and find out a lot more wise things than I’m going to say. But what do I bring into it is I bring in things that I assimilate. And I mean, ask my clients that I’ve worked with over the years how many times I’ve quoted The Simpsons, for example, because comedy and some of those kinds of things and fiction speaks really loudly to me, and I get insights in that realm that I don’t get by reading a textbook or something. So drawing that inspiration from other sources and letting a little bit of you and what speaks to you come into the interactions with people, I think is very powerful. I think it’s very-

MEL: I agree completely. And by the way, when people ask me what I do, meaning for a living, I’m almost reluctant to say I’m a therapist, because it’s a mind speak about what a therapist is. See, coming back to words, Newton’s worldview, which I’ve done so much work on trying to transcend it, is about a worldview of fixed objective reality. The quantum worldview is that it’s flowing, the reality is participatory making, it’s making itself up and nothing is objective, it’s in flow. I read about and came to realize that when people ask me, why is it taking us so long to shift out of the 17th century worldview into this new worldview? And my answer is, there are eight common words that we use in virtually every sense. And those are the to be verbs.

MEL: Is, am, were, was, be, been. These are the only verbs that are static, inert, they’re not moving. Now every time we talk and use a to be verb, we are static and we’re making objective reality. I am. That means I’m not changing. There’s no flow, there’s no movement, you are. So instead of saying you are in an argument, you say, may I tell you how I experience you? That could be open. But when you say you are, objective statement, done. Doesn’t work. So early in my career as a therapist, a therapist across the whole would say, can I speak to you about a client I have, Jane has ADHD. And I say, what do you mean she has ADHD or Jane is bipolar? I said, bipolar is a word. It’s a description that a team of psychiatrists coined to describe certain behavior they think they see as a description, no issue. But you turned it into a thing. Jane is bipolar. The is, it’s the problem. And it’s ruinous in our arguments, in our discussions. That’s why everything breaks down. Someone will say, change is hard. I’ll have them say, I have a difficult time changing. Now I take ownership of it. Well, let’s look at what we can do differently. Change is hard. Where are you going to go with that? So these words restrict our growth and our movement and keep us stuck in 17th century thinking.

DWIGHT: I’ve been called on that before describing my own bipolarity, my own bipolar diagnosis. My prescriber did that to me once. That sort of cultural shorthand snuck out where it was like, well, I mean, since I’m bipolar and he’s like, well, you know better. Because he knows me and we work in the same area. He’s like, yeah, no, well, would you let someone else do that to themselves? And I was like, oh, I didn’t think about it that way. But you’re right. It’s this label that I even, I was putting that on myself. And I might be more cognizant of that when I’m working with a client and say, well, what’s that label mean? Why are we calling ourselves that? And but yet did it to myself, right?

MEL: That’s right.

DWIGHT: I’d love to say it was a long time ago and I’ve learned so much. No, but it wasn’t that long ago. It was more recent.

MEL: But that’s the self-reflection. But the self-reflection, as you know, of course, is altogether healthy. But when it slides along the continuum to be self-critical, and I don’t mean critical, but critical thinking is important as a culture. We have lost critical thinking. So we operate from a belief, but it doesn’t work out. So do we go back to the belief and say, well, that belief isn’t working out? Why am I adhering to that belief? There’s a lack of critical thinking in our culture. I find it frightful. So critical thinking is how did I come to that belief? What makes me think that belief is valid? It requires some scrutiny. But how many people do we know to do that?

DWIGHT: Yeah. It occurs to me, too, that one of the things where, and in your terminology, too, we go against the inseparability part of our core, who we are, is when we also put that out at others. If it’s a bad thing for me to label myself that way and look at me as that’s my whole person, how much worse than or equally, I don’t know, I don’t want to compare it, but it’s also bad to throw that at other people, right? I mean, you mentioned we’re staffing a client here and we say, well, she or he’s bipolar, they’re autistic, they’re this, they’re that. And it’s like, well, why are we doing that to them then? Instead of saying, here’s the things that they struggle with or whatever.

MEL: That is so. And I wrote an article I called the diagnosis madness, which is that the DM needs a diagnosis, DSM needs a diagnosis. The diagnosis is they forgot that they made all this stuff up and it just descriptions. And then we think of it as real. Now I learned that from philosophy. It’s called reification. Reification is my mind makes something up, which can be productive and inventive, but then I forgot I made it up and I think it’s real. And I understand that mind constructed. So every diagnosis we have is useful as a description, but they’re not real things.

DWIGHT: Yeah, I’ve always thought of diagnosis as if you put a bunch of people in a big room and let’s say it’s everyone in the world. And I like to use eye health as a good example of this. Let’s say you put everybody in a big room and you say, how well can everybody see? Well, this group of people, they seem to see things close up easier than far away. Let’s call them nearsighted. These people seem to say the opposite. Let’s call them farsighted. That’s a word, as you put it, it’s a term. We made it up to describe something. Now does that mean we know everything about the way the eye works just because we said that? And also does it mean, by the way, there’s a whole spectrum of different ways that people who might, what about people who struggle with both? We need a new name. And it’s helpful, as you put it, it’s a description. It helps us maybe categorize in a way that’s like, oh, okay, if I approach this, but even then we can fall into a trap if I think, well, everybody who’s been diagnosed with X is going to react badly to this and well to this. We’re not really doing any services there. We got to now, does it help to have a sense of that, of with cases of addiction, there’s usually trauma associated with it. It’s good to know. But does that mean day one, someone walks in my office and says, I’m here for addiction. I go, oh, you’ve had, you have trauma. You must have PTSD.

MEL: It’s that reductionist way of thinking. So I also look at other contexts, which is in the United States, in anyone’s lifetime, they have a one out of three chance of having a diagnosable mental illness. One out of three people, 120 million people. So I step back and I said, well, wait a minute, there’s something terribly wrong here. We are victimizing the victim. In other words, if we live in a way that is creating all this disharmony and distress, we need to look at the way we’re living. Why do we have an epidemic of mental illness? Instead of just pointing our finger and diagnosing the individual and medicating them, we say, wait a minute, maybe the way we’re living makes no sense because there’s a cultural and environmental influence. It’s not just the individual. You have to look at a larger context.

DWIGHT: It’s interesting when you point that out. And sometimes you look at the difference here and you think of, what’s the term, endemic, right? If it’s just normal and bad versus epidemic, meaning a spike. And you’re describing kind of almost that there’s a transitionary feeling there of being like, is this just our, if our normal is so much depression, so much anxiety, maybe we do need to question the normal instead.

MEL: Well, I look at that in terms of reading about this horrible realm, a statistic of anxiety with young people. And I look at it and I said, well, it makes sense to me that they have such anxiety. Why? In many parts of the country, we are stealing childhood from children, unintentional child abuse. So then that child doesn’t have free time, play time, creative time, curiosity time, adventure time. Everything is scheduled. And I work with very affluent clientele, so it’s even worse there. So in third grade, that kid’s being groomed to get into an Ivy League school. They buckle under that pressure, right? So parents don’t understand that success doesn’t bring happiness. It may bring suicide if it’s fostered in an unreasonable way. So why is there this outbreak of anxiety amongst kids? Because they’ve lost childhood. They’re being treated as young adults at tender ages of being children.

MEL: So I realized this before I ever became a therapist. My son comes home with his fifth grade report card that’s a bit disappointing. I give him the normal conversation. He looks at me, he says, Dad, I’m just in fifth grade. I’m just a kid. My grades don’t count. When I get to high school, I’ll get on it. So I thought, he’s kind of saying to me, like, you know, in baseball, in spring training, the exhibition season, you don’t try to play to win, you try to get into shape. And he’s saying to me, I’m just a kid. Would you let me just be a kid? And it just stunned me, the wisdom. I see, you know, that was 25 years ago. Now I see this outbreak, this unintentional child abuse, where we’re turning children into these robotic, calculating, inquisitive people. And by the way, there’s no intellectual curiosity being developed. What grade did you get on that? What did your teacher say? Did you hand your report in? Are parents saying to kids, what do you think about that? What are your thoughts about that?

MEL: You know, Columbus is a hero. But if you live in a different part of the world, Columbus would be a villain. A lot of people got slaughtered. The victors, the conquerors got to write the history book. How different would it be if the other people were like, you create an intellectual curiosity. There’s an absence of that.

DWIGHT: In fact, it’s seen as so threatening a lot of times. Columbus is a good example. I like to play around with that once in a while and test the waters with people and say, yeah, it’s Columbus Day.Some people, I’m not sure. He’s kind of a jerk, right? Try that and see what people do, right? People, oh, I have this sacred view because that’s what I’ve been told about Columbus. And I’m not trying to get all lost in the weeds on Columbus. But to even suggest, right? People have such a strong reaction. And I think that our brains are so good at, whether it’s confirmation bias or we just kind of repeat the cycles of what, to use your word, trained. It’s interesting because I mean, I use that word in therapy all the time when I talk about the ways that we’ve been from trauma or abuse or whatever, we get trained, right? The way we’re treated as a training. And I like how you compared that to like an animal being trained to jump through a hoop, right? We get trained to start abusing ourselves eventually with those expectations, you know, when even when there’s no one around for us.

MEL: And so that training comes from parents, school, the culture at large. There’s this tremendous drive toward consensual reality where people are afraid to be autonomous themselves. And that’s why people are lacking in resilience. Ralph Waldo Emerson did a great piece on resilience. Resilience comes from not having to follow the path of conformity. Follow my own path. That’s resilient.

DWIGHT: It’s funny when you mentioned the achievement based kind of thing. I think that it’s interesting that any of us who’ve been through a letter grade system growing up, right? A doesn’t really stand for anything. B doesn’t really stand for anything. C doesn’t stand for anything. D doesn’t stand for anything. And let’s skip E by the way, so that we can, this is in a field by the way, that is professionally known for educating. We’re going to skip a letter and we all know what F stands for, right? F is a word. It’s not just, it’s fail. And by the way, let’s get E out of there because we can’t think of a properly shaming word with E. So we want to put a big red F and we all know what it means, you know? So it is an interesting emphasis that we have to say none of the other letter grades have an automatic name. You know, C.

MEL: That’s a good point, Dwight. And we don’t have a better word for failed, which is not yet succeeded.

DWIGHT: Sure.

MEL: I didn’t just succeed. That doesn’t mean I failed. Failed means game over. Finished. End of the day.

DWIGHT: In education, right, even just saying like what it really should represent. And I think, and there’s plenty of good teachers who do look at it this way and try to teach the students, but we use the same concept to say instead of fail, right? And we just say like, oh, I haven’t grasped that concept yet. That’s what a test is supposed to measure. It’s not supposed to measure if I’m a good enough person. But I think to that feeling of pressure, we tie that and so much of it also goes into the economics of the situation, you know, to say as, as a college degrees became like more and more necessary for more and more jobs and more and more assumed and as the cost and debt go up and as the need for salaries increased and cost of living, also what’s gone up is academic dishonesty, right? There’s only so many that have done where people cheat, but then you look at it and say if you’ve got, if, if school and education, it feels like a, pardon me, the violence of the expression, but a gun to my head and I, and failure is not an option if I’m going to be able to do all the things I’d like to do in my life. Well, it makes a little more sense to be a little more flexible about the ethics of that, right? And not just saying that leads to that. Like, you know, you’d, you’d throw a bunch of eggs and chocolate chips and flour in a bowl and put it in the oven and you get cookies out and say, how did these get here? You know, that doesn’t make any sense.

MEL: Yeah. Yeah. Just an enigmatic mystery.

DWIGHT: Yeah.

MEL: But, but that notion of fail in all aspects of life, not just a grade is horrific. It’s damaging and punishing. I didn’t yet succeed. I’ll keep at it until I do.

DWIGHT: Yeah. And may the way, by the way, maybe I don’t have to succeed equally at everything. Maybe it’s not my thing, you know.

MEL: But we live in this cultural drive for success. I was working years ago with a nationally seeded tennis player. And I asked him out of curiosity, you play any other sports? He said, no. I said, never. He said, never. I said, how come? He said, I just wasn’t excellent at anything else. I said, so you wouldn’t play a sport unless you were excellent at it. He said, yeah, of course. I said, wow.

MEL: When I was a kid, I loved playing baseball. I was just average. I imagined myself to be Mickey Mantle, but I was average. I wouldn’t have given up for anything. You see how the experience becomes all consumed by the stamp of how good you are, how excellent you are. I watch guys on the golf course, recreational golfers, and they’re throwing hissy fits, shit fits all over the place, throwing their clubs out. I said, you’re not in the tournament. This isn’t your career. Have fun. But this drive for excellence is part of the underbelly of anxiety and depression. At least I think so.

DWIGHT: It makes, well, it works for me. I know I think so too, and I think that’s what we see with a lot of people and how they’re reacting to it. And are we really so far out of step with where we should be because of how we feel, or is it because of some of these things we interact with? And that begs that question. Am I insane or am I sane in an insane place? You know, that kind of a thing, right? That’s how we’re.

MEL: Ultimately, the distinction falls away, right? Because a distinction is something our mind made up, right?

DWIGHT: Right. Those are labels too. Yeah. Speaking of, I mentioned the Simpsons earlier. There’s a famous classic episode of the Simpsons where Homer Simpson goes through some weird series of events, goes into a mental institution, asylum kind of award. And he asks them at some point, how can you even tell who’s sane and who’s insane? And they stamp his hand and it says this big red insane on his hand. They go, it’s very simple. The insane people have that stamp on their hand.

DWIGHT: So well, this is, I mean, this has been such a great conversation. I could just keep going and going with it. I’m really grateful for you. I always like to ask everybody if they have a suggestion of a nonprofit, a way to give back to the community or connect with people, maybe a specific charity, something that’s near and dear to your heart. It can be related to absolutely anything. Doesn’t have to be, especially because I’ve learned from you about how inseparable everything is. So I guess it is connected no matter what it is.

MEL: Well, for me, there are many tragedies in life, but when I see young lives come to an end either through suicide or addiction, that’s just so morally reprehensible. So I don’t have a favorite or particular charity, but I would say any charity that does some good work to save young lives.

DWIGHT: Great. No, that’s important. A very important movement, because especially speaking of endemic, that’s a whole other episode we could spin into about that, that problem being there. And I always like to include too, right? There’s also the loss of damage of quality of life. Statistically speaking, more people, right, have their quality of life damaged than have their life actually ended. So they’re both hand in hand. Yeah, I really appreciate that mention for people out there to look and remember that. And Mel, I really appreciate you taking the time to be here today. I feel very, very fortunate.

MEL: It’s a really charged, interesting conversation that you participate with. So it’s my pleasure being on the show with you.

MEL: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #132 Quantum Physics and Psychotherapy first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz episode 131 asks a simple question: How is your relationship with yourself?

The most important relationship we’ll have in our lives is our relationship with ourselves. So, how’s it going? Do you like yourself? In your self-talk, are you validating, or negative? Do you allow yourself the time, space, and energy to nurture yourself?

How we treat ourselves is often reflected in how we treat others. In this episode, I explain why our own personal, inner sense of success is the key to sustaining happiness in life.

I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a guest on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit. Of course, your anonymity will be respected if that’s your wish.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Today I’m going to be speaking very directly to the possibilities that await us or the possibilities that we deny ourselves by taking a dive into looking at our relationship with our own self on the most subtle and on the most personal level. Considering do you like yourself? Do you validate yourself? What are the messages you give yourself?

What is the intimate relationship with yourself that perhaps or most likely you’ve never even considered because that my friends is the source of how you’re going to experience your life and how other people are going to experience you. The thought to share this topic came to me while I was facilitating a therapy session just today.

I was working with a woman who is a physician and she works in the hospital and at times she is on call. Now this is not a young woman right out of medical school. She’s approaching middle age and has children and is married and when she is on call perhaps once a week it is ruinous. We understand sleep hygiene, being on call means sleep deprivation, grave consequences but the reason I was looking at her being on call and going along with it was around how she didn’t value herself. So I started to ask some questions.

Do you have to be on call? She hesitated a bit and said to me, well probably not. Well then why are you on call? Would there be negative consequences to your not being on call? She shrugged her shoulders and said no. Then why are you causing harm to your health, your well-being, your family by suffering terrible sleep deprivation at least once a week?

We talked about this for weeks. We talked about it perhaps for months until I could urge her to get to the place of finally agreeing to address it with her supervisor at work. Well today she had great news. She had the meeting and she is no longer on call. I thought, wow cause for celebration. How is she feeling about herself? Did she give herself a pat on the back at least or share this great information in the celebratory way around what she did for herself? And she looked at me like I was speaking another language that she was not conversant with. She said, give myself a pat on the back, feel good? No, I’m too busy to do that. I don’t have the time.

I proposed to her that of course she has the time. It’s just a moment’s reflection, but I’m too busy. I have so much to do. I moved from one task to the next. I explained to her that she was like the cog in the machine. You know that cog in Newton’s worldview machine that I’ve spoken about? She was part of that machine and the cog with no inner relationship with herself other than how she was facilitating getting through her tasks of the day, day in and day out. But she was not cultivating any kind of relationship with herself.

Your primary relationship in life is your relationship with yourself, not with your spouse, your children or your parents and not with work. It’s your relationship with yourself. Depriving yourself of happiness results in depression or at the least just blindly going through life day in and day out like a hamster on a wheel.

So I shared with her a story personally. I had never really devoted myself to being in shape, working out, exercising. When I was young and at any point in life, I never had any issues with weight. So the motivation to work out, to lose weight was not there for me. But as the years go by, I’ve come to understand clearly that if I want to be healthy and live an optimal life and thwart disease and slow down aging, I need to be fit. I already take great care of my nutrition, but I needed exercise. So I’ve gotten the habit of what I’m going to call power walking or it’s called power walking. It looks silly. I’m walking, but racing as fast as I can.

And I recently purchased an Oura ring, which I greatly recommend, which allows me to track everything including my fitness. So I have a path that I take once a day and it’s a mile and I time it. And it’s a power walk. And I had been doing 15 minutes or 16 minutes to power walk the mile, but I got competitive with myself. I wanted to get my heart rate up. I wanted to get into better shape. And so I kept knocking off 10, 15, 20 seconds off my time. Then intermittently through the power walk, I begin to jog. Ultimately, the jog turned into a bit of a sprint. So over that mile, three or four times, I would sprint for maybe a hundred yards. I was having a hard time, however, breaking my personal barrier of a 14 minute mile. This weekend, I did it. 13 minutes and 55 seconds, my power walk mile.

I was proud as a peacock. I came home. I told my wife, I told my children, I texted them. I texted my brother. I was proud of myself.

That’s the key. I was proud of myself. I shared this with my client. I felt good about me. Could I say I was too busy to feel good about me? That would be ridiculous. In fact, I wasn’t too busy to choose not to share it with those I loved and cared about. I congratulated myself. It just took a moment. I explained to my client that I wouldn’t say I don’t have the time. It’s a moment. I asked her to think about what is her life’s purpose. Is it simply her productivity? How about cultivating a relationship with herself? Do you feel good about yourself? Invite it in. Allow it.

A relationship with yourself is a mirror to your relationship with everyone else. I was curious about this absence, this void of her allowing herself to feel good about herself. So we explored her childhood and not for the first time. And I learned that her reward, her affirmation from her parents was about moving successfully from one achievement to the next. But she never felt special. As a child, she never felt special as a person. She never learned how to nurture herself, whether it’s her health, her nutrition, her parenting, her work as a physician. It was robotic. She’d been going through life robotically. And with that, her only takeaway ultimately was, I don’t matter. I just have work to do. I have to function. And I don’t matter. There are things to get done. I’m off to my next task.

Not coming up for air and acknowledging herself, not nurturing herself. You know, you can be successful and you can be productive and you can value yourself as well. That’s what I call inner success. Inner success, valuing yourself leads to happiness. Happiness requires inner success. You can have all of the external success and achievement and rewards in life, but it’s going to leave you incomplete and shallow if you don’t allow yourself inner success, feel good about yourself.

Look at yourself. Think about yourself. Smile to yourself. I did well.

For her, it was stepping out of the straight jacket and conformity of life and asking her supervisor or insisting that she just couldn’t be on call anymore. By not being on call, she could open up to treating herself well. But the next step is where we ventured today. And it was an opening up to rewarding herself financially. How many of us go through life without the gratification of emotionally rewarding ourselves, feeling good about herself? And by the way, when you do that, you have a tremendous reserve of happiness and gratitude and good feelings that you can share with others. They experience you entirely differently.

So the takeaway for today is life is about much more than the work, the business, the challenges and the tasks of life. The source to a life well lived is to have a joyful, healthy, inner relationship with yourself where the first person to feel good about you is not someone external to you. Feel good about yourself. That doesn’t mean that you’re turning a blind eye to things that you need to be self-critical about. It doesn’t mean that at all. It just means you’re nurturing yourself. And if you nurture yourself, then you are in a position to nurture others.

So give this some thought. Are you kind to yourself? Do you have thoughts and feelings where you embrace yourself and take that step forward in your own unity? If you don’t, ask yourself what’s in the way and get started. And if you do, keep it going and give yourself more of it. It’s joyful.

Until next time, be well and nurture yourself.

Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #131 Do You Nurture Yourself? first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

Let’s talk about aging not just gracefully, but positively, in The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz episode 130.

While we might find it easy to adopt a negative attitude toward aging as we move into our fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond, there are many positive aspects to aging.

Embracing the rewards of aging can quite literally help keep us young in every way save the chronological. In this episode, I’ll list a few of the advantages and benefits to positive aging, and help you achieve the necessary shift of mind for this healthy perspective.

I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a guest on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit. Of course, your anonymity will be respected if that’s your wish.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Hello everyone. We’re going to explore the topic around the concept of aging. What does the word aging typically imply historically? Well, it’s limiting. We age, we’re running out of youthful vitality. We’re running out of possibilities ordinarily. We’re winding down the clock, our biological clock.

The notion of aging is depressing. It’s narrowing. It speaks about a retreat from life. But there is a new vista of aging occurring and some of it has to do with the profound medical advances. As we come into certain ages, 60s, 70s, 80s, even 90s, people are medically fit. You can be physically fit. Last week I read about a 93 year old man who could get his heart rate up to 136 beats per minute almost instantly. He was just focused on rowing and lifting weights.

But here’s the good news. He didn’t begin this exercise regimen until he was 73. He’s a youthful 93.

The data, the research, the scientific breakthroughs about staying fit and healthy and conscious and sentient well into our 80s and 90s and arguably we’re moving towards centurions living well. This is all available to us, but not if we don’t open to a new mindset.

I’m speaking on this topic because I’m entering that place myself. It’s hard for me to believe that I am in my 70s. I think as though I’m in my 40s or 50s, I feel fitter and healthier than I have in 30 years. Yet I’m aware of my age, but I’m not acting that age. What we think and how we feel and how we act is what really tells us our age. We shouldn’t reduce ourselves to this notion of biological age. Our age is more a factor of how we think, how we feel and how we see.

So this notion of positive aging, of wellness requires a shift of mind. One of the advantages we have when we come into a certain age, hopefully it allows us to access wisdom. And what is wisdom? It’s about knowing how to live well. It’s about understanding what really matters, not getting caught up in the grind and the conveyor belt of conventionality and conformity and competing and just acquiring. We come to the place where we see that, well, maybe it was something we chose to go through or had to go through, but now it doesn’t matter.

What really matters? Peace of mind, close relationships and a reason for living. Curiosity is the key to aging. Well, curiosity is such an essential at any age, but curiosity provokes new learning. Every day waking up with something new to learn, to develop, to experience. These are the things that really matter, especially when we have completed taking care of many of the challenges and necessities that come with earlier in life, raising a family.

There is an integrity that is available to us when we reach a certain age. That integrity is being in harmony with our own self. Again, being at peace with yourself and choosing to be at peace with others. This leaves us with the ability for a gratifying life, meaning and purpose.

You know, earlier in life, we don’t seek meaning and purpose and it’s probably because we don’t have a philosophy for living well. You cannot live well without meaning and purpose in your life. So as we age and we are not distracted by so many of the things that we were earlier, the meaning and purpose may involve a spiritual reckoning, which is what is my life all about? And as I’ve mentioned before, the fear of death just is so decimating. Open up, talk about it, discuss it with friends, relatives, other people, come to your own spiritual awareness. What does it mean to you? Is it the end of your physical being? Is it the end of your being?

You know, asking those questions like, what would I do differently if I could live my life over? Well, the next moment is an ability to live your life differently. Tomorrow is an ability to live your life differently. You don’t need to be young. You just need to be present and to be curious and developing new relationships, new interests, having new experiences are not just for the young at heart.

You can still choose to live your life without regrets. You may not go jump out of a plane and parachute. You may not take on risky things physically, but you can take on risks emotionally and psychologically with positive aging. You know, one of the risks that people often don’t take is the conversations they’ve never had. Boy, how that constrains us. The conversations that you could have that you never did because you chose to play it safe. Choose not to play it safe.

What’s the risk? Have those conversations. Open up, ask new questions of yourself and of others. There are so many opportunities that await us with the concept of positive aging.

But first we have to shift the paradigm. If you’re feeling you’re aging physically and mentally, it is not too late. Stop. Try a new path. Devote yourself to eating well, to exercising, to stretching your mind. You know, stretch your mind with new thinking and new learning. Creates an absolutely new experience of life. And it’s never too late to develop new relationships. And those relationships don’t need to be with people of our own age. I’ve developed relationships with the young people who I go out and buy a cup of coffee from in the morning. The baristas, we start to chat. I ask them about their lives. They open up. I can start to mentor them. That gives me a meaning and a purpose.

Of course, my work provides enormous meaning and purpose for me, but for everybody listening, think about what would provide you with meaning and purpose. What path can you venture down that you’ve never explored before and never opened up to before? Take those risks. There is vitality and energy and stepping into new terrain, asking new questions, having new experiences and devoting yourself to your wellness, not to the self-limiting narrowing of aging. Choose differently and you can experience the great rewards of positive aging replete with wisdom, meaning, purpose, and integrity. Go for it and model that for all the younger people around you.

Let’s return to an earlier age. Let’s return to earlier epics in history when elderly people were revered. And you know what? I don’t like the word elderly either. Drop that language. Forget about age. Venture forth in life. Be positive about yourself and your experiences and harvest all the rewards that are available to you right now.

Go for it, my friends.

Until next time, positive aging to you, no matter what age you are. Be well and I look forward to seeing you soon. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #130 The Rewards of Positive Aging first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.

The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz episode 129 is inspired by a book I’m reading around the time I recorded this, Determined by Robert Sapolsky. What is free will? Has Sapolsky proven it doesn’t exist? What are the implications?

Listen as I argue that free will can be considered from an approach other than the purely scientific, and how that holistic perspective is central to my own commitment to help you escape the influences of your past experience in order to embrace possibility and live a rich and fulfilling life.

I’d love to hear what you think! Be sure to leave a comment with your own thoughts and questions!

Don’t miss a single Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz! Subscribe for free in iTunes / Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or, simply copy / paste the RSS link directly into the podcast app of your choice!

If you enjoy The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, please take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes / Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It only takes a few minutes, and adding your review is as easy as clicking this link.

Your rating and review helps raise the visibility of The Possibility Podcast with Mel Schwartz, especially on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, which is one of the biggest podcasting platforms today. More visibility for the show means more listeners… and that growth means the show reaches — and helps — more people like you.

Thank you!

Help others when Mel helps you: Contact Mel and find out how you can be a guest on the show and ask Mel a question. He’ll put the Possibility Principle to work for you, and your conversation will be recorded for use in a future episode of the podcast so other listeners can benefit. Of course, your anonymity will be respected if that’s your wish.

Hello everybody and welcome to The Possibility Podcast. I’m your host Mel Schwartz. I practice psychotherapy, marriage counseling, and I am the author of the book The Possibility Principle, the companion to this podcast. I hope to be your thought provocateur and I’ll be introducing you to new ways of thinking and a new game plan for life.

Today we’re going to dive into one aspect of the nature of possibility. Possibility on the human level kind of implies that we have free will. If we don’t have free will, then what is possible and what is not possible has nothing to do with us.

I have just been reading a fascinating book on the nature of free will. It is called Determined and the author is Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurology, and neurological sciences at Stanford University. Very, very noteworthy intellectual scholar. And virtually everything he’s written has caused a visceral, a deep visceral reaction in me. I cannot dispute his empirical research and science and perhaps his conclusions. And yet on an innately intuitive and visceral level, I want to scream, I want to argue. It’s contrary to my core beliefs.

Sapolsky suggests that we are a product of our lived experience. And by this he means that our DNA, our biology, the society and culture and subculture that we are in, our cultural norms, our lived experiences, all create a scenario by which we may think that we’re consciously making decisions and choices, but they’re all rather programmed into us, not in a simplistic, reductive way, but in what he calls an emergent complexity. The variables are rather infinite, but in their infinite complexity, they form our decision making process and that we make decisions without even knowing that we are making them. It’s actually our neurons firing and making our decisions for us, even if we are unaware that we have already made the decision.

The conclusion from his thesis is astounding. We are at the mercy of our lived experience and our neurons, and therefore there’s no fault, there’s no blame because there’s no free will. In other words, Sapolsky’s proposing that there is no actual intentionality because our will is not free, it is a complex that is decided for us. If there’s no free will, the entire basis of jurisprudence of the legal system falls away because number one, nobody is to blame, nobody can be held at fault if we have no free will. And furthermore, there’s no issue of intentionality. We are simply biologically reactive on the level beneath our conscious attention.

Taking Sapolsky’s thesis even further, there’s no morality. How can we have a moral code absent of free will? If we have no ability to behave or not behave, to act or not act in a certain way, Sapolsky would be arguing that we are imprisoned by everything that has preceded us and we are not agents of free will. So the absence of free will means it’s all in our programming and it’s all predetermined.

Again, not in a reductive way, but what Sapolsky calls emergent complexity. There is such insane amount of complexity going on and our decision is made even before our brain is aware of the decision.

I am only halfway through the book, but my reaction is so strong and the dissonance is tremendous because his arguments sound scientifically valid. I’m certainly in no position to argue them, but every aspect of my intuitive being wants to cry out in objection. After all, I am a proponent, a passionate proponent of consciousness, of sentience, of rising above our biological limitations. And my life and my work is devoted toward helping everyone, myself included, to attaining the greatest capacity for free will that we can. Boy, you can just begin to appreciate how this book has triggered me.

Now, have you ever in your life felt an instinct or an urge to do something that you knew was wrong, morally wrong, legally wrong, ethically wrong, and you chose not to do it? Let’s suppose it’s infidelity or an adolescent excitement of stealing something and not getting caught and perhaps you didn’t do it and you didn’t do it opposed to your instinct to do it because you had a moral consideration, you knew it was wrong. And I guess Sapolsky would argue that if you didn’t do it, that was part of your programming. I appreciate this argument, but I think of it differently.

I think of embracing the dissonance between what we want and what we think is right or what we think will cause pain or harm to another or to our own self. Embracing that dissonance is where creativity and growth lie. That’s the emergent field for me, that dissonance. How about the free will to break past the harms that have been done to you if you have been abused or you grew up in a childhood absent of love or nurturing? Can you break past those harms done toward you by emerging in a healthy, sensible way and living a life full of vitality? Of course you can. I can appreciate what Sapolsky’s argument would be, but my argument is that when we rise above the limitations of our neurons and the functioning of our brain, there is consciousness, there is sentience, a deeper manifestation of creative intelligence. For us, leaving Sapolsky’s argument aside, what does free will mean to us on a more mundane, non-scientific level?

Free will requires the ability, the freedom to break free from our past in some way, to choose differently than we’ve been inclined to choose. That’s where growth emerges. But freedom, having the freedom from not attaching to conformity is a large part of free will. Think about the stress and the imposition of societal and cultural norms of conformity, what we can or can’t say, how we can or can’t dress, how we can or can’t engage one another. We are robotic in our acquiescence to societal conformity. Think about children at play. How have they learned the rules of engagement of a culture? Children have not yet conformed, but in an all too early age, our culture, our parenting teaches children to come into conformity, to act and behave in a certain way, in a programmed way.

Ultimately, free will for me requires freedom from old thought and old felts. So remember, and I have shared this any number of times and wrote about it extensively in my book, The Possibility Principle, old thought imprisons us. Throughout our lives, we continue to replicate hundreds of thousands, arguably millions of times the same recurring old thoughts. And when we have old thoughts, they summon up the old feelings, the old felts that attach to those thoughts. We certainly can’t access free will when we are imprisoned by old thought.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead created the term which I had never seen before, I think he created it, that term is concrescence. Concrescence is the stirring of energy before a material thing becomes material. In other words, he’s proposing that energy is stirring in a certain way before it becomes material. I worked with his notion of concrescence to develop the ability to know that it’s the stirring, the energy that ultimately becomes a thought. Now that’s just a nanosecond, but in that nanosecond, feeling that energy preceding the thought allows me to see the thought break free from the thought and just see it and say, ah, that’s an old thought, it’s an old feeling, I’m not going there. In that nanosecond, and to use a quantum physics terminology in that state of superposition where I am poised in a place of infinite possibility, boy is there free will there. It’s a learned skill, but you can learn how to do it.

So the intention here is to be able to become the master, to see my old thoughts and my old feelings and not succumb to them. In that nanosecond between the thoughts and the feelings that I’ve always had, in that nanosecond I exist in the state of pure possibility. Now pure possibility is of course free will.

How do you actualize this intention to break free from the past? The past could be the past moment, the past lifetime, the past decade. I’m sure you know some people and see some people who seem to access change easily. Is that because it’s in their programming as Sapolsky would propose? Or is it they have access to that level of consciousness, they’ve broken free from the constraints of old thought?

Becoming conscious, becoming sentient, sentient is self-awareness, awareness of my thought. Becoming conscious and sentient, breaking free from the grip of old thought allows us to transcend the amalgam, the conglomeration of all our past experiences. Now it doesn’t change our DNA, an argument Sapolsky might make, but remember DNA is not an imprint of a direction you have to take, it is simply a suggestive state, you can shift the direction that antenna is programming you in. In a way what I’m speaking about here is the field of epigenetics, in which shifting our environment, shifting our consciousness allows us to break free of the grip of direct programming of DNA.

So to transcend this complex amalgam of our past experience to access consciousness and sentience requires breaking free of the conglomeration of old thought and old felts and old beliefs, temporarily suspending them. I’m not proposing that you can go through your life without having thought and feeling, but it’s in that moment, in that nanosecond when you can break free from it, that you can choose differently, and choosing differently on every level, to me, looks like free will.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, experiences and comments on this very, very intriguing dilemma. Until next time, wishing you the freest will that your free will can provide for you, as long as you do no harm to yourself and do no harm to others. Looking forward to talking with you again soon.

Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Possibility Podcast. I welcome your feedback on this and any episode. Please send me an email at mel at melschwartz.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode at melschwartz.com. If you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to rate and review the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your reviews really help boost the visibility for the show, and it’s a great way for you to show your support. Finally, please make sure to subscribe to the Possibility Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and please remember to always welcome uncertainty into your life and embrace new possibilities.

The post #129 So Do You Think We Have Free Will? first appeared on Mel Schwartz, LCSW.