Psychology Has It Backwards

When events leave people feeling hopeless or afraid, the inclination we have is to share our fear, or to follow people who feel the same.  Yet we know deep down that hopelessness and fear do not solve problems or inspire solutions.  Events have no power to make feel bad or good -- how and what we THINK about events creates our feelings.  As the thinkers, we always have the power to clear our heads...

"Panic" crops up a lot in conversation. "I realized I forgot to finish that report and I panicked."  "Tests always induce panic in me."  "She panicked when her brother uncovered her secret."  The actual experience of panic -- racing heart, shaking,  sweaty palms -- is unpleasant.  We tend to think events and things induce that feeling in us.  But panic is ju...

Most people are taught that productivity makes us feel good about ourselves, proud of our efforts.  It gets linked to well-being.  In truth, when we're not at peace with ourselves, we can't force productivity and if we do a lot of work, it usually leaves us tired and depleted.  When we are at peace in our own minds, feeling at ease and connected to the moment, we are naturally productive...

Because thinking is how we make our way through life, we don't realize that we are always making a choice which thinking to follow and which thinking to turn away from.  When we get caught up in negative thinking, and keep focused on it to try to get out of it, we are innocently holding it in place.  That leads to defining ourselves as negative.  We come to expect it.  With understanding of h...

Why does it matter that we know we are always creating our own experience of life and that only our thinking generates our reality.  No two people create the identical experience.  Realizing this provides us valuable information about how to sidestep disagreements, how to understand other people better, and how to "read" our own and others' moods and reactions.  When we know that th...

"Ego" is whatever we think about ourselves.  Believing those thoughts can result in acting on idiotic ideas.  Such thoughts are illusions we create about what we are or how we should be.  Our thoughts appear real as we're thinking them, but they are no more than illusions we have created.  There is no need to be frightened by illusions that will disappear as soon as we stop thinking...

People often think that the Principles explain why we are tempted to act on negative past thoughts when they come to mind.  We try to assign blame, or rationalize that we were insecure at the time.  We engage our intellect (our memories) to see how/why thinking and behaviors we wanted to put behind us came back.  We find ways to use the Principles to sidestep accountability and acceptance of what...

It's true that the only "reality" we experience is created by our thoughts.  But it's not an excuse for acting on any and every thought we have.  We've heard people who have exposure to the Principles say things like, "Yes, I probably shouldn't have done that.  But when it came to mind, it was so real and compelling to me."  We can't forget we have free...

Many people struggle with decisions.  What to do, what to do?  The usual approach is to mull it over; consider all the options, think carefully, solicit a lot of information.  Our tendency is to engage our intellect in analysis of pros and cons, advice and considerations.  This kind of thinking is exhausting and frustrating.  For every pro, we can think of a con.  There are always new ways to look...

People sometimes assume that if they really "saw" the Principles, they would always be happy.  The truth is, understanding the Principles that describe how we create experience does not lead to any particular emotional outcome; it simply leads us to accept the rollercoaster of life's ups and downs and the range of emotions we feel as they occur as natural and ever-changing.  We do n...

Innate Health is a description of the effect of The Three Principles in action.  Everyone has Innate Health; it is the pure spiritual energy of creation that is aliveness in us.  It is the pure energy we bring to our experience via our power to think.  The Principles have no role in what we think; they describe that we think.  Innate Health is the state we experience when we are in the present mom...

It seems like anxiety is a plague of contemporary life.  Anxiety is a feeling generated from our habit of constant access to an overload of information and entertainment, and the fear of missing out (FOMO in today's internet shorthand).  We've lost our appreciation for stillness, for quiet moments of appreciating beauty and the delight of presence in the moment.  We check our phones cons...

The higher the IQ a person has and the more they have depended on analysis and retention of information, using what they know to "figure out" what to do moment-to-moment, the harder it is for them to trust insights — fresh ideas that just pop up for us.  Many of us have rejected helpful ideas we've had, inspiring new thoughts, because we hadn't analyzed the situation sufficient...

The good news about understanding the Three Principles: We are the thinkers of our own thoughts and we can create anything.  The "bad" news about understanding the Three Principles: We are the thinkers of our own thoughts; our thinking creates our reality; we are totally responsible for our moment-to-moment experience of what our life offers.  For many people who have spent a lot of time...

Chris and Judy confess to their own habitual perfectionism.  We've learned from years of delving deeply into the Principles that it's just a thought not worth taking seriously, and harmless when we can laugh it off or let go of it.  Thoughts that seem vitally important to our happiness or impossible standards we set for ourselves, our lives, or other people, are just ideas that we adopte...

Anger is a warning that we are taking things personally.  Anger rises up when we think that someone or something is making us upset, hurting our feelings, undercutting us, not caring how they impact us.  We stop listening to what is being said and start listening to our own reactions.  We feel or express defensiveness.  Anger is no different from any other experience; OUR thinking creates ALL our...

We have talked before about the potential harm from taking diagnoses seriously.  Diagnoses are a snapshot in time, not the portrait of who you are deep-down.  The manual of Diagnoses the mental health professionals use is a huge catalogue naming observed behaviors of people who appear to be "mentally ill."  From our perspective, they are descriptions of the individual creativity we expre...

When it comes to escaping negative thinking, less is more.  As we become increasingly aware of the Principles at work, we increasingly realize that we always have natural peace of mind available to us and we don't have to manage our thinking to find it.  We know that bad or sad feelings are signals that tell us we are using that power against ourselves.  We become comfortable with ups and dow...

When we have a lot of negative thoughts on our mind, they look very real and upsetting to us and we get the feeling we have to do something about them to get away from them.  Or we get the feeling there must be something wrong with us, and we have to figure them out or discuss them with others to resolve them.  But, as a colleague of ours often used to say, "The life of a thought is as long a...

We created this podcast live with an audience at the Three Principles conference in London.  Chris was on stage in London; Judy was being broadcast from her home in Pittsburgh, appearing on a big screen on stage with Chris.  People often ask how we develop ideas, how long it takes to prepare our material, etc., so we decided to show them.  We asked for a subject from the audience.  Someone respond...

Clients normally seek mental health help when they are facing "problems" they feel they can't resolve.  A question others ask us is, "If you're not paying attention to their problems and helping them to solve them, then why do they keep coming to you?"  Some people are concerned that we "brush off" problems and don't listen to our clients.  Grounding in...

When people become curious about the Three Principles, they often think of our work as a tool to add to their tool kit.  So sometimes it seems confusing when we make a point about not "mixing" the 3P with other approaches.  The reason is that, although there are well-established approaches that do help people, the assumptions of other approaches are that people are affected by circumstan...

There are many expressions that are used when people are sharing the Principles that are easily grasped and interpreted by our intellect, but do not mean what people commonly think they mean.  Our intellect, the repository of everything we have learned or know so far, is quick to jump in and give us easy answers.  That is why we tell people to listen for the feeling, or listen beyond the words.  H...

When we decide we want to change or we feel we need to change, we often work at it.  We try really hard to change.  We come up with strategies; we seek advice; we read self-help books; we go to courses, thinking we'll find a technique, or a means to fix ourselves.  Too often, that leads to hopelessness and discouragement.  Too often we monitor ourselves and force ourselves and get ourselves s...

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