The Dr. Zwig Show

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

Psychology and self help teachings have it wrong by viewing the inner critic as a purely negative feature of the mind, something to try to get rid of by silencing. Since it leads to depression, anxiety, and other problems, it’s seen as a poison of the psyche, a pathology of the soul, a sickness of your psychology. But this misses the fact that the critic’s hurtful words are just its surface manife...

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

What’s the first thing you think of when you feel affected by depression, anxiety, attention deficit, loneliness, trauma conflict, etc? If you’re like most people, it’s, “I wish I could just rid of it.” But this reaction is all wrong. It’s based on a false assumption about why we have problems. It assumes your life issues are personal ordeals with no purpose other than to make you miserable. The o...

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

Music is emotional flow, and there’s literally an emotional flow state trying to happen in you in every moment. If it’s consciously perceived, it manifests as authentic feelings of joy, creativity, love, personal power, spirit, a sense of freedom, etc. If it’s not in your awareness, it manifests as a problem (depression, anxiety, addiction, etc.) that disturbs you in order to force a process of ch...

Your subconscious continually tries to alert and awaken you to your deeper process. It does this by creating intractable problems, dreaming up fateful events, and sending you seemingly random thoughts, feelings, visions, and…musical communications. Songs that pop into your mind aren’t random or meaningless. They don’t suddenly appear just because you heard them recently. Like any thought, feeling,...

Feeling stuck in your life doesn’t mean you’re bad or weak; it means you have a powerful process of growth trying to happen—a heroic calling toward your greater self. The more stuck you feel, the more challenging and numinous the change that’s trying to come forth. But how can you change something that seems impossible? Enter your hero / heroine. Think of a problem you’ve had trouble making progre...

In today’s episode, I discuss one of my clients, Jeremy (his pseudonym), a twenty-year-old man whom everyone thought was crazy because he had stopped speaking. Three psychiatrists had given him three different mental health diagnoses.  I didn’t approach him as someone with a “mental illness” because I don’t believe this pseudoscientific paradigm is useful. I saw him as a young man with a meaningfu...

Each year billions of drug company dollars are spent on media campaigns that exploit the fact that most people don’t know how science works. These campaigns have been astonishingly successful at conveying a distorted picture of the relationship between the brain and mental health.  The public consumes these ideas without being able to vet them and they become accepted, commonplace ways of thinking...

Everyone in your life plays a role in your psychological narrative. Your story already exists as a set of internal dynamics, some of which you’re conscious of, and others which hide deep in the shadows of your psyche. Your process unfolds fate in a way to bring you exactly who you need in your life to reflect your story back to you. It’s a powerful process of unconsciously manifesting your psyche’...

The people that come into your life do so, in part, to awaken you, make you more self-aware, and help you evolve. These peoples’ personalities and actions reflect something in your psyche—not literally, but symbolically. The quality you dislike in them is a quality in yourself you need to embrace more! What!? Yup, you need to become more like them—(again, not literally, especially if they’re mean,...

Envy is a painful process that isn’t easily solved. You can suppress it and focus on a higher power, rationalize it, judge and ban it from your mind, give it negative labels, etc, but all you’re doing is transferring it to your subconscious. Then it stews and figures out how to give you other problems to compensate for being suppressed.  Being envious of someone is the process of projecting your o...

Everyday there’s another famous Instagram model, popular YouTuber, viral Tik-Tokker, or public figure who seems to have it all. If you didn’t already have a complex that you’re not good enough, well, now you do : ) The constant barrage of images of success and perfection can make you feel depressed and resentful that you don’t possess what these lucky folks seem to have. But what if your envy of t...

The current paradigm in psychology and psychiatry is deeply flawed. A few years ago an international review study in which 270 researchers on five continents, including the U.S., examined a hundred research reports in the most prestigious psychology journals, and what they discovered was shocking: Only 36% percent of the findings held up when the experiments were redone. If you ask researchers any...

Attaining a sense of inner freedom is one of our core needs but we’re often blocked from having such an experience. This can lead to problems like addiction, depression, and anxiety.  There are two ways to make your inner freedom conscious: The first is to process the negative altered states of mind your problems induce (depression, anxiety, etc); the second is to process the positive altered stat...

In your core self you’re a free spirit. Your subconscious contains a version of who you are that’s unencumbered by problems and blocks, and it can be tapped into and used to transform your life issues. It has an emotional and intellectual perspective that can help you change stuckness into freedom and flow. Today’s episode guides you through a practical exercise for connecting with your inner free...

What you desire contains your roadmap for healing and personal growth. This doesn’t mean you should act on every desire. It means that you should acknowledge each one, and determine whether it’s conscious or unconscious. If it’s conscious, for example, the desire to transform a problem, it will feel like a goal to push toward. If it’s unconscious, for example, the drive toward an addiction, it wil...

If you’re like most people, you get so caught up in your daily routine, you lose contact with what you really need, what you truly yearn for. This is amplified by constant media messages telling you that life is about success, money, appearance, etc.. Many folks spend their lives trying to fulfill these ideals but never quite feel happy and content, or they succeed at them but still feel a subtle...

Conventional psychologists and psychiatrists diagnose depression by asking leading questions about things like apathy, hopelessness, loss of interest or pleasure in things, sleep problems, appetite and weight changes, lack of concentration, social isolation, and repeatedly going over thoughts. It’s a way to gather general information that could mean anything but is useful for concocting a diagnosi...

Traditional mental health practice has it all wrong. Depression isn’t an “illness”—it’s your calling.  Even severe depression is a meaningful and purposeful process that's trying to awaken you to deep change. Solely suppressing your symptoms misses the whole point.   Your life is an unfolding process, and everything you experience—the good, the bad, and the ugly--aims at positive transformation. T...

Wisdom is not a state of consciousness as some spiritual teachings make it sound. It’s an attribute of enlightenment, and neither enlightenment nor wisdom happen through a balanced, unchanging, static state of mind; they happen through your process. A process consists of changing and evolving states of mind, not just one way of being. It’s a growth trajectory, not a fixed condition.   If you reall...

You have a deep wisdom in your psyche but you may not be in contact with it. This part of yourself can help you heal your problems and boost your personal growth. Imagine you’re a wise elder or spiritual teacher. Alternately, you could imagine that you’re 99 years old, happy and content, finished with life, and ready to leave the world.  Visualize, feel, and embody this character.   Stay with this...

Not only do we experience extreme variation in our highs and lows in life, we can re-access and re-experience them—as if they always exist somewhere within us. While you are in the depths of depression there’s an ecstatic, free, happy version of yourself just at the fringe of your awareness, and you can tap into it. The notion that we have many different potential states of being within us at all...

Today’s episode guides you through an exercise to begin to transform problems like depression and anxiety by re-accessing a joyful, empowering  experience from the past and using it to solve a current issue. Choose a problem to work on. Reflect on it, then put it aside and think of a time in your life when you were incredibly ecstatic. You felt high, on top of the world, in the flow. Everything wa...