A short history of how we found hope in hopelessness in modern mental health

The most important message I have to share with people this year comes from what I have learned in my career of helping people. To share a quick story from you from the beginning of that career 25 years ago I remember sitting as a counsellor in a large therapy group of ill people suffering an array of emotional and mental health problems. I remember feeling one feeling specifically after being in that group for about half an hour. I felt just for a moment a sense of overwhelm. As each person shared their own accounts of their traumatic past the feeling of overwhelm spread across the room like wildfire. People recounted one traumatic issue after another as they became more and more visibly victimised. As everyone started to relate to this powerful feeling of powerlessness I remember one single thought raced into my mind seemingly out of nowhere. The thought was on everyones mind eventually. The thought was, "but there is no such thing as overwhelm."

Years later as I sat in over 10,000 groups I still remember that call to overwhelm beckoning so strongly to everyone. It calls people to lose hope and think that there is no way out of trouble. What we started to do in groups is allow people to sit and hear other peoples of stories and feel the dread, the hopelessness and overwhelm and then to intervene and do something miraculous - change it with the truth. You see, there is no such thing as overwhelm except the manifestation of confusion, unmanageability, chaos and disorder. There are only thoughts of overwhelm and thoughts change things when you change the way you look at them.

The proof I saw from hundreds of people who have overcome the most horrific traumas is that once they saw past the negative accumulations and the darkness, the light then came. They showed me what M Scott Peck suggested in his book the road less travelled in its famous opening line. Once we understand that life is difficult, that bad things can and do happen; we can accept these things and go even further - we can transcend them! This is what everyone is capable of, transformation, or going beyond their 'form' to create a new person.

Wow. Back in around 1997, this was the beginning of our deep dive into the science of finding your spiritual self - and it's nothing short of marvellous wonder, of radical resilience turning hell into heaven and overwhelm into a new beginning. This is the beauty, truth and goodness that life has shown me.

The problem of a broken environment

Years later, what we realized is that when we showed people that transformation was possible, and gave them just a few simple tools we saw that people were healing themselves in shorter and shorter periods of time. We didn't really have the answers that we need, so we thoroughly researched it. But we knew we were onto something. What we came up with was mind boggling. We genuinely thought we were to treat, comfort and help people cope and manage symptoms; but something else entirely happened. People were healing 20 and 30 years worth of anxiety, depression, personality disorders, and all kinds of stress and trauma issues just by getting out of their story, stopping what they were doing, and moving past the masks of personality.

What has to change is absolutely everything, and that's one of the key ingredients that we found. You subconscious programs, your addiction to your own thinking becomes neurobiological. It activates the hormones of stress and storms then brew. It makes you think that your external environment is bad, the whole world sometimes, and it is a threat to you personally, leaving you in extended states of survival mind. At the very least, psychosis or self destruct at the worst. We saw that your idea of reality creates your personality over time. That gave us a spark of hope that was enough to light the fires of change we see today.

It's no secret today that people live in extended states of stress, and it's not sustainable or acceptable. In fact we are born into these states socially. The obvious result is crisis, breakdown, burnout, never mind depression, personality disorders, addictions, and all sorts of different things that hold us back from living our best life. People are living in an extended state of survival mode calling it normal life, and it's affecting the body, the heart, the mind. The average adolescent brain today is scouring the earth for sabre toothed tigers that are ready to attack us and people are responding by cutting themselves, numbing the mind with alcohol and drugs and even committing suicide at unprecedented rates at unprecedented youthful ages. The aftermath of this seems more pathology for more people more often.

"Pressure in our culture is making the brain mush." It's not sustainable to live in a stressed state for very long; we're just not neurologically equipped to do it and now we are seeing the first effects of these socially accepted states. We're trying to get rid of it with pharmaceuticals but it just ain't working and it looks like it is a get worse before it gets better situation in many ways. So the first thing we need to do is STOP. Admitting we are doing life wrong is where it's going to have to start.

We're doing busy, we're doing isolation, we're doing screen-time compulsively and we're doing mind altering substances as well as looking for pleasure and relief in all the wrong ways. Instead of trying to medicate the insanity of our environment we are saying give me a chemical like ketamine, diazepine or whatever else to make my depression, stress and bad thoughts go away. In other words stop the symptoms and warning signs so I can continue towards a dead end is a bad idea. It will lead us to more and more of what doesn't work and the evidence of this is much of medicine today. Changing the self will change the environment and this is something that has little certainty attached to it, so we just don't do it.

The 10 Step Paradigm Process of Life Transform

The first way out of survival is realizing that you're in it, and from that very point, you can start to shift and to thrive. It starts with awareness. That's where we developed the Paradigm Shift program about 13 years ago, and we saw people with 20 and 30 years of depression issues start to heal in shorter and shorter periods of time, just 6 to 8 weeks. People came in with devastating diagnoses, incurable conditions, physical manifestations of what had really been troubling them emotionally.

So, the good news is that when we did our research on all these people from all different parts of the world, with all different kinds of problems, issues, and symptoms, we found one commonality: they were all trapped in frightened parts of their personality. They were all being smothered to death by the masks that they wore from their persona, their attitudes, perceptions, thoughts, feelings - everything that had built up to that moment in their life where they said "I can't do this anymore. It's either breakdown or breakthrough."

We genuinely never ever expected to find what we did through our research, where we saw people literally shed their masks, their personas, and become free from a lifetime of survival, of fear, and living in these states of stress that created all kinds of symptoms, psychological, emotional, and spiritual. When people started to stop, when they left behind the stories of who they thought they were through powerful tools, meditation, contemplative techniques, that began to leave behind the masks as well, we really saw this as a paradigm shift. Stop was an answer? Hell yes, and it was a good start of a revolution of underlying wellness.

We took a deep dive into psychiatric model (DSM-5), the psychological model, then we looked at the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao de Ching, the Old and New Testament, and what we saw was that they're all right! They've all got the answer, and we need to leave behind the old what doesn't work, but in turn we need to put on something new. That is the science of finding your spiritual self, and the Paradigm process rarely gets you there in 10 simple steps.

The answer is always the same. The tools are what we are all hearing do actually start the work of healing. Get into the present, the now of the mind. Then become aware that how you think, feel and act creates your personality. Then realise everything is energy and that you can shift that energy. The solution is always the same. It is always a return to authenticity, connection and love. You will then need to let a lot of that negative energy go. We allow feelings to become the short hand of the brain and through talking therapies and tools we allow our feelings from the heart to shift the mind and how we do this is by going from the certainty of what we have been doing into the unknown, uncertain and unfamiliar. All we have doesn't is create 10 steps to get there a little easier with slightly less of a bumpy ride. More about the Paradigm Process here. We would love to hear from you and work with you on making transformation happen - that's what we do. https://markllockwood.com/the-paradigm-process/