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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 9 months ago
Have you heard people make comments such as, “I am always there for my friends”, “I would never do that”, “My father was always verbally abusive” or “My boss never appreciates me”.
‘All’ or ‘never’ are absolutisms, and absolutisms in most human contexts are simply not true.
Let me share an example with you. There was a woman who attended my program in Florida, and she expressed, "My mother was never there for me." I encouraged her to reconsider her statement and asked her to reflect on what she had just said.
I reminded her that her mother had likely been present and taken care of her for nine months while carrying her. I further questioned whether her mother had fed, bathed, clothed, and looked after her. She acknowledged that her mother had indeed fulfilled these responsibilities for a certain period.
A while later, after I had dug a little deeper, she revealed that her original statement that her mother was never there was the result of her mother not being able to attend events or get-togethers at short notice.
She realized that her absolutist statement was a result of imbalanced perceptions about her mother that stemmed from her own unrealistic expectations.
Once she balanced her perceptions and became fully conscious of the times her mother had been, and still was equally there for her, her heart opened and she experienced tears of gratitude for her mother instead of anger and resentment.
This is a wonderful example of how black and white, all or none thinking tends to hinder your growth and self-mastery, as well as your resilience and adaptability.
Let’s look at another example, Let’s say you meet someone and initially become infatuated with them. You perceive them to be absolutely amazing with very few flaws. As such, you likely focus more on their upsides while mostly disregarding any downsides.
This infatuation may also tend to consume your thoughts, maybe even resulting in your not being able to sleep because you keep thinking about how amazing they are.
However, as time passes, you likely begin to see downsides that you weren’t initially consciously aware of or wanting to see.
Gradually, the balance shifts, and you realize that the individual is not one sided. Eventually, you see them for who they truly are, an individual with two sides, nice and mean, kind and cruel, positive and negative.
Similar patterns can arise when you harbor resentment towards someone.
You may initially become conscious of their downsides while ignoring any upsides. You may even label them as always negative, critical, untrustworthy, or similar to others you dislike. These exaggerated statements are the result of an imbalanced perception, and not a true reflection of their whole or authentic self.
With time, you may discover that your perceptions were imbalanced and come to appreciate both sides of them.
If you don’t, you’ll remain stuck and continue reacting to them with your more black and white thinking until you bring your lopsided perceptions back into balance by seeing both polarities of them.
When you’re resentful to an individual, it is wiser to look for their upsides to balance your perceived downsides.
The question is, how do you do that?
How do you balance your imbalanced perceptions so you can rewire your brain to become more balanced, objective and neutral so you can stop reacting to the world on the outside and instead govern your mind and run your life and act from the inside.
The wisest way to do this is to ask quality equilibrating questions.
The quality of your life is based on the quality of questions you ask yourself.
Asking quality equilibrative questions can help you become aware of what you may have initially overlooked.
These questions and your resulting answers can help liberate you from the grip of infatuation, resentment, and impulsive and instinctive reactions driven by the amygdala, the subcortical region of your brain responsible for assigning emotional valency and emotional charges to your incoming sensory perceptions.
By balancing the polarized emotional charges that have accumulated in your subconscious, you are more likely to free yourself from their falsely attributed control.
In the Breakthrough Experience, my signature program that I run almost every week, I teach people a powerful methodology called the Demartini Method. It’s a series of questions to help you balance the mathematical equations of your perceptions. In doing so, you transform your perception of an event from a polarized black and white, all or none to a balanced perspective. You transform your polarized emotions into synthesized emotions of gratitude, love, inspiration, enthusiasm, presence and certainty. It’s what moves you from reactive to proactive. Ungoverned to governed. Out of control to in control. It helps you discover the hidden order in your apparent disorder.
As an example of how the Demartini Method works, one of the questions you will learn to ask yourself is:
“How specifically has this so-called ‘negative’ event or experience helped or served me in the most important areas of my life?”
Suppose you have labelled a past event in your life as being “traumatic”. In doing so, you're likely to be conscious of the downsides and unconscious of any upsides that may have transpired as a result.
In that way, you will tend to unconsciously choose to hold on to and run a story about how this event happened to you, how someone did this to you, how ‘terrible’ it was and how they are to blame, while also looking for an external individual to rescue or save you.
However, when you bring your mathematical equation of perception into balance by asking yourself the quality questions outlined in the Demartini Method, you can move into the executive center of your brain where you are more objective and self-governed so you can bring balance to your mind which also brings balance to your physiology.
The number one thing that distracts people from living purposefully is their impulses and their instincts, their pleasures, their pains, the things that attract them or repel them.
Why? Because they’re allowing themselves to be run from the outside.
It is wiser to:
- Learn to achieve internal balance so you can run your life from the inside and truly begin to master your life.
- Recognize that life is not simply black or white, filled with absolutes but instead a beautiful synchronous integration of support and challenge, nice and mean, kind and cruel and all other pairs of opposites.
By embracing a more nuanced and balanced perspective, you can more easily navigate your relationships and experiences with greater appreciation, wisdom and authenticity.
Whatever you see in other people is a reflection of what you have inside yourself.
Sometimes, you may resent others because they remind you of qualities you feel ashamed of or judge in yourself. As a result, you may try to avoid them and prefer living in a dissociated fantasy where you deny your shame and create an idealized or prideful version of yourself.
This avoidance and unwillingness to face the truth about your own nature is powerful feedback to help you become conscious of an unwillingness to embrace both sides of your being.
Like me, you possess all the human u traits. In fact, I went through a detailed process many years ago in which I discovered that I possess every single trait listed in the Oxford English Dictionary - kindness, cruelty, positivity, negativity, generosity, stinginess, honesty, and dishonesty. When I looked honestly, I realized that I displayed each of the 4,628 identified traits in me, and I can assure you that if you look, you too will find each of them to.
However, you may sometimes consciously or subconsciously fear owning the fact that you possess all the traits, including those you perceive to be negative, because of some moral hypocrisy indoctrination or training or because you are trying to be a one-sided individual.
When you catch yourself making absolute statements like "I would never do that" or "I always pride myself on this,” it is wise to remember that absolutes about human behavior are lies.
For example, if I were to tell you that you are always positive, never negative, always kind, never cruel, always generous, never stingy, always peaceful, never wrathful, always considerate, never inconsiderate, your own inner BS-meter would immediately remind you of moments when you've behaved in the opposite manner.
Deep down, you know that these absolutes are not true.
Similarly, if I were to tell you that you are always mean, never nice, always cruel, never kind, always negative, never positive, always in the downside, wrathful, never peaceful, always inconsiderate, never considerate, you would likely recall instances when you've displayed the opposite behavior.
Your intuition naturally seeks balance and points out the other side to bring you back to the center where you recognize that you have both sides simultaneously.
So, when you find yourself proclaiming, "I would never do that" or "I always pride myself on this," be aware that you might be distorting your self-perception.
Sometimes, you become disconnected from your own experiences and fail to see the complete picture of who you are.
It is wiser to learn to ask yourself quality questions, such as those in the Demartini Method. These questions are clinically proven to help you balance your perceptions, become conscious of any missing information, and become neutral, objective and balanced as a result.
You may find it interesting to know that this tendency to distort reality through black and white thinking originates from earlier evolutionary survival mechanisms.
Animals in the wild typically see prey and immediately impulsively seek it, or see predator and immediately instinctively avoid it.
This black and white thinking results in an immediate fight or flight response that is reactive nature, as opposed to executive thinking in which the animal pauses to consider the pros and cons of running or staying still. Survival in the wild often depends on impulsive, or instinctive reactions.
However, you likely don’t live in the wild, and activating your executive function instead of primitive reactions will serve you more effectively and efficiently on your journey to self-mastery.
If you would love to be centred, poised, present, powerful, purposeful, productive, patient, and prioritize effectively, it's wise to learn to be objective and simultaneously see both sides of a situation.
Seeing both sides helps you to rebuild your brain for a more productive, more accurate and wiser objective view on life. In this way, you are more likely to set real expectations in real time with real objectives that give you real results. You will also be more able to love and appreciate individuals for who they truly are, without falling into absolute black-and-white judgments of who you perceive them to be.
Every week, individuals come to the Breakthrough Experience with strong resentment towards other individuals. We spend time exploring what triggers these strong polarized emotions and judgments.
We examine the aspects that they are judging in the other individual and discover where they have exhibited the equivalent behaviors in their own lives to the same degree.
We then look at the benefits of the actions they’re judging negative and the drawbacks of the actions they’re judging positive. By understanding both the benefits and drawbacks of these traits, they are more likely to be able to break free from rigid labels and absolutes.
In conclusion, you possess an incredible capacity to love and embrace any event that has happened in your life.
Many people believe that certain events are the cause of their anger or resentment, thinking, "This happened to me, and that's why I'm angry." But it's important for you to understand that it's your perception, decisions, and actions that truly matter.
You can transform any event into gratitude. It’s all in your power to transform your perceptions with quality questions.
I can show you how to take command of your perceptions, decisions, and actions, so that no matter what has happened in your life, you can turn it into fuel and opportunity.
You have the power to see things on the way, not in the way, and break free from the trap of black-and-white, all or none thinking, labelling, and blaming others.
To Sum Up:
- Your tendency to distort reality through black and white thinking originates from early evolutionary survival mechanisms of avoiding predators and seeking prey. However, you are likely not living in the wild and therefore don’t need to live in a fight-or-flight state of mind.
- You have control of only three things in your life: your perceptions, decisions, and actions.
- Taking accountability for your perceptions instead of allowing black and white thinking to run your life is a powerful step towards mastering your life, instead of allowing your emotions to run you.
- The quality of your life depends on the quality of questions you ask yourself.
- When you ask yourself quality and empowering questions such as those presented in the Demartini Method that I teach during the Breakthrough Experience, you can reveal the unconscious and balance out your lopsided perceptions.
- If you would love to be centred, poised, present, powerful, purposeful, productive, patient, and prioritize effectively, it's wise to learn to be objective and simultaneously see both sides of a situation.
- In doing so, you can transform your resulting perceptions, decisions and actions, thereby transforming and mastering your life.
If you would love to rewire your brain so you awaken your executive function, quieten your fight-or-flight reactive responses, learn to see both sides of an individual or event (including yourself), and become more masterful, objective, present, poised and purposeful, then I would love you to join me at my next online Breakthrough Experience program.
These two days with me can completely transform your life and set you on a trajectory for fulfillment, inspired living, and leadership.
If you’re ready for change then click HERE to find out more.
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