I’m Not Wounded, Broken, F’d Up, And Neither Are You!

If someone considers you wounded, it just means they can’t see your authentic self. Of course, it might be buried under emotional rubble, but everyone has an innate intelligence. Collecting rubble happens, but it doesn’t need to define anyone. Like the weather, storms may come and go while the Moon and stars continue to shine.

Honestly, why spend any moment in life collecting or promoting the gloom of a cloudy day when the sun will shine again?

In conventional psychiatry and counseling, clients are accustomed to being deemed broken. Conditions, casualties, and disabilities are the general offshoots. It seems like a discipline of disease more than health! However, in a mental health setting, the clinician must identify a specific condition before treatment can begin.

Inadvertently, the profession promotes the idea that people are damaged or unchangeable unless there is clinical intervention. Overall, the goal isn’t curative. It is mainly to reduce the symptoms. Likewise, if one approach falls short, another is enlisted.

Since many mental health conditions are deemed permanent, it usually requires ongoing maintenance. Therefore, decades of counseling are customary. But even beneficial interventions can, over long periods, cause harmful effects. For example, medications with contraindications or side effects. Further, non-invasive options can have limits when their basis promotes illness as a person’s defining core. Moreover, the underlying premise is that a person is incurable. Thus, it displaces health.

The Clinical Experience

Decades ago, when I began my mental health career, I also believed that people were defective, including myself!

Products can be faulty, but people aren’t products. There isn’t a recall notice for people. Labeling people defunct, even with good intentions, can compound, stigmatize, and possibly imprison a person’s psyche while the goal of the practice is to support well-being.

Consider the following statement by an unspecified client:

“You can only be treated like a wounded animal for so long until you start believing you are wounded.”

After a decade or more of ascribing numerous evaluations, educational groups, treatment, and case management, one option rose above the many. Yet, surprisingly, it wasn’t a technique, strategy, or part of any training or diagnostic manual.

Realizing that people heal because of an inner source isn’t a new idea. The resiliency of the spirit is timeless. The premise that wellness is already in a person transcends the current construct of the mental health discipline.

When I was a clinician, I had a shift of experience, from practicing an outside-in modus to recognizing an inside-out phenomenon. In my experience, acknowledging clients as people, whole and divine, was a profound mind-shift. At these moments, seeing the authentic core of another, the symptoms would subside, and the wellness would rise. Although it appeared as if I was the activator, the true reason had to do with the well-being that already resides in the client. My part was merely to provide an invitation that could be accepted or denied.

Transcending Conditions

Once the nature of well-being grows into understanding, it affords a person the opportunity to pursue life unencumbered by the lens of brokenness. So, from my perspective, it makes sense that mental freedom includes the experience of well-being.

The distinction here is that conventional approaches engage cognitive healing, while divine healing arrives from realizing there isn’t anything to fix. An inside-out modus is an understanding that the essence of the psyche brings forth states of experience. It is profound resilience that reaches beyond conventional modalities.

Syd Banks knew that the Three Principles would shift the profession of psychiatry and psychology. While it isn’t a silver bullet, it guides directly towards the silver lining of the spirit. Rather than an innovative trend, realizing wellness is a discovery that each person makes on their own. Each person has a gift of psychological potential, which can guide experience towards happiness, sadness, and anything in between.

So while the Three Principles provide a guidepost toward psychological well-being, giving a person well-being is impossible. Wellness isn’t injectable. Simply, mental health is already in every living being, and it is one thought away.

The Feeling of Wellness

A wellness model with a foundation of a disease isn’t a wellness practice. To truly have a wellness model, the basis would be everything about discovering mental health. Thus, recognizing well-being is primary, and it happens with the understanding that the psyche has unbreakable divine features.

For this reason, 3P practitioners are resolute in offering guidance and understanding about the functions of the psyche that create an experience. It inevitably leads a person to an unfolding recognition of their unbreakable potential. Hence, there isn’t any damage to repair unless someone makes it so via thinking. So then, why support a person in subscribing to a condition?

Here is an unidentified client’s experience with conventional medication:

“Prescribing medications is not an exact science. It’s like kissing a lot of toads to find the right one. Many side effects are intolerable, and that’s why we need doctors that LISTEN. The process sucks, but I’m lucky and love the results.”

Consider this, the origin of the placebo: placēbō Dominō in regiōne vīvōrum, a design to please the living by reducing the symptomatic worries about the condition of death.

In modern days, a client feels supported by external treatments that result in fewer symptoms. This process may please the client’s concerns. Still, the causality of how thinking functions to create unwanted behaviours or feelings is often unexplored.

The Core of Mental Health

Mental health is about understanding the spirit. It is the most direct course in affirming the core of wellness and a person’s authentic self.

So, why blame a person for sadness, depression, or anxiety? Why blame the psyche for doing what it does? Its function is to think, and when it thinks, it becomes realistic. When sad thoughts fade for the healthy ones, a shift happens. The psyche naturally produces the experience it embraces.

Believe it or not, many psychiatrists, counselors, and practitioners are switching gears from the fixer-upper approach to supporting well-being directly. It is a new frontier. When insightful guidance is fundamental, there isn’t a need to claim that people are damaged goods.

Practicing without reliance on coping mechanisms is a shift, indeed. It is a pioneer’s territory where practitioners resemble healers, advocates, and mentors by aiming their clients toward well-being rather than tinkering with mental constraints. Supporting a person’s resiliency is the core of the helping profession anyhow.

Exploring wellness gives a person another chance to discover the divine well of being that is already there instead of enlisting a coping crutch. Sound too good to be true?

Instead of resembling an auto repair shop that diagnoses a complaint with a mechanical solution, Three Principles is a process that guides towards inner abundance. In this sense, 3P describes how the psyche is a content creator of reality rather than fussing about the momentary content it makes.

Before I go further, here’s a visual encapsulation of the Three Principles:

The Three Principles are foundational for a 3P coach or mentor that guides individuals, couples, or groups to further their understanding of the inner golden egg of wisdom. With this in mind, a 3P mentor offers an invitation to live in wellness by compassionately sharing their understanding of the universal nature of the psyche that makes every experience possible.

Person-Centered Wisdom

When a person wants to feel happiness instead of sadness, it isn’t a matter of reducing symptoms. Instead, it is about recognizing thought as a divine gift that can create a temporary state of mind. The principle of Consciousness enlivens thought beyond neutrality and into a pool of sensory experience. Every life experience has a divine source, and the principle of Mind is the origin of it.

Everyone is born with a psyche, and its essential features are near invisible. Its universal functions bring formless into form. Each experience begins with a thought, awash by consciousness and powered by the mind. The experience itself is a composition of memories, associations, and beliefs. Thus, the past infuses the present via thought. The intellect can have prominence, but wisdom is always in the mix.

What is wisdom? Where does it come from? Does it ever go away?

Wisdom becomes self-evident with awareness. Its origin is divine, and it is within everyone. The point, it is an aspect of our authentic self. Our ancient relatives considered it the Allness. Since its source is continuously forming, there are limitless moments to recognize it. In the 3P modality, wisdom is a moment of divine sight.

As wisdom reaches the cognitive surface of experience, it brings a new branch of thought, an ‘a-ha’ moment. The profound A-ha of living is when pureness saturates the hum-drums of thinking with originality. It is the spirit of inner sight, and every insight has a divine origin.

Experience is the Mirror of the Psyche

The psyche is pure energy, continually bringing the ethereal functions of Mind, Thought, and Consciousness into existence. Nevertheless, every moment is full of unknowns, and our thinking can console us as much as it can create fear.

Thinking is a factor of living. It is relative to every experience, including mental health. Rather than addressing the offshoots of mental conditions as primary, there is another option. It is a self-recognition of the psyche’s interplay with experience. Essentially, understanding how the psyche functions can illuminate what creates distortions and how to right-size them insightfully. Mostly, distortions are shadows pulled by a string of thought.

By understanding the psyche’s functions, the Principles go beyond the root cause of conditions and into the origin of how energy manifests. Syd stated, “[Our wisdom is] hidden in the depths of a silent mind. It is a state of no thought.” If an experience is unwanted, only a new thought can dissolve it completely.

New ways of thinking make the past ruts obsolete. For this reason, even addictions, such as opioids or alcohol, can have closure beyond recovery.

Truly, what else is there that could cause mental health or illness than thinking within the consciousness of the psyche? More central, what else is mental healing than a leap beyond the condition via plunging into wellness within the divinity of the mind?

One of the biggest hurdles in life is trust. Trusting there is an authentic self buried under the rubble of the ego, the fear, and the illusions of life. “Physician, heal thyself” is a shift from illness to wellness from the inside out. Each person has the resilience to delve beyond all psychic wounds to heal, and experience is the mirror that makes it self-evident.

3P In Me and 3P In You

The most frequent obstacle a person faces in life is pain and suffering. It is an oppression of the spirit and exists by engaging thought. For example, when thinking of persecution is absent, its hardship cannot exist.

From a couple of broken-free practitioners:

“I meditate in my own way, and I do my own thing in life. There isn’t a prescribed method to follow anymore, and there might never have been. Living from one insight to the next, I move with what moves me and be with whatever wisdom rises into awareness.”

“Been self-healing so long, it’s time to smell the roses and commune with nature from the inside out. It’s all there is anyway. It brings more solace than any of the temporary stuff of life. While many are digging their heels in known comforts, I’d rather be in the unknown. It’s where the divine possibilities rendezvous.”

There isn’t anyone more healthy, holy, or resilient than any person. The difference is merely in the actualization. Manifesting one’s divine core into each moment is engaging innate intelligence. Bringing potential into awareness is boundless. It is an energetic state that is accessible to every living being. Having this in mind, we are our own teachers and students. We are the enlightenment we seek.

Of course, the choice is up to each person to pursue well-being from the outside or the inside. Either way, it begins from the same formless place.

The Ingredients of An Insight

Are the Three Principles the most reliable way to recognize mental health, or is it conventional therapy?

Each person makes a choice in life. Everyone wants optimal health, and it is as close as within oneself. Of course, the ultimate hope is for a person to discover and experience life without anguish.

While 3P coaches, like myself, find the Principles to be a direct route to illuminating well-being, it is up to each person’s inner sight to be the guide. Howbeit, there are some points I want to make about the Principles and the differences it has with conventional methods:

Modality Chart-A-Factors

3P Transparency: A 3P coach can disclose personal stories as it relates to the nature of well-being. There isn’t a diagnosis needed. Instead, there is compassionate guidance towards innate intelligence. Progress is self-evident. Identifying the Core of Mental Wellness: Person-centered support in discovering and understanding the psyche’s universal functions. Transcending Pain & Suffering: The goal is dissolving anguish via a mind-shift of that enlivens mental freedom. Maintenance-Free Modality: Cognitive and behaviour modification-free. Therapeutic Equity: 3P providers have the same innate potential as their participants. 3P providers are teachers & students, mentors & learners of well-being.

Conventional Transparency: A clinician rarely discloses personal stories of well-being. The clinician’s reasoning for ascribing a diagnosis is often for billing purposes. Medication regimens rarely include physiological measurement. Identifying the Mental Condition & Treatment: Identifying a condition is necessary for treatment. The aim is to reduce symptoms and behaviours. Lifelong Recovery: Clients subscribe to the idea they are broken. It defines their life, along with lifestyle adaptation. Regiment of Maintenance: Enlisting cognitive and behavioural modification based on modality. Therapeutic Professionalism: Conventional providers are considered an authority on mental health conditions, reducing symptoms, but not wellness.

Everyone deserves a choice for therapeutic support. But especially when the basis is insightfully generated. Whichever path, healing is a worthwhile pursuit when insight is engaged.

Listening For Something Well

“Not all good feelings are grounded in insight, and not all uneasiness signals a condition.”

Everything can become a learning opportunity in life’s journey toward well-being. For example, I met an industrial mechanic while working as a technician at an oil refinery in California. He told me about his diagnosis of Black Lung Disease. He told me that some treatments are available, but no conventional cure exists. Many jobs throughout his career required him to wear a mask or respirator when he was in confined spaces. These confined spaces had various forms of coal dust and chemical particles. He knew he was required to comply. He just didn’t feel like following the guidelines.

The inflammation and damage to his lungs from repeated exposure weren’t apparent until twenty-five years later. While he had some regrets, he was unphased. He considered his career and life an overall success. He was able to provide for his wife and secure his children’s college aspirations. From his perspective, the benefits outweighed the costs.

Our health relies upon a sight within. A holistic nutritionist had told me, “… act as if everything human-made causes cancer, and everything in nature doesn’t.” Each person decides the mantra to live by and how and when to listen to the wisdom within.

The nearest point of access to well-being is listening to our inner voice. Whenever it reverberates the tone of divine wisdom, something well is engaging. Hence, the main reason for anyone to attend a therapeutic group or plant a garden reveals itself by an unfolding insight.

Listening to wellness is an optimal way of living life. For example, if a person has an insight that reading a book is helpful, rather than reading it based upon outside endorsement, then that would be wisdom in action.

The journey towards health, healing, and well-being is unconditionally present within the spirit.

Special Note:

For most of my life, I was treated as subhuman. Yet, I survived many traumatic events in childhood and adulthood. As a result, I have a unique view of life. Even so, my life mutated from a subhuman state into experiencing a profound sense of awareness and well-being.

Early in my clinical career, I rarely heard a story that was more tragic than my own experience. It seemed I had an experiential reference point for just about every category in the diagnostic manual. At one point in life, I was even prescribed Stelazine, a generic brand of Thorazine.

Why be a clinician after experiencing so much pain and suffering in life?

Years ago, I had a profound inkling. Much more than any treatment modality, I found that hope is an evergreen component of the healing process. With this in mind, sharing my hope as a clinician became part of my healing process. Today, I realize that hope is anything and everywhere. It is a matter of listening to the depths of the conscious heart.

Peeling Away the Layers of Illusion

Pardon my boldness, but people don’t need another innovative modality, whether it claims folks are damaged or claims that health is at the core. Neither matters as much as holding onto hope and self-love. It is the stuff that brings the possibility of healing nearer, even for a second.

Life isn’t about 3P (Three Principles), WRAP (Wellness Recovery Action Plan), ET (Exposure Therapy), MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy), ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy), and the list goes on and on.

Finding hope is everywhere, and it is a matter of discovery. My sense, wherever we go in life, hope is there. When it seems that it isn’t there, we likely forget how to recognize it. But in the moment of need, remembering our truer nature brings it to the forefront from its inner depths. Rediscovering our innate resilience is a profound moment indeed.

“Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”

—Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

The divine is within everyone, and like starting a loving relationship, recognizing it begins with a spark. From there, it warms into a flame. Of course, the flame of hope and love isn’t an actual fire. It is consciousness illuminating.

The bottom line, there is no reason for a person to give up on themselves or squelch their spirit for the temporary wants of living. There is much, much more to life than meets the optical eyes.

The Eternal Re-Discovering Authenticity

Life is full of struggles, challenges, and perplexities. Yet, it may seem like it is full of brokenness or wounded spirits. If we let the outside sabotage the purity within, we might even believe it. Truly, the abyss in life isn’t indicative of a condition. On the contrary, it reminds us of our resilient nature!

How about letting the divine spirit within us ambush the outer illusions of conditions, casualties, and disabilities for the sake of well-being?

The limitless potential of the spirit is nearly invisible. Yet, it is the authentic energy that each person is born with and rediscovers in their own way. It isn’t up to me to advise anyone in which direction to go. However, I have a bias to guide towards insight because it is the closest position without end.

“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”

—Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

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