Origins 31 - Can Self-Help Become an Addiction

0:00Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did, and have one of your assistance assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra, default terms at mintmobile.com. Welcome to a live and free origins, the podcast where we continue to discuss common misconceptions, practices, and sometimes even outright lives that make things like anxiety, depression, trauma, and addictions of all kinds extremely hard if not impossible to get rid of. We'll keep sharing what has worked in thousands of cases to change that and make freedom a reality. Only now will be going even deeper. Also bringing back to the table the one thing that is the source of any and all healing. God. So stick around for some bite-sized ideas that might unmask any

1:05falsehood preventing the truth from finally setting you free. And if it feels helpful, don't forget to share it with others. Okay, so we're going to get started on the self-help cycle thing again. Sorry, I got sidetracked last time. All right, so here's the deal. You have an aha moment, you have a breakthrough, and it feels so good, and you have this period of time that feels magical where you're getting things done. And then, because you haven't changed the behaviors and the instincts and the muscle memory at your in your home base, how you operate normally, and you haven't retrained that, the old habits start to creep up, the old situations start to weigh in, and pretty soon you find your momentum is shifted, and then it could be a week, could be a month, could be a couple months down the line. You're like, why do I feel like I'm back where I started? At this place, because what is critical hasn't happened, that's when a person starts to seek another seminar, another coach, another, if I just go this program again, and it's another pill, and the difficulty with this, I mean, I almost want to call itself

2:09help addiction, even though I don't like the word addiction, and it's not diagnosed in the DSM or anything like that that I'm aware of. It's not a thing, but this I've seen happen over and over and over again. When I got out of pornography, all those years ago, this like perpetual use of it, and all the stuff that goes with it, right? When I got rid of that, I was still eating a lot of sugar. It's pretty common, and I was still eating a lot of sugar beforehand, but I found that I had gotten out of it, and I was having these moments that were really clear, and so I started craving those cathartic, cathartic means cleansing, right? Moments, and I can produce them on my own to a certain extent, but then I would find a coach or somebody online who like, oh man, I really love their content, I really love their material, and then as I listened to it more and I really got to learn from that guy, and then my mind would start to go like, man, if I don't really have his help, I'm not sure my life will get better, and that's what marketing is supposed to do, is make you feel like their solution is the only solution that will

3:14help you, and the world of marketing, I really dislike it, I really do, and this podcast is potentially marketing. The reality is none of us are a savior, none of us are the source of healing, I think I've talked about that recently, healing comes from a very different place, and so we're here and we're in this place, so I find a coach, and so I buy the coaches program, and it's helpful, and I'm having these aha moments and these breakthroughs, and then I come back home and I adjust what I'm doing, and the momentum dies out. So then I go back to that coach, or I find another coach, and we go and the momentum dies out, and many wives have watched this in their husbands, many husbands have watched this in their wives, and they've tried to say things, but of course the person going through this is like, no, this is this is the stuff, like I've finally found it, this is it, well the other person is sitting back going like when is the other shoe going to drop, when is the next thing going to hit, and Jasmine bless her heart, she's

4:20been through a lot of that, a lot of different arenas for me, because I didn't realize this was happening, and so this cycle of self-help, this is the most innocuous form of it, is that you go in, you develop some sense of like, oh, I've just shifted some things, I've got some personal empowerment now, I have a sense that it really is possible for me, whether it's law of attraction stuff, or whether it is business coaching, or whether whatever else, like you get some sort of clarity on your situation, that clarity, clarity is very, very useful, very good, there's nothing wrong with it, but that clarity give you an aha moment, and your brain thinks something magical has happened when the only thing that happened was your brain made a new chemical for a bit and broke some neuropathways a little bit down and freed up some space and created something new, it's the aha moment is the feeling of throwing out the trash, that's it, but it has not changed anything in your life, it has not changed your environment at all, and so I didn't know that,

5:24so I go from one to the next, trying to learn how to do it on my own so that I don't have to keep paying money, but you end up spending a lot of money on these places, and I know people who they have the best intentions, but their mind frame around this is like, I'll never be without a coach, I will, like I want, when I get to the judgment seat with God, I want to have spent more money on personal development than on anything else in my life, that is not, these are Christians, but that's not a Christian mindset at all, the Christian mindset has nothing to do with that, because the true personal development is the one who made you finally gets room in your life, not, oh, I'm going to learn to do all these things on my own, and I'm going to develop this mastery, and I'm going to have developed my person, which is just a word that means mask, I'm going to develop this fake identity that I believe is real, that I've carried with me my whole life, and I've

6:25propped up and done all this effort to preserve that, I'm going to spend a lot of money on, that has nothing to do with spiritual growth at all, but it gets sold as spiritual growth, it gets sold as this new environment, like this new frontier, this transcendent reality, and then at some point, in those circles, you're going to meet people who are going to talk about energy healing, you're going to meet people who are going to talk about shifting your energy, you're going to meet people who talk about using psychedelics to do it, or micro-dosing, which is just psychedelics and small doses that you're supposed to not notice, or you're going to get people that are going to talk about energy healers, or shamans, or deep experiences, and meditation, and whatnot, in order to get to this next plane, or supplements and neutropics, and all these other things, in order to chase this phantom that you've created in your mind, which is all like this is this addictive cycle, I need the next hit, and then there's a

7:27come down, and then you need another hit, and then there's a come down, and you need another hit, and the last hit isn't good enough, so you need a higher breakthrough, and a bigger reality, because you're already used to the old one, and the old one didn't work, so you need a better one. That is, that's like the description of addiction, and what I've seen happen in collateral damage, in very real terms is people lose a lot of money and a lot of years to it, and that's the more in like, inane version of it, or the the the the tammest version of it. There are people who go and get a little bit of help, and then move on with their life, and that's great, I love that they can do that. There's a large percentage of them, that like they just spend a whole lot of money, spend a whole lot of years doing these things, and one day they realize like nothing's really changed, I'm still in the same place I was five, ten years ago. There's also a large percentage of people, that when they go there, not only do they not really get anywhere, and you know they might increase

8:28any income for a little bit, and they might do some other stuff, and it's not like some elements don't improve, they might feel a lot of peace and love and joy in all these things, it's not like it's a bad experience, so they wouldn't keep doing it. But at the end, at a certain point, it's sort of dumps them, and I've seen these people like, whether it's just like, healings that eventually don't actually turn out to be healings at all, or whether it is, and that's the physical sort of like energy healing side of things, or whether it's just they've got all this money, they've been taken advantage of, and all of, and at a certain point they just get dumped on their on their can, and they realize this was all just this self perpetuating promise that never gets fulfilled. Then there's this deep disillusionment, I've seen people like because of this, they get involved in this arena, and their spouse isn't, is at home, and they don't, they're not as involved, and their spouse is resistant to it in some way, and so then that breaks their marriage up, because they're, they're evolving, and their spouse doesn't want to evolve with them, and so they end up going in a different direction. I've seen a lot of them get spiritually diluted, and they lose

9:33their faith, and their hope in God, and they start to become believers that they are God incarnate, or that like the bride of God, or something, and they have this mission to change the world. And you have this drive toward this massive purpose. I was on the phone the other day with a person who told me that their mission was to help a hundred billion people resolve their deep, deep hurts in their wounds, and that to me is insanity speaking, and of course they know that, so they say, hey, this is going to require rethinking the math, right? Obviously you have to understand how many people have been born, by the largest estimates I've seen, only 50 billion people have been born. So this person is attempting to help more humans than have ever existed, with problems that are assumed that they have, and so she's thinking future generations and she's

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11:38Past generations, and I actually really applaud that level of ambition, and I think it's a really wonderful to have that sense of purpose. But the problem is that's a vague purpose that doesn't deal with the person in front of you. You can't love a hundred billion people. Love is something that you experience and share. You can't love a class. It's a category. It's a mental category. You experience this deep connection with a person and with other people. It's very personal, and it has nothing to do with these large numbers and these vague things, but these get proposed in these business conferences and in these self-help cycles. Whether it's a person healing trauma from seven generations or 70 generations past, and so they're doing this work for all their ancestry. Whether it's healing, like all that generational trauma, whether it's healing trauma and saving stuff from their future generations, there's this inflated sense of what's going on, and nobody is grounded in the reality of the moment. But because it feels so good and because

12:43it often comes with a lot of nurture, with a lot of excitement, or with challenge and breakthrough, and aha moments or whatever else it is, it develops this high in the body, and that high is just an experience. You can go on a roller coaster and feel pretty high, and they're remarkably similar in places, depending on your relationship to roller coasters, I suppose. And you can get off and you can just feel like, yeah, on top of the world, it's just that you're thinking about different subjects at the time, but the body feeling is more or less the same. And then there's a come down from that feeling. After the come down comes a desire to not be in that come down. And so we look for something to help make it better. What was the last thing to work? Was it a roller coaster? Was it a business conference? Was it a twinkie? Was it pornography on a computer? What was it? This is the addictive cycle. And so that is described. And basically, if we were to define addiction, we're going to look at it and go, addiction comes from two parts, like the word

13:47itself means to say yes to something, like addiction, you like to say something like a dictionary, the things we say. And then like an edict from a king, the thing that came out of the king, you know, and whatnot. And then you have an adict, which is to say toward or to say yes to, or to speak towards something, meaning like you're headed that direction. Right? And so you have this sense of addiction literally means the habit of saying yes to something before you have the ability to stop yourself from the behaviors that come after it. So before you can stop all the behaviors that come downstream of it, you have to stop that saying yes. And it's just a habit of saying yes. And the something you're saying yes to is not the behavior. It's not the porn. It's not the food. It's not the thing you're saying yes to is your view of the world before it shows up. Like your view of your circumstances, your automatic reactions of you're just agreeing that your reaction and the way you're seeing

14:48things is reality. And because you're saying yes to that, all the behaviors that you cope with that reality with are part and parcel of the whole thing. They're the byproducts of the of the factory, right? And so in order to stop saying yes to things, we got to we got to go back to the beginning and look at what is really going on. I spent so much time on this with people and and it's really difficult because we're so used to seeing what we think is there. It takes work. It's hard. And on the phone, it's like I can almost hear people's brains over like frying and overloading at times and like shutting down because it's just too much load to go like wait, what? I have to like move all this junk I've put on top of reality to see what's under there. That's so much work. I would rather keep it covered because at least it looks pretty. And that's what we've done. We've dressed up reality with our imaginations. So this this movement in the self-help world, I have seen over and over and over again, it was me.

15:49And fortunately it didn't go to the point of me having an affair or hooking up with somebody or losing marriage and kids and divorce, right? Fortunately that. Fortunately, it didn't go to I mean, but it did go to financial bankruptcy at one point. It like in a big way. And that was like at the beginning of it because I couldn't manage the funds well. But fortunately it didn't go to like death but there were sort of like suicidal moments in the middle of it and there were moments where I just didn't want to exist. It did go to failed business ventures. It did go to me being an absentee father at times. It did go to a constant focus on that rather than a relationship with the God that made me in the first place. It did go to me building up some ego about who I am and what I deserve and what life is and all this other stuff as if I were a God and I never got to the point thankfully of believing I was God incarnate. But those thoughts did cross my mind at times.

16:49I will admit. And that's all the psychosis that comes from what happens in this like self-help aha moment break through industry and the personal coaching and life coaching industry. And if you've been paying attention to the news with the Epstein files and everything else, a lot of these life coaches are involved in some deep stuff. And I know some I know somebody who was Anton Wasbisky. He has a YouTube channel. You know, I've you know, I've talked to them personally who was the marketer for a lot for like 40 different of these new age coaches. And the stuff they do behind the scenes and what they're engaged in and what they're doing and what they're inviting in as you're getting these breakthrough moments is downright creepy and scary and it goes beyond just all this stuff falls apart. It's like demonic almost, you know, like I mean in some cases it is like they're they're outright doing some rituals that are calling in other beings and and so like but you don't see that on the front. You don't see

17:53that on the front page and the people that are in those circles most of them don't know that it's happening. They don't know what it's happening to them. They think it's just peace and love and light and all of these other things and it comes with this great pretty package. And you know, those are the worst ones. Those are the worst case scenarios. Obviously not everybody is in that place. They don't know what they don't know and not everybody is following those people. But even in the teamest measure, this self-help cycle and addiction is very very observable. You can observe it in a lot of people. You can observe it in people that want to do bodywork and they learn one form of bodywork and then they geek out on it and they want to learn another one and they want to learn another one and they want to learn another one and the question of like why do you want to learn it. There are some people that are genuinely interested in understanding the body. That's not the issue. A lot of them are chasing these things because it feels like that is the next savior that's dangerous. You can see it with people who are in counseling professions maybe less.

18:57I'm not a counselor so I don't know exactly. I haven't observed it firsthand. But I've just heard here and there from some of the counselors I've talked with how much like learning a new theory and keeping up all this other stuff just feels like it's a thing. I don't think most counselors are in that boat so I don't know. I could be wrong but most of it I see in this life coaching industry. I see it in the energy healing world a ton where people just collect modalities and they learn one modality and another modality and they're trying to be the source of everybody's healing without recognizing that healing doesn't come from them but it's because it like there's this moment of like discovering that you have new skills and this moment of feeling good about yourself and this moment of feeling like you can contribute. Those are not necessarily bad things. Contribution to the world is wonderful. Learning a skill that you can help people with is great. I'm talking about this cycle of chasing more and going for more and going for more without actually sitting with what's real and doing what's necessary with your situation right now and not not getting on balance and not losing sight of all of the pieces of your life, your family,

20:00your relationship with God, your work life and your individual interests and making sure that those live in a really good way, good and healthy way. So hopefully I know this has been a long episode but I'm raising a warning flag of caution from my own personal experience. I mean the self-help thing led me to the Himalayas with Sadguru and some deep disillusionment down on the other side of that one and exorcisms and all kinds of stuff. I'm speaking from personal experience when I'm telling you I'm not the only one that was on those trips and in those seminars and doing those things and I've spoken to many people that are still recovering from their experiences there and there's a lot of people that are still in them and love it and they think it's wonderful and they're giving their life more and more to it, more and more time, more and more effort, more and more energy and it's beautiful to them. That's great. That's where I was for a while and then it led me to the edge of the cliff of my own sanity wondering why the heck I was, why, what is the point of my existence? Not suicidal. I feel great but why am I here? I'd lost some things

21:05in the way. So I've seen this and then I've seen it in hundreds of other people watching them from the sidelines. People I know people I was in masterminds with, people I was in these coaching programs of watching them lose money, hand over fist, not for legitimate expenses. Like if you're going to go to a retreat it's going to cost a bunch to be able to run that retreat but like if you're somebody's time and they're taking your time and resources and what not, so that they can help you out. Okay, cool. You're paying for time and labor and things like that. You're paying for results. That's true, right? And so if it's worth it for you, great. But I've seen people lose lots and lots of money, go into massive amounts of debts and constantly have to pay off those debts in order to have their next hit and the next thing and then I see them a year later or two years later and they're still in the same cycle. And I don't I don't want that for me anymore. I certainly don't want that for anybody listening. And so I bring this up as like

22:07a warning flag, a shot off the bow, a cautionary tail. And the people who are in it will likely hear this and think, you know what? But that's not me. I'm okay. I can do this. And I just take a step back and ask, just take a step back and pause. What I'll tell my kids is like to help them understand addiction, what I'll tell them is if you can't stop it immediately and put it down, then it's unhealthy. Right? If you can't just like if I just say, hey, time to shut off the TV and they're like, hold on, I just want to finish this. That's already unhealthy. Unless they've stopped it, paused it, and then come to me and said, hey, dad, can I can I just finish the show? I would like to finish the show, please. And I'll look at it. I'm going to be like, dude, do you pause it when I ask you to? How much time is left? Let's look at it. And if it's a no, it's a no. If it's a yes, it's a yes. But if they can't, if they continue doing what they're doing, despite the request to do something different, that's unhealthy. And as adults, we don't have a parent that we have to be obey in that same way anymore. And so you're going to have to do it to yourself. Could you pause for a week? Could you

23:11pause for a month? Could you pause for six months and put it all down? Could you pause for a year and put it all down? If not, like it put all the like chasing of new things down, right? If not, there's an issue, right? If you need coaching in order to be functional, that's a problem. You might need coaching in order to get rid of some dysfunction. But if you need ongoing coaching for the rest of your life, in order to live a fulfilling life, in my opinion, obviously, that's a problem. And I have people I know, friends, old coaches that I paid for their coaching and stuff, who would tell me that that's probably a mindset issue. And I need to shift my thinking and all that other stuff. But I've tasted the fruits that come at the other end of this. And they are bitter or sour, one of the two. And all the sweetness that it starts with eventually goes away. And so you keep having to find different coaches, different sweetness, different, you know,

24:12sugar substitutes in order to get it until finally, you just overloaded and you got to throw up. And so having tasted that, I'm hoping that this episode is useful in just raising a warning flag about that. And if we can maybe look at this idea of self-help addiction. And I don't know, I'd be curious if therapists are here listening. If there is, if they would look at some people who are in therapy, and like these people are just addicted to therapy. And that's a problem. They've become dependent on therapy in order to function. That feels like a problem as well. It's a problem in my mind, but I would be curious, you know, the therapist that do listen. Shoot me, no, let me know. What's going on? Otherwise, for you all, be careful of self-help. Because in the end, you ain't the one beating your own heart. There's someone else that is the true him. And that's enough to chew on for now. To dive deeper into any of this and experience what it's

25:15like to build an automatic muscle memory that produces joy and freedom, even in difficult circumstances, visit findtheorigin.com. And don't forget, God, the real origin of both life and happiness is closer even than your heartbeat and the very reason you and I still have one, despite everything we keep doing to push him away.