Personal Transformation and The Solution Method
January 2, 2008 | In Making A Diff. Lifestyle |
I don’t have any hard statistics; however, I would venture a guess that the majority of people are not currently living the life they dreamed they would be living. I am one of those folks. And, as I’m quickly learning, moving from a lifestyle that isn’t what I dreamed to one that is requires as lot more than just doing a few things differently. In fact, the actions are only a tiny piece of the effort. The real effort is in massive personal transformation.
Photo by Guylaine2007
I’m not talking about the kind of transformation that leads to a few pounds lost, or less sugar consumed. Nor am I talking about a transformation to include a compost bin in the back yard or a recycle bin in the kitchen. These are small actions, and while important, aren’t automatically long lasting. Only changing yourself is long lasting.
My Own Start At Personal Transformation
I’ve previously written a few articles on this. I started with Creating Our Self Definition. Then I followed up with Only We Have The Power to Change Ourselves. While I deeply believe the principles I wrote about in these articles, they are just ideas. They don’t make my transformation any more simple. They are just education, or using my thinking brain. Not my feeling brain, where real transformation needs to occur.
I have talked around the source of many of my ideas in my recent posts because personal transformation, is well, personal. It is deeply grueling work, as difficult at times as intense physical activity. As I’ve been pursing my own personal transformation, I’ve raged, I’ve cried, I’ve shaken with fear and I’ve felt deep remorse. Feeling my emotions intensely has been liberating, as well as exhausting.
New Year’s Eve, I wrote an article entitled The Angries - “Management” Isn’t Always The Best Idea. In this post, I focused on anger, which is the first feeling in the natural flow of feelings: anger, sadness, fear, and guilt. I talked about learning to express my anger instead of stuffing it and how this has greatly loosened the grip of out of balance sadness, otherwise known as depression.
However, in this post, I didn’t explain how I learned to do this. While it was a deeply personal, transformative experience, I didn’t do it alone. The actual processing of the feelings had to be done by me, but I had a wonderful coach through the process.
A New Direction
In the spring of 2006, I was looking for information on emotional eating, looking for some new ideas to help me break this bad habit. I knew it was connected to depression, but the therapy I had attended hadn’t really solved the problem. Sure, I’d made progress, but I knew there was something else that I was missing - a piece of the puzzle that was still in the box, but wasn’t seen because the lid was closed. I found the book The Pathway by Laurel Mellin.
What I read in this book changed my life. It led me to a program that I’ve received a lot of benefit from and that I can directly credit with my recent decision to pursue my dream.
This book is very rich in detail, and serves as an introduction to The Solution Method. This is a method developed over the past 20+ years at the University of San Francisco. It is backed by solid neurological research and continues to be developed as we speak. I would be doing a huge disservice to try to explain the entire idea in one blog post, so I encourage you to check out the website and the book for more information. However, I would also be doing a disservice to my readers if it left it like that.
The Solution Method
The basic premise of The Solution Method is that we lack the nurturing and limits setting skills to allow us to live an emotionally balanced life. These skills are called Development Skills and as such can be learned now, even though we didn’t as children. Because those around us as we were growing up didn’t have the skills, and couldn’t teach them to us, we grew up with a distorted version of these skills. Most of us have some, but not enough to live a life that is more emotionally balanced than unbalanced. When we encounter an emotional situation that we don’t have sufficient skills to process, we look outside for other coping mechanisms. For me, that involves numbing out and emotional eating. For others, it may be smoking, excessive drinking, or overspending.
As we grow up we learn things about ourselves. Taunts by classmates can teach us that we are worthless. Of course we aren’t, but we are told these things so many times that the belief becomes hardwired into the neural networks of our brain. Since these lessons are more often than not put into place in an emotionally charged atmosphere, they become that much more solid. Everyone should be familiar with the term “emotional baggage.” That’s what this is talking about.
The good news is that emotional baggage (or trash as The Solution Method terms it), is a matter of neural wiring. This isn’t simple, but because it is biological, there is a process we can undergo that can “re-wire” these neural networks to bring about emotional balance more of the time than unbalance.
In a nutshell, the process involves going back into the emotional upsets of the past, processing the emotions we didn’t at the time, and then getting a new perspective on them - setting a new, reasonable expectation. This process can also be used in the moment (or shortly thereafter) to process emotions as they arise, before they have a chance to turn into the trash and add to the pile we already have. As part of the process, these new expectations are repeated, until the brain believes the new expectations stronger than the old ones and it becomes our new way of thinking - automatically.
This is similar to affirmations, except that with affirmations, emotion doesn’t matter and is sometimes discouraged. With the new expectations, emotion is encouraged. Highly charged emotional circumstances put the original expectation in our brains. The more highly emotionally charged we can get about the reasonable, new expectation, the easier it is for our brains to adopt the new one over the old one.
Life Changes
I mentioned above that this method has changed my life. As I uncovered the automatic, unreasonable beliefs, I’ve been able to see that they were messages planted by mean classmates, or chance comments taken out of context. In other words, I’ve been able to undo the belief that these expectations represent the truth. They aren’t the truth. And the cool thing is, I then get to define what the truth is. Like: going for my dreams isn’t stupid after all!
By no means is this process complete; I may be doing little pieces of it for the rest of my life. However, The Solution Method does have an end point - when you reach your Solution. This is a tipping point where you have emotional balance most of the time. There will still be pockets of trash and times when you go out of balance, but they happen much less often and going out of balance is much harder than it was when you started the program.
I’ve been working with the program for a little over a year (since late fall 2006). I don’t yet have a Solution, and it’s really hard to say how much farther I have to go; I hear that towards the end the effects snowball and a Solution comes quickly. For several reasons, I’m unable to formally participate in the training at this time; however, I am still using the skills and techniques I’ve learned to give myself as much emotional balance as possible in any given moment.
Going Forward
I may not mention The Solution Method again. Then again, I may talk about it in depth in the future. It has been a very big part of my life over the past year and as such, it has really helped me get up the courage to go for my dreams and start this blog. As I continue to transform and go for my dreams, I will encounter obstacles. I hope that by sharing some of what I learn in overcoming these obstacles can help someone else. I also hope that if this Method appeals to you, that you will check out their website. I’ve only given you a brief overview and Laurel does a much better job than I at explaining the neurological research behind the method.
If this story had struck you, or if you have experienced The Solution Method, I would love to hear from you in the comments below.
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Sounds like a great program.
A friend of mine who had food issues swears by the books by Geneen Roth (though some of the writing is a bit cringeful).
Evan,
Thanks for the reference to Ms. Roth. I checked out her website a little. From what I read, it sounds like she would agree with some of the premise behind The Solution Method. Although, she just focuses on food.
One of the great things about The Solution Method is that it shows that the cause of all kinds of excess is essentially the same. So, whether I’m craving chocolate, numbing in front of the TV, or rushing to stay so busy I’m overwhelmed, the root cause is the same - avoiding the painful feelings and the bad memories they stir up. So, as I work on processing those emotions, it helps across the board with all excesses, not just emotional eating.
I also like that The Solution Method has so much research behind it. I don’t know if this applies to Ms. Roth (I haven’t read her specifically), but I have read others in the past who seem to be just talking about their ideas, which may or may not be backed by science.
Just something else to think about.
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