leebus99

What exactly are you thinking when you feel the anxiety? Perhaps try writing down as many thoughts/inferences as you can, like: I need to get all these tasks done. I need to get a well paid career. I have to maintain my sporting prowess in XYZ. Think in terms of facts, true/false, as 'concrete' as you can. Try to work out causality, do you feel anxious then seek to find a cause, or do the thoughts themselves lead to anxiety? Once you've got a good handle on some of those, try to explore the evaluations behind them: If I don't get all my tasks done I've had a 'bad' day. Not having a well paid job like my family means I have a low(er) worth. Performing poorly at sports is not an acceptable option for me. Here, try to focus on good/bad evaluations, what are the underlying beliefs driving your behaviours. Ultimately underneath your cognitive nature are some drives, to get a certain feeling, or avoid a certain feeling. You could also flip the script and explore things like how you think and feel when considering a future "being an authentic creator sharing wisdom about health and the mind." I would also suggest you think very deeply about your parental expectations from this point of view. If you know what you want to do, and what you don't want to do, then what is holding you back? Also, if you haven't learnt about Spiral Dynamics, definitely do that. It sounds like your family is heavily rooted in Orange (that's not a judgement by the way), whereas you are starting to transcend that stage and exploring Green/Yellow values.

Rationality is a closed system, and 'debunking' is effectively using rationality to analyse something in a certain way. Therefore it's like saying can we use maths to disprove maths. You don't need to debunk anything my friend, just look at the people who are completely paradigm locked into 'rationality as the ultimate truth' and how narrowminded that makes them, Rationality has effectively become their god/spirituality/belief system. If this sounds like nonsense, perhaps check out Leo's video on Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the implications it has on perspectives in general.

I think you may be confusing the model itself with people who misappropriate it. For me, trying to ground myself in stage Yellow thinking has made me massively less judgemental. I would also argue that humans aren't complex and chaotic, we're just a bunch of meat robots that are almost entirely products of our environments. Perhaps not even 'almost' (cue endless debate about free will).

Haha! I'll take that as a compliment. To be fair, when I was typing that out, I thought "man this sounds like the essay I wrote a few weeks ago". But yeah, you're right, connection is super important, and a common thing I hear from experienced therapists is that they often find it hard to initially accept that some clients just won't gel with them, and they will move on to someone else. I think even the most skilled, experienced, personable therapist won't be the right fit for everyone. Laying out your insecurities can definitely be really confronting, and I guess that's why people like journaling, and perhaps the anonymity of the internet. But, I think the real value comes in being able to lay it all out to another human, and be met with compassion and understanding. That's what really changes the deep negative values and feelings, because suddenly you've got contradictory information that perhaps all that 'bad' stuff isn't quite as bad as you thought it was. All that being said, I'm sure we will see a huge amount of AI tools aimed at promoting good mental health over the next few years, and I'm sure a lot of them will have some value and do some good.

The interaction of AI and Therapy is going to be an interesting area over the next few years. While fans of AI will tell you it's going to revolutionise therapy and make therapists redundant, most therapists would have a very different take based on their experience. Since the early days of the field, it has becoming increasingly apparent that one of the most important, if not the most important factors in successful therapy is the therapeutic relationship. There's a great book by Mick Cooper that is a kind of meta-study of meta-studies that looks at every possible variable in the world of the therapy to make some sense of where the efficacy comes from, and the relationship itself comes out on top again and again. Obviously there are also a huge amount of qualitative books and sources making the same argument. So, if successful therapy is ultimately down to the human connection between client and therapist, with the therapist providing unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence (Carl Roger's core conditions), what happens when the therapist isn't a human? My belief is that a AI therapist could be a great psychoeducation tool, could certainly help a client find valuable insights about themselves, some of which they will be able to integrate and use to make tangible changes to their lives. However, I think there will always be something missing in the lack of a real relationship, and depending on the issues at hand, this could be a small problem or a huge one. From my own therapy experiences (as part of my current training to be a therapist), it is the human nature of my therapist, her human fallibility, her genuine opinions, judgements and life experiences that often lead me to my own progress. My question is whether an AI will be able to integrate with a client on a real 'feelings' level, or whether the insights and knowledge gained will only ever be on a cognitive level. Perhaps it would be like absorbing 100 therapy books, videos, journals etc, you're going to get a lot of knowledge, and AI can give you this in a very concise and tailored format, but is it going to really land? Additionally, if it's a text entry only AI model, it's going to be missing all of your body language, tone of voice changes, somatic reactions to things etc., which are all integral parts of real therapy. I certainly don't profess to have all the answers, but I think I can be sure that this issue is a lot more complicated than a lot of people make out, and could end up being a good example of where the 'hype curve' thinks a new tech is going to change everything, but ultimately does very little.

Great question. It was absolutely awful to be honest. Being cut off completely from our support network was really difficult. I worked from home throughout the whole pandemic, so it felt like the 4 of us were imprisoned in our house most of the time. The care from the hospital during the pregnancy was poor, and the limited appointments we did have my wife had to go on her own, including scans. They also decided my wife had gestational diabetes very late in the pregnancy, using a method that doesn't really make sense, so then wanted to induce her and messed us around with that, so the end stage of the pregnancy was tough. My really good friends who had a baby due a few weeks later ended up losing her during childbirth because complications had been missed during the pregnancy due to the poor care. It was definitely a terrible time to have young kids for a lot of people. After my son was born we started seeing our parents in a 'bubble', and that certainly made things a bit easier. In terms of what helped me get through it all, very little to be honest! I really didn't cope very well at all. Sleep deprivation hit hard, because neither of our kids were sleeping for months. Eventually in early 2021 it all got to boiling point and I ended up going off work with stress. I had a couple of months off, started counselling then changed jobs. I just didn't have the right skills, knowledge or coping strategies to deal with all of that stuff hitting me at the same time. Once the 'dust had settled' I decided I would never let myself get in such a hole ever again, so started my self-improvement journey. Got into meditation and Buddhism, and through that found Actualized.org. Fast forward 4 years I'm now retraining to become a therapist, and I'm a very different person to who I was pre-Covid/pre-Kids.

If a snap election was called in the UK tomorrow, theoretically Nigel Farage could be a front runner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election So as far as I'm concerned, anything is possible these days. Perhaps Tate could get a cabinet role in a Reform government, Secretary of State for Exploitation or something.

I'm 36 with two kids, 6 and 4. Having children was the most growth inducing thing I've ever done. The experience, coupled with Covid and career failure totally broke me and I had no choice but to remake myself into something completely different. If I never had kids, I'd still be stuck neck deep in stage orange wealth/success obsessions and living a boring and empty life.

@Vercingetorix Thanks for your post. I agree that self acceptance can be a major objective in a lot of therapy, but not all. I've seen a lot of different ways of differentiating therapy and coaching, and I certainly like your take on therapy being past/present focused and coaching being present/future focused. For me, coaching all involves a lot more knowledge/information/experience sharing from coach to client, whereas a therapist should be 95%+ focused the client's space, but with a little room for psycho-education etc. Part of me thinks that with yellow and above on the spiral, therapy content/topics could became quite all encompassing, and it might be quite difficult to really differentiate between therapy/coaching/mentoring/guiding etc etc. at that level. In fact, I think as a general point when you get to yellow and above a lot of labels and definitions start to lose meaning and became much less useful.

@Michael569 That's exactly the sort thing I was thinking about, and super helpful, thanks for bearing with me! What you're saying makes perfect sense, if I stay local I'll be practicing (face to face at least) in a small town, so would imagine most of my clients will be either middle aged blue/orange, and perhaps younger orange/green. So I think a lot of the theories that really interest me, and were really important on my own journey, probably won't land at all with a lot of my clients, and like you said, probably turn a lot of them off completely. Working primarily with people higher on the spiral all the time would be fantastic, but like you said, probably very difficult to build a practice around. I wonder if there are trends between spiral stages and the need/efficacy of therapy. In my own case, being neck deep in stage orange values started to cause me a lot of stress, and it was mainly learning about SD and getting into green/yellow that helped me move on from those values I've seen a lot of stage green people though absolutely stressed/miserable/anxious with the state of the world/their world as well. But like you said, people solidly in yellow/turquoise are going to be much more self-aware and conscious, but then again that might actually lead them to seek out others who can help them continue to grow. I wonder how easy it would be to have a local practice focussed on common issues, working face to face, but an online practice, branded and marketed different to try and appeal to higher consciousness people seeking a different style of relationship to work on their less socially understood growth areas. I'd love to know more about what you were talking about in your last paragraph if you are happy to share? @ricachica That's really interesting, thanks for sharing. Sounds like you've got some good plans to work at. I'm yet to explore psychedelics personally, but have read a fair bit on how useful they seem to be for treating various conditions. I can see that over the next decade more adoption of their use in clinical settings, so hopefully some options will open up for you. I haven't learnt too much about Jung yet, but I think I'll find his theories interesting once I get into the detail. Looking forward to what you'll share here in the future!

Both really. I find that things like spiral dynamics factor heavily in my sense making of the world/people/problems now, but it doesn't seem to feature massively in the core modalities of therapy. I almost find it hard to not see things through a spiral dynamics lense most of the time, but it's probably because I found it so helpful in my own journey. There seems to be an increasing amount of therapists incorporating spirituality into their practice, but not in a dogmatic religious way. I guess that's bordering on existential therapy as well. So I guess I'm kinda seeing a Venn diagram of 'actualized stuff' on one circle and 'therapy' as the other, and wondering what people find sits nicely in the shared segment.

Hi All, I'm 6 months into re-training as a therapist (counsellor / psychotherapist / talk therapist etc etc.). I'm 36, live in the UK and currently work in engineering management, which I have completely lost interest in, and was probably never truly interested in it in the first place. I had counselling myself 5 years ago during a miserable 2020. It was totally transformative, and led me to discover meditation, spirituality, developmental psychology and of course a lot of that has been through the Actualized YT channel. I found an almost inexhaustible enthusiasm for these topics, which hasn't remotely waned over the last 4 years, so decided it was time for a career change and a move towards life purpose, and becoming a therapist appealed to me for a variety of reasons. I'm interested to know if there are any qualified or trainee therapists on the forum, and if so, how do the topics covered on Actualized inform/interact with your practice? Or perhaps if anyone has any related insights on the career path. Lee

Princess Arabia makes some good points on labels, but I would suggest you look into 'Pansexuality'. I thought it I was Bi after experimenting with men a few times, but my attraction to women is still much stronger. I am much more specific in the type of guys I am attracted to, and considering myself pansexual rather than bisexual kind of 'opened me up' a little and made me feel like I didn't have to have a 50/50 attraction to the normal gender binary. Another good topic I picked up from a Bi girl my wife and I dated was that she described herself as bisexual but homo-romantic. We could all argue about semantics till the end of time, but point she was making was that she had sexual attraction to both genders, but only a romantic attraction to other women. Perhaps thinking about your own feelings through these terms might help. I would consider myself pansexual but hetero-romantic.

I really liked this documentary. Such a good thing to watch from a Spiral Dynamics point of view as well. I saw it as a great example of Blue vs. Green, but then you've got Ma Anand Sheela who very Orange, kind of battling for power against Osho himself, who is Turquoise (but with a rather strong Orange fondness for luxury cars perhaps!). Also, what happens when you gather a group of people with a strong Red element and parachute them into a Green community. My only criticism of the doc is that it doesn't go very much into Osho's teachings, but I get why they didn't.

I wouldn't worry too much about Blue, I find its more useful as a societal lens than a personal one. Perhaps spend time reflecting on the demographics that are very 'Blue' in your own society and see what value you find in how they operate. I also wouldn't worry about Orange, the western world is so painfully Orange that you'll be 'Oranged' out up to your eyeballs as you go through life anyway. I find I'm constantly drawn to Orange thinking through work, finances, raising my kids, economics, etc. Just keep focusing on developing your 'Yellow' style thinking (mega-threads are great), and you'll continue to understand all the preceding stages more anyway. But remember, the map is not the territory, and Spiral Dynamics is a model, not the ultimate truth. Use it, but don't base your life on it.