Why didn't anyone tell me?
I am telling you the things that I wish
that folks had told me back in the day.
And I want you to know that you can reclaim your agency
over your life by choosing the beliefs, habits,
practice, and strategies that actually get you
to the result that you want.
Welcome to the Re-patterning podcast,
where we believe your mind body system is your domain
and that choosing the beliefs, habits, and patterns
that best support you is your birthright.
I'm your host, Artin Lee,
creator of the Re-patterning Project,
an eight week course in learning to free yourself
from the patterns of your past and program your mind
for your dreams of the future.
Join me for these extraordinary conversations
as we unpack the keys to creating our reality.
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Re-patterning Podcast.
I'm your host, Artin Lee,
and this is the final episode of season one.
I have decided to release these episodes in batches of 10
because of my neurodivergence consistency is something
that I can sometimes struggle with.
And I also want to make sure that rather than
keep myself adhering to a schedule that may not always
feel in flow with my other projects, that it is easier
and will lead to better quality conversations overall
if I create these podcasts with the help of my producer,
Tomi, who has absolutely done an amazing job this season.
I want to thank her in particular.
I want to create these podcasts in batches of 10,
which will allow me to make sure that each conversation
has adequate time to be well researched, et cetera.
And also give everyone a chance to catch up
on any episodes that you may have missed.
So we will be taking a bit of a hiatus for a little while
as we go into recording season two.
I'm very excited about some of the guests
that I have coming up.
So I hope you will stay with us and we'll
look forward to seeing you next time.
And for the end of each season episode,
I decided that I'd like to come on and do a solo talk
so that I can drop in with all of you
with some of my feelings and thoughts about re-patterning,
about magic, about mental health,
about the kinds of discussions that we curate here
at the Re-patterning Podcast.
So you can also get to know me and my own thoughts,
and so I can provide, hopefully, a good, conclusive season
wrap-up to some of the topics that we have discussed.
So thank you for being here.
Thank you for listening.
And I hope you will stick around, catch up on any episodes
that you may have missed along the way.
And then we'll see you in season two.
For today, I want to talk a little bit about what I feel,
based on my own experience, my own knowledge,
my research into mental health, as well as my lived experience
in it, and also some of what magic has taught me
and shown me along the way.
And I want to speak to the current state of mental health
and the mental health industry.
And to a paradigm that I believe is a more accurate map
of the landscape that we are dealing with when we talk
about our mental health, when we talk
about looking into some of the things that we may struggle with
and finding those solutions.
It is probably no surprise to anyone
at this point in the season that I have lots of critiques
of the mental health industry, as someone who
is a survivor of it myself, who is a former client of practitioners
who, while many of them may have been well-meaning,
have essentially been indoctrinated into a system of what
I look at essentially as pathologization
and learned helplessness that is quicker to stigmatize
and further burden the very demographics that it claims
to treat.
And I'd like to talk a little bit about what I have learned.
And I want to emphasize too that when I talk about research
and lived experience and magic, or perhaps we could even
say, noces, that sort of knowledge
that seems to come from engaging with magic, engaging
with spirit and being open to learning.
And I want to simply emphasize that those are not distinct
categories.
There have been times when I have done magic
in order to increase my knowledge or increase my abilities
or in the beginning simply to solve my own mental health
problems, which required me learning more knowledge
and also increasing my abilities.
And often that knowledge would come to me
by way of research studies, articles
that would be considered, as Dr. Jamie Marich said
in her episode, more toward that hard science data.
Mental health is not a hard science,
but there are certainly everything from the most rigorous
studies that adhere to the industry's standards
of what is considered legitimate data all the way
to lived experience and not that even those things
are necessarily on a linear spectrum,
but also the lived experience of those
who have spiritual experiences, those who have spiritual experiences
that intersect with their mental health experience
that may even provide great relief and clarity
to their mental health struggles, things that perhaps we cannot
prove.
We have sometimes these great experiences.
You go into something like an Iowaska ceremony,
like we were speaking about on the Jeffrey Criple episode,
and you come out with this experience that maybe for you
is incredibly meaningful.
And then you try and tell someone else about it,
and they're just looking at you like, what?
You did what?
You went to hell and you rescued your own soul.
That was my first Iowaska.
Maybe that will be a different podcast episode
where I'll tell a little bit more about that experience.
But basically these spiritual experiences
that are very difficult, if not impossible,
to translate into hard data, and yet which
create results for so many of us, and everything in between.
So these are not--
I'm not a big, strict boxes person.
As much as I love logic and categorization,
as much as my autism is geared toward that,
I find that the questions and the spaces where the answers
are not always sufficient to fully answer all the questions,
I'm finding that that is for me where
some of the richness and true understanding really lies.
The more that we try to fit things into neat boxes and categories--
and again, I love categorization.
It makes my brain very happy.
But the more that we try to fit things into these strict boxes
or categories, the more we are going to come up
with exceptions to those rules, and the more we
are going to have to expand our worldview and our mindset
to be able to include them.
And our refusal to do so, especially
the mental health industries, often refusal to do so,
is I think where we can get caught up in prioritizing dogma
over a truth.
Woo!
[LAUGHS]
So I want to speak today a little bit about describing
what for me has become the most accurate map
for speaking about and treating mental health.
And ultimately, what I have found is that there is a way
of speaking about our mental health and understanding
our mental health that distances greatly
from the pathological models that I see in current mental health.
So for example, one thing that you may have heard me sort of rail
against many times is the idea of personality disorders.
Quote unquote, the DSM is full of them.
And you can look them up.
And there are the symptoms of these personality disorders
and these neat little boxes that if you tick so many of these things,
then you perhaps qualify for having this personality disorder.
And I want to first zoom out, and I just
want to look at that frame, because it really bums me out.
It really bums me out that our current model for mental health
essentially involves someone going to a provider or practitioner
for help, right?
That's why we end up having our mental health treated
is we are dealing with something some sort of a struggle.
And we seek out help, and we go to the practitioner
that is available to us, usually a therapist, perhaps a counselor,
perhaps a psychiatrist, depending on the kind of help
that we think we need at the time.
And so often, the very framework that we enter into
when we ask for that help is something that immediately is going
to make us feel worse about ourselves.
Because how does it feel to have a label
slapped on you that says you have a personality disorder?
And certainly, I think there are some therapists
out there who are better than others at allowing that to be
something that is non-stigmatizing to say, hey,
look, these are symptoms of your experience.
A lot of therapists, I know, will say, look, the DSM is essentially
at the end of the day.
It's a billing manual.
If I'm going to treat you for something, if I'm a psychiatrist
and I'm going to prescribe you something,
I need to be able to make a diagnosis.
And this is just the best that we have.
But, man, when you consider that that really,
like that's the best that we have, and that's the industry
that trains these professions.
And the more and more that I interact with therapists,
and certainly, like you've seen two therapists on my show
this season, Katie Keach and Dr. JV Merich.
And I admire both of them so very, very much.
But the reason I think that a therapist becomes a good therapist,
so often is that their humanity and their compassion
actually survive the indoctrination of their licensure.
I believe that the institutions that are granting licensure
are the very foundations of them, are built in frameworks
that are not compassionate, that are not patient-centric.
If you look at history, for example, we didn't just arrive
here today where we are out of nowhere.
If you look at the history of mental health,
we're looking at history of institutionalization,
history of pathologization.
I mean, you don't have to go that far to look at stories
and media, for example, of in prior centuries,
or even just decades of abuses happening in institutions.
Some of you may be familiar with Emily Autumn,
and the home for wayward girls, the sort of character
that she's created that is a sort of fictionalization
of some of her own struggles with mental health,
and some of the treatment that she received.
You can look at Sweeney Todd, and they go to the inmates
of the asylum for the hair, for their wigs, for example.
What a way to say, we don't care about your humanity anymore.
We're just going to take your hair away, things like that.
And those are both fictional examples, of course.
And look at sucker punch, sucker punch.
And what a great if flawed movie, but it certainly--
these are all fictional examples, but again,
fiction doesn't arise out of nowhere.
These are our history, the history of mental health care,
quote unquote, is rife with abuse, dehumanization,
the idea that those who suffer from mental health struggles
are unworthy of being treated like people.
And we didn't just evolve out of that past and leave it
entirely behind.
As we talked about in KDK, this episode,
there's the Franklin scandal, which
was where homes for delinquent youth
were being used to essentially feed trafficking networks.
Paris Hilton has also spoken out about some of her experiences
and the experiences of her fellow incarcerated, quote unquote,
delinquence.
This is a history that we have not eradicated.
And these same fields of expertise
that have produced these institutions--
I'm not saying it's all the same people, et cetera,
but it is essentially the same behemoth,
the same aggrigor, so to speak, that licenses your average
therapist.
I don't think that there are many clean hands in that industry,
because we are paying in many ways for the sins of the fathers.
We have not-- just in the same way that, especially in America,
we have not evolved out of systemic racism.
We look at, yeah, sure, we can all share water fountains today,
but that doesn't mean that it's over.
That doesn't mean that those things don't still run
through the veins of this country and this society.
And I think that mental health care is guilty
in much of the same ways.
So I think that for many therapists,
what separates a therapist who is effective
is has their own compassion and their humanity
survived their indoctrination into this institution.
And that is not to say that they're not also good researchers
who are doing work in those fields,
and that effective care cannot be based on some of that good
research.
I'm just saying that things are not so black and white,
and it's important, I think, for us to keep our eyes
and our minds open to where those patterns
are still insidiously affecting us today.
And I think personality disorders are one of them, quite frankly,
because I think it's really cruel if a person is coming
to a professional for help to immediately place a label on them
that stigmatizes them and others them, rather than looking
at like, hey, what happened?
Where is the curiosity?
They are also circular diagnoses, right?
You have a personality disorder because you display these symptoms,
you display these symptoms because you
have this personality disorder, quote unquote.
And it really just amazes me that here we are in the year
of our Lord, 2026, and this is still in many ways the standard.
There have been terrific evolutions in the conversation.
I have seen, especially within the last decade,
many thought leaders in mental health begin
to speak out about how, for example,
there was a popular article that circulated a while back,
titled Something Along the Lines of its Time,
we start calling borderline personality disorder,
what it is, which is a response to trauma,
specifically early attachment trauma that creates these symptoms.
So I'm not denying that personality disorders
are a real thing in the sense that there
are clusters of symptoms and patterns
that we humans have categorized into what we think
are these neat little boxes and that those patterns
are not often present in people.
I am saying that the framework for treatment
is sometimes the cure is just as bad as the poison.
And I have seen speaking of borderline personality disorder,
I have seen particularly young women,
and I was one of them at once.
I was never formally diagnosed with borderline,
but it was sort of thrown around as a possibility.
And I remember specifically feeling like there is something
wrong with me, I am damaged.
So therefore I am lucky to receive whatever love or care I receive
because the problem is with me.
I am inherently damaged or broken somehow.
And what did that belief lead to?
That belief led me to settling in a lot of my relationships
and settling for the kind of poor treatment inconsistent,
intermittent reward, intermittent reinforcement,
which is going to like really ramp up someone's anxious attachment.
It led me to settle for that kind of treatment
because I thought that that was sort of all I deserved
or that I should be grateful for what I do get.
And that if I am not being loved in my relationship
as I wish to be, that I need to please better,
to please harder, to be better, to squash down
and repress those emotions that were causing those sort of borderline
style outbursts.
And again, sure like yes, those needed to be healed,
but repression was not the way to do that.
The way to do that for me would have actually been to listen
to my body and say, this is a terrible relationship.
You're being treated poorly.
You need to get out of here.
And the only reason that you think that this is as good as it gets
is because you did have early attachment trauma
and that formed a lot of your ideas about relationships, right?
And I think again, there are probably many therapists
out there who understand this and can treat folks
with those symptoms in that way.
But again, they are surviving the framework
into which they are indoctrinated.
That's been my experience, that's been my knowledge.
And as much as there are times that I want to believe
that things are getting better with few exceptions
of many therapists that I do admire,
whose work I have promoted here in elsewhere,
I often end up being disappointed.
So that's the old framework that I want to invite us all
to break out of.
If you are someone who is listening to this podcast right now
and you go to a therapist, which is like,
it's a great and healthy thing to do
to ask for help with your mental health, whatever that looks like.
And if you have a good therapist, I know there are a lot of people
out there who have therapists that they like
and they have a good working relationship with.
That's amazing, that's awesome.
I invite you to challenge your therapists
on how they operate within this framework.
I think that would lead to a lot of very interesting discussions
to say the least.
And there are many who will come out and say,
like, yeah, no, this is messed up and we do the best work
that we can, but it's very difficult to get institutions
on that great level to change.
There's so much red tape, there's so much, you know,
things that are that large are slow to move and evolve.
So that might be an interesting conversation, right?
And I want to talk about what I feel is a new and better paradigm
to look at things from.
Like, of course, I feel it's a new and better paradigm, right?
I, it's essentially what I teach in the repatting project,
which is the eight week course that I teach to help folks
to understand a comprehensive map and manual
of their human mind body learning system in a way
that's going to help them to better pinpoint the roots
of some of their mental health struggles
and to fix them at the source, to rewire them at the source,
I should say.
Again, I believe that our mind body systems are our domain.
And while there are a lot of forces out there
that are fighting for our attention and fighting to program us
and our behavior in ways that they want us to comply with,
at the end of the day, our sovereignty, our freedom,
our agency lies in reclaiming our mind body learning systems
for ourselves.
This is my belief.
This is the core belief and value of the repatting project.
So again, this is my work.
I'm biased, of course.
This is what I believe.
And I believe you should question everything, even from me.
And you should always take everything
that anyone tells you with a grain of salt,
because it is always coming from their own personal experiences
as all of our perspectives are coming
from all of our personal experiences.
So I just mentioned that, right?
Of course, I believe this is what I teach.
And I'm also here to let you know about my course
and to let you know that that is available for you to take
if you want to.
You can join us in one of our live cohorts.
You can also go ahead and purchase for download
the self-study version and get started on that today
if you want to.
So any time anyone is selling something to you,
you should always take it with a grain of salt.
That said, part of the reason that I began this podcast
is because I want this information to be available to more
and more people.
I absolutely believe that I will be sustained and supported
in my work.
Just fine.
The universe will take care of me.
It will bring me the people who want to work with me more
directly.
It will bring the people who want to go through the official course,
right?
And that that will be taking care of regardless.
And the important thing to me is to get this information out
to as many people as possible so that we can quite literally
change ourselves and change the world.
I want us to be bigger than this industry, you guys.
I want this industry to stop being able to operate so
harmfully in with such impunity.
And if we just take our power back, reclaim our agency
and find the solutions for our mental health that actually
work for us, whether that's a good therapist
that you like and have a great relationship with,
or whether it is a non-licensed practitioner,
or a practitioner licensed in a different modality,
whether it's-- I don't know, you guys-- whether it's
acupuncture and Chinese medicine, or whether it's
raky, whether it's timeline therapy, what I practice,
whether it's repotterning and those modalities,
whether it's hypnosis like Phil Farber is speaking about
and brain magic, whether it is actually
taking up a practice of magic and learning
to become good enough at magic that you can cast on yourself,
like we talked about in our inaugural episode
with my teacher, Grant Morrison, that the purpose of magic
is this elevation of the self.
That is really the closest path to what I did.
But of course, in the process of that magic working,
I learned all of these things and was deeply inspired
to put them together in a curriculum and offer them,
as if not a modality in itself at the very least
a school of thought, a way of thinking, that for me, anyway,
has been far more effective than any path
I was able to follow within the mental health industry.
So it's important to me that I spread this information
as freely as I can.
So that is what I'm going to speak about.
This new way of thinking about our mental health,
about our neurodevelopment, about our human operating system.
We were not given an owner as an operator's manual
when we were born.
And there was part of me on my path that
was a little resentful of that when I finally figured out
so much of it for myself.
Why did no one ever teach me this?
Why when I went to therapy, when I visited mental health
professionals, if they had just told me this information,
that would have changed my life.
Did they know where they gatekeeping it?
Did they not know?
Which is worse, right?
They also failed to spot my autism in my ADHD, which now
that, looking at myself now, I'm like,
gosh, how did anyone miss that?
But there you have it.
So here's the paradigm that I operate from.
We are born, and we are a consciousness
that is anchored to a body.
You understand that the day that you die,
your consciousness is going to move on and evolve,
and your body is going to stay behind and slowly decompose.
So we understand that the part of us that thinks and feels--
it is linked inextricably--
well, inextricably until the day I suppose--
or corded, perhaps just if we astral project
and then bring it back, right?
But our consciousness is anchored to our body
and linked in a lot of ways that this is a symbiotic relationship,
because when you have emotions, when you have thoughts,
that can affect your physicality.
You feel nervous, so you feel those butterflies in your stomach
or you feel grief so you can feel pain in your chest
or whatever that is.
So our bodies and our consciousnesses are linked.
And from the day that we are born, that we come into this world
and arguably even beforehand, even as our consciousness
is forming and anchoring into our developing body
when we are in our mother's womb, we learn through our experiences.
We come into the world.
There we are in probably the operating room, the hospital,
bright lights.
We get slapped on the back when we start breathing.
And from that very moment, and arguably even before,
we begin to learn things about the world
and about what we can expect of this strange place
that we have been born into.
We learn, for example.
And when we're babies, we really don't have a lot of agencies.
So to speak, we'll have much agency at all, so to speak.
In fact, really as babies, the only thing that we can pretty much
do is cry or not cry, right?
We can make little gurgly sounds.
We can maybe try and roll around in our crib a little bit.
But it's basically if there's something that we need,
if there is a need that we have, and we need to communicate
to our caregiver, usually our parents, right?
Maybe our grandparents or maybe we're raised in a foster family
or maybe we were in an adoption agency for a while.
All of those things can affect us, right?
But so we're a small baby and we have a need.
We either need to be held.
We need to be fed.
We're hungry.
We need to be burped.
Something is going on.
We have a need.
And our option is basically make noise or don't make noise,
right?
Cry, don't cry.
So we have a need, and we're probably going to cry.
We're going to try and alert someone, anyone out there,
that we need to be taken care of in some way.
And there's many different ways that folks who
are our caregivers may respond to us.
It's something I teach in the very first module of the
Re-patterning Project is three hypothetical scenarios,
baby A, baby B, and baby C.
Baby A learns hypothetically that when they cry,
they can reasonably expect their needs to be met.
Baby A learns that when they cry, one of their parents
comes over and is like, oh, hey, what's wrong?
What do you need?
I'm going to hold you.
I'm going to figure out the problem.
And you're going to be all right.
And that baby learns if I ask for help, I can reasonably
expect that my needs will be met.
And then they later grow up to be an adult that has what
we think of as secure attachment, right?
I mean, it's not quite that simple.
There's so many other experiences that can color that.
But generally speaking, right, if we're looking at,
if we're looking at the theoretical category, then that
generally is how baby A is going to grow up.
Baby B, let's say on the other hands, hypothetically,
baby B is born into a household where the parents are,
let's say, low income.
And they have to work a lot.
They can't always care for baby B.
Maybe they're also dealing with a lot of stress.
And so they drink or they do drugs or things to relieve
that stress.
And I say that not even in a stigmatizing way
because when you're in a lot of stress and pain,
as someone who has worked with addiction to some extent,
you will do anything to soothe that pain and to make it go away.
So no shame on that, right?
That just happens to be baby B's circumstances.
So baby B cries and baby B's parents
are either out working, trying to provide income for the family,
including baby B.
Baby B doesn't know that though.
Baby B isn't sitting there in this crib going like,
oh, it's OK that my parents didn't answer my cry
because they're out at their job.
Baby B just knows that when they cry,
that it doesn't work or maybe it works inconsistently.
Maybe they cry and their parents is passed out on the couch,
whatever that is.
And baby B learns that when they ask for help,
they cannot expect their needs to be met reasonably.
They can usually expect that no one is going to hear them
and that they're going to have to somehow figure this out
for themselves.
And of course, the more that baby B grows up,
maybe baby B's parents win the lottery.
And then all of a sudden they're in a better place.
And maybe baby B still has some of that deep seated
in security deep down knowing that that is a possibility,
that that was their experience when they first came into the world.
But maybe they learn more security over time, right?
Baby B's parents got lucky won the lottery
and now they have a lot of free time to spend with baby B.
And that's also maybe how baby B ends up healing,
and becoming more securely attached, right?
But probably in most cases, maybe not, right?
Counting on winning the lottery is not usually a very good bet.
Any magician will tell you there is a way
to many magicians and occultists already doing magic
to win the lottery.
So it's one of the can it be done?
Yes, but you've got a lot of competition.
You're going to, it's going to have to be
from some real strong campaigning.
You might as well build a business and, and chant for it
to be successful.
You're going to have a lot better odds with that.
Anyway.
So baby B essentially learns neglect, right?
And that sort of internal algorithm forums.
If I ask for help, there's kind of no point.
I'm just going to end up screaming and wasting my voice
and nobody is going to come for me.
So I better learn to do things and take care of myself
on my own.
Then you have baby C. And baby C comes into the world.
And not only does baby C learn that there is no point to crying.
Baby C cries.
And baby C is punished for crying.
There was a story that my mother told me from when I was
apparently about six weeks old as a baby when she,
my mother, went out and came home.
And then my father had been watching over me.
And there was a giant red hand print on my backside.
So presumably I had cried.
And my father had taken this as like in a front.
Like the baby is crying at me.
I don't know what to do with this.
And the baby won't behave.
The baby won't shut up.
And so he smacks me apparently.
So there I am.
And I'm baby C, right?
And what baby C learns is if I speak up and ask for my needs
to be met, that is actually dangerous to me.
I am inviting harm to myself.
As I said, I would later grow up to have borderline personality
disorder kind of thrown around at me, not officially diagnosed,
right?
But why is that, right?
If we look at when I was six weeks old, something
that I learned was that--
and of course, this was reinforced
throughout my childhood, right?
And it's funny because my relationships with women
have often been mostly secure, because I
had a great relationship with my mom.
I was really, really lucky that for all of my father's abuse
and his mental illness, that went untreated
because what resources did he have in his day?
Plus patriarchy.
And there's nothing wrong with me and all that kind of stuff
that really, in many ways, held met
of my father's generation back from being able to self-examine
because to admit fault or flaw was to be seen as less of a man
or whatever that looks like, all of that, right?
So I grow up in that environment,
and I learn that asking for my needs to be met actually
incurs danger to me.
And what does that lead to?
It leads to overly people-pleasing behaviors,
because I learn that asking for my needs directly at best,
I'm just not going to get them met.
And at worst, it's going to somehow,
I am offensive by asking for a need to be met.
I have inconvenienced you.
I am losing love.
And in the worst-case scenarios,
I am possibly even incurring physical violence.
It's amazing to me.
Like, it's not like, but it's amazing to me
that something that happens at six weeks old to me
as a baby can have such reverberations
up through my adult relationships.
And thankfully, I have repatterned now.
I've changed that wiring.
I know that as an adult, I can use my agency
to choose people who meet my needs in a reasonable manner,
or at least hear me out and have a conversation,
things like that.
So healing and repatterning is possible.
I am living proof.
Hopefully, at this point in the podcast season,
you know that by now.
But yeah, so baby A, baby B, and baby C.
We learn from a very young age these patterns.
And that's just one example, right?
That's one example that I think we all go through as babies.
We cry when we have a need that we need to have met.
And then we learn whether that need is going to be met or not.
And we go through an infinite number of permutations
of these lessons, right?
Another classic one is like, you reach out,
you touch the hot stove, and you learn that it's hot.
And then you don't do it anymore.
That one is probably like a smart thing to learn, right?
To not touch hot stoves.
But there we are as, you know, little kids.
And we reach out.
And again, that internal algorithm forms.
If X, then Y, if I touch the hot stove, I will get burned.
If I open up and I tell my feelings to my crush,
as I talked about in the Phil Farber episode, right?
I will get punched in the stomach.
That's another, like, I'm opening up, not even like asking
for a need at that point.
For me, that was like making a gesture of love
and receiving physical violence in return from a fellow eight-year-old.
[LAUGHS]
You know who to thought.
And as we go on, we learn these things.
And so we adapt our strategies for having our needs met
and for figuring out how to be secure and exist in the world.
And we learn sometimes that we do certain things and they feel bad.
So we don't do them anymore.
And we lock ourselves out of strategies that perhaps as adults
would actually be healthier for us,
such as like actually asking for your need to be met
or actually making that gesture of love and, you know, trusting
that you're that a grown adult hopefully isn't going to hit you
physically when you try to flirt with them or whatever.
And so there are those strategies that we end up locking ourselves
out of because for whatever reason when we tried them,
when we were young and developing, they proved unsafe to us.
And then there are the strategies that we adopt
because we try them and they do feel good.
So there are a lot of people in the world, for example,
who they grew up learning to be funny, right?
Because their parents paid them more attention
when they were entertaining to them as kids.
They paid them more attention when they
knew how to be pleasing and when they knew how to be charming.
And you can see, like I see this pattern in a lot of men,
for example, who learn to be these really charismatic,
seductive individuals who end up not in any way
having the secure attachment to be able to create
healthier relationships with the women that they're
lowering in, but they're still just like on autopilot,
doing the same thing that worked with mom when they were five,
you know, I make a joke or I do something and all,
now mom is laughing and she's pleased with me or whatever, right?
But there is still that insecurity deep down.
A lot of, I'm sure like you guys know this,
I'm probably not telling you anything that you aren't already aware of,
but a lot of our gifts can also come from our trauma,
you know, the ability to be funny, the ability to be intuitive sometimes
and to read the room.
I know for me, that was one of them that in my own repatterning,
it wasn't that I had to give up that gift, but I had to call my energy back from it,
from constantly spending like 80% of my human CPU scanning the room
for the little green falling matrix numbers and always making sure
like everything is always okay, right?
That's called hypervigilance.
That's something that we may learn growing up that we need to do
if we are in an inconsistent or you know,
often dangerous environment that we need to constantly be scanning the horizon
for danger and that ability to be perceptive can be a great gift,
but we can also over-learn it.
So a lot of repatterning is also about,
I honor the gift and the wisdom that this experience brought me
and I'm also not going to let it run my life past the point of diminishing returns.
The law of diminishing returns is essentially a concept that states that
at some point a given strategy will stop being as effective as it was in the beginning.
For example, if let's say you have a farmer that is using fertilizer on their crops,
the more fertilizer that the farmer uses, the greater the crop yield will be
up until a certain point, right?
At a certain point, that farmer is using more fertilizer
that is actually costing more money than the crop yield is giving.
At a certain point, too much fertilizer may even poison the crops, right?
Another example is our income.
Adjusted for, oh gosh, this is going to be a slightly outdated statistic,
so bear with me because you know, in the last five years, especially since the pandemic,
we've had so much greed flation in the United States in particular,
that I'm pretty sure this is no longer the actual number, but a few years before that anyway,
the roughly the number of, I forget if it's individual or household income,
where we would start crossing into diminishing returns in our quality of life in the United States
was about $100,000, right?
So let's say you have someone who is making $30,000 a year,
and if they double that, if they make $60,000, that's going to be like life changing, right?
That's the difference probably between whether they can afford health insurance,
make reliable car payments, you know, all of those things,
and that's going to be a really, really big difference in their life.
If you then have that person who's making $60,000, and you add another $30,000 on top of that,
and they're making $90,000, that's pretty cool, right?
Like that's great.
Maybe they've already got their bases covered, but maybe now they can also take their family
on a nice vacation once or twice a year.
Maybe they can afford a second car so that, you know,
mom can drive the kids to soccer practice or whatever they're doing.
That absolutely will increase their quality of life in a meaningful and worthwhile way.
If you add another $30,000 on top of that, now that person is making $120,000, okay, great,
but less, right?
Then that first and second and third, $30,000 was to them.
It becomes less and less meaningful.
And yet, so many people, especially living in capitalism, in late-stage capitalist America,
in particular, which is where I live, though I imagine this is, you know, a global issue as well.
So many people learn from that initial if X, then Y, if I make more money, then I will feel secure,
and they don't stop learning.
And this is like the billionaire sickness that we talked about with Doug Rushkov,
an episode two, Wettico, right?
The idea that there is, Wettico is a concept that Doug talks about in team human that is an
American indigenous word that essentially means the sickness of needing to hoard too much
that they saw in the white man, right?
That we still see in our billionaires today looking at all, like, right, like Elon Musk was told,
like, by the United Nations apparently, you know, $6 billion would solve World Hunger.
We got the plan and he was like, nah, never mind.
Change my mind.
Man, you could sneeze six billion dollars.
I remember reading that Vanity Fair interview with Grimes as well, where she talked about how
they were living in like a $45,000 unsecured home with paparazzi around them, with no safety or
security for her.
And there was a hole in her side of the mattress and she was like, can we get a new mattress?
And he was like, well, why don't you just bring yours over?
Bro!
What is, what is, what is this, right?
So, so there we have someone who has overlearned the pattern that money is going to help them feel
secure.
And that's the thing about it that can be so difficult is when we go on autopilot,
we don't recognize the point at which we are reaching diminishing returns.
The alcoholic begins as a person who takes a drink or a shot of alcohol and thinks,
all right, I'm going to drink this and it's going to make me feel better and more comfortable.
And it's also going to make me make me better at socializing.
Well, that may be true of the first drink.
It may be even true of the second and maybe even the third drink.
But when you get to like the 12th and 13th drink, you definitely aren't feeling better and you're
definitely not better at socializing, right?
So realizing the point of diminishing returns in any of our given patterns and strategies
is huge.
It's such a critical component.
And then of course, there are the patterns and strategies that we take on in well-meaning ways,
which we think are going to be effective for us, but which actually are not.
And when we shine a light on those, one thing I like to say often in the course is that
incredulity is a great weapon against our demons.
When we can shine a light on make these patterns conscious and realize how when we actually
hold them up to the scrutiny of daylight, they actually don't make any sense.
I look at myself and the pattern that I mentioned in our episode with Celeste Mott,
that I first noticed in myself that was sort of that brain breaking, mind opening,
paradigm shattering, entree into my understanding of repattering, was that I believe truly and fully
that if I was valuable to people that they would treat me well, that seemed to make sense to me,
right?
If you have something that is valuable to you that is pleasing you, that is adding value to your life,
why wouldn't you treasure and cherish it?
And very early on in my repattering journey, I heard this sentence in my head, which was
art and people destroy beautiful things all the time.
And I imagine myself as a priceless painting hanging on the wall of a museum and that there
would be someone out there who would come and throw a cake at it for some reasons.
If you were paying attention maybe five or six years ago or so, there was an incident where there
was a person who threw a cake at the Mona Lisa, right? And the Mona Lisa is behind glass,
the Mona Lisa was fine, the person was doing it as some sort of a protest or political statement.
I don't recall exactly what it was about at this time, but could you imagine me being
theoretically the Mona Lisa thinking that if I'm just a good enough painting,
then I won't get cakes thrown at me.
It's ridiculous when you actually hold it up to the light of day, but the thing is when we're
learning this as we're growing up and we are that fish swimming in the water of our childhood homes
that we don't have an objective viewpoint about, then we're not going to be conscious of those
learned strategies. And we are going to go on autopilot and we are going to simply react in ways
to our external circumstances that we have been programmed to react with via our lived experiences.
This is the source of almost all, if not all, of our mental health struggles. And there are some
exceptions actually, right? So not all most, but there are such things as chemical imbalances.
For example, I have ADHD. It means I have a dopamine deficiency. So I do medicate for that at times.
And I also am simply mindful of what my need for dopamine is and how I can meet that need.
Oftentimes it means engaging in work that is about puzzle solving and all the stuff I'm talking
about with you right now. Like it's very interesting to me. It allows me to hyper focus. It holds my
attention. I will be depressed if I'm in a job environment where I have to just like crunch numbers or
you know, do data entry like then of course my mental health is going to struggle, right? Because I'm
not getting my dopamine needs met by the world around me. So there are such things as chemical
imbalances or deficiencies. I will argue, however, that the mental health industry really is not
great at understanding or treating all of those yet. There is that research that came out recently
that were like, oh, we don't really know why SSRIs have the, you know, they don't actually work with
serotonin the way that we thought that they did. And so much of psychiatry has been this sort of trial
and error. We'll try this drug and see how this does try that and see how that does. I just think,
you know, man, I just think we can do better, right? So chemical imbalances, chemical deficiencies
are a thing. I don't believe that the industry is as good as it could be at understanding and
treating them, right? But I want to make sure that I include that exception, right? So it's not all
lived experience. There's also things like traumatic brain injury that can also affect our mental health,
our memory, our mood in many ways. So there's things like that too. But for things that do not
involve the gray matter of the brain and the neurochemicals that it traffics in, I really believe
that most of our mental health struggles come from learning these patterns and either learning
maladaptive patterns, learning strategies that we think are going to work for us, but don't, or
learning certain strategies that maybe worked for us in the beginning or would work if we knew
how to use them in moderation or perhaps in tandem with other patterns and strategies. But we over
learn them, we go past that point of diminishing returns and we end up poisoning our own crops with
the fertilizer, drinking until we black out, et cetera, et cetera, right? A lot of these apparent
problems, quote unquote are actually bad solutions to greater underlying problems. Even the most
destructive of behaviors is motivated in some way. Even the autistic kid who is banging his head against
a wall has a reason for doing that. Maybe there is something going on internally. There is over stimulation
happening where actually the act of banging one's head against a wall feels by comparison, like relief,
right? It is necessary for us to know ourselves and if we are practitioners to know our clients,
to look at the underlying needs and strategies and motivations that are causing destructive behaviors.
And it is also necessary for us to look at the beliefs about the world that we may have taken on
in what feels like a very reasonable manner because our experiences of it when we were growing up
reflected this worldview, the feelings and beliefs about the world that also result in things like
depression and anxiety. I have a theory about depression and that is that the root of depression is
simply hopelessness because we are trying strategies that aren't working and we can no longer
motivate ourselves to do those strategies. And so we sort of give up the body, the mind body system
kind of gives up and says, I don't know what to do here. Nothing I'm doing is working. It's futile,
it's hopeless, it's pointless. And I have a theory also that anxiety comes primarily from having
strategies that work inconsistently. I'm anxious because I'm doing something and I don't know
if it's going to get me the result that I want or not. I am trying that strategy, but I feel
anxiety, I feel trepidation because sometimes this works and sometimes this doesn't, right?
Anxious attachment, which is something that I have a lot of familiarity with in my own history,
primarily came from being in relationships where I'm like, I'm going to try and be pleasing, but I
don't know if the person is going to leave me, right? And these worldviews can be very difficult
to break ourselves out of because we have a function in our brain called confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias, I believe is also the foundation of the understanding of the law of attraction.
The law of attraction says like that, which you think about will be what you see in your reality.
And this is explained by some precepts of neuro-linguistic programming, which is one of my
certifications that you may see on the wall behind me here if you're watching the video,
a version of this conversation. In neuro-linguistic programming, what I learned is that
we take in information through our five senses at roughly 8 billion bits per second. I've
no idea how they measured how many bits of information your brain takes in, but apparently that it,
and apparently it's about 8 billion bits per second. But you can't possibly remember everything,
right? There are some folks out there who have extraordinary brains with extraordinary memories
who can remember like, oh yeah, the morning of July 1993, I woke up and I had blueberry oatmeal
for breakfast that morning, right? There is an artist named Steven Wiltshire. He is a black autistic man
who he'll take like a helicopter ride over a city and then he'll come back and he'll draw that
city scape from memory. It's just amazing. Like these folks are the outliers in some ways who
who help us to understand just how flawed our own minds and memories are at remembering things
accurately. We often think that we remember things accurately and often even the things we do remember
we end up distorting, right? So our brains, according to these precepts of NLPR brains,
take in this information at 8 billion bits per second and then we delete, distort and generalize.
And so we fit it into this nice neat little picture that we remember. Well, what happens to the rest
of those bits of information, right? Even right now, I'm sitting here at my desk and I have bookshelves
on either side of me, but I couldn't recite to you from memory without looking each of the titles
of the books. Why? I passed that bookshelf literally every single day, right? But my brain kind of
generalizes and just says, oh, those are my books. I generally kind of know where some of them are.
I know that section is there, that section. If I have to look something up, I can go and look at
there, at it there, right? But I don't, despite the fact that I look at it literally every day,
I don't have it memorized. Why? Because my brain is like, that's not relevant for you to keep there. We
can only hang on to so much information. We're going to get rid of some of what you don't need. And
in the process of doing this, the brain will lock on to what is familiar. It will find even without
our consciously trying, it will lock on to the things that confirm the worldview that we already
believe because that feels good. It feels cohesive. Uh-huh. You know? So if I grow up with, let's say,
an abusive father, which I did, I am in many ways going to be conditioned to view men with more of those
qualities and even in some ways to, even in some ways to ascribe qualities to them that aren't
even actually there that are just my own perception and projection. But also to notice more
the men with those qualities, right? It is because we gravitate toward that, which is familiar. So
law of attraction, like, it has been weaponized in so many ways. And I just, I hate to see it thrown
out with the bathwater because if you understand the function of how confirmation bias works within
our mind body learning systems, you can understand how the law of attraction is applicable. I've just
seen so many people in the spiritual community, especially white people being like, well, how did you
attract that experience of being racially profiled at the airport or whatever? What were you doing that?
And it's just, you know, it's not helpful and it's not accurate either. Like we exist in a system
where we are all like co-creating our reality and all sort of like agreeing on these different
narratives or disagreeing on them, you know? Certainly a lot of divide. Certainly a lot of divide
right now in America, for example, but, you know, we don't exist in a bubble. It's not healthy to blame
ourselves for the things that are part of our flawed consensus narrative. But at the same time,
I see people being like throwing out law of attraction entirely when there is a way to use it to
say, wait a minute, that which I focus on. If I focus on noticing more of it, even if that's all
that I do, if I understand that my brain is a bad scientist that is cherry picking the data of the
8 billion bits per second of information that is coming into my mind and finding the things that I'm
already familiar with, even if I don't want those things, even if I want a healthy relationship with a
man, for example, right? But somehow I'm gravitating toward these things that are familiar because
that is what my brain tends to notice. It finds it more familiar and then I give my energy to those
things and I get locked into those patterns and habits and all of a sudden I'm replaying my childhood
all over again, right? And so if we step back and we realize that this is the way that our brains operate,
also you guys, there is something called negativity bias. Negativity bias was developed
evolutionarily in our mind body learning system in order to protect us from danger. This is why you will
remember something that is like scary or traumatic. And there's a point of diminishing returns
of that too, like certain things that are traumatic or so traumatic that we will repress them or
they'll actually not, you know, they'll be like buried memories, right? So that also happens,
right? But, but to a certain point of diminishing returns, if we go through something that is scary
or traumatic, that will stand out in our memories more because evolutionarily speaking, we evolved
so that the caveman that remembered that, oh, this is the bush I walked by the other day where
the saber tooth tiger jumped out at me. I'm going to go around this other way and avoid that, right? The
caveman that learned to avoid that bush with the tiger in it was the one who was more likely to
survive. So we evolved to actually ascribe greater, more impactful memory to those things that
actually feel dangerous and unsafe to us. This is amazing. It was a story that a shaman once told
a sort of parable that sums this up really well. He says the light and the dark were doing battle
with one another and they each got to choose a weapon and the dark chose gravity that if you just
let things be as they are and kind of sink like that pull that natural force that natural pull down,
you will fall into the darkness. That is, I believe, negativity bias, right? You will fall into
just noticing what is, what is that? It's almost like that sort of metaphor of the red queen
and Alice in Wonderland where it's like you have to keep running as fast as you can just to say in one
place. If you give in to gravity, you will fall into that negativity bias and noticing just all of the
bad things and all of a sudden the world will just seem to be a very bad and dangerous place to be,
which is a symptom of borderline personality disorder. Quote unquote, right? The light on the other hand
shows for its weapon, gratitude. If you notice the things around you that you are grateful for and I
kind of hate gratitude and grateful as words because they're weaponized against us as kids a lot,
right? Like be grateful, eat all the food on your plate or whatever, like they're, they're weaponized
against us in many households to get us to actually not listen to our bodies and honor our needs
because we should just shut up and be grateful or whatever, right? But as an adult, I've come around
to gratitude because gratitude helps us to identify that in our lives that we already like and that we
want more of. So gratitude is a great tool. So the light chooses gratitude as its weapon and says if
you notice the things around you in your life that you already like, then you can use that to
notice more of them and call in more love and goodness and abundance and happiness into your life.
So this is the essence of The Re-patterning Project is that we go through our internal algorithms.
We notice the strategies that we're using in order to try and get our needs met and we get to ask
as adults is this actually working for me? Is this actually a strategy that is helpful to me in
any way? Is this the right strategy for the result that we want? And you might notice for those of
you who are familiar with chaos magic, maybe you are practitioners yourselves. This is essentially
the essence of chaos magic, right? We choose the beliefs, practices, and behaviors that get us the
results that we want. We do not adhere to dogma for dogma or traditions, sake, alone. We choose our
beliefs, practices, and behaviors based on the results that they get us. And that is our soul, judge
of whether something is effective is if it gets us the result that we want and if it fits sustainably
into our ecosystem, so we're not doing harm to others, right? I guess maybe you could be an evil chaos
magician and not care about the second one, but I think for my money in the long run, it's a lot better.
It's just a lot easier to be sustainable than you're not going to be like it war with people and
stuff like that. Big war and small war, right? So this is the essence of repatterning is for me
applying that sort of basic foundational value of chaos magic to a deep understanding of our
neurodevelopment and of our mental health and how our mind body learning systems work to help us
to navigate the world and that our mind body system is our domain and it is our birthright
to go through our patterns, our habits, our beliefs, behaviors and to choose the patterns and the
strategies that work to get us the results that we want in the world. For example, instead of, you know,
people pleasing, repressing my needs and just trying to be valuable to people who are being abusive to
me, maybe the better strategies like shocker is to actually practice discernment and to yes,
be good to people but in a way that is also reciprocal and to ask myself rather than what can I do
to get this person to like me, to ask myself am I even in the right relationship to begin with?
And if I am stuck in that pattern or that dichotomy between like, well, there's the interesting people
that I'm attracted to who treat me poorly. And then there's like the boring nice folks or whatever.
I challenge that a great deal. You can absolutely if if you're stuck in that paradigm, I invite you to
think more outside of those two boxes, look for those healthy relationship models with people that
you find attractive. Look for those people. Gosh, I feel like in today's world with some of,
you know, the the artists and public figures that we have coming forward, it's it's easier than ever
to find examples of people who are both attractive and kind and compassionate, right? There's a lot of
memes about artists around there that are like, you know, we made the right person famous. Like, look
for those kinds of people. Train your confirmation bias. Train your law of attraction to notice those
qualities in people. And then go out in the world. And as your mind is taking in that 8 billion bits
of information per second, you're going to start attuning yourself to noticing that which you want more
of. This has solved bar none. Pretty much all of my mental health struggles, except for like the
fact that I still take a little bit of Adderall, the bifurscription for my ADHD, right? Everything else
has been all about zooming out, detaching, creating space, moving back and looking at my life and my
patterns and saying, is this the right thing for the result that I want? So there we have it. And
what I love about this paradigm is that there need be no shame involved. Sometimes there's a little
bit of like self-deprecating humor like why on earth do that? I think that was a good strategy. Like,
we can laugh at ourselves with compassion for our past selves that we're really doing the best that
we can, but there's no pathologization. There's no like you have a personality disorder, right? There's
no need for that framework. Man, my invitation to you all is let's make it obsolete. Let's not give
our energy and our attention to these frameworks that pathologize us, you know? I mean, yes,
absolutely if you need medication, then be on that medication if it works for you. Do the practice
that gets you the result that you want and if that medication is getting you a good result, then yeah,
absolutely go to see your psychiatrist. Go to your therapist if you have a good relationship with
them. Bring this topic to your therapist. Have this conversation with them. Ask them like, hey,
what is it in my own life that I'm not seeing? What patterns or strategies? Am I using thinking that
I'm going to get a good result? But really, I just need a different strategy. My need is legitimate,
my underlying need is legitimate and I am worthy of having that need being met, but maybe I need help
picking the right strategy and just detaching and thinking about what could I do that will actually
get me the result that I want and so often like in our mind-body systems like our bodies will remember
being that little kid and being like, oh no, I can't speak up and ask for my needs to be met because
I get my ass beat, right? And bringing compassion and more importantly, a wider perspective
to that viewpoint that has been locked into place and saying, you're not a six-week-old baby anymore,
Arden, you can choose who you give your time and attention to, unlike you were able to
growing up in a household with your father. You can choose people who treat you well and then you
will be treated well. That's a better strategy than trying to overly please the people who don't
treat you well hoping that they will change their behavior toward you. So yeah, I feel like this is
a paradigm that really works across the board for most mental health struggles. Far more than our
current paradigm seems to work. I spent years in therapy. It really did nothing for me. Now maybe I
was locked into my own viewpoint too much to see what the issue was, but what was that therapist job,
if not to guide me into a viewpoint that would have helped me more? And when I did that research and
embarked on that spiritual journey of repotting and found all of the information that I eventually
called into this eight-week course, my response was, why didn't anyone tell me? So today I am here
telling you, I am telling you the things that I wish that folks had told me back in the day.
And I want you to know that you can reclaim your agency over your life by choosing the beliefs,
habits, practice, and strategies that actually get you to the result that you want. And I know for me
just that agency, like my life doesn't even have to be working perfectly. I just have to be engaged
with navigating from a place of power and sovereignty, creating those changes in my life,
changing my internal programming so that my external results change too. That's what I want to
all of us. So, all right, so that concludes season one of the Repattering Podcast. I hope that
these conversations have been interesting and thought-provoking for you. I hope that they
cause you to look at your own life and your own strategies in a different way. I hope that they
empower you. I hope that they inspire you away from the depression and anxiety, quote unquote,
that are products of feelings of futility and fear of inconsistency. And I hope that they empower
you to make changes in your own life that, yeah, sometimes like it's great to have facilitators and
counselors like I have facilitators that I go to because we all need help, we all need that outside
perspective, but I also want to emphasize how much of this we can do on our own just by noticing more,
just by pulling back and noticing and examining and questioning ourselves. As Socrates said,
the unexamined life is not worth living. And written over the door of every mystery school,
was the phrase "Noscaté Ipsum, no thyself." If you want to join me and do that, again, there are ways
of doing that through the work of the Repattering Project, but also just like just listen,
just listen to the podcast, it's free and journaling is free and thinking is free and changing
yourself and making those daily, small, gradual changes to your own habits and patterns is free.
And that's really what I want everyone to do. So thank you guys for being here. Thank you to Tomi
my producer for beautifully producing this first season. We're going to take a little hiatus and then
when I have season two ready, we shall return. So rest, catch up on any that you haven't watched already.
Come join us in the Repattering Parlor, our Discord group. You can join at patreon.com/therepatteringpodcast
just five dollars a month to join our Discord and come find me on social media. Come follow along and
be part of this journey. Thank you guys and we'll see you next season.
Thank you for listening to the Repattering Podcast. If you're curious about the Repattering Project,
the eight-week course in mental mastery and creative freedom that inspires these conversations,
you can check out more details at therepatteringproject.com. We run a cohort twice a year,
or you can download the self-study version of the course and get started today. We also offer a
four-week course on narrative magic and archetype titled "Mitzen Magic, Changing Your Life Through
Story" also twice a year. If you'd like to join our community, the Repattering Parlor, on Discord,
you can sign up for five dollars a month at patreon.com/therepatteringpodcast. Thanks to everyone who
makes the Repattering Podcast possible. Firstly, our award-winning producer Tomi Trembath of the
Keymaster Collective Network of Podcasts. She also produces Transcending Comics, Vision in the Void
and Giant-sized Violence. Thanks also to Animation Studio Mortis and Madriacs who created the video
for our introduction, as well as to Andrew Means who composed and produced our theme music.
And also thanks to Al Alvarez, who took the photos of yours truly that you see on the cover of each
episode if you're watching the video version. And finally, thanks to you, our listeners, who give
meaning to this work. Our greatest wish is that whatever you've heard today inspires you to live
freely and begin creating your reality from the inside out. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you
again soon.
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