Dr. Paul Conti

I can look at that and understand.

It's like, why am I doing that?

Maybe that's some reflex of a lesson I learned a long time ago that isn't real or true.

You know, someone or people around me saying negative things about me and then I take it inside and I start saying those things too.

And if I realize that I can change that story inside and then it can shift the lay of the land where I'm no longer sort of almost in a straight jacket because I can't move out of this place where I find myself inside forever.

which can be a negative place or a restricted place.

But by looking at that and understanding, we can sort of take the straitjacket off and say, hey, I can, you know, I can move around here wherever I choose to.

It's very empowering.

And that's the other side of the coin is understanding brings empowerment.

Yeah, yeah.

It allows us to look at ourselves with the same open minds and the same compassion that we would bring to someone else, right?

So if you tell me about difficulties in your life and something that may have been hard and gotten you into a negative place, you know, then in general, I'm likely to hear that with a sense of compassion.

I'm interested in you.

And oh, how did that happen?

And like, how can we understand and bring that understanding to bear and you can shift and change.

But if it's me, right, I tend to have a very different understanding

And we tend to say negative things to ourselves and then to kind of not want to look because we're afraid of what we're going to find, right?

So it's that kind of feeling of being on the back foot of, gosh, if it's about me, there's probably something really bad.

There's probably something I'm really not going to be able to change.

Like these are things that are not true, right?