The Most Helpful Mindset I See as a Therapist — Transcript

Fundamentally, you need a desire to change and a belief that that change is possible.

People love pointing out to me how pointless counseling is, how pointless self-development of any kind is, how pointless hope itself is as a concept.

Those individuals will point at broken systems and, you know, their past failures and attempts and failures and attempts, and they're really deeply rooted in their pessimism, and that's their prerogative.

It's not my place to force my worldview upon them or force change upon them, just like they can't tell me that hope and therapy don't help me, I can't tell them, yeah, yeah, hope and therapy are going to help you.

And that was hard for me to accept at first, to accept that, yeah, you're right, actually, you know, counseling, hope, self-development, that doesn't matter for you, that won't be helpful, that was hard for me to wrap my head around.

There was a time period when I was in my undergraduate program and there was an individual in my life that I cared about, I saw him struggling, and of course, I thought I knew all the answers, I was like, hey, hey, I know how to help you, guy, you got to stop doing this, this, this, you got to start doing this, this, and this.

Couldn't get him to listen, couldn't figure out how to make him see what he was doing wrong in my opinion, so I went to one of my professors, a guy I really looked up to, and I weighed out that question of like, hey, how do I give this guy a little, how you doing, wake up, how do I give this guy a wake-up call that he's going to listen to?

And what my professor said was not what I was expecting, he was like, you should not and cannot force change on people, even if you got him by force into the counseling room, nothing's going to change if he doesn't want to be there, doesn't believe in what he's doing there, there's no, there's no point, right?

But this video is about is that for those individuals who are like me, who believe in hope and self-development and the power of the human spirit, there should be a lot of, it's hard, I hate to use, overused the word here, but there should be a lot of hope in the fact that we have seen some powerful examples of how this is, this is real, it is real.

I point to someone like Victor Frankl, who wrote The Man's Search for Meaning, if you haven't heard his story or read his book, do that.

It's much better than anything I'll ever say, but he went through Auschwitz, one of the darkest times in human history, and he was able to build this internal citadel, this inner fortress that got him through, that held on, he was able to hold on to purpose and hope through that.

I mean, could you imagine, or someone like, I can't remember the dude's name, but the book is called The Philosophical Fighter Pilot, and he was shot down in Vietnam, he was a POW, tortured, starved, you know, you name it, broken down, every system, everything in that world was telling him, give up, die, we don't want you here, and he would not give in, he would not give up hope.

Or someone like, again, Dunce Cap over here, can't remember his name at all, but, um, the Hurricane, that boxer who was wrongfully convicted of murder and put away, and he said, yeah, my body's here in prison, but you will not imprison my mind, I get to control what's between my ears, and he, same thing, built up that inner fortress, that inner citadel.

Our, our human spirit is so incredibly powerful, our survival instincts are just our ability to be resilient is remarkable, and I obviously want and hope that a lot of people buy into that and want that, you know, that path.

But again, it's not my place to force somebody who is, as the cool kids say, I guess, uh, black-pilled or a doomer, like, it's not my place to be like, no, no, no, no, no, you have to see it my way, but yeah, if you are one of the individuals like me, know that out of the darkness you might be shrouded in, look at Victor Frankl, no matter what you've done in your past or, you know, what mistakes you're trying to correct, there is road ahead, and you get to choose how you're going to walk it, and I don't know you, but I do believe in the human spirit, so I do believe in you, all right, guys, take care.