We Are Not Our Personalities

As a Psychiatrist I spent most of my life training and researching effective therapies that would help my clients make changes in their personalities. The premise was that by making such a change the client would feel capable of doing or feeling things that they could not access before. Such change is regularly sought by individuals who find themselves the prisoners of personality characteristics that they have either inherited or become conditioned with throughout their lives. These personality characteristics often leave these individuals unhappy, unfulfilled, incapable, trapped, sad, depressed, alone, ostracized, self-conscious, depressed, and suicidal just to name a few.

After 20 years of clinical practice and after having trained in numerous modalities (i.e. psychoanalytic psychotherapy, interpersonal therapy, hypnotherapy and hypnoanalysis, psychoenergetics, imagery therapy, and EMDR) I found my views about personality evolving in a rather non-traditional direction. This came about following several new observations that I made in my clinical work that changed both the nature of my work and my life completely.

These observations were:

1. Our so-called personality is based on the sum total of beliefs that we have about others our environment and ourselves.

2. These beliefs are held in the mind/body (i.e. also referred to some as consciousness/unconsciousness) system as "packets" of information which I term "Thought Miasms"

3. These Thought Miasms act much like subroutines (i.e. a subroutine is a sub-component, or sub-program embedded in a computer program or algorithm) in a computer program. That is they have a certain purpose, they affect and are affected by other Thought Miasms. An example would be "I am not worthy" because "I am a bad person" and conversely, "I am a bad person" and therefore "I am not worthy".

4. These Thought Miasms form an intricate web of sub-programs that affect our perceptions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors at every moment of our lives.

5. These Thought Miasms become embedded in us through conditioning which arise from all experiences we have in our lives and which become stored in the mind/body as memory fragments or complete memories.

6. These memory fragments, which are complex constellations of Thought Miasms exist as information stored in what many call Thought Energy Fields. These are fields of energy that contain all of one's waking and non-waking thoughts experienced and accumulated throughout time and space i.e. one's life experience.

7. An individual is keenly aware of when a Thought Miasm exists by how it makes them feel. That is it often has the tendency to negatively affect how they feel emotionally, physically or spiritually.

8. The very fact that one is able to make an internal assessment of the desirability of a particular Miasm suggested that perhaps they were not naturally meant to be in one's Thought Field in the first place.

After considerable research I developed a tool I call the Mind Resonance Process? that allowed me to help individuals release undesirable Thought Miasms from their Thought Fields (Arrizza, N., Releasing Multiple Traumatic Memories Simultaneously in a Single Session Using the Mind Resonance Process?, 2005, Arrizza Performance Coaching Inc.) By so doing I was effectively helping these individuals "dismantle" their personalities. A process, which is conceptually and practically very different from helping one "change" their personality.

So what does it mean to say that one is "dismantling" a personality? A difficult question to answer based on the fact that human beings have not experienced this phenomenon so far. In order to get at an answer to this I will first relate the experience of clients of having undergone such a transformation.

Generally one experiences the following: they feel lighter and more buoyant, they feel a great sense of inner peace, palpable feelings of divine love, joy and fulfillment, a greater feeling of connectedness to others and to their environment, a greater sense of resilience to emotional stresses, more confident, heightened self-esteem and self-confidence, a feeling of expansiveness (i.e. they feel that they exist beyond the confines of their physical body), an overall enhancement in emotional, physical and spiritual well being and in some cases there have been observed spontaneous healing of various medical conditions.

What is most interesting though is that most clients report the following:

1. They feel m