A gym for your mental health

_________ J.J. Thiret ___________ I think I heard from you that is what really inspired you. That they weren't going to wallow in symptoms. That they weren't just a collection of symptoms: I feel this; I feel that; I'm scared of this um...; I get headaches; I can't work; I can't this; I can't that, but refusing to acknowledge that this is, is, was as good as it was going to get for them and they demanded more for their life. _________ Ronald Kaiser ___________ Essentially, that's one of the reasons why I call my web site "the mental health gym" because I think it's very analogous to going to the gym and working out from the physical standpoint. Uh... You don't have to accept the fact that you're overweight. You don't have to accept the fact that you're, you're out of shape. And you don't have to wallow in how you got that way. The important thing is that you start where you are and you move forward in much the same way as I tell my patients the first session, you know if, if three months from now, if we're still talking about your mother, or if we're still talking about all uh... lousy things that happened to you, then I'm not doing my job. Because I want to start building emotional muscle right from the start. And I want to develop what I call the type P personality or the healthy personality _________ J.J. Thiret ___________ but it seems to me you're more focused on, on solutions instead of problems. Is that right? _________ Ronald Kaiser ___________ That's correct but, unlike a lot of people in kind of my orientation, I do look at some things in in the past that I consider to be important, such as, when was the best time of your life? What are the things you've done that you're most proud of? What are the things you like about yourself ? Things of this nature. Why... What makes you so resilient, which I have to say for a lot of people that's almost a shocking question because they don't think of themselves as that. And I figure that if they're getting to my office, and they want to work on something, they haven't packed it in. They're resilient. We just have to figure out why. What are the things we can call on from the past? So that even though we're working and building toward the future, uh... everybody um... brings things in from the past that that can be helpful, uh one of uh... I forgot whether it's a blog or a podcast that I've put on my web site um... I call it: "taking yourself back to you". That there are... there's a time in your life and there are things you've accomplished that we can call upon and get you back to the core just like we've got to build core and... when we go to the regular gym.