Dr Tracy Thomas: The Method

Transcript

[0:00:28] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Dr. Tracy Thomas, author of The Method. In today’s world, the act of living can feel overwhelming, we get emotionally cluttered, we feel trapped just trying to maintain the semblance of a happy life all the while feeling like we are failing. But Tracy believes there is a practical path to moving into a fulfilled state of being. That’s what this conversation is about. Tracy holds a PHD in psychology and she spent more than 20 years helping other people maximize their performance and potential. After working with thousands of high profile clients in New York and Los Angeles, Tracy has developed a reputation for fully recovering the most challenging cases of addiction. Her clients pay her an average of $20,000 per month for guiding them through her method and that’s what you’re going to get in today’s episode. If you’ve heard self-help gurus tell you to love yourself but you’re still struggling with how to do that, this episode is the missing piece of the puzzle. Now, here is our conversation with Dr. Tracy Thomas.

[0:02:09] TT: This was actually back in 2005 and, as it was turning into 2006 and I was going through yet another breakthrough with a boyfriend who was one of the many people that I dated while living in Manhattan and it was really stressful and really, I was full of anger and frustration about it because this person had been lying to me and had been cheating on me and you know, it was really painful. I was at a stage in my life, in my young 30’s where I just was really – you want to meet the one, you want it to go forward, you want to get engaged and I was really in love with this person. When I figured this all out and we needed to break up and I was really grieving about it and trying to figure out and full of tremendous anxiety like “How am I going to figure out how to do relationships? Why does this always happen to me?” All of a sudden, in this moment, this amazing epiphany moment, I realized the part that it was happening to me and the concept of me being this real revelation that this was about me and how I was showing up in the world and the way that I was collaborating in life with people. I had this great moment of clarity which was that the very things that I had ever been frustrated with anyone else about in a relationship which are often the causes of the stress that lead people to do other kinds of coping mechanisms like overeating or drinking. When I really looked at it, I thought, well, he was lying to me and cheating on me but let’s really look about myself and is there anywhere that I’m doing that? Because if that’s showing up in my life, then it’s about me. It was really easy to find where I was, essentially, a liar without really ever telling myself that and I was in a way cheating on other people in my life because I wasn’t being authentic. I was performing a version of myself, doing a job that I was successful at, it was lucrative, I was highly regarded and I made a great contribution. But I was never satisfied with it and it was in fact a job instead of me really living my life’s purpose and feeling authentic and true so that in all the things I could speak each day to somebody, they would be really me versus a concocted version of me. I really looked at how out of integrity I was and where that was its own form of cheating on somebody because you’re ultimately pretending a whole landscape of things within jobs and often with people in your life and it really just occurred to me that I was experiencing things in my life that were painful, that were all about the areas that I needed to develop for myself and I knew in an instant that physics and the laws of physics work really wonderfully and you can’t escape them which is good. I knew that if everything I was willing to develop in myself to be the person that I might ever want to date, you know? I felt like I finally actually had control over something in my life which was I could develop all the parts of myself that I needed to and even more, develop my strengths and that it just made sense that I would then only be in alignment with people that were not my exact replica of course but they were also more in integrity, more true to themselves, more purposeful and aligned. That we be able to be in a more authentic experience, more connected and just more satisfying and fulfilling and so that turned out to just be this tremendous gift to me that sent me on the path to know that my greatest mission in life at that point was to really create a relationship with myself. That was the most ideal one I would ever experience so that every other relationship in my life could take their cues from that relationship I had with myself and it was just a game changer that set me down the path to know that I would someday, as I figured this out, I would someday be sharing it with the world because I know everybody around me was suffering in the same way hating their jobs and their lives and just trying to have a few moments in between with some bottles of wine and you know, brunch or whatever. It was really a wonderful thing in my life and I’m so grateful for it.

[0:07:09] Charlie Hoehn: That happened 12 years ago and here you are today about to share how you were able to develop that relationship with yourself that were you able to each this point of much greater authenticity and I think it’s interesting that you noticed that just because this guy was cheating and lying to you that you didn’t just stop right there, that you actually examined yourself and said, “Where am I doing this for myself? Even if it’s in completely different ways.” I think that’s really illustrative and it’s making me pause and think on like my relationships, how do I shop and how does that reverberate and create the effect in the other person and vice versa, that’s really thought provoking. Where did you start, where did you begin on your path to having a more authentic relationship with yourself? What worked and what didn’t?

[0:08:09] TT: Yeah, it absolutely became very exciting to me and it is because when you start to see this whole matrix of anything that you experience in a relationship, you can just take a check in of again anywhere that you’re cultivating that, it doesn’t have to be the same categories or one for one and I was able to discover that in this great adventure that I went on in this very strategic exploration that I chose. What I knew at that time was that to become an expert on my own self and to literally date myself was my job because spending time with myself was important and spending time with yourself actually with yourself, not thinking about a bunch of other people and thinking about the future and other things you’re not doing but really becoming intimate with myself was a major focus of the strategy.

[0:09:08] Charlie Hoehn: Intimate with yourself? How do you mean?

[0:09:09] TT: Really coming – yes. Really becoming intimate with myself so that doing things like this one funny day where I could watch my behavior and I was sitting there, maybe sitting on a chair I think in my living room in Manhattan and there was a show on and I was sort of half tuning in to it and all of a sudden I watched myself get up out of the chair and go to my desk and start online shopping for some jeans on eBay. I caught myself because this commitment to really know myself was already in progress and I just had a chuckle watching myself not be able to sit with myself without some activity that would be distracting and not allow me to have some really great revelations just come up within me just from being a person. Just great thoughts and interesting ideas and I had a chuckle and I sat back down in the other chair and I just smiled because I thought, let’s just be with myself a little bit here. Interestingly, Charlie, out of this, what happened is that some of the greatest answers that are now in this book, that some of the greatest answers about a methodology of having a relationship with yourself and knowing yourself and seeing really what’s been going on. They came up because I didn’t go fill everything up with activity as I’m prone to do and especially as a New Yorker at that time outside my doorstep. And wanting to really know myself and know what I thought, know what I felt and instead of expecting the men particularly which we often do expect the opposite sex. Instead of expecting them or anybody in my life or giving them this job that they’re somehow supposed to know how to meet my needs and how to read my mind and how to make me feel good and I realized in that moment of choosing to become intimate with myself that I was giving people a job, I hadn’t even been willing to take on. That desire to be intimate with myself, it just made perfect sense so that I could have that level of intimacy with other people. The decision was to date myself for an entire year and to take myself to places and everything that I change was about doing stuff with myself instead of by myself.

[0:11:55] Charlie Hoehn: What was your pickup line when you approached yourself?

[0:12:00] TT: It was great, it was like, “I’m taking you to the movies.”

[0:12:04] Charlie Hoehn: It’s good, that’s pretty good.

[0:12:05] TT: Exactly. I was easy Charlie. Yeah, I was really easy with myself because I really was that interested in myself and I would say funny things to girlfriends like, “You know, I’m taking myself down the radio city hall tonight to watch Michael Buble,” and all kinds of different things and it wasn’t that I wasn’t doing things with people but of course I was doing all kinds of great things with other people. Instead of going and seeking this out in another person and doing what I call outsourcing, all of this to someone else, I really made that commitment for an entire year that I was not going to get in a relationship with somebody until I was in the highest form of the relationship with myself that I possibly could be. That’s what I did, it was one of the greatest years of my entire life.

[0:12:55] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, that’s amazing. You sound like a great date for yourself. I’d imagine if I was –

[0:13:02] TT: Awesome.

[0:13:03] Charlie Hoehn: If I was dating myself I’d be like, the old ball and chain wants to – did you hit a point ever in the year where you’re like man, this commitment to myself is very challenging, did you get side tracked at all?

[0:13:17] TT: Charlie, it’s great that you noticed that. For me, because I did in the discovery of myself recognize, “I’m awesome, I’m really fun to hang out with, I’m really smart, I’ve got so many different kinds of ideas,” and there’s never not sort of, my team calls it that I’m always, content is always just generating all the time, there’s always this beautiful flow of ideas about how to make people’s lives better. There’s always this beautiful flow of ideas about the interconnection and the matrix of being a person and life itself. I found quite the opposite. I truly fell in love with myself which is something I highly recommend. I had a great time because it was the first year of my life that I ever really got to know this really awesome person that other people really love. You know, 21 best friends, you know? I actually wanted more time with myself in some ways because the proportions of how much time I spent with other people, just brought me to really crave that intimacy with myself but at the same time, I wasn’t just with myself all the time, I was intermixed with doing all kinds of regular things. It became a really special experience and that is exactly what I did discover is that “Wow, I am great to be in a relationship with and now that I’m not a liar and a performer, it’s even better.”

[0:14:55] Charlie Hoehn: Well this sounds fantastic and I’m sure everybody listening wants to know the method for doing it and I think while you were explaining that, I was thinking, “Man, it’s funny how we often kid ourselves that we’re nurturing ourselves, getting to know ourselves.” I do it with reading a lot online. I’ve slowly started to realize that this activity is not always very helpful and in fact, it’s keeping me asleep in my relationship with myself, it’s just consuming, it’s just a different way of doing it. There have been times, I remembered clearly over the last few years where an individual that I know pretty well or knows me pretty well will say something really complimentary to me or that they really care about me. It’s been recurring where I’ve been like, really? I’ve almost been surprised and I think it’s probably speaking to the problem that you’re describing here of that we don’t really take the time to really date ourselves or get to know ourselves on the level that you’re talking about to the point where you’re falling in love with yourself. Would you say that falling in love with yourself is really the big idea in The Method?

[0:16:26] TT: Sure, it’s really one of the most important ones and I think it represents kind of larger definition of that because to know yourself as they say, “To know thyself and to be true to thyself and I believe they say to know,” – I think it’s Greek or roman, “To know thyself is to heal thyself by knowing thyself,” and to me, that overarching umbrella of falling in love with yourself includes this real depth of education about yourself and the intimacy. It extends to what I call the internal navigation system which can be understood by reading the book. That navigation system is speaking to you, there’s always some sort of wisdom that’s coming up when there’s space for it and it’s more interesting than any show you’ll ever watch or any other person. There is no one more interesting than our own selves and the vastness and depth of that. In that falling in love with yourself, it’s that true desire to know yourself and even know yourself on very practical levels at like we teach our clients, you know, knowing everything, your digestion and all the things about you and is your liver working well or by the way, how does your pancreas work and you know, there’s so much about being a human that people are not intimate with and it’s not socialized in our culture to know yourself to this degree. Within the umbrella of loving yourself, I feel like there’s so many things that go into that and it’s so unique to what each person would need or want in that but it really extends to a lifelong interest in yourself, to really know how you work, how you feel, how great you are, you know, fill in the blank, like you’re saying. Of course when people say, “I love you so much,” it’s like, that really just – now I can receive it because I so get why people do love me. All those extra pieces that can be added in, it’s just a never ending peeling back of the onion, to learn about all the different aspects of exactly who you are on a whole metaphysical level, everything about you.

[0:18:59] Charlie Hoehn: Tracy, teach us how to know ourselves, know thyself. How do we do it and let’s talk about the specific things in your book that you walk the reader through?

[0:19:13] TT: So, one of the first things is interestingly to first make that commitment to yourself. To just recognize and take ownership of really important operating truth which is that every single thing in your life that is going on and, by the way, especially since when people become, what I refer to as chronological adults, and they’re no longer literally dependent on other people for their actual survival and basic needs. Once somebody’s beyond that need for dependent survival stuff from other people, like parents, then they’re responsible ultimately in a way that I don’t think people truly ever take full ownership of. The first stage is to just recognize without being afraid, right, “Of I need to take ownership and now everything is on me.” It’s not really like that, it’s actually an exciting experience that says, “Everything really is within me, about me and I get to cultivate in this exploration of life, what I’m interested in. I get to do that with this life that’s been given to me.” Starting out with that commitment that says, “Forget all the boyfriends, girlfriends or all the people in your life you ever want to have them make a commitment to you.” It starts with you essentially kind of marrying your own self. We actually start people out saying some ballast to themselves that ultimately, to get into that gear that says, I am in a relationship with myself and I am interested in getting to know myself intimately and spending the rest of my life with myself and making it better and better. Then everyone else that’s around me that I love to enjoy and marry them and all of these things, they’re along for the ride in the parallel process of life together but I’m committed to myself for life and I’m going to make that life the best it can be between me and myself because guess who you’re always spending your life with? You’re spending your life with you even if you’re with other people. That’s number one.

[0:21:30] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I mean, you have spoken a few times and I understand why you’re doing this, I think it’s a very healthy thing to do but for those who notice this as well, you speak as though you’re speaking in third person, about a separate person, right? Are you referring to your ego, what’s your explanation for this?

[0:21:51] TT: Yes, okay, right. I’ve been doing that for so long that I forget about it. Back when I first started it, I thought of it as a funny, for those mature enough to know Seinfeld references and how the joke about George likes this or George doesn’t like that. Of course, part of getting to know myself is that I love to make everything fun and I don’t care how serious of a subject it is. I love to make things fun. I love to make them practical that’s why the book is the title that it is. What I recognized is, I did need to speak to myself that way and I did it out loud for years as well as doing it internally because in all reality, we actually are, there’s sort of this entity that we all know because of Eckhart Tolle at this point and spiritual masters before him, there is an observer that is observing your thinking. You’re really never alone as if you’re a one dimensional experience. There is always, if you will pay attention and you actually – this is actually how you’re going to have less suffering, there’s always an observer and there’s always the ability to see what you’re doing as if you were observing another person or as if you could observe another person’s thinking when they’re not saying something. Absolutely, the third person is an appropriate part of this methodology because when I say, “Right, I’m going to take myself to lunch,” that is actually literal, that’s an actual, literal reality. I am not just going to lunch, I am truly making a decision to take this self, you know, my brain is telling myself to pick myself up out of the chair and go to lunch. It really does apply to everything that way and when you think about that, when you’re connected to that, you’re never alone and you’re actually connected to this navigation system that is always giving you some information and giving you direction and it always has been, right? Before you know it, you didn’t have to really focus on it but all of a sudden you went into the other room to grab something that you wanted to remember and that navigation system was telling you to do that and there’s an absolute multi-dimensional way in which we experience being human beings and it really is an important part of The Method.

[0:24:26] Charlie Hoehn: I like that. Let’s get into the method. Let’s break it down.

[0:24:30] TT: Okay. Once you’ve made that commitment to yourself and as we like to say, you decided to be BFF yourself, right? You're going to be your best friend forever no matter what happens, no matter what you screw up or whatever, that’s like some language we don’t even use but once you’ve done that, then, and once you’ve recognized what we were just speaking about which is that you are there, there’s essentially you, this physical person there but there’s this awareness that you have of your thinking. And this whole awareness of this self and you’ve now been able to say, “Okay, I’m with myself.” As you’re going, just as a starting point, as you’re going throughout your day, what we really train people to do and ultimately condition them to do is to be in that awareness of one’s thinking on a regular basis. That’s something that I think people have heard of for a while now but we take it a step further in that you don’t have to constantly – you know, while you’re working on something constantly be watching your thoughts, when you notice any sort of prompt of tension or stress or we would call it pain. When you have a cue for something that is not feeling good in you, that cue is also a place to go ahead and do what we call ‘just check in.’ A big part of the methodology is having you consistently check in with yourself about what are you thinking right now, what are you feeling, are those two things related, you know, what’s intuitive to you in the moment. Here’s an example. You know, when I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I would get this cues to go eat or whatever and that queue would happen and I would check in with myself, I would say, “Okay, let me just check in with that queue because I just ate an hour ago.” I would just check in to see, am I hungry or am I trying to get out of this statistical formula that’s really hard on my brain right now? Or, what really is the truth of what’s happening in this moment? There’s always like below the layers or in the complexity of the layers of a situation in a given moment, there’s always some sort of truth for you to recognize and then operate from and then go ahead and say, “Okay, I need a break because I need a break right now.” I’m going to follow my navigation and I’m going to give myself that break because that navigation within me, that me that I am now in alignment with, it’s telling me something and it’s really freaking smart. It’s running my whole body, it’s blinking my eyes, you know, breathing me and so I want to be in touch with it as a regular part of my human experience and make decisions and choices from that place so that’s one part of it.

[0:27:36] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. This actually makes me think of some of the new and you would know this obviously much better than I would but some of the newest research on addiction is that it’s not this external evil thing that’s grabbed hold of you but it’s actually your body responding properly and connecting and bonding with something and that’s a good thing. It just happens to be destructive over time.

[0:28:52] TT: Right, we call it maladaptive. Yeah it becomes maladaptive.

[0:28:54] Charlie Hoehn: Right, yeah. Anyway, so we make our vows to know ourselves, to be with ourselves, would you say this is the mindfulness step this part of the method?

[0:29:06] TT: Yeah, I think it’s a mindfulness step but it’s another level of that because we are checking in on everything right? We’re checking in on the whole being. You know, “Is my stomach upset right now? Are my temples kind of throbbing?” It’s really a full scan of yourself and once you get to do it, it happens quite quickly once you have conditioned yourself for it but it’s really mindfulness that helps you make the decision to check in more fully. But you also, Charlie, might be prompted by some pain in your stomach or some indigestion or it could be anything and that’s where we ignore ourselves a lot and so that right there would just be another place to check in and, “Okay, let me check in. What is that about? Is that about something that I ate? Is that about something that I am doing right now that really is honestly making me sick to my stomach? So I might want to investigate that further.” And so it’s really a total person kind of greater level of awareness because you might be having back pain on something or feeling really tense and you can start to examine what are the things that are present right now or the things that are present in your mind that are causing that experience or is some part of your body telling you something so you will go ahead and adjust something for yourself and in that way, that really does relate to addiction. Because I think it’s funny to me at this moment but I think in that whole umbrella of love yourself, I meant to mention as one of the biggest aspects of that is and how this relates to addiction as well, is that loving yourself the way we condition it for people is it’s absolutely an action. It’s very far beyond just a feeling of saying, “You know you’re a good girl and people like you and I like you for what you are doing in life and who you are.” Loving yourself is an action. So the method is also a deep commitment within that love yourself umbrella to treat yourself better than anyone in your life will ever treat you as the standard that you are setting for everyone around you to really know what your standards are.

[0:31:30] Charlie Hoehn: Can any action be loving yourself with that intent?

[0:31:35] TT: Yes, every single action that I take or my team takes, or that we have our clients take is in the category of loving yourself or not and we kind of even taken it to another level. We say it’s either taking you toward the direction of your purpose and fullest potential, because we define that full potential as making the most enjoyable moments of your life. You know making as many moments of your life enjoyable and present and fulfilling. So loving yourself really is, these actions are, is this benefiting and enhancing my life and also in alignment with my truth and the road I am wanting to go down on, or to go down and or is this an action that is somehow consciously or subconsciously in some ways a way of punishing myself or keeping myself small or just doing something I’m habituated to do and is it heading me in the direction I want to go because we all have the deal here where time is not renewable. So every single choice can really in the methodology, we really mean it when we say like every single choice that comes with the integrity between you and yourself will lead you to just a mind blowing experience as a human being that cannot be accessed on an external level. It’s just not available on an external level.

[0:33:12] Charlie Hoehn: Can you tell me a story about the first time you had your mind blown by a new relationship with yourself?

[0:33:19] TT: Absolutely. So there’s been many but I am just going to use the one that comes to mind. I remember in my relationship with cookies because that’s another part of the method everyone is that you have a relationship with everything and you’ll notice that your relationship with everything is the same relationship you have with yourself and I noticed that although I was very conscious at this point, still just successful by anyone’s standards and getting more and more fulfilled. I noticed that I still had this thing about eating sugar and eating more of it than I knew that was good for myself. And this really plays into the whole addictive patterns that people can have because somehow that was fulfilling something in my life and what I came to recognize when I saw so many great outcomes happen from this method, I was able to look this one day. I was at the kitchen counter and this – I don’t know why cookies weren’t always my thing but it ended up being this. It was usually ice cream but on this day it was some cookies and I was about to eat these cookies even though I had a great – yeah, I have eaten healthy almost every other part of my life. I am eating healthy but here I am, putting this sugar in my body to this degree and before I did it, I just took this gut check because I checked in with me and I said to myself, “Okay if you’re going to do that when you know that that can cause diabetes and cancer and you might down the road be getting cancer…” It could be 30 years from now, “And then you are going to be whining because something happened to you but that’s not true Tracy because you’re the cultivator of everything that you choose.” And I recognize that I didn’t want to be a person that had anything “happen to me” that I could then really point to the fact that I’d colluded in that process in some way because I had plenty of knowledge that the proportions of sugar were not good for me. And in that moment Charlie, I recognized that if I did not win the battle between me and the cookie and if I was not more powerful because I was powerful in everything else, if I was not more powerful than this cookie then what could the universe possibly deliver to me because it knows I can only handle so much yet? And it was just clear to me that my whole life was going to change because this is the lowest denominator of how I was living and I made that decision that no longer would there be some entity or some craving or something that I would let be more powerful than my purpose and potential in life and living a life of true fulfillment not artificial cookie fulfillment. And from literary the week that I did this Charlie and I just put that down, those cravings for sugar were gone. So I didn’t have to do a detox or anything and within that week, I started to have a series of clients just influx that was like 40 to 50% more than usual that come into seeking to be clients with us. And by two weeks later, I’d met a person that I had a wonderful relationship with that I didn’t ever go the full distance with but he represented the next level, kind of, romantic relationship because once you are not messing around with the cookie and giving your power to the cookie, you’re available to be more powerful and with people who are more powerful and conscious. And it just blew my mind because within six months, my income was triple what it had been in previous years and I just chuckled and I chuckle every day because this is the kind of thing that just goes on and on and on.

[0:37:21] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it’s like the universe opens up when you have realized your limitations and exceed them and that’s – you know this is making me think, do you know Geneen Roth?

[0:37:38] TT: I know her very well. She is not far away from me and Geneen –

[0:37:43] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I was going to say it. If you guys don’t know each other you ought to get together. I was going to introduce you to.

[0:37:47] TT: We do.

[0:37:48] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s awesome.

[0:37:49] TT: Well she was one of my teachers who helped with some of these pieces toward later, you know I was really digging into a lot of this but when Geneen made one comment which was another relationship with yourself comment, when she said that she realized my life was not meant to be standing on a scale, gaining and losing the same 10 pounds every month or year after year, that was another moment of realizing that we’re here with a purpose to bring our gifts and our true authentic self, our irrepeatable self, only one. You know we’ve got this fingerprint and identical twins have their own fingerprint, we’re meant to bring that offering to the world and it’s beautiful in uniqueness and we are not meant to be in a spin cycle of coping from pain that is simply coming from us not being our full selves or even knowing how to do that and so yes, Geneen is a dear, dear person to me.

[0:38:55] Charlie Hoehn: I could totally see you two getting along super well. So I am very happy that you two know each other and are friends, that’s great.

[0:39:03] TT: Yes, absolutely.

[0:39:05] Charlie Hoehn: So I mean I love to keep talking more about the book but I think at this point, anybody who is listening to this is probably ready to get a copy and go through the method. What I’d like to talk about now Tracy is some of the transformations that you have seen in others. So what have you seen now that you’ve brought this idea, your method to others, can you tell a couple of stories there?

[0:39:32] TT: Sure, Charlie I really initially of course saw it in the people around me in my life just in my day to day life, my friends and family. I saw them evolving as a side effect of my evolution because of the way I interacted and everything. So that was just a simple piece that was going and is always ongoing but as I brought this methodology into my work with clients and I worked in treatment centers for both eating disorders and substance abuse earlier in my career and even as an intern in community therapy and community treatment centers where people had really little resources and very difficult backgrounds. And out of all the drugs and everything they’ve done, the crack and the meth and the years and years of bulimia and opiates and all of these things, it was really phenomenal to see that instead of constantly discussing people’s horrific painful childhood, the pain they’re in right now from their boyfriend, the pain that their mom’s still isn’t treating them like an adult or whatever it would be and processing that pain and reprocessing it all the time, I am a practical person and that never made practical sense to me. What I did very, very intuitively as a practical person was I began to institute immediately for all clients this concept of the relationship with yourself and that this would be our methodology for all the work we did together, all the healing we did together and then that would also in a consultation help them understand whether or not we were fit for each other and what I saw happened so wonderfully was that people, they woke up in that moment. They’d never heard of anything like it, it was all of a sudden like, “Gosh well this sounds like the only thing that’s ever really made sense because 15 rehabs later, I’m 45 and I’m still struggling.” So as an example, there was absolutely so many different people in that position but one that comes to mind right now is a woman who had been in, I believe it was, 13 different rehabs but the length of time that she’d stayed in each totalled something like seven years of her life. Either being in eating disorder treatment or then alternating substance abuse treatment for opiate addiction and she had sober companions, paying them $20,000 a month indefinitely and she was essentially infantilized in the situation and terrified and she also still wanted to be a light fit person. She wanted to look good, she didn’t want to have an eating disorder and she didn’t want to be dependent on any chemicals or a bunch of people when she was 45 years old. She came from a family of high achievers and this was really, really painful. So the road had been littered with other therapists who just were like, “I give up. I can’t get this to happen. She’s still relapsing.” And once I introduced her to this model, from the get go, it’s like her whole life opened up and she wanted to come in as often as she possibly could. So she could dose on this whole methodology and within two weeks, all of her cravings for opiates that had been there forever were gone. She’s already lost 10 pounds without doing any eating disorder activity and she appeared in my office in a way that was sort of like, “I’m feeling like I am doing a supermodel program here,” because there is such a level of comfort with herself that the chronic stress was fading away and she was reverse aging, because of this relationship with herself and today, she is completely independent. She will never be able to hurt herself again. According to her, “You’ve made it impossible for me to ever be willing to hurt myself with anything.” She is working a career that she loves because she hadn’t worked for 20 years. She’s the weight that she wants to be and she’s safe with her own self because she is there for herself and no rehabs now. It’s been so long and her life is completely different than the path that it was going on and it’s one of the things that I am the most proud of, one of the client success stories that I am the most proud of. Because you know just this morning Charlie, I got an email from her family thanking me here around the Thanksgiving holiday here, thanking me for changing all of their lives through this method.

[0:44:25] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, I don’t often say this on this podcast but damn, that’s incredible.

[0:44:30] TT: Absolutely, thank you.

[0:44:31] Charlie Hoehn: And I don’t know if you could top that but do you want me to challenge you and ask for another story? I mean that’s phenomenal, congratulations.

[0:44:39] TT: Sure, absolutely. We have worked with a lot of clients and most of them come to us having really gone through the wringer Charlie, really struggling with other therapeutic processes or having people not diagnosed them properly and really feeling like the worst thing that ever happened to them was being them, and that can be the way that a lot of people feel which is why I really love this methodology and so you know, there is a gentleman, a young man, 29 years old and we started to work with him because he had been addicted to pot for about three years and pretty much holed up in his room at his parents’ house who were both professionals and things were just getting really, really worse. His mental health was just deteriorating and there was a lot of symptoms that at first I didn’t know that they were attributed to just chronic pot smoking and what that would do. But once I got in there and did some diagnostics and realized that he had what’s called a thought disorder and you may recognize something like that by the most famous one would be something like schizophrenia and he had essentially schizophrenia and paranoid personality disorder which are very extreme mental health issues because you actually have delusions and hallucinations and you fear for your life and the people around you want to hurt you. And he’d been diagnosed for year with social anxiety disorder and with the proper diagnostics that we do, we were able to get down to what it was but what’s so great Charlie about this method and its capacity for completely putting people into remission from any of this struggles they have is that even though we had to have some certain type of medication for this person because that particular issue really calls for, there’s a gold standard with a certain medication. That medication would never have worked without the method because the method took away what is the biggest symptom inducing factor which is chronic stress and so through this young man following this process of the method with our coaches, yesterday he’s not only been symptom free now for months but yesterday, he started a brand new job. A brand new professional job which is him living his purpose, him doing something that he wants to do which is to teach young children and mentor them. And he is safe and capable and even with this disorder that is the kind of disorder Charlie that has people ending up like on the street talking to themselves, you know as a homeless person, this disorder and all disorders, when they have this methodology employed this is so powerful that it can keep chronic stress down and therefore the symptomology of most every single condition that people ever had can be lowered and reduced and perhaps eliminated through this methodology. I know it sounds a little grand but this is literally life in our world with the method.

[0:47:59] Charlie Hoehn: Dr. Tracy Thomas, this has been phenomenal, let’s wrap up with a challenge for listeners. What’s the one thing you’d like for them to do today or this week that can begin this change in their life?

[0:48:15] TT: Okay, what I really want everyone to do as a simple and true point is to be willing to notice, just start today, be willing to notice anywhere where you’re either about to do something or committing to something or maybe about to say, “Yes,” to something or just again, going to do something that maybe isn’t the right path for you. I want you to notice where you’re out of alignment or out of integrity with yourself and that you’re about to assert that in some way and I want you to notice that moment where you’re doing that and even though it might be a little scary, no matter what it is or how benign of a situation it is and it can feel like jumping off a cliff to say “No, that’s actually not true for me, I am not interested in going out tonight to have drinks with this person, even though I love this person and I’ll want to do that at a future date,” you know, as an example. Instead of saying, “I don’t even want to,” I want you all to notice what is true for you about what you do want to do and let your navigation system just say to you, what do I really want to do here? Sometimes the answer might be, “I want to want to help my friend move this weekend but what I want is to do my taxes and finish those up and I want to go to a movie and I want to sleep in,” or whatever it is. Noticing what your truth is and starting to assert it, everywhere you can and testing those waters and seeing how much better it feels to be in integrity with yourself is really something that is going to remove mountains of tension and stress within you just by this one activity alone. Sound good?

[0:50:10] Charlie Hoehn: Sounds great. Final question, how can listeners connect with you and follow you? What’s the best way to do that?

[0:50:18] TT: Yeah, you can go to drtracyinc.com and you can also find us on Facebook and follow us there and for anybody that does really want to get rid of certain addictive behaviors, they can also join our Facebook Group which is called Addiction Recovery Mastery. We look forward to seeing you there.

[0:50:43] Charlie Hoehn: I love it. Tracy, this has been wonderful, thank you again and I know this episode is going to help a lot of people, I really feel very confident in saying, this will make a big impact so thank you for being so generous.

[0:50:58] TT: I’m so glad, thank you Charlie.

[0:51:03] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Dr. Tracy Thomas for being on the show, you can buy her book, the method on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.