Mental Illness Isn't What You Think (and Neither Is Your Personality)

What "Mental Illness" Really Is

In conventional medicine, "mental illness" is when your perception is distorted - that's called psychosis. It's a detachment from reality.

But it's actually something you and I do every day.

Your psyche takes raw sensory data, constructs an interpretation… and then mistakes that interpretation for reality.

(That's a mechanism called "psychic equivalence." And everyone does it)

From the perspective of the five biological laws, mistaking our own feelings and imagination for reality isn't a a malfunction. It's a response. It's way of continuing to function while organizing yourself to avoid and deal with something that you've unconsciously decided is a threat.

But when this pattern becomes intense enough that it makes us behave in ways that threaten others, it's labelled "mental illness." When threatening thinking and behaviour patterns are consistent and pervasive in every part of our lives, it gets labelled, "personality disorder."

From a distorted sense of reality all the way up to personality disorder, the mechanism is the same.

Your Personality Isn't Who You Are

Your personality isn't your identity.

And it's not something your brain produces like a machine spitting out results.

Your personality - like your psyche, brain, and body - is something you originate. And you start originating it at conception (just like you start originating your psyche, brain, and body at conception).

Your personality is your structure of attention, desire, fear, defenses, and behaviour.

It's how you organize your experience in order to deal with what you perceive as "threats."

• Your attention decides what you focus on
• Your desire points to what you want
• Your fear shows what you're avoiding
• Your defenses protect you
• Your behaviour tries to resolve it

Put together, this creates your personality.

In other words, your personality is your MindTree in action.

Your Personality Is Never the Actual Problem

The issue isn't that your personality exists.

The issue is that it's organized around conflict.

Your psyche - your unconscious mind - is made out of unfulfilled intentions to relate — things you want to experience in reality but haven't.

When those intentions conflict with each other because:

• you want to experience a particular state
• but in experiencing that, you have to experience another state you want to avoid (the Dirk Hamer syndrome or DHS)

That is a biological conflict within the psyche.

The biological conflict creates the persistent thoughts, emotional charge, and compulsive behaviour we call "mental illness" and "personality disorder."

Your MindTree is your collection of unsolved biological conflicts in your psyche (as well as recently-solved biological conflicts for which you haven't finished the healing phase).

But your MindTree is constantly trying to resolve biological conflicts. Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours are all trying to help you somehow overcome those threats and fulfill your unfulfilled intentions to relate.

When you resolve your biological conflicts - when you actually fulfill the unfulfilled intentions to relate despite your strong desire to avoid re-experiencing the DHS's - then your MindTree integrates and dissolves.

The thoughts complete.
The emotions clear.
The behaviour disappears.

What Happens When You Resolve Your MindTree?

If your personality is built around biological conflicts…

What happens when the conflicts are gone?

Do you disappear?

No.

What remains is your essential self: your quintessence.

The part of you that was there all along, creating the entire structure.

You don't become less yourself; you become more yourself.

The Enneagram: A Map of Your Path Back to Yourself

I love the Enneagram (literally, "nine-path") of personality.

It isn't just a personality-typing system; it's a map of:

• your basic fear (which you're fighting a variation of in most of your biological conflicts)
• your basic desire (which is driving the biological conflicts you create in the first place)
• and your path back to wholeness (which always involves integrating your MindTree by fulfilling unfulfilled intentions to relate)

Each Enneagram type represents a different way of losing contact with your essential self. Here are the nine types (simplified) and how they lose contact with the reality they desire to experience:

• Type 1: avoids imperfection → loses essential goodness
• Type 2: avoids being unloved → loses essential love
• Type 3: avoids worthlessness → loses essential value
• Type 4: avoids lack of identity → loses essential uniqueness
• Type 5: avoids incompetence → loses essential capability
• Type 6: avoids uncertainty → loses essential guidance
• Type 7: avoids pain → loses essential satisfaction
• Type 8: avoids vulnerability → loses essential strength
• Type 9: avoids conflict → loses essential unity

So each type has a predictable pattern of losing contact with reality ("psychic equivalence," "psychosis," "mental illness," and "personality disorder"). And each type also has a predictable way back home to wellbeing.

The Path Back to Wellness

Healing isn't about fixing yourself.

It's about seeing clearly.

When you:

• observe your patterns of what you desire and what you fear,
• stop obeying your patterns,
• and deliberately let your attention contact what you've been avoiding

…your biological conflict resolves.

And when the conflict resolves, you reconnect with what you were actually looking for all along.

You Don't Need to Fix Yourself

Your personality isn't the problem...it's the map.

Once you understand how you're wired, you can see where you've been using your own patterns to dodge what you actually want.

And when you stop dodging, things get real fast.

You're not trapped inside the old loop anymore.

You're back in contact with reality.

That's where the shift happens. That's the dissolution of the biological conflict.

That's the way back to wellness.

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