Rapid Transformational Therapy with Marisa Peer

Transcript

Marisa, it’s great to have you on the show.

It’s wonderful to be on the show. Thank you so much for inviting me.

It’s a great pleasure and privilege to have you on and talking about the Rapid Transformational Therapy and more generally hypnotherapy as well. Let’s define for our audience what is hypnotherapy and why should they do that over regular therapy?

Hypnotherapy is the founder of all psychotherapy. Hypnotherapy is, in my opinion, the most effective way to have any kind of therapy because therapy is about understanding yourself and changing behaviors. I’m a great believer that you can’t change what you don’t understand. If you go to a conventional therapist, you never get to that level of deep and profound understanding that you’ll get in hypnotherapy in one session. We live in a fast world and people are no longer willing to go and spend a year talking about the symptom when they can use the technique that can show them the cause of the symptom and simultaneously remove this. I don’t understand why everybody wanted to do that. Patients would go to a dentist and say, “Can I come in every day and talk about the infection in my gum?” The dentist goes, “No, if we don’t get rid of it, it’s going to spread so let’s get rid of it.” My therapy, and most hypnotherapy, is about finding out why you do something and simultaneously stopping it, whereas conventional therapy is, “Let’s talk about it for a long time with the idea that we might find out why you do it and we might stop it, but we might not.”

How does that work if I can’t answer the question to myself? Let me give you a specific example. I have some nerve pain in my left index finger and I would love to know why this is happening. Maybe on the subconscious level or unconscious level, there’s some reason, a spiritual reason I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out. Why would hypnotherapy or RTT more specifically, access the reason why I am having that particular pain versus me introspectively asking myself?

First of all, the answers are all stored in the subconscious mind, which many of us don’t know how to access. We have logical behavior and emotional behavior. Here’s the rule of the mind. Emotion will defeat logic every time. Imagine you have something as you say, “I want to be a speaker but every time I go to speak, I lose it. I get bright red and my mind goes blank. I mess it up. I want to write a book and I’ve written it, but I can’t send it out to a publisher. I want to lose weight. I’ve done SlimFast. I’ve done everything, going to boot camp, but I always gained the weight back.” These are logical behaviors that can’t be fixed with logic.

In hypnosis, you don’t ask a question. You say, “Here’s the fact.”Nobody is born with a fear of being looked at because that’s the baby’s first experience. No one is born unable to leave donuts because all babies leave food and no one is born with the fear of being rejected. It’s very clear that this is an acquired behavior and what hypnosis does instead of spending hours talking about, “How do you feel when you can’t speak on stage? How do you feel when you eat the donut? Are you feeling that feeling in your mouth, your stomach or your brain?” I don’t do any of that. I’m saying, “In the count to five, you’ll be back at a scene that has all to do with why, how and where,” and like magic because it is quite magical.

Even after 30 years, I still find it so amazing when I’ll go back and go, “I’m five years old. I tried to read in class and I got the word wrong and everyone laughed at me. I said to myself, ‘I’m never going to draw attention to myself again’ or I’m six years old and my dad shuts me in a cupboard every time I leave food on my plate. I realize now that I’ve been trained to eat everything without thinking about it. I’m not allowed to have cake and I think to myself, ‘When I’m older, I’m going to have as much cake as I want.’” What hypnosis does so beautifully and what RTT does even more beautifully is take a client back and say, “Look at these scenes.” I don’t do it for them, I do it with them. Most of us walk around and go, “I don’t know why I can’t lose weight. I guess I’m messed up. I don’t know why I ruined all my relationships or can’t seem to pursue the job of my dreams. I guess I’m damaged.” When you can say, “I know why. I can see certainly that is because of that and I never need to do that again,” it changes people’s lives in the most profound way.

We have something which I’m immensely proud of called role, function, purpose of an illness. What that means is in hypnosis, it sounds a bit woo-woo, but it’s profound. You ask the unconscious mind, what is the role, the function, the purpose of this illness and it will always come up with stuff. I worked with people with migraines, dermatitis. I’ll give you an example. I worked with a girl who had the most crippling migraine you can imagine of such severity that she couldn’t work at all. She was saying that when she was younger, her father wanted her to be a lawyer just like him. He would push her and she always felt the disappointment. When she got the headaches, he began to go, “My daughter could have been like me but she gets these terrible headaches and now she can’t work.” They had the role, function, purpose.

People will say, “When I got eczema, my mom put all the cream on. I felt she must love me. Look at the effort she’s going to.” When someone has something going on in their thing, “I want to be a guitarist or I want to write, but I’ve got this constant repetitive strain injury and I can’t do it,” that’s because at some level they’ve said to themselves, “Imagine if it was a failure. Imagine if I wrote that book and no one loved it. Imagine if I got guitar lessons and never made it.”That’s worse than never trying. If you never tried and go like, “I could have, would have, should have, but I never put the work in,” when you put the work in and it fails, it’s a belief that it would be a million times worse. It wouldn’t be actually because you’d have learned something. Role, function, purpose of an illness, it’s taking the medical world by storm. If so many doctors say, “Wow,” every doctor should be asking our clients. As I was teaching with a whole group of doctors, they’re going, “It’s so interesting.” Every illness you’re working with on stage is an autoimmune disease and it’s so interesting what comes up.

This role, function, purpose, is that something that you came up with? Is that part of RTT?

Yeah. Most of our RTT is stuff that I created. In over 30-year period of working with clients and very interesting clients too, it doesn’t take long at all to realize I work with so many obese women in particular and infertile women too, who would spend all of their money on treatments that never worked. One of the rules of the mind is that emotion will defeat logic. I decided to find out what emotion was going on behind the issues. I’ll give you a good example. I was doing this with a group of doctors. I was working with a girl who created a chronic illness that no doctor could fix. She said that when she was nine, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. When she was seventeen, her mother died and she said, “I always knew it would come and get me and there’s nothing you can do about it because that’s what happened to my mom. Then I got this chronic Crohn’s disease, and my dad’s family have that.” It was so weird that the father wasn’t in her life. The mother died and she was all alone. She created and said his dad’s family have that and get them to almost identify with her. The doctor said, “I never thought that when children watch a parent getting progressively ill, they create a belief that when illness comes, there’s nothing you can do about it, that you’re helpless in the face of illness.” It’s so important to empower people to know that isn’t true and never has to be true.

What you’re saying is that we create disease in our mind even though this could be something that is a hereditary genetic predisposition. The fact that it expresses itself is because our subconscious mind is choosing to express that illness or disease in a way to help us.

We learn what we live. If you were a child living with a mother who says, “I’ve got my period and it’s agony. I’ve got the cramping,” as opposed to a mother who says, “I’m off to play tennis now, periods don’t stop me.” Most women will look at how their mother reacted to that time of the month and have the same reaction, even if they’re adopted. When I worked with infertile women, they so often will go back to their mother talking about the birth, how awful it was, how they nearly died, the pain went on for five days and they bled non-stop. The child will think, “I don’t want to go through that.” We should be aware that even what you say when you have your baby on the hip will influence babies. Beyond that, you’ll have people who say, “We’re depressed. My mother was depressed. My great-grandmother killed herself with depression,” and so the kids go, “We’ve got the depression. It’s the gene. We’ve got the alcoholic gene.” We allow people to believe this. While genetics play a part, what plays the biggest part is upbringing and children who are brought up with depressed mothers see it as inevitable.

It’s a great shame because all the studies that say you’ve got this chemical imbalance in your brain, they’re not flawed studies, they are non-existent studies. There’s no way any doctor can test a chemical imbalance in the brain. I’ve worked with many doctors and they were telling me 70% that come into ER have problems we can’t fix because they have an emotional basis. The migraine, the stomachaches, the irritable bowel, the panic attacks, the anxiety, the depression. Even this hypertension, the flare-ups, the acne, the skin breakouts, they’re real symptoms but they’re caused by an emotion. I see that over and over again and have an extraordinary ability to get clients to stop being depressed because they’re often more repressed than depressed. They’re often more suppressed than they are depressed but they buy in the belief that, “I’ve got this illness and I can’t do anything about it,” which is very disempowering rather than a belief that, “I have got an illness but I can get over it.” The mind will not only create symptoms but also get rid of them, especially symptoms that are linked to the nervous system like skin conditions and headaches and so many illnesses we see in the Western world that have a basis in stress, tension and deep unhappiness.

What you’re saying is that a lot of the disease that we’re experiencing is psychosomatic?

Yeah. Psychosomatic, they may think they imagine it. It’s not imaginary. Its cause is based on an emotion so the mind will create any symptom. For instance, if you’re really unhappy and someone gives you a tiny dose of poison, you’ll react as if you’re poisoned. If you are deeply, madly in love and you’re given a higher dose of that poison, it won’t have any impact on you whatsoever. When you’re in love, your immune system is stronger, your digestion is better, everything in your body works better because we listen to our thinking. I have to be careful with the word psychosomatic because people think we’re saying you’re inventing your symptoms. The symptoms are real, whether you have a headache because you banged your head or because you’re deeply depressed. The headache feels the same and the symptoms are the same, but one’s got a physical cause and one’s got an emotional cause.

A chemical imbalance, which is causing what we think is depression, is being created by our subconscious mind thinking that maybe we’re saving ourselves from facing some uncomfortable situation that we say, “I’d rather die than speak on stage.” Then we have a speaking engagement coming up and we end up with some psychosomatic illness.

People think your mind’s job is to make you happy. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Your mind’s job is to keep you alive on the plan against what were once not great odds. The only way your mind can work out what’s going on with you is by the way you talk to yourself when you go, “This commute is killing me. My boss is killing me. This kid is making me want to die. I’m going insane with this demanding baby or my children are a nightmare, or my customers make me want to kill myself.” None of which we mean for a minute, but when your mind hears your job is killing you, this commute makes you want to die you, you’ll go insane if you have to deal with a customer. Your mind’s job, which is to keep you alive, starts to come up with ways of getting you away with what you keep telling you is killing you, usually it’s your job.

Even just saying, “My job is demanding and some of my clients are difficult, my boss can be very taxing at times, but I have amazing coping skills and it doesn’t affect me every minute of every day,” will make your brain go, “I see you can deal with this.”When you say, “I’d rather die than give a speech. I’d rather kill myself than present a meeting. I’d die if it goes wrong. It’s a nightmare trying to lead this team,” we tend to use these very powerful words and our mind’s job is to do what it thinks we want. Your minds got a job to get you away from that event you’ve said you don’t want. That’s your mind’s job. Your job is to communicate so much better with your mind and then you get whatever you want. We’ve all done that. We’ve all said, “This weekend I’m going to write a business plan or design a website or work on my speech or write a book.”As the weekend comes and go, “This is so boring and I could be out in the bar with my friends.”Then we find we’ll tidy up our sock drawer and straighten out the cutlery and do anything rather than the job because we told them I didn’t want to do it. When you go, “I want to do it,” it’s entirely different. I’m surprised that schools don’t teach how to dialogue with yourself because once you learn how to do that, the results you get are extraordinary out of all proportion to the effort required to communicate with yourself in a better way.

How do you do that? How do you dialogue with yourself? Are you even able to hypnotize yourself?

You don’t have to hypnotize yourself. One of the rules of the mind and it’s a very important rule is the way we think and feel about anything is down to two things: the pictures we make in our head and the words we say to ourselves. If you can take control of the words, then the pictures tend to follow. Here’s an example. You’ve got to work at the weekend. You’ve got to do your account and go, “I’ve got to do my accounts. I’d rather do anything than do my accounts. I’m not doing my accounts.” Then you notice you’re bingeing on Netflix and not doing the accounts. You’re getting stressed but you’re telling yourself, “I do not want to do my accounts.”

When you go, “I want to do my accounts, but I love doing my accounts. There’s nowhere I’d rather be right now to do my accounts. When I’ve done them, I’m going to go out and celebrate. I’m going to reward myself with something from doing my accounts.” Your mind is very clear, you want to do your accounts and you can lie to your mind. I call it lie, cheat, and steal. I learned this when I was teaching a group of very overweight celebrities to take the action that would make them slimmer. They’d go, “It’s not fair that I can’t eat cake. Why shouldn’t I have whatever I want? I hate to exercise.” If I took them running or working out, they go, “I don’t like this. It hurts my legs and it’s so boring.” I took them to train with Marines. When Marines have to run through snow, ice, sleet and mud, they don’t go, “This hurts.” They sing. They’re saying, “Bring it on, I don’t care, I love it.”

If you’re doing 100 sit-ups, don’t go, “It’s so painful.” You’ve got to go, “I love it, love it, love it,” even if it’s not true because your mind doesn’t care if what you tell it is true or false, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. It let sits in, so you might as well tell it great things. Here’s a silly example. If you were looking at a big burger, you’re not going to react to the burger, you’re going to react to the pictures you make. If you’re hungry you go, “Look at that burger and all the juices coming out.” If you’re a Hindu you go, “That’s disgusting. That’s the sacred cow. You shouldn’t eat a sacred cow.” If you’re vegan you go, “That’s awful because you’re eating a living creature.” If you’re a bodybuilder you go, “That’s great, all that lean protein will help me build muscle.” We don’t react to a thing, it’s like a needle. Someone having a Botox, someone having a life-saving surgery or someone in immense pain will react differently in each case to a needle. What we react to is the pictures we make in our head and the words we say to ourselves. The great news is you can change the pictures and words at any time.

One of the best ways to dialogue with your mind is to do this one sentence, “I’ve chosen to do this and I’ve chosen to feel great about it.” “I’ve chosen to work all weekend on my website and I feel great that I’m getting to build my own business. I’ve chosen to eat an apple instead of a cake and I feel great because I’m choosing to have the body I want. I’ve chosen to go and talk to people and to feel great about it because I’ve chosen to be more social.” You can choose to be negative or positive. You can choose to go, “No, people don’t like me. I can’t speak to them all. They’ll like me. Who wouldn’t like me? I can speak to anyone.” You do have freewill to choose. What you can’t choose is what you do to your body and how much illness you create when you go into the negative.

It’s like you’re fighting with yourself. Your conscious mind is saying one thing and your subconscious is taking the meaning differently or is trying to protect you based on something that happened in the past and you’re fighting with yourself.

The subconscious always wins. I see so many people who want love. Everybody wants love. Love is a wonderful thing, why wouldn’t you want love? If you begin by saying, “I’ll die if this relationship doesn’t work out. I’ll never get over that last person. I’d rather be on my own for the rest of my life than go through that heartache again. My dad left when I was two, so clearly, I’m not lovable. If my own parents didn’t love me, how could anyone else?” You’re telling your mind very clearly that you do not want love. As weird as that may sound because we all want love, when you meet someone that offers you love, you will reject them. You will act in a difficult way, a clingy way or a needy way because every word you say forms a blueprint and your mind and body must act to meet that blueprint, even if it’s a terrible blueprint.

When you could go, “Every word I’m saying is the blueprint I’m moving towards,” you get to see that why not say, “I can find love. I am lovable. Everyone’s lovable. I’ve got unique skills. I’ve got a good heart. I’m a good person. There is someone in the world who can love me and be loved by me. It will be amazing.” If you tell yourself that, you have a totally different experience to saying, “It always goes wrong. I always end up getting rejected. Everyone dumps me. You can’t trust men. You can’t trust women. They’re all after something. They all have an ulterior motive,” because you’re choosing to say the most terrible things. If you could know that your words are a blueprint and your mind uses everything it disposes to make that blueprint real, then we might all succeed better at having a better blueprint.

It’s like you wouldn’t say these horrible things to other people like your friends like “You look horrible on those jeans, maybe you should lose a few pounds.” You wouldn’t say that to your friend, but you say it to yourself.

You wouldn’t say to a friend, “I don’t even know why you’re on Tinder. Who’s going to go out with you? You’ve got cellulite. No guy in the world would like a single parent. No woman’s going to date you because you’re not wealthy enough,” but we say it to ourselves. If we spoke to our friends the way we spoke to ourselves, they wouldn’t be our friends. We should be our own best friend and say things like, “I’m lovable. I’m significant. I’ve got a unique skill. I’ve got something of value to offer the world,” because I promise you, every baby is born believing that they matter, they’re significant and they’ve got something to offer. If you shut your baby in a cupboard the day it’s born, it wouldn’t lie there and accept it. It will scream because its belief system is, “Someone’s going to come and attend to me because I’m worth it.” When you were in the womb, it’s always 75 degrees, you have 24-hour room service, you’re connected to another person. We’re born with that same expectation. While it’s very easy to get small children to doubt themselves, nobody was born like that. It’s also quite easy to reactivate the innate confidence that we’re all born with.

How would you reactivate that?

When people come in and say to me, “I’ve always been insecure. I’ve never had any confidence. I’ve always been shy. I’ve never been able to talk,” you know that’s not true. If we went back in time to the day of your birth, what do you think happened? Eight people looked at you, the nurse, the doctor, your parents will come to visit. No baby goes, “Don’t look at me, my diaper’s leaked or I’ve got milk spots.” We all know with babies that when you take them out in the stroller and people say, “Look at you,” they kick their little legs and smile that gummy smile even if their diapers are leaking because they have no concept of they’re not lovable.

You say to a little one-year-old or two-year-old for Christmas that they’ve got a castle or horse or swimming pool. They don’t agree, they are limitless. What I would say is go back to the time you were born, the very day. Even if you don’t remember it, you were born full of expectation with something to offer. Your first experience was being looked at. Even if you say, “My parents didn’t want me,” that’s sad but somebody wanted you because here you are. There are people who love to have babies that never have them, and other people appear to not want the babies they have. You are wanted. The universe puts you here and it will support you in everything that you do but you have to develop self-belief and that’s not difficult.

Here’s a great thing to do. Think of all the praise you would have liked to have had in your life. If you could go back in time and you had an amazing mom, a dad who believed in you, a teacher who thought you were the best student in the class, what would they say? They’d go, “You’re such a great kid. You’re so good at learning. You’re so interesting to talk to. I love being around you.” Take your pick. Start saying that to yourself because even if it sounds a bit wacky, your mind has no idea that you’re saying those words and it will let them in. If you think of what you always wanted to hear, “You’re the favorite. You’re great, you’re interesting, you’re smart, you’re talented, you’re lovely.” If you begin to say that to yourself, it has a better effect than hearing it from someone else. It’s such a shame we wait so long to make withholding parents to say, “I’m proud of you,” and sometimes they never do. We have it within ourselves to say, “I’m proud of you. You’ve got something great to offer the world.”The mind doesn’t question it, it lets it in.

How is this different though from affirmations where you’re saying to yourself for example, “I am intentional with everything I do.” That was an affirmation that I used on myself.

I don’t like affirmations because that very affirmation you gave me, “I’m intentional,” it is very abstract. If you understand the mind loves pictures, it only works in pictures. It likes pictures that make sense or words that make a picture. Here’s an affirmation, “Life is a sunny day where the sun is always shining, and the flowers are growing in and life is a walk through the park.” That’s not true. It isn’t like that every day. “In every day and everywhere, I’m getting better and better every day. My life is perfect. It’s all perfect. I’m a goddess. I’m a rockstar.” You might go, “Are you a rockstar? You seem to be sharing an apartment with three other people. You don’t even have a car and you can’t afford a home. That doesn’t sound like a rockstar to me.” It’s not your mind saying that, it’s you. “I’m a goddess.” “Really? You’re wearing clothes from Target. You’re not a goddess.” You have to stop with these affirmations.

I prefer statements of truth and here’s my favorite one. “I’m enough, I’m lovable, I always have been, I always will be.” That makes the picture. The mind gets that. When you say something like, “I’m confident and I’ve got fantastic coping skills. I have phenomenal coping skills and I can cope with stuff.” Your mind understands that but, “It’s a walk in the park and the sun is always shining,” I’ve had a lot of affirmation that’s just too abstract. Let’s imagine you’ve got an irritable bowel disease and you want to get better. Then what you’d say is, “My gut is working perfectly. My gut is strong. My gut rhythms are perfect. My immune system is super effective and I have phenomenal health,” because it makes a very clear picture. The mind understands what phenomenal health is. I know this to be true because of my work with women who can’t conceive, I’m very direct. I put them in hypnosis and I say, “Your eggs are phenomenal grade A, super fertile eggs and your husband’s sperm is like the crack military sperm. It swims straight and it gets to that egg. Then a perfect sperm breaks through the perfect egg and you create a perfect embryo that becomes a perfect fetus that grows perfectly. Then you have a perfect birth.” I put more into it than that.

When they’re giving birth, I would make them a tape going, “You can cope with the pain. The pain is not so bad. The contractions don’t hurt that much,” because they’re the words the mind will pick up pain and hurt. I say that, “The birth signals, the rushes are amazing. The more contractions you have, the quicker that baby is floating out of your body into your arms and the birth is the best day of your life.” If you make the right pictures, the mind goes that’s what you want. You want a swift fast birth where you can cope and when the contractions are stronger, you know the baby’s birth is imminent and you’re so excited, you’re elated. You’re delighted. You could do this for hours because it’s so wonderful. It makes a better picture of, “It doesn’t hurt too much and it’s okay. You can cope with the pain and the pain is only unbearable for a few hours,” because we’re always giving our mind pictures, but you’ve got to give it better pictures. If you say, “I’m going on stage. It’s okay, I won’t forget and I won’t dry up. I won’t go blank,” that’s the very pictures you make. You have to flip that over to, “When I’m on stage, it’s like speaking to my friend. My memory is amazing and I know what to say. The audience like me and I like them. I speak to them because I’m so interested in my subject and I deliver it so well.”

I find that one of the things that RTT is so good at is getting people to understand the power of words. I teach all my students that you have to use powerful words. If you use wishy-washy words, you get wishy-washy results. I’m working with so many teenagers that are so disempowered and they go, “What if this girl doesn’t like me? What if I like this boy and he dumped me? What if I don’t have any friends?” I just go, “We’re not even going there. We’re going to change that to, “People like me because I’m a great kid. People like me because I’m awesome.””The great thing is that when you say it enough because you believe it, everyone around you will believe it too. We spent so much of our time trying to make other people like us when in fact all you have to do is be truly yourself and then your world becomes extraordinary. It’s so easy when you know how.

While you were talking about the birth process going so easy and so forth, it occurred to me that my mother during my birth, it was a very long, painful birth. It took 24 hours, longer than that, before I was finally born. The contractions and all that, it was hours upon hours and I don’t know how she did it without having the C-section, but she did. Now for the first time in my life, at least my conscious mind is connecting with that thinking, “I wonder what the impact was on me.”

I have someone who his father usually said, “You nearly killed your mother,” and people love to share these stories. It was agony. It was unbearable and I don’t know how I did it. All the baby can think is, “I brought pain. I cause people pain.”Some people walk around in the world with this belief, “My presence hurts people. I caused people pain.”That’s why we shouldn’t even describe birth experience with our babies on our hip. I know when I had my baby, which was amazing, wonderful and extraordinary, especially because I was told I could never have children and I decided not to let that in. Shortly after I had her, in England, they have a ward and you stay on the ward for a couple of days. All the mothers are in the same ward and it’s all nice. It’s all free and you usually stay there for four days. They brought boxes of Kleenex to every bed. I was like, “What was that?” “That’s for the postnatal depression.”By day three, the whole ward is a sea of weeping because the hormones start to leave your body. As the hormones leave, you’re going to feel postnatal depression. I went, “No, I’m having postnatal euphoria. That’s what I’ve signed up. I don’t want the tissues and if this ward is going to be a sea of weeping, I should go home early.” I did and they looked at me like I was crazy.

I used to always say I’m having postnatal euphoria. My baby causes non-stop joy and she did until she was a teenager. I had my moments with her, but I never bought into that, “It’s so tiring and it’s exhausting,” because my mom always said to me, “Babies are easy. They sleep all the time. They’re delightful.” You are what you believe, but we’re all programmed. We spend so much time updating our software and no one says, “Why don’t we update the software in your head? All this stuff you’ve been fed that isn’t true. If it isn’t true for you, it isn’t true for someone else. Why are you believing these beliefs that you were given?” I still want to have a different experience for you.

It’s like those nurses were programming all of those new mothers to end up with postpartum depression.

Absolutely, and they didn’t intend to. Nurses are wonderful people, but when doctor say things like, “You’ve got depression and you’re going to have it for the rest of your life,” or like I was told, “You’ll never be able to carry a baby to full-term.”

“You have three months left to live,” that’s another one of them giving the future to you of your demise.

That’s a terrible thing because people turn into that, they start to watch the clock. “You’re going to have this illness for the rest of your life. You’re going to get progressively worse. You’re always going to be like this. You’ll never be able to recover.” I had two extraordinary illnesses and I was given that kind of diagnosis and I don’t know. There’s no way I’m going to accept that and it’s a great shame. Teachers do that too. They say to kids, “You’ll never amount to anything, you’ll never make it.” My daughter, who’s an amazing artist, her teacher said to her, “Do not apply to go to art school. You’ll never get in because your work isn’t good enough.” Some teachers, not all, say terrible things like, “You shouldn’t go to math or you’ll never do any good in sport. It’s not you. Don’t apply for that position. You’ll never get it.” Teachers, parents, doctors, anyone that has an impressionable child and talks them, should be made to be aware that they hear stuff and they believe that.

That could create a lifelong fear or phobia. What is it that you say that babies are born with two fears? What are those two fears?

The fear of rejection. We’re born with two needs as a baby. We must find connection and avoid rejection because our need for survival is very linked to being connected rather than rejected. Years ago, we would die from rejection. We don’t anymore, but we still feel as if we might and then we hear all these songs, “I’ll die if you leave me or my life is empty without you.” It’s very easy to tap into this primitive fear we have of, “I’ll die from rejection,” because it used to be true and it isn’t anymore but we still feel like it’s true. We fear rejection and I sometimes think that often rejection can be the best thing that ever happened to you. I’m so glad my first ever boyfriend rejected me because if he hadn’t, I might have married him. He wasn’t right for me and I’m sure I wasn’t right for him. I’m glad I got thrown out of college and fired from my first job. Otherwise, I probably would have still been in that job and there was something else for me. It’s never what happens if you’re ready to look at it. That’s why I love RTT so much because RTT starts from an absolute fact. Events do not affect you but the meaning you put on that event, that will affect you. The interpretation of that event affects you. Here’s the great news, you can change the interpretation and you can change the meaning at any time at all.

Don’t you have like a left hand, right hand process that helps you to do that?

RTT is a very replicable process. It’s why we’re able to teach it. People come in and they start to talk about their problem, “I’m depressed. I can’t find love. I can’t get promotion. I get these terrible headaches. I can’t speak in public. I’m scared of heights.” There’s a whole gamut of stuff and I never spent the session to that much. I say, “Tell me how you want it to be.” They say, “This is what I want.”“If you could leave the outcome, what is it?” They’ll say, “I want to be able to lose weight or have a perfect body or find love or speak in public or not have a stammer or be confident.” What I do is go back straight away, count backwards to why. The mind will always come up with these scenes and I usually try to get three or four scenes because it’s a bit like being a detective. I’m gathering information and looking at it to make sense of it. I do that with the clients.

After we’ve got the four scenes, we’ll do left hand, right hand. “Here are these four scenes in your left hand. In the right hand is an image of you now where you can attract love or maintain love. Look at those four scenes and tell me how could those four scenes have led you to where you are now?” They will tell you, “I see, my dad left. My mom had all these different husbands. They all left her. She’s always in tears. She had one baby with the second husband. They liked it far more than me and I’m beginning to see now that I got this belief.”What I do in the regression is when they go, “I’m scared because my stepdad is shattered, because my mom is crying because she doesn’t have a husband and I’m thinking, “She got me. Am I enough?””Then we do the left hand, right hand. These scenes on the left and the scenes on the right.

The clients are always astounded at how much information they come up with and then we get rid of it. It is like being a detective finding the cause and then like a dentist, extracting all the toxic stuff and putting them back together in a much more effective way. We have some very specific formulas such as role, function, purpose, dialoguing with a person that hurt them, getting the praise they’ve always wanted. It works so amazingly, so incredibly. I was in Talin and this waiter came up and said to me, “I was so close to killing myself and I came across your I Am Enough talk and it changed my entire life. Within a week, I felt so different and now here I am, I’m working in this restaurant. I’m working my way up and I’m happy.” I love that. That changed his thought process. It was able to give him a whole new world.

I’m sure you never get tired of hearing that. The I Am Enough program, that’s something that you can go through yourself. You don’t have to learn hypnosis or hypnotherapy. Are you going through some processes, guided visualizations or what is that?

I’ve been a therapist for 30 years and I realized very quickly that all my clients have the same problems, whether they’re movie stars, an actor, a painter or someone who runs a little nursery school. They all have these issues. When clients have a presenting problem, that’s never the problem. It’s what lies beneath and what lies beneath is almost always, “I’m not enough.” I’ve worked with thousands of addicts. I’ve never met one ever who believe they are enough. Since the cause of all our issues: hoarding, addictions, bingeing, obesity, so many things are caused by this feeling that, “I’m not enough,” I figured maybe that’s the way to cure it. I started to work on a program called I Am Enough. It’s an eight-week program and it comes with different recordings and it unravels where you ever thought you weren’t enough and then puts you back together again.

All you have to do is listen to it. It’s not long. It’s not complex. It doesn’t require anything much because that’s the other thing with therapy. People think, “You have bulimia or depression. That’s very complex, so the cure must be complex.”It doesn’t have to be complex at all. What lies behind bulimia and depression is, “I don’t think I’m enough,” and its strength is in its simplicity. I’ve fixed the most traumatic illnesses including the most awful abuse, which is not to denigrate that, but by making them know that they are enough that it wasn’t their fault.“I’m enough,” is my favorite saying because it changes people’s lives so profoundly. I got a letter from someone who said, “I adopted three girls, pre-teens and your I Am Enough has done more for them than every psychiatrist, every mental health doctor and every social service,” because it went to the heart of what was wrong with them. They didn’t think they’re enough and they acted out and now they know they are enough. They don’t act out and I’m having a wonderful life with them.

Things like addictions, hoarding, probably even phobias and nightmares, maybe clenching, grinding at night. Those could probably be compulsive behaviors?

Yeah. Even acting out and not being successful at all or the people who said, “I’m difficult.” It is because you don’t feel enough. There’s almost nothing that can’t be dramatically changed by believing you’re enough. If we look at some of the most beautiful, talented people in the world, Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, Robin Williams, Whitney Houston, George Michael, Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, it is so clear not one of those people ever believed they’re enough. They were talented, beautiful, gifted, extraordinary, and they all got treated like Amy Winehouse has three different drug addiction, alcoholism, bulimia, depression but she was never treated for the real problem, that she didn’t think she was good enough.

Do you think that somebody would probably get more benefit working with an RTT trained therapist? Maybe exposing these different beliefs from early childhood and in addition to the I Am Enough program, I’m imagining that it would be a whole other level to get that kind of therapy, right?

The therapy is amazing. Our graduates are truly getting the most extraordinary results, incredible results with people. If you suffer with low moods or you feel you’re not achieving enough or you’d want to have more love, more success, more outcomes, then I Am Enough would be a great program for you. If you have bulimia or anorexia, then I would certainly say go and see an RTT therapist. You can probably fix that within one to three sessions. If you have a physical illness, let’s say you have irritable bowel, panic attacks, anxiety, claustrophobia or agoraphobia, go and see one of our incredibly trained therapists who I know can fix that within one to three sessions. If you’ve got something deep then, by all means, go to an RTT therapist.

Having said that, I get letters every week saying, “I Am Enough course changed my life. I realized what it was all about.” It’s probably worth taking that first because it’s so revolutionary, so transformational. I’m always thrilled when many people say, “It was that program that got me through the door to get a promotion. It was that program that got me to date someone different and we’ll be married. It is that program that got me pregnant, that changed my parenting skills, got rid of this rash that I’d had for twenty years.” Even people are telling me that it’s improved their eyesight and their hearing and their digestion. It’s a wonderful thing. I’m so proud of it. I figured it found me as much as I found it. It was my own patients who taught me what people need and what they want. I was lucky enough to put that together because I had an extraordinary client base from movie stars to Olympic athletes to royalty and I thought they’ve all got the same problems. That was able to able to help me create one product that addressed everyone’s problems but also fixed them at their core.

That sounds like a foundational program as Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life.

I know it’s a foundation because I’ve got some schools now both in San Francisco and England trying it. I’ve got more and more schools asking for it. We’ve got many hospitals and doctors using it. I’m currently working on a version of it going into the juvenile detention system. Apparently, if I can get enough young offenders to use this, they believe it’s going to change the re-offending rates. It’s such an amazing thing that’s happening. How people are waking up to everything that goes on with us is to do with our thinking, which we’re free to change if we only knew how. I Am Enough is absolutely the how that is changing people and it’s such a wonderful thing to witness.

Where would people find this program online?

If you go to MarisaPeer.com, you can find everything. If you go to RapidTransformationalTherapy.com, you can find everything. The best way is to go to MarissaPeer.com. You can find all our products, including many that we give away free.

What if you wanted to find a therapist who’s trained in RTT?

If you want to find a therapist who is trained in RTT or indeed if you think maybe you’d like to do this yourself because it is the most extraordinary career. You cannot possibly change people’s lives the way RTT does without changing your own, then simply go to RapidTransformationalTherapy.com where you can find a list of therapists in your area and they are extraordinary. You can also decide if you’d like to possibly train yourself, we do online training, we do live training. We’re training this method all over the world because the demand for it is so great. We’ve done this at the New York Academy of Medicine and now we’re going to Los Angeles and then to Australia. Next year we’re taking it to Miami and Singapore. It’s very exciting, come and train with me live, but you can also train online or you can find an amazing therapist. I promise you, it will change your life.

What if you don’t have somebody local to you who’s RTT trained? Can you take these sessions or get therapy through Skype, Zoom or online?

Yes, in fact I’ve got a girl I trained in Australia. Almost all her clients are in Dubai. She doesn’t know why that is, it’s a different time zone for her. Skype therapy works very well; Skype, Zoom, Facetime. We do have graduates all over the world who see people on Skype. We have many people who train with us because they say this is such a great life. Not only I am changing people lives, I do it from my kitchen. I’m a mom, I never have to miss school, drop off, pick up or sports days because I’ve got so much freedom. We have a lot of retired people who see a couple of clients a week but loved it. Not only is it amazing for you to see a therapist online, it’s also great if you want to be a therapist because there isn’t the cost involved in having to run a clinic and pay for all of that. RTT works incredibly well online. Some of our graduates have never done anything but online sessions and they love it.

When you become so skilled at RTT that you help all these other people, you also inherently help yourself and you can have all these incredible breakthroughs. One in particular that I relate to that I heard that you had was you used to be late all the time and then you discovered what was behind that. Do you want to share that?

I was always late for everything. I missed planes. If I had ten hours to get somewhere, I’d be late. It caused immense stress. It caused stress in my relationship and at work. One day when I was training to be a therapist, I had this memory of my father. He was very eminent. You call them principals, we call them head teachers. I’d always miss the bus to take me to school. He’d always have to come home and he’d have to drive me. He’d be furious, but I never missed the bus that brought me home from school. I realized I did that unconsciously because I was so desperate for his attention. Even though he drove me to my school furious, that was wired to me. I said to my mind, “I want my dad to notice me.”He said, “Let’s miss the bus everyday. I can’t help but notice you.”The minute I had that memory, everything changed on a dime. I was never late again; the relief in getting to places on time. It took my friends two years to catch up with that because they always expect me to be late, so they’d never be there either. Now that never happens. I don’t have that racing to airports, driving like a crazy person, changing the clock in the car so I could go, “It says ten past.” I stopped all of that, but it was a great lesson to me that I’m affected.

I had another interesting experience where I would always have relationships that never worked out. That was entirely down to me being so difficult and I was expecting them to end. Then I realized that when I was a little girl, my parents let me live with my grandmother for nearly a year. I thought if I die, I could go to heaven. I loved living with her and I never wanted to go home, but I knew I had to because my dad was a principal. He couldn’t let his daughter live with her grandparents. I was always waiting for that blissful time to end. In one of my relationships, my boyfriend said, “What is wrong with you? Why do you keep doing this, making me jump through hoops? Why are you so dramatic, emotional and crazy?” I realized it’s because I’m waiting for it to end. He loves me like my grandmother did but I don’t believe that’s going to last so I’m making it end. On that day, everything changed and now I’m blissfully happily married. It would never occur to me to go ahead and sabotage it, but I did that for years.

You were waiting for the other shoe to drop, and to be semi in control of that process, you sabotaged your own happiness.

I expected it to go wrong, so I had to turn into the expectation. I didn’t believe that love could last for me. Now I wish I’d known that. I caused myself so much grief, pain and heartache not to mention other people because I didn’t understand what I now understand.

You don’t have to listen to hours of visualizations over courses of years and you don’t have to do affirmations for years or anything. This is all something that can be identified and broken through within a few sessions.

I’ve noticed that when small children have an experience like love is removed or they’re told they’re annoying or there isn’t any money in the house or the teacher doesn’t like them or they get bullied, they add on this what I call a tag, which is, “No one likes me. It will be like this for the rest of my life. We don’t have money. We’ll always be like this. I can’t find friends and this will never change.” They always add on those tags, “It would be like this forever. It will always be like this. It will be like this for the rest of my life.” What I do is get the client to go, “That’s not me and that’ll never be me ever again because,” and when they say that it’s a massive interruption, it breaks the neural pathways.

We have these adult pathways that become superhighways that goes, “We’re always going to be like this. It’s never going to change.” When you go, “It’s already changed because that’s not me because I’m not three. I don’t have to live with someone I don’t want to live with. I can be with someone that loves me forever.” The superhighways unravel and go back to being a dirt track and then disappear. It’s called neuroplasticity, getting the neurons in the brain to stop firing off negative beliefs and to fire off positive ones. Uncovering the source and then go, “That’s not me,” is enough to make negative neurons unravel, but positive ones installed themselves and fire off all the time.

It’s very important that the therapist not just connects all the dots for the patient, for the client that they’re helping. They have to let the client connect those dots, “This is why it’s going to not ever happen again, this horrible situation that happened when I was three.”

There are two types. There’s one type of person who goes, “I have no idea why I’m always late and I sabotage every relationship. I guess I’m messed up and there’s no hope for me.” The second one will go, “I know exactly why I drink. I know exactly why I sabotage my relationships, but I’m powerless to stop myself.” The belief that the understanding is enough is not quite correct. The understanding is transformational, but you have to add to that interruptions, the changing behavior, the rewiring, the software, installing a different belief system. It all takes place in the same session. It isn’t like, “Let’s have ten sessions looking at the past and another ten talking about the future.” It’s like, “Let’s find out why, now we’ve got the information, now let’s break it. Let’s change it, let’s erase and eradicate those old beliefs and put in incredibly empowering ones.” I ask all my grads, “What do you give your clients?” They all say the same thing, “Freedom and empowerment.”What a great thing to give people freedom and empowerment, that’s a wonderful thing.

You have your ten-day training for those who want to become a practitioner of RTT or who want to become super skilled at that and help others either through therapy or as a coach or somebody that’s out there in the world. They have this amazing skillset. Even working on yourself by going through that I Am Enough product will make a big difference for all our audience.

It would probably be the best investment you ever made. People say to me, “I wish I found you twenty years. This is the best thing I ever did.” I used to get letters almost everyday from my own patients, letters, cards, flowers, boxes of candy. Now I get letters from my grads. One of my grads, someone sent her 100 roses. They’re bigger than her head. I get letters from my grads going, “Look at the letters I got from the clients,” and it’s such so exciting to liberate some of them from depression or anxiety or chronic stress or insomnia. Insomnia is a terrible thing and yet sleep is nature’s resort. It’s a natural thing in the world to sleep. It’s a natural thing not to worry and it’s not natural to sabotage yourself or procrastinate. It isn’t just coaches that train with us. We’ve had firemen, policemen, single parents, beauty therapists, all kinds of people come to train with us because they then have a career with meaning and purpose.

Even just being a parent, that’s one of the most important jobs that you can have. To have those skills that you can utilize while you’re raising these beautiful souls into the world, that’s pretty amazing.

If you’ve had a horrible childhood yourself or the best one in the world, your own gorgeous little squiggly thing is going to bring up all the issues, “When I was two, I didn’t get that. When I was five, my mom wasn’t kind, no one celebrated my birthday.” Even though you come at it with like, “My kid’s going to have everything, it’s going to be amazing.” A lot of buttons get pushed, your own buttons, and we do a lot of work to stop that so you can be a loving parent to yourself while being a loving parent to your own child. I tell all my grads, in fact, I tell all my students, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. It is never too late to become a loving parent to yourself because when you want someone else to come along and meet your needs, then it makes you needier. When you can meet many of your needs yourself, it’s such a wonderful feeling. It doesn’t mean you don’t need people. It means that you could meet many of your needs and that makes you a more attractive prospect for anyone else anyway. I met someone who’s 75 who’s living that now who said, “I’ve never been so happy in my entire life and everyday is like being at Disneyland. I wish I’d done it 40 years ago but thank God I did it now.

The expression is, “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago but the second-best time is now.”

People would say, “Isn’t your childhood the best time of your life? Let’s make the first day amazing then it’s all downhill. I’m having the best time in my life right now. My last ten years have been amazing and extraordinary, and I wouldn’t go back and have my childhood again. I wouldn’t have my teens and my early twenties again. They’re so full of angst. Now I’m having a blissful time and I’m getting to play and adventure. All the things I didn’t do when I was a kid because I felt so unhappy and unattractive. I thought I was stupid.”

I certainly can relate that my time on this Earth is much more blissful, impactful, purposeful and powerful now than it was ten years ago or certainly twenty or 30 years ago. Life is certainly a gift and it’s getting better and better every day. Let’s send our audience again to the two websites that you had mentioned, that’s MarisaPeer.com and RapidTransformationalTherapy.com. Thank you again, Marisa. This was such an amazing, inspiring, wonderful episode. I hope that our audience now take action and use it to take their lives to the next level and those around them. Thank you again, Marisa. We’ll catch you on the next episode of the Optimized Geek.

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