Joanne Smith describes how the 3 principles shifted her view of emotion and mental health. She saw people recover from anxiety, depression, ADHD, and bipolar disorder by recognizing they create their own emotional responses from the inside out, not from external events.
understanding with the 3 principles was purely based on maybe anxiety and depression. It really didn't aim towards people with physical, but yeah, I could see that people who did have physical pain were recovering too, but I couldn't figure out how. But what I did know was that the understanding of the 3 principles and understanding about how thought works and how feeling how we feel, what we're thinking, I could really get my head around, wow, yeah, this is life-changing, and this— and I could see how it would help people with like mental health problems, anxiety, depression, ADHD, many things that involved anxiety, panic attacks, people that had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. There were people that were making spontaneous recoveries from years and years and years of Of complex mental health issues, and I could see how that worked and how that would really help having that understanding. But yet, at the time, I couldn't really work out how it worked with physical because I wasn't getting any benefit. The benefit I was getting was just how I could see that no matter what I was the only reason for my experience. I was creating my own experience from the inside out. Like, that was really helpful for me to understand that, that nothing, like, no other person could be to blame for how I feel. No other person could, or nothing happening, like, you know, getting a flat tire or circumstantial, like, maybe having a massive expense and then not being able to afford to pay bills, you know, those external things. I began to understand that there is no way that an external challenge can have any power over how I respond. I'm the one that does that, and I felt really empowered by having this new inside-out understanding that I create my experience. I'm the one that decides on how I respond. It was really empowering.
