"Everything popular is wrong."

Hello, hello. It's Mary Schiller, author and coach from MarySchiller.com, coming to you from my neighborhood park once again here in Paris, France. And it's quite overcast today, as you can see. It's a little bit cool, but I'm still enjoying a little sit here on a park bench. And I wanted to and jump on live again. I'm going to do more and more of these live chats with you, so I hope you enjoy them whether you watch them live or on the recording. I wanted to chat with you today about something that's really been on my mind a lot for the last 3 years, but in particular recently, and that is this idea that everything popular is wrong, which is a quote from Oscar Wilde. And I love that quote because for me It is absolutely apropos in terms of psychology and self-help that everything popular is wrong. And I know that that is a very bold statement for me to make, but I'm making it because it looks so obvious to me that everything that I used to think about psychology, everything I used to help about self-help and self-development was just completely wrong. And I know that there are a lot of really amazing people in those fields who are doing their very best to help others. They are motivated to help people have a better life. They're motivated to, you know, help people solve major problems like addiction and all kinds of things. But they are coming at human beings from the wrong direction. So I'm going to take just a couple of minutes to tell you, uh, why it looks this way to me. You know, in my own experience, um, I was someone who dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder for about 30 years of my adult life, which is essentially my whole adult life up until about 3 and a half years ago. And I sought out a lot of help during that time. I saw numerous therapists even before I knew, uh, had that label attached to me of post-traumatic stress disorder. I looked at the list of people that I saw and came up with 25 professionals over that 30-year span and quit counting. That wasn't even all of them. And as much as most of them were trying to help me, they were coming at me from the wrong point of view. It's the same point of view that 99.9% of self-help people are coming at us from as well, and that is that there is something wrong with us that needs to be fixed. There is this idea that human beings are fundamentally broken, or something in life has broken them and has caused damage that needs to be repaired. You could— you see this everywhere, it's in everything. There's, you know, for instance, this morning I was looking at some things by Danielle Laporte, who I know is quite popular with people. And in her work, I was looking at some things related to the desire map. It implies that there's something wrong with my feelings. That if I'm not having the feelings I want more of the time, that that's a problem that needs to be fixed or that even can be fixed. And both of those ideas are completely untrue. What would happen to psychology and self-help, and concurrently then, what would happen to the way people view themselves if they knew that humans are fundamentally healthy and that there was actually nothing wrong with us, even when our behavior might seem otherwise. You know, I look back at myself and I can see very clearly that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me, even though I was told over and over again that I had a mental illness that was never going to be cured. I can see very clearly now that that just wasn't true. I'm even so bold as to say that I don't even believe in mental illness. I don't think it exists. What seems to me to be going on is that we're all fundamentally healthy and we have thinking. That's what human beings do. Thoughts are the same as feelings, as far as I can tell. They're kind of like two sides of the same coin or something. And occasionally we are paying so much attention to to that thinking, that it looks really, really real to us. It looks like I have an anxiety disorder. You know, it looks like I have these mental health problems. But all I'm doing is listening to some thinking. And I'm experiencing some feelings along with that. If we could see that human beings are fundamentally healthy and fine. And in addition to that, that no feeling is positive or negative, and no feeling is better or worse than any other. No thought is positive or negative, better or worse. Just remove all of the measurements that we place on ourselves and the assumptions that we have all these things wrong with us. The world could change in a day. I mean, when I think about this, sometimes I get really, really excited because it's like, if If I can help people to see this fundamental truth that human beings are fine, that there is nothing wrong with us that needs to be fixed or corrected or changed, that we are not broken no matter what circumstances we've been through, that there is nothing that can ever touch who we actually are as human beings. If we could get that message out there to the world, That would change everything. We would stop spending all this time trying to create certain feelings because we think we have to, because if we don't, then our life just isn't what it could be. You know, those kinds of messages. We could just stop all of that. Stop worrying about whatever feelings we have because they don't matter. Our feelings don't matter. They have nothing to do with who we are. I just can't even begin to imagine how much people's lives would change, except that I know how much my life has changed from recognizing this simple fact that I was never broken. There was nothing wrong with me ever. There has never been anything wrong with me, and there's never been anything wrong with you either. I have seen in the last 3 and a half, 3 and a half years such a major positive shift in my life experience. It's hard to even put into words what has happened to me. My daily life has improved dramatically in terms of my just general sense of my own natural well-being. I have been able to make changes in my financial life, in my life circumstances. I mean, I'm living now in my dream city that I never thought I would ever live in, Paris, France. I mean, Good grief, you know, talk about a major change. My marriage was deeply, deeply troubled and is now better than it has ever been. I have more happiness and joy in my life than I thought humanly possible, and it's only increasing by the moment. I have met and interacted with hundreds, maybe thousands of people who have brought me more joy than I could imagine. And all of this, all of this and more, more than I could ever describe, has come from recognizing this simple truth, which is that there is nothing wrong with people. There is nothing wrong with anyone. We are fundamentally healthy, no matter what our behavior or what our thinking says. It matters not one bit. There is nothing wrong with us. And I'm going to do everything in my power to get this message out there to people and prove it to them, because I want people to be able to spend their precious lives living and doing what they want to do and exploring and having a wonderful time, because that is what life is for. It's not meant for mucking around in something that doesn't need to be fixed. And, you know, just think of how much time you would save if you stopped caring if you felt sad one day, if you stopped worrying about having some thinking that you deem as negative. You know, if you stop working on yourself, if you stop worrying about feeling however you feel, you'd be amazed at how much time gets freed up in your day to actually go live and do things that are just everything that you want in life. Oh, thank you for those emojis. So I'm going to call it quits there because actually my hands are cold and I didn't bring my gloves with me. So I'm going to put them in my pockets and walk to the hair salon to see if I can get a haircut appointment. So I will talk to you again soon and continue this series of Everything Popular Is Wrong. Thanks so much for watching. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.