Master Hypnotist Suzanne Kellner-Zinck discusses that little voice we all have in our head and the best ways to make it work for you.
Click the above link if you have found value in this podcast and wish to support it.
Jul 29 2021
What is Mental Health, Really? Vol. 524, July 29, 2021
Today I am going to speak to what mental health actually is because I don’t believe many people understand it given all the writing by the psychs that complicate it.
Very simply mental health is being contented in life, to the point where other peoples’ actions and statements have no negative emotional impact on you because you have decided that nobody has the right to upset you for any reason whatsoever. It is a choice, we make in each and every interaction that we have both with ourselves in our own mind, and while interacting with others.
How does one get to the point? Well, I believe it is understanding that allowing ourselves to have our minds played with by other people is not something that we are going to allow. Because when another person is able to make you angry with all the ‘injustice’ or ‘unfairness’ they perceive you are allowing this person to impact you in a very negative fashion. Anger begets resentment which begets depression and the downward cycle of ill health from there. It is way too high a price to pay for something that need not negatively affect you.
So, how do we deal with these injustices we see in our lives? We take a positive stand operating from our heart and soul to heal that which needs healing in whatever way we are moved to do so. Not because someone else forced you to feel angry or guilty – NO- you do it because you feel in your heart moved to do that thing that is the correct thing to do.
Is it always easy to do the right thing? Absolutely not. However, when we are coming from the heart, it is being done with the correct energy and becomes helpful instead of destructive to ourselves and those around us. Because, my guess is that you would rather be enrolled in doing something positive with heart and soul, than doing something negative to prove a point – which by the way is always based on one’s perceptions – something that was drilled into my brain here as I learned about the Palestinian side of things by Palestinians and Arabs themselves – people that are not in proximity for these deep conversations from the places in which I have previously lived in the United States – on both coasts at this point.
You see, it is when we are capable of having humility in knowing that there are many things that we do not know or understand that we can open our minds and hearts to others giving us a much larger understanding of the world and the way that it is – and then we can figure out what matters to us enough to do something to provide some positive change. However, it needs to be coming from the right place and that place is never from anger – it always comes from a place of desiring to learn about the other’s perspective and moving into healing from there.
Learning: To have mental health means that we are contented in our own lives. We are able to get out of our own heads and into that of the greater world to understand the perspectives of others from our hearts and soul. It means that we love and respect others instead of making assessments we have no right to make because until we have experienced what they have we can never fully understand – however, humility will take us a long way to healing the wounds that have come between us being willing for a change to care as much about others as we do about ourselves. That is what mental health really means in case you wanted to know.
Jul 26 2021
Claim Your Excellent Life #343 – What’s Wrong with the Pursuit of Happiness?
Master Hypnotist Suzanne Kellner-Zinck share her thoughts on happiness.
Click the above link if you have found value in this podcast and wish to support it.
Jul 22 2021
What’s Wrong With the Pursuit of Happiness? Vol. 523, July 22, 2021
Today we are going to explore the idea of ‘happiness’ something that many people say is what they are looking for in their lives.
I was listening to an interview with Peter Crone this morning where he made a very interesting observation, “Happiness is the lack of pursuit of happiness.”
Think about that for a moment. If one is already happy, there is no need to think about it, it just is.
So, how does one create that feeling of happiness for one’s self? Well, I would have to say that it all begins with the self. No one can make you happy, and no material thing will keep you happy for more than a few days (in most cases – a sentimental possession would be the one exception but even then that possession is not going to make you a happy person per se).
From my own life’s experience, there are a couple of things that have given me a happy and contented existence and some that have made my life utterly miserable during those times. What was the difference between these two situations? The environments in which I was living. In one case it had to do with the overpopulation of the area, and the hot humid summers and cold damp winters my body no longer could take – well, it didn’t want to take it any longer so it was time to go somewhere less populous and in a temperate climate.
The second situation would be living with people that had serious mental health issues that were not under control – just crazy behavior. One example was my roommate calling the cops on me the evening I was due to move out. Understand I had not been home the entire day having taken a job helping an elderly couple while the wife was recovering from knee surgery. The roommates did not know of this job because I never told them. However, one has to ask themselves why a person would be calling the cops on a roommate who wasn’t even home and not allowing her in her own apartment? The ironic part of this story is that the cop came to find me packing my stuff to move out and told my roommate that for wasting his time that she needed to stay in her own room till I left. It was about midnight by the time I was done packing so I spent the night there and left early the next morning. So freaking crazy…I left to drive back east to find out along my drive somewhere in Minnesota that my mom had been put under hospice care, not that she was dying you know – they just needed the increase in funding to cover her more complicated care at the time. Within 2 weeks of my arrival back to Massachusetts she quietly passed away. So, that timing worked out exquisitely well – I was there for the last 10 days of her life to visit her daily. And, I was fine with her passing as she lived a long life dying at the age of 84 – content for the most part at the nursing home she lived in for the last 7 years of her life. Because was living in a loving environment where she was supported in doing all the activities she wanted to partake in. So, our environment is so very important in various ways to be happy.
Another thing that I have found most important in being a happy individual is doing those things of interest to me. Too many people spend the best part of their days and lives doing work they do not enjoy and don’t want to be doing. One needs to take the time to really think about those things that are fun and interesting and work in a fashion that works for one.
In my case, I hate waking up early to deal with traffic rushing to some job to be there at a certain time or I hear about it. No, I need to have control over my time, when I work, and with whom I work. For this reason, over the years I have become much less employable – living by others’ rules and regulations, dealing with bosses and co-workers – forget it! I hire my own clients who are a great fit for the manner in which I work and leave it at that. Again, the environment matters a lot!
Relationships are the other area that not enough people take into consideration. Look, if you feel that you need to be a certain way for others to accept you, then I would suggest that you are not accepting of yourself and that is what needs to be addressed first. There is no reason for anyone to feel that they are not able to be good enough to have real relationships with real people in person. Because, the reality is that we all can clean up our acts some, being the imperfect people we are – and yet, till we are able to respect others for who they are and what they believe given the different family and perhaps culture they grew up in, happiness will be a wish, instead of a way of life.
Jul 19 2021
Claim Your Excellent Life #342 – What Does It Really Take to Work With Mentally Ill Folks?
Master Hypnotist Suzanne Kellner-Zinck shares her experiences working with the mentally ill both in and out of institutional settings.
Click the above link if you have found value in this podcast and wish to support it.
Jul 15 2021
As a Therapist, Have I Ever Been Tempted to Seek Understanding, Validation or Support From A Client? Vol. 522 – July 15 ,2021
This was a question that was asked by a very thoughtful person on Quora:
“As a therapist, have you ever been struggling yourself and been tempted to seek understanding, validation, or support from a client you had a good rapport with, yet knew this was inappropriate. What did you learn about yourself?”
This is a great question and I respect those who are licensed practitioners and answering it honestly because as one of the folks below mentioned – they have licensing requirements to uphold to keep their licenses. Of course, they were unable to speak to this at all because to do so would have put their licenses at risk – given all the other licensed folks who are on Quora answering questions and maybe many more reading them. To stay out of one another’s business isn’t a boundary that they uphold based on what I witnessed while answering questions from licensed practitioners on how to better help their patients heal from various forms of trauma. I received all sorts of kickback from the licensed folks back then (2005-2006) and later so did others for merely trying to give best practices as requested to truly help a colleague help a patient. This is why I stopped interacting on there. Now it Linkedin is just a bunch of ads for people to sell whatever their greatest new offering of the week is – so no more best practices are exchanged which is sad, really.
The answers that the questioner received from the licensed folks were:
“There have been times in my life when I’ve been struggling myself but no, I have never been tempted to seek understanding, validation, or support from a client – apart from it being inappropriate, unfair to the client, unethical, and potentially outright harmful to the client, it doesn’t make sense to me (as a course of action) and it would make me feel utterly despicable for mis-using their time and abusing their trust they have placed in me…”
There was another brave soal who spoke to when he first began practice who actually admitted that almost everything he did was done to feel validated and affirmed as a competent therapist, but it wasn’t conscious on his side as he recollected those moments early in his career.
I am a hypnotist so I don’t have a license to lose as a result of the sometimes restrictive manner in which those who are licensed are practicing.
Over the years I have been through some really challenging times – one of them that comes to mind is during the time that I went through treatment for a brain tumor (I no longer have it so no worries on that one.) During the entire time that I was going for treatment, I had clients seeing me in the evening after the treatments for the 6 weeks of 5-day-a-week treatments which took place 1.5 hours from where I was living at the time. I never spoke of the condition at the time, but I certainly did let folks know after the fact of what was going on because clients had asked about the change in their scheduling of our appointments and because I was taking time off to go abroad after the treatment was completed for an undetermined amount of time. The reason for not telling them till after the treatment was because I did not want them worrying about me – because, I was there to treat them and frankly, anything that was going on with my own treatment was not in the way of my taking care of my clients – the brain tumor did not bother me in the least by that time (there was the double vision for a while which is how it was found, but had stopped before the tumor was found a few months later on its own – go figure…). I didn’t even deal with the meaning of the tumor till I left the country for an extended trip abroad to do my healing work on my own which was quite an experience.
My clients did help me when I had returned to the East Coast after living in California during my mom’s last 10 days or so of life – 2 in particular who lived very close to the nursing home and the funeral home which took care of her ashes. They allowed me to stay with them as I just did what had to be done – and they were lifesavers to me during this time. I wasn’t particularly upset with the situation with my mom – I was seeing clients during this entire time – going to my client’s homes to do the work seeing mom for an hour around lunchtime right before her passing. It was the only time she was awake during this time stopping eating which was one way I knew she was ready to go…I let her know that all her kids were fine and that she could do whatever she needed when she was ready – all would be quite fine. The next day she quietly passed away with 3 of her 5 daughters and their two husbands, her 2 longtime roommates, and the staff of the nursing home that took care of her for the past several years right there with her.
What is the relationship that I have with these two families in particular currently? To tell you the truth they are both stronger than ever. The one family is always speaking to others of how I helped to save their son’s life because the in-patient program he was in at the time came very close to killing him telling him that he would be in jail or dead by the time he was 18. I originally did the work with him back in 2005 right before his 17th birthday. Today he is 30-years- old, has his own business, and is living a ‘normal’ life – just what his adoptive mom wanted for him when we first met all those years ago.
The other family has known me from the very beginning of my practice 18 years ago when I first worked with one of their family members that again the conventional mental health world had no idea in how to help. It was because of that success that her brother came to find out what I had done for his sister about a year later. He was just curious. To his surprise, we ended up dealing with some career issues he was going through at the time. After that he had his wife come to see me and that has been an ongoing relationship where she calls for tuneups when she needs them being in a very stressful career. She just referred her daughter to me with whom I worked to help with a 1-time intervention to help her through a sporting event. I just heard that her daughter is now in a much better frame of mind regarding this sporting challenge she has taken on.
The notion that people who help others are incapable of having a life separate and apart from their clients is ridiculous. There are times when others are in a place where they can be very helpful and are more than happy to be there because the reality is that not all people are so emotionally a mess that they are unable to make a decision to help out when it makes sense. I believe that if anything the relationships with these two families and myself has been made even stronger because I wasn’t looking for emotional help at all – I was still living my own life – just needed a place to stay for a little while giving the circumstances going on with my mom whose passing was welcome by me given the state that she was in. She was ready to leave this world as she told me that she ‘wanted to go home” which means going back to her Creator. She also let me know that she had 2 wonderful marriages and had fun raising her kids – a great summation for a woman who had a tumultuous life due to a severe mental illness – actually a few of them that made things much more difficult for her than a person without them. It was more her physical condition that was making life a bit too hard in the end, not the emotional as she had great mental health care from the staff at her nursing home where she spent the last 7 years of her life – many of the staff in tears at her passing – which was certainly heartfelt and beautiful to see. She was 84-years-old at her passing so she had a very long life.
So, I don’t really know how anyone else will feel about this reality of life and how my very long-term and grateful clients were more than willing to help me during this time. Frankly, it doesn’t matter to me because the reality is that at least as far as I am concerned, I have always treated my clients with the respect to know that they were capable of making their own decisions and allowing them to do so. I don’t infantilize my clients, instead, I allow them to demonstrate to me during the work we do together to show me what they are capable of which allows them to grow to the point where people are capable of overcoming those diagnoses that the conventional practitioners feel are diagnoses to be forever managed, never cleared – which is a complete disservice to the true healing of their patients. Why should a patient have to be seen as a person who is always dependent on another for care – as if they are lesser capable than the person treating them? Frankly, it is a system that continues to keep people ill who do not need to be in at least 95% of the cases that I have had over the 19 years of my being in practice. My own mother would be an example of a person who needed her mental health to be managed throughout her life – but she is in the tiny minority of folks so far as my own experience has proven.
I take the time to write these answers because I want people to realize that there is more than one way to deliver care and interact with clients and patients than the restrictive and I would say dehumanizing manner of which many of the licensed folks do. It is the reason that many in the mental health profession are going into life and business coaching and why others are moving out of the system. Many are sick of the lack of sessions reimbursed by insurance companies and the forcing of medication as the main form of treatment with their restrictions over the form of care that can be covered.
When one works on one’s own, there is a much more elastic manner in which the client may be treated and where the client is seen as an equal in care rather than someone who can’t think for themself – which unfortunately happens more often than many of the credentialed people understand. It is that behavior that makes many of their patients look elsewhere for care. I know because their past clients and my current clients tell me so.
To my mind, real healing occurs as people learn how to navigate their own lives. This is the underlying work that I do with my clients without the need to classify them in any way other than to give them the healing work and the ability to learn the interpersonal skills necessary to better navigate their lives. I do what I can to take the diagnoses away by having them no longer demonstrating the symptoms that got them diagnosed in the first place – no symptoms – no diagnosis needed. See how simple that is? It’s a paradigm for holistic healing and true health and wellbeing.
To be honest, nothing would make me happier than to see every licensed mental health and physical health professional learn how to work with their patients’ unconscious mind which would predicate a paradigm of true healing instead of fear and over concern for the great majority of their patients – much deeper and better healing could be had and with that many more people could be healed without medication for life (which causes physiological problems over time) and sessions forever. But, that would mean that they would actually have to find new clients to work with and that may not work as well for their business model…just a thought…
Jul 12 2021
Claim Your Excellent Life #341 – What is Mental Health?
Master Hypnotist Suzanne Kellner-Zinck gives her definition of mental health and how best to achieve it.
Click the above link if you have found value in this podcast and wish to support it.