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Guy Spiro: It’s commonly spoken in metaphysical circles that you can’t control what happens to you, but you do have responsibility for how you respond to it. That’s well established. But this idea of no such thing as a subconscious mind?

Barry Neil Kaufman: It’s not a useful idea. It [the subconscious] literally was a fantasy of a German physician that everybody embraced because it allowed people to abdicate responsibility. Now if that was a relief in the human condition, I’d be all for it, but unfortunately I don’t think it relieved much of anything. If you are not a victim of the dysfunctional family around you, which is another set of beliefs, then you are a victim to your libido, your id, your superego, whatever it is, and all the unconscious mechanisms. I always saw Freud not as a scientist, but as a novelist. He was misconstrued. I hope people won’t find that too outrageous. I teach personal development. I teach people how to deal with traumatic challenges in their lives like loss of a loved one, diagnosis of a difficult illness, difficulty with a child, the collapse of a marriage, a career, whatever it might be in a very easy self-empowered and optimistic manner. And all I’m teaching is another set of make-believes. In other words, one set of make-believes is the subconscious, and if you buy that you’re buying an entire reality of victimization. If it’s not victimization to things outside of yourself, it’s victimizations of the things that are sort of boiling and unknowable inside.

GS: Belief in the subconscious mind is part of the bedrock of consensual reality. Everybody believes in that.

BNK: Right, but I don’t think it’s useful. I neither believe in it, nor teach it. I think it is a disabler, rather than an enabler, to people experiencing their own power and really getting on top of taking responsibility. When you tell people to take responsibility it always starts to sound like an accusation. I see it as a major step towards liberation. If I’m unhappy because of the way you acted with me and I point my finger at you, then the only way I can get happy is for you to change the way you’re dealing with me. So now I’m a victim waiting for you, my stimulus, to change. However, if I’m choosing through my own belief filters and my own self-judgments to be unhappy when you act that way with me, then all I have to do is figure out what my beliefs are, change them, and you can still act in the same way, and my reality becomes completely different. I’m in charge of that reality.

GS: Dealing with others this way is fairly simple and easy to understand when people have self-destructive behaviors. Most misery is not caused by other people, most misery is caused by things that we tend to remain sometimes resolutely unaware of about ourselves.

BNK: Can I just modify what you just said?

GS: Certainly.

BNK: All personal misery is personally created.

GS: Not even most, all (laughs), OK.

BNK: All, not most. But you understand that that’s my belief and you have a different belief and we’re just making up our own realities. Mine is no more valid, Guy, than the one I just said. But mine, I feel is more useful.

GS: Certainly, but my question is, people have self-destructive mechanisms that are functioning in their lives, that are bringing them misery, that they’re largely unaware of. If that’s not subconscious mind, what is it, and how do you deal with it?

BNK: Firstly, I believe that people are aware of what they’re doing. They just don’t claim ownership. I work with thousands of people from 70 or 80 countries. People are aware. When they say they’re not aware, they’re really just not taking ownership. They don’t want to claim their feelings. They don’t want to claim their behaviors. Number two, you’re using an interesting word called self-destructive. I have never met a self-destructive person. I have seen and worked with children who bang their heads against the wall, so much so that they break the skin and fracture their skull. I’ve worked with young adults who are starving themselves and they’re called anorexic. I have worked with young adults who take razor blades and cut their arms and legs so that they have to be taken to a hospital. I’ve worked with adults, youngsters and older people who have attempted to commit suicide by all sort of means. From the external point of view, because there’s a judgment about those kinds of behaviors, we see those people as self-injurious, self-destructive. I don’t see that at all. When I work with them and start to understand their beliefs, they’re actually trying their very darndest, through unhappiness, to take care of themselves.

So take for example the little boy that was banging his head before he came to the Option Institute, who had been tied to a chair so he couldn’t bang his head. Next thing that happened is that they locked a helmet onto his head so when he banged he couldn’t hurt himself, etc. When he came here one of the first things we did is that we allowed him to be in a room and we watched him bang his head in various places. One thing we noticed immediately, is that he seemed to be banging his head between the studs and not on the studs. We thought that was very curious. As he banged his head more, we actually joined him and banged our head against the walls. Little by little he started to make sounds with it, almost like you were hitting a drum. Then we started to give him things to make noise with. Then we started to massage the back of his head because he was looking for stimulus there. Within two or three days, after banging his head for five or six years, he stopped. He was banging his head to create certain sounds. He was banging his head to give himself a certain physical sensation.

When I work with people who are dealing with anorexia, I don’t see them as self-injurious. They are not believing they’re trying to injure themselves. They are actually trying to take care of themselves. The persons that decide to commit suicide are basically trying to relieve themselves of pain. So they take an action that the rest of society finds abhorrent. They are not actually trying to hurt themselves, they’re trying to help themselves by relieving pain. To me what’s interesting is, once you drop the notion of self-destructive and self-injurious, you can see that everybody is taking action to take care of themselves. Some of us do it effectively on a personal and social level. Some of us do it in what looks to be ineffectually on a personal and social level.

So what, we ask the person who gets unhappy in order to go on a diet because they’re fat and then eats more, or the person who scares themselves when they’re smoking cigarettes in order to stop smoking and then smokes more, does the operational perspective that you’re utilizing get you where you want to go? If it doesn’t, let’s question it. You don’t have to put it in the bag of injurious or self-destructive, because nobody is doing that anyway. Everyone is trying the best they can, oftentimes with fear and unhappiness, to take care of themselves.

GS: How about people who overspend, or those that don’t take care of business and things pile up on them? Procrastinators, other addictive behaviors?

BNK: I love the term addictive. I have a peculiar notion. I believe there are no addictions.

GS: I love this guy!

BNK: This is all make-believe. I have to say it over and over again. I exercise every morning. I have been doing it for thirty years. I do it religiously. I do not call that addictive behavior. Nobody else around me calls it addictive behavior. Why? Because I and the people around me approve of my behavior. Even though it’s repetitious, even though I do it every morning like clock work. Nobody calls it an addiction.

GS: There are acceptable addictions.

BNK: Yes, but I don’t think they are addictions. For example, a person may be smoking, or drinking, or procrastinating, or accumulating too much debt, and does it repetitiously. That is viewed as addictive, and addictive is another problematic victim word. It is a word that suggests a lack of control. If someone is procrastinating, they do that for very specific reasons, because they don’t want to deal with the consequences of their actions. So they resist taking action until the last minute in order to avoid potential consequences which they think are adverse or difficult for themselves. If you break it down, there’s always a reason I’m doing it. There’s always a belief behind it. Addictive sounds like you’re out of control, versus, I make a choice and I keep making the same choice to behave in a certain way, and because I haven’t challenged the way I’m behaving, it looks like I’m out of control. But I’m not out of control, I’m just deciding to do it that way, everyday, or four times a day, or however I’m choosing to do it. But if I approve of what you’re doing, of course I wouldn’t call you addictive. I would call you inspired. I would call you self-disciplined because I like what you’re doing. But if I don’t like what you’re doing, I call you out of control, addictive.

GS: Well, when the person himself doesn’t like what he’s doing, then what?

BNK: Great question. If you came here to the Option Institute, I would first ask you why don’t you like what you’re doing, and you would give me your reason and then we would try to explore the reasons why you don’t like it. You know what I say to people that don’t like what they’re doing? I say that the best way to change what you don’t like is to first love what you don’t like. In other words, I eat too much and I’m fat, or I spend too much and I have too much debt.

First, really get in touch with the fact that this has been your way of taking care of yourself and really be open and loving of that way. Because when we don’t like something in ourselves we tend to make it an enemy and not explore it. By literally shifting it from enemy to friend, we give ourselves an opportunity to look at it.

I have people that do a session with me and they literally will be puffing on a cigarette and they’ll say “It’s a disgusting habit, I don’t like that I do it and I want to talk about that I don’t want to smoke.” In effect what they’re doing in that moment is really lying. Because what they really want to do is to smoke while they’re talking and talk as if they don’t want to smoke, while they’re smoking. It would be more useful to say, if I was exploring this for myself, I’m doing this as a way of taking care of myself. Every single behavior I do is to take care of myself. How do I believe this is taking care of me? And does it work? If you took that perspective, you’d have much more of a possibility of unraveling and changing than if you say I don’t want to do what I’m doing. Because you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing if you didn’t want to do it. What you’re really doing is exactly what you want to do, but you want to make believe that you don’t want to do it. That’s not only ineffective, but it’s distancing yourself from the circumstance.

GS: So this goes back to no subconscious mind.

BNK: You bet! The make believe of subconscious mind has not been useful for human dynamics, human potential and human possibility. I really don’t I think it’s a stumbling block. I think the make believe that there is no unconscious, no subconscious, but that it’s all available and knowable presents a completely different opportunity for self-knowledge, self-exploration and self-change. That’s everything that we teach here at the Option Institute. I see people walk away and do things they never thought they could do before because they’d never asked themselves. They never thought they had that knowledge inside.

GS: It’s very impressive how you refused to accept the reality of your son Raun.

BNK: People come from all over the world to the Son-Rise program, the Autistic Treatment Center of America. Parents, professionals come here on their knees, feeling just in utter despair and we look at them and say, oh, you have a six year old that can’t talk, doesn’t look at you, you can’t touch him, he spins in circles ... we smile and we say, how blessed you are!

[laughter]

And let me tell you, people look at us like we’re out of our minds. However, three or four days later, they feel their blessings. And by feeling their blessings, they do something so different and so much more powerful because they are no longer self absorbed into their own unhappiness. They feel centered and they have a point of view that works for them. The fact that the kid is a blessing or a curse is just make believe anyway. You have that choice. Making that choice with Raun really began a revolution.

GS: I have believed, and I’m getting a sense here of how important that word “believed” is, that in order for people to make a choice they have to have attained a certain modicum of consciousness. You seem to be saying the choice can be made by anybody, at anytime, regardless of anything.

BNK: Yes, the people that come to the Institute are not all high I.Q. folks.

GS: Nor have they meditated, or read countless metaphysical books.

BNK: Yes, it’s incredible, in our programs we’ll have doctors, lawyers, business executives, plumbers, electricians, waitresses, bus drivers, etc., and it is awesome. There’s sort of a leveling of understanding as people start to grasp these kinds of ideas and then look at themselves. I’m always blown away.

GS: As briefly as you can, lay out the essence of the teaching.

BNK: The title of my book, Happiness is a Choice lays it out most clearly for me. What we teach is that happiness is a choice, which then means that unhappiness is yet another choice. Misery is optional but not inevitable. Essentially what that means is that in the world we have stimulus, beliefs and response. We’re not in charge of the stimuli, events around us, what people choose to do and not to do. But we are in charge of our own responses. They are emotional and behavioral and the way that we determine our responses is by the beliefs that fuel them. We choose our beliefs and we can change our beliefs. But it also means that our responses, emotions and behaviors are essentially our own design. We’re not victims. We never were. And constructing ourselves in that fashion is not useful.

There are two ways that we teach people how to explore this make believe construct of how human nature works. One is through a process called Dialogues. I wrote a book called Power Dialogues. It is simply a logical system, Socratic in nature, of questions in which you use behaviors and feelings as a tracking system, back to your belief, to understand what you’re believing so that you can change your belief if you want to. For example, if I said, I’m feeling sad, the question might be, why do you feel sad? I feel sad because my partner left me. What makes you sad about that? Because it means somehow that I wasn’t worthy. Oh, we’ve now hit a belief. Next question is why does it mean, if your partner leaves you, that you’re not worthy? Then the person gets a chance to look at that. Why do I think it means I’m not worthy? Am I not good enough, not smart enough, or pretty enough? Whatever it might be. It’s at that pay dirt level that we get to understand what germinates the sadness, what germinates the behavior, and then we get a chance to look — alright, am I not worthy or am I worthy? And oftentimes people can see through the initial judgment, unexplored, that I wasn’t worthy to one that is deeper and more centered.

GS: What if the thing they are sad about is the loss of companionship?

BNK: They might be sad about the loss of companionship, but that’s another question. There are many different possibilities. One is that nobody else will come into my life that will have that meaning for me. That’s a belief. Why do you believe that? If I’m alone I won’t be nurtured. Why do you believe that you can’t nurture yourself if you’re alone? That’s another belief. The dialogue questions those conclusions. Why do we believe those conclusions?

We also create what we call Shortcuts to Happiness. This is immediately deciding to create a state of mind that would facilitate, by intention, a level of comfort, ease and clarity inside of ourselves. This is a series of simple things, teaching people how to be present and listen. A lot of No Regrets is about that. Teaching people how to be authentic is important because one of the great causes of distress and discomfort is the incongruity of what we present outside and what we feel inside of ourselves. We teach people to trust themselves and be authentic, inside to outside. We teach people what the experience of gratitude is all about, using gratitude as a shortcut to happiness. We teach people that one of the great causes of unhappiness is judgments. We filter lots of things through — is this good, is this bad, and a lot of the judgments that it’s bad are stimuli for distress. You can actually create yourself so that you’re non-judgmental most, if not all of the time. We’ve been systematically taught to be judgmental. We talk about love being a shortcut to happiness. Love is defined really simply as accepting somebody, wanting the best for them and taking useful action to help them get the best.

So it’s the process of self-exploration through dialogue. We do it through actively teaching people how to jump into a frame of reference, a state of mind, that would bring happiness and love bubbling to the surface. We have a great course called Living the Dream which is our two month training program. We have a wonderful class called Inward Bound which is seeking your purpose. We have a class called Optimal Self Trust which is learning to listen to your inner voice. We have a course called Empowering Yourself which is teaching yourself from a place of comfort and respect to be powerful in the world. Exceptional Woman is run by our female staff and Sumahria is the head teacher. That’s to teach women how to take ownership of their own exceptionality and to develop a belief system of self trust and self empowerment, in part, based on their gender. We’re constantly teaching different doorways into these essential ideas.

GS: What about people with a meditative background. It has always seemed to me that the human mind is a wily character that is not really interested in being brought under any kind of control.

[laughter]

BNK: Oh, not at all interested. When I was younger I used to meditate. I actually adopted the sort of kill off your mind and you’ll be much better off. I have a contrasting point of view now. I think that one of the most amazing, distinguishing apparatus of the humankind is our ability to think and make up beliefs. But rather than decide that that’s a problematic aspect of ourselves, I think that we just have to train ourselves to utilize this incredible capacity to serve us rather than work against us. I think that if our minds are sort of seemingly out of control, or the nemesis within our substructure, that’s because we have not really learned to utilize ourselves. When you were in first, second and third grades you learned to draw, write, use letters, simple mathematics, you learned geography, etc. Nobody sat down and said, pre-kindergarten, we’re going to give you an owners manual of yourself. We’re going to teach you, by gosh, happiness is a choice, emotions are your choice and your behaviors are your decisions. None of us learned that. So when we’re 25, 45 or 85 it still looks rather mystifying. But it’s just a matter of education. We have not educated ourselves to use our thinking apparatus productively for ourselves.

GS: People are more victimized by their minds than anything else. Most people can control, somewhat, what they project as behavior in the world, but if anyone were to hear what was really going on in their minds, they’d be mortified.

BNK: But imagine if you could change that. That’s what we teach people. Your behaviors and what’s going on in your mind can be congruent. So when you’re smiling, you’re smiling through and through and all of the fifty-one trillion cells are smiling. But when you’re smiling outside and inside you’re seething, that is part of the breakdown within the human system. But I think it’s all learned, I don’t think this is part of the design. I think this is part of the human software that we’ve created based on our beliefs, and we can design it differently. That’s what we’ve spent our lives doing, first for ourselves and then for the many thousands of people that we have helped.

Barry Neil Kaufman’s newest book, No Regrets is available at bookstores everywhere. Mr. Kaufman is the best-selling author of twelve books, including Happiness is a Choice and Son-Rise, in addition to the screenplay of the award-winning NBC-TV movie, Son-Rise: A Miracle of Love. Kaufman is co-founder of The Option Institute, a non-profit organization, located in Sheffield, MA, counseling individuals, couples, and corporate groups on methods of self-empowerment. For information on The Option Institute and Mr. Kaufman's work, call 800-714-2779, or visit www.option.org.

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