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Guy Spiro: Give us a brief overview of your work, your life. How did you come to be who you are?

Barry Neil Kaufman: It’s a good question and I’ll try to give you relatively concise answer. I’ve been teaching what we call the Option Process, and also the Son-Rise program for nearly thirty years. In my early to mid twenties I ran a successful organization in Manhattan, working in the motion picture industry. I was, from all the external accoutrements, extraordinarily successful. I had a wife, two children, drove a Mercedes, and I was feeling totally hollow inside. While the style of living, and maybe my ambiance, suggested confidence and comfort, inside there was a real discomfort and displeasure. I was sort of living out Thoreau’s quote, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.” That was me.

By my late twenties I had done years of analysis. I said to my therapist, “Now that you have a teak deck on your new sail boat, paid for by my sessions, it’s time for me to move on.” He kind of went back and forth on it, and I said, “My only question is, I’ve been working on myself for years now. I am still anxious, I still get scared, things look really confused to me, and I still get angry.” He nodded, smiled, laughed and said to me, “That is the human condition. The only difference is now you’re able to cope and adapt with those internal feelings and experiences.” I remember saying, “You really believe that?” and he said, “Yes.” And I laughed and said, “I’ve been believing it too.” And I walked out.

I went back home and I said, “You know, I want much more than what he believes about the human condition. I’d like to get to a place in my life where I can be clear, comfortable, happy, and have a sense of love and God that is pervasive and not rare. I want to have that as a continuous feeling without touching my thumb to my pinkie while sitting on some peak in the Himalayas. I’d like to have that experience in a subway train in New York City, in a traffic jam, with someone who is disapproving of me, or yelling at me or threatening me.” In my pursuit of trying to find that path, I came across one person in particular who really talked about the power of beliefs. In between the stimulus which we attend to outside of ourselves, and our response to it, is a belief or a filter. I started to use that as a germination to explore my own personal dynamics of who I was, how I felt and how I behaved. I started to notice something that was rather spectacular for me. I was able to change my responses, not by changing what people did and said, but by changing really decisively how I viewed the stimulus of the people and the events around me. I started to change, my wife started to change, and about two years into this process we felt we were on top of an educational and therapeutic process that seemed to have profound human dynamics in it in terms of helping ourselves to come to a comfortable, clearer and more easy place in our lives.

Then there was the birth of our third child, Raun. He was diagnosed as severely autistic, under 30 I.Q., functionally mentally retarded. We were told by everybody that he was institutional material that there was very little if anything we could do, and we just had to accept this particular “tragedy” in our lives. It was as if God was saying to us, “So you think you understand how it works, human dynamics, you think you have your life together? Well I’m going to give you this real amazing challenge to see if you live out what you believe.”

We looked at this little boy as what became a wonderful way to explore ourselves. When they said Raun was tragic, incurable, irreversible — the well-meaning experts and physicians and psychiatrists that were diagnosing him — instead of seeing that as fact, we saw what they said as beliefs. The word “belief” is very important here. Belief is basically a point of view. It is something that somebody makes up. We looked at the same little boy, two years old, spinning in circles, babbling nonsensical sounds, refusing to be touched, looked at or held, and we decided that he was fascinating, curious, wonderful and we really loved him. We decided he was gift to us from the universe. They suggested institutionalizing him because when they analyzed him in terms of their point of view they felt despair for us. Their advice in terms of behavior was to put him in a facility. We made up different beliefs about the same stimulus, about the same little boy, and we became supercharged, excited, and creative. Instead of feeling despair or depression, we actually felt enthusiasm and excitement. As a result of that our behavior was quite different from the recommended one.

We took the process we were teaching with adults, which came from a basis of looking at beliefs and coming to a non-judgmental accepting place. We joined our son in his world, literally doing all those spinning, flapping, rocking behaviors he did as a way to make contact and bond with him. This took place slowly over a period of three and a half years. By the time we were done he was at a near genius I.Q. He was extroverted, verbal and defied every prognosis and every diagnostic work up. I wrote a book about it called Son-Rise. That book got international notoriety. NBC made a television movie of it that was seen in 90 countries by 300 million people worldwide. We were bombarded with requests from people all over the world, from people who wanted help. Interestingly, excitingly and curiously enough, it was not only for help with their special, autistic, brain impaired, and developmentally delayed children. We were getting calls from people that said, “My father had a stroke. Can you take the same attitudinal things that you did with your son — can you teach me how to do that with my father?” “My son is seriously depressed, can you take that attitudinal perspective you’ve used and those questions that you ask, and teach me how to do that with my son?” We got calls from people having collapses in their marriages or careers with the same kind of questions.

We said to them, essentially, come on over. We started to use this process, which is a dialogue method, that has blossomed into a whole group dynamics program. We do personal growth programs, we work with families of special needs in what we call the Son-Rise program, and a division of the institute is called the Autism Treatment Center of America. A good part of what then developed is what we call the Option Institute International Learning and Training Center. In the last 25 years we have trained a highly skilled staff of people. We have worked with people from 78 countries who have come to the institute here in Massachusetts. I have written several books over the years, there was another book called To Love is to Be Happy With. Son-Rise was ultimately, along with another book called A Miracle to Believe In, required reading in 280 universities.

About twelve years ago I wrote a book that also became very big called Happiness is a Choice. It outlined in a simplified form our philosophy about stimulus, beliefs that you can choose to change, and the resulting responses which are emotional and behavioral. How you can make happiness a choice, a living reality, and get to understand that misery is optional, not inevitable, and then give people the tools to work with that. Over this past quarter of a century that my wife and I have partnered together, we created the Institute which has a staff of almost 100 people. We have trained a lot of mentors, Son-Rise teachers, child facilitators and counselors. We work in group formats and do programs throughout the year in different parts of the world. We also work with couples, families and one on one with individuals. That smorgasbord of services allows us to be in the trenches. Of my twelve books, and I think there are three million in print, there are two books that are extraordinarily personal to me. One is Son-Rise, the first book I wrote. And the other one that is just as personal for me and very close to my heart is the one that is currently being published called No Regrets — Last Chance for a Father and Son. Because I feel my relationship with my dad tracks my entire career.

When I started to teach in the way that I taught, my dad felt very combative with our ideas. He felt that I dismissed genetics as powerful human dynamics and that I simplified the complexities of the human condition. He felt he was angry, his grandfather was angry, his great grandfather was angry. When I was a kid I was angry, so that was his proof it was genetic and behavioral conditioning. My concept that I could change it all, change all my beliefs and therefore change myself ... he thought was not only simplification but somehow an insult. I have five other siblings and it always seemed he was closer with them, so it was a great surprise to me to receive a phone call from him one Sunday morning in which he and my step mom Rosie were on the phone. He said that he didn’t want to talk to any of the other siblings. He just wanted to talk to me and he wanted the conversation kept secret. He had just been diagnosed two months earlier with lymphoma that had metastasized throughout his system. He had 27-29 tumors in his groin and abdomen area and he was in pain. He and Rosie were getting mixed signals from different doctors as to surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, and they wanted help. They hadn’t told anyone but had called me for help. And I remember sitting back in awe and surprise, since he had been so combative with my ideas and my attitude, and I thought to myself ... this was a transformation with me and my dad, at least step number one.

The next two years were glorious. Challenging, yes, but glorious and very uplifting. This was my walk with God and I had trained all my life to do this. I leaned forward into the phone and thought, my God, he’s calling me. He could have called any of the five other kids and he’s calling me. He knows who I am, he knows what I believe, he knows I think it’s all attitude, so I guess if he’s calling me he must really want me. So I thought to myself, how do I want to be with him? And I thought three things. The first, to love him, two to serve him, and three — this was key — to be authentically me with him. So I leaned forward into the receiver and I said, “Pop, it sounds like you are about to embark, at 84 years old, on one of the great adventures of your life.” And the phone went silent. All of a sudden, to my surprise my father started to laugh. He said to Rosie, “Hey, you see, listen to his attitude, that’s why we called him.” I remember thinking that after having a discordant relationship for basically 3-4 decades, somehow who I was and what I taught could be helpful to him, and I felt very, very grateful for that opportunity.

GS: What incredible validation for yourself in that moment.

BNK: It was the most amazing gift. You know, it’s funny, a lot of people have discordant, stressed relationships with parents and children. My dad was a man who came out of the Depression, was stoic, who thought asking questions was a violation of personal privacy, who felt that you don’t show your emotions and you’re always supposed to be polite. So basically, I was brought up in a household where everyone lied to each other. No one said what they really felt and everyone smiled when they didn’t feel the smiles. It was sort of interesting to me as I plodded along in my life and started to change myself radically, to see him feel actually affronted because I wasn’t holding his standards. We teach parenting programs here and I have three things that I always use as the basis of those programs. When you’re parenting I always say, Love, Guide and Let Go. The most important part of parenting is to let go. Most parents don’t. I have six children, I’ve practiced letting go my whole life and therefore parenting has been easy. With my dad there wasn’t an easy let go because he wanted his children to reflect his beliefs, his morals and his values. When I was moving through a different path, it was very difficult for him.

Sometime before my father called me, we were one day walking on the property of the Institute. I was sort of wanting to knock on his door to get to know him better and to open our hearts to each other. I was walking with him, his wife Rosie and my wife Samahria and I said to him, “Pop, if you were put on an island and you had to be there for ten years, but you could only take one person, would you take me?” And he said, “Is that what you do up here at the Option Institute? That’s an outrageous question. You’re my son, I love you.” So I looked at him, and said “O.K., now it’s me and I have to choose who to take for period of ten years on a private island, and I wouldn’t be speaking to any other human being.” I looked at him and I said, “You know, Pop, I wouldn’t take you.” He looked at me, stern for a moment, and then his shoulders relaxed and he grinned and he said, “You know what, Bears, I wouldn’t take you either.” And we laughed and we hugged and we walked arm and arm looking into each other’s eyes and giggled. That was a level of authenticity that he hadn’t permitted. So when he called me years later with all these tumors in his system, he sort of knew who I was.

I went down there to help him. We were with this one doctor who starts talking about my father’s malignant spreading cancerous tumors as if they’re swollen lymph nodes, and he isn’t even frontal with that information in conversation. After one particular CAT scan the four of us were together in the car and I said to them, “You know, in order for us to make choices, we really have to start using the language. So let’s talk about why you’re uncomfortable using the language.” Rosie said, “No, don’t start.” And I said, “Don’t start what? The words only mean the definitions you give them.” Then I said, “Listen, I’m going to try something and you guys can join in if you want. I’m going to start singing a song.” So I start singing “Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, malignancy, malignancy, tumor, tumor, death, death, death ...” to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat. I look in the rear view mirror and their eyes are bugged out ... and I go on for a moment or two and then Rosie and Dad and Samahria start singing. After we sang that song, they made friends with those words. This started something ultimately spectacular, which was to make friends with the cancer as an opportunity, instead of a curse.

GS: I’ve said many times that sometimes healing doesn’t mean surviving.

BNK: You bet! I totally concur with that. People sometimes think that death is a failure. I don’t think death is a failure at all, it’s the next transition that we’re all going into and I think that, in some way, to be ready to die is really to be ready to live. There’s a wonderful line that the monks used to say to each other in the middle ages. “Momento Moree,” which means, remember you must die. I said it in a workshop once and everyone thought it was very cryptic. I said that I didn’t think it was cryptic at all, it reminds you of the preciousness of the moment. It is useful to remind ourselves of this moment. To be here at this moment. Because the basis of love, the basis of happiness, is our ability to be present. About my father’s challenge I was very clear with myself, I was going to love him, serve him and be authentic. That meant I was going to be present for him in every moment. As a result of having such clear intention, I didn’t draw back into myself. I found it easy whether he was in pain, whether he was crying or laughing, to be there fully with him and as a result have an experience of delight and not sadness. To have an experience of honoring a holy experience rather than a diminishing experience. So, No Regrets, at least in terms of that book, is a book that profiles this particular journey that I took with my dad. Because of how my dad and I worked together, moved together and learned together, it really details a lot of what we teach about the notion of authenticity, the concept of what love is and expressing love. The notion of really being an active listener and being present, the concept of acceptance and not judging, the notion of being willing to let go, and to be a force of nature. Being a force of nature is a five step process; first it’s clarity of purpose, beginning with having an intention. Number two is conviction, which is developing beliefs and ideas that support your purpose. Number three is the daring action — you actually bring it out into the world. Number four is you do it with passion; and five, you do it with persistence. With my dad I really felt that that was what I was doing, and that he gave me and blessed me with the opportunity to do that with him.

GS: You get different impressions of death from different directions. Out of the Castaneda material it is to make friends with your death and keep death as your constant companion. The Vikings went into battle already dead. It is an inevitability. The fear of death has a lot to do with the problems of the condition of humanity.

BNK: In a nitty gritty, day to day experience, people who are challenged with serious illness, people who are challenged with their own demise, are often left isolated. There were so many instances with my dad. Friends of my siblings would come to visit him and they would say, “Abe, you look really good, looking bright eyed this morning.” Now he knew what he looked like. Once in a while he would walk out of the room with me and sometimes we would walk together, holding hands, and he would turn to me and say “OK, how do I look?” I would say, “You look like an 18 wheeler just ran over you.” And he would smile and say, “That’s what I thought I looked like, thanks.” It is owning, accepting and acknowledging what is that gives the person who is challenged a safe place to be with other people.

GS: Once you helped him to accept the truth and deal with it, he valued that truth.

BNK: He did. About five months into this process, he was in the hospital, and I said, “Pop, as a result of having cancer and going through what you’ve been going through, what’s the biggest thing that you can say you’ve learned?” He thought for a moment and said, “I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is how utterly closed I have been most of my life.” I remember being so deeply touched by that. And I said, “Pop, in order for you to say that right now you have to know how incredibly open you are. It doesn’t matter where you were yesterday, last year or ten years ago. It matters where you are right now.”

No Regrets is a celebration in an area that people don’t tend to celebrate and having the best time with material that seems fragile and tender but is actually a powerful conduit for bonding, community, insight, understanding and love. Later on, I was walking down the hall with my sister, and I said, “If I had dreamed of what I would have wanted for Pop, it would have been that he one day would have just gone to sleep and not woke up the next morning. Never would I have wished him cancer, chemotherapy, radiation, and operations. But you know, now that I look at what he has done, I am so grateful for his cancer.” She then looked at me and said, “You know what, you’re a monster,” and walked away. I knew that over the past two years she was having this tough time, and I was having a really beautiful, actually incredibly alive and humorous experience with my dad. That is an example of what we teach. We both loved this man, we both saw the same data outside of ourselves, but we put it through completely different filters. Her belief filter is something terrible is happening, something painful is happening. My belief filter is that an adventure was beginning. A chance to walk with God was right before us and I’m going to do whatever I have to do to help my father do that. So we had different targets and different perceptions. When I was having an illuminated experience of incredible gratitude, she was suffering.

GS: It’s a foreign concept to the vast majority of people that they have a choice in what to believe. The first thing I’m struck by in your story is your refusal to accept the goal of psychotherapy. If the goal of psychotherapy is to take people who are less functional and make them functional to the level of the normal human condition, what’s the point? But your refusal to accept that as a goal, and even come up with the concept that you can choose ... it’s pretty radical.

BNK: The amazing part is ... it didn’t feel radical. I think where it came to have such power for me was one time in the early days, as I was exploring my beliefs through dialogue, and we’ve now made dialogue a lot more productive and sophisticated than it was originally, and I was talking about somebody in New York City that had made me angry. The other person asked how the person had made me angry? I said, “Well, he didn’t appreciate what I did, he didn’t value what I had delivered, he dismissed some of these amazing creative ideas.” When I had finished he said, “Yes, I understand that’s what he did, but how did he make you angry?” I remember thinking, wait, maybe his hand was in my central nervous system. His fingertips were in my neurons somewhere in my cortical geography. This was one time among many that I really started to see that I can forever point my finger at others and say, “You make me angry, you make me frustrated, you make me uncomfortable, you make me sad,” and therefore experience my life as being a victim of what other people say and do. Or I can see what’s really happening. What’s really happening is that you can call me a jerk, but you calling me a jerk only has power if I think I’m a jerk. So my making myself uncomfortable actually is not your judgment, your anger, your dismissal of me, it’s my judgment of myself. So what I realized is that it’s all about my thoughts and my beliefs. As I started to change one belief and two beliefs and three beliefs, I became aware that the changes were regarding specific situations but the ramifications of changing was a global impact on my life. Let me go back to not accepting the traditional goal of psychotherapy. I really felt that after working so hard on myself, I wanted to dream my biggest dream. And rather than just leaving it as a dream, I wanted to put arms and legs on my vision. I was going to do everything I could to figure it out and make it work.

I was doing a class here once with about 50 or 60 people. A woman, who’s a quite noted psychoanalyst, raised her hand and said to me “This whole idea that beliefs are freely chosen, which is what you’re teaching, that even if your parents taught them, the priests taught them, the minister, the politician or whoever it is that taught you, you still bought it, and since you bought it, you can unbuy it so to speak. You’re teaching people that everything that they do comes from their beliefs, everything they feel comes from their beliefs, and those beliefs are something they empower freely, and they can change at any given moment. Did you ever consider that you might be wrong?” I remember looking at her, and laughing and said, “Not really.” Because what we teach is not about truth, it’s not about right or wrong. When I believed I couldn’t change my beliefs, when I believed I had a subconscious and an unconscious, I stopped my own self exploration. I diminished my own personal power and I could only see changes in myself as tiny and incremental. When I adopted the notion that there is no subconscious and unconscious, and I can know everything about myself, I then started to ask questions and hear myself give answers that I never gave before. It seemed as if just the decision to believe that I could know opened doorways in which I then gave myself more self-knowledge. That self-knowledge allowed me to make radical changes. Now I tell that to other people. I show other people, by questions, how they can do that for themselves. They then are doing the same thing that I’m doing and they’re even more powerful with it in certain instances. You might say, suppose it’s all wrong, and I will say to you again, this is not about right and wrong. We don’t teach truth at the Option Institute. We teach a make believe process. Everything we teach here is make believe. A make believe construct about how human nature works. But if you adopt this construct you will never be a victim again. You will be in charge of your behaviors and feelings because you’re going to take responsibility and become a happy detective regarding your own beliefs, and therefore you’re going to empower yourself to see more and change more ...

GS: Well, that’s going to break the rules, isn’t it?

[laughter]

BNK: Well, that’s what my dad felt. He felt I was breaking the rules. Except towards the end of his life, he broke the rules, too!

I believe you can change everything. I don’t believe that it’s about coping and adapting, and my dad is the most amazing story. From 84-86 years old, he radically changed almost every part of himself. In terms of what we teach here at the Option Institute, you can learn principles you can utilize, self discovery tools to really rake those changes in. Those changes can be radical. We had a gentleman here who came in on Prozac (and other medications) for fifteen years and took a one week program. He literally changed a history of depression. Just in that one week, he radically changed it. He went off all his medications and his psychiatrist couldn’t believe what had happened. He told him, “I’m changing my beliefs about myself.”

GS: Was it the red queen that advised Alice to believe three impossible things before breakfast every morning?

BNK: Indeed, I think it was.

GS: 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?

BNK: 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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