My function is to serve as your guide, providing tools and supporting you, while you refocus on your personal life, examine your own truths, goals and motives. Together, we can revisit and revise when necessary, all the information, ideas, beliefs, and values that fill your inner world, helping you to evaluate what is constructive and beneficial, what it means, what information can be trusted, what will help you better navigate towards your desired goals, and what information is dispensable and worthless, untrustworthy, what can be disregarded or ignored.

By remaining focused on what is meaningful to you, personally, and disregarding the rest, you will begin to perceive your individual life as simpler, easier to grasp. The process of planning future steps towards goals and confronting and overcoming challenges along the way, becomes much less daunting.

I work by facilitating an open, non-judgmental two-way discussion in which we examine together your life, self-perception, and the challenges that you are facing. Our discussions are a place for you to express what is meaningful for you, personally, and learn to filter out the ‘noise’ that hinders you. The goal is to promote, clarify and enhance basic rational values that, when given the appropriate attention, can affect the perception of one’s self and life’s situations.

I call them rational values because adhering to them serves the interest of the individual and can improve one’s experience of well-being and progress in life. Some of these values are:

We know that from the time we are babies, what we learn about ourselves and the reality around us is by personal contact and experience. At a very young age we start being taught about the world first by our immediate family, and before long, by institutions and the media.

The picture of the world presented to us is almost always the “ideal” picture of society, the people are always beautiful, wearing nice expensive clothes, smart, successful, intelligent. If by some chance, they are portrayed differently, it is usually with a negative connotation. In ‘real’ life, most of us experience a very different reality in our personal life than what we are led to expect.

We are not as beautiful, not as rich, our family home is not as big, nor full of all the latest products and technology that are shown on the commercials. We are not always as happy and successful, and the people we know in our own lives, more closely resemble ourselves than they do the ‘ideal’ reality.

Social media can be another false measurement of how people live. We connect with people and follow each other’s lives, forgetting we tend to show each other only the ‘best’ pictures, and the ‘best’ moments, giving the follower the perception that their friend’s lives are “perfect” and much better than their own.

So much information in the media and our environment helps foster a false perception that there is a “perfect reality” out there accessible to others, if it’s so easy for everyone else, why not me?

This huge gap between our personal reality (what we experience firsthand, the truth in our lives) and the false perception of reality “out there” that is communicated to us by the media may cause a profound cognitive dissonance that can lead to feelings of: shame, depression, low self-esteem, anger, confusion and anxiety.

In the light of this false “perfect world”, my personal life will always seem negative, simple, boring, poor, unsuccessful, and even meaningless or hopeless.

Once a person accepts that this “perfect world” is imaginary and basically false, he/she can realize that the only reality they have is their own, and there is no other reality to compare it with. Once we acknowledge that we have only one perspective, our own, the values of “negative” and “positive” disappear. As these are relative terms, they only exist in comparison to something else. (something can only be positive or negative in comparison to something else that carries the opposite value).

Once we lose the negativity and all the negative feelings it carries, we are already in a much better position to confront our challenges.

Realizing that much of our inner perception of the outside world is false and how greatly it affects our decision making process and sense of well-being, doesn’t just eliminate a lot of negativity, but also opens a door to a path of personal progress by self examination to find out what other fale ideas, concepts and believes one carries and how they affect their navigation in life.

As we don’t like experiencing negative emotions we naturally do what we can to avoid them. A healthy capable person, facing different challenges or difficulties in their life, will act, the best way they can, to improve their reality to accommodate their wishes. 

A person who feels powerless to better their reality, will find other solutions to avoid their internal negative experience. A very common pathological solution would be simply denying the concepts or ideas that produce these sensations either by lying to ourselves, convincing ourselves that our reality is different then the way we actually perceive it, or by actively screening the difficulte information out of our consciousness as if we never encountered it.

This natural mechanism, that helps shelter us from negative feelings and sensations, is a great positive inner tool that helps us improve our sense of well-being. Unfortunately, like many other inner tools, if we use it in a pathological way it can harm our sense of well-being and can be an obstacle in our path.

The more difficult these truths are to admit and face, the inner resistance to admit them will be stronger. But without accepting and facing them, there can not be a real hope for a positive change and progress.

Same as in AA and NA –  the first step of the program is to admit you have an addiction and need help to overcome it, without it one can not continue in the program towards independence. 

So the first step of honesty, to admit your challenging truths in life, is the first and most difficult to overcome.

A very common “false notion” in our modern society is that for any problem one encounters in life, there is an authority figure that has the wisdom, experience and ability to solve and when the time will come will be available to help solve or overcome the problem.

For health issues, we go to the doctor, for safety, the police, emotional problems, the psychologist etc etc.

A healthy capable person will confront their challenges themself and will only seek an authority figure when handling the challenge is beyond their capacity.

A person who feels threatened by life’s challenges and incapable of facing them, can release himself from the burden and responsibility of thinking and preparing himself to face them by adopting this false notion that they don’t need to, since these authority figures are waiting by to solve anything for them when the time of need will come.

On one hand, this person is free from the worry and anxiety and can focus on more positive and productive aspects of their life. On the other hand, this person loses their independence and self authority in life. In many different life situations, when the time of need comes, they may find that their expectations will not be met by reality, those “ideal” authority figures are not to be found, may not know the solution, may not be trusted or unaffordable… In this situation, without a merciful authority figure to give them the answer, this person might feel lost and their chances of making the wrong decisions, confront the challenge in a negative way and receive negative results are high.

A metaphor for life:

We are sailing on a boat in the sea and we want to reach our safe shore.

We cannot choose the boat, it is given and it’s not the best we can imagine.

We cannot choose the weather, wind or currents of the sea nor control them. They are changing all the time and not always in our favor.

There are many crew members on the boat, some are better sailors then us and with more experience, but each of them wants to sail to a different shore, his own.

We are the captain of this boat.

We are the only ones who know which shore we want to reach.

So we must be the ones who navigate it.

If we will gift the authority of the ship to another, more experienced, crew member, they will navigate our ship to their shore and not ours.

The only way for us to reach our true goals is to trust ourselves that we are capable of confronting all these challenges and imperfections and with the help and skills of our crew members navigate our ship safely to our desired shore.

The second step would be for the person to accept self authority and responsibility. While they can find help and advise in others, others will never solve their problems in life. The person is the only one that makes the final decision at every step of the way, must take responsibility for it and understands that they are the one that will suffer the consequences or rip the rewards.

Accepting this standpoint in life will promote focusing on the person’s personal future challenges, researching, practicing and preparing for them, and so increasing the chances of the person for better success in their progress towards their goals in life.

One should never doubt themselves but one should always put a doubt on the information they are given.

In our modern times we are being bombarded by all sides with huge amounts of information, most of the time we have no clue of it’s source or validity yet we know and understand that most of it is tainted by commercial and political interest that often may contradict with our own.

Even if we try to be selective with the information we consume, we are constantly being exposed to other information which is echoing around us through friends, family, commercial ads etc..

All this information may affect tremendously, consciously or unconsciously, on our perception of the world and our position in it. Given that a lot of it is tainted or false, we can realize that a big part of our perception of the reality around us is based on false information.

Obviously, our motives, the goals we choose in life and the ways we try to obtain them are based directly in our perception of the world we live in.

The third step would be accepting the doubt in the information we have been given second-hands all our lives, which many times we just accept casually as truth, and the important need to examine thoroughly our perception of reality and basic assumptions about the world.

This does not mean erasing or disregarding all we have learned till now. First we have our first-hand personal information that we have gathered through our own encounter with reality and this information is the most trustworthy information we got. The rest should be examined and only adopted if we find it to be trustworthy, relevant and helpful to us on our journey.

After we have accepted our challenging truths in life and the responsibility and authority to confront them and find our solutions, we need to examine and understand our best the challenges that we are facing and how to confront them.

Through an open, non judgemental, patient and supportive dialog we review the current life situation, guided by our previous understandings. From focusing on the current situation we will slowly move to examine our motives and perception of ourselves and the world, trying together to understand better the truths of the person, what are their real interests and how to overcome their unique challenges. 

My role is to provide tools for the person, guide and support them as they are learning to work themself within their subjective world. I am not there to teach the person any idea or doctrine but to train the person to find their own independent clarity and then their own ways to confront their personal challenges.

I’m just there to guide and support and help the person focus on their own truths and understand better how to confront their challenges.