FOREVER ONWARD
Forever Onward was probably one of the first “mantras” I ever heard. It came from a person who ended up becoming very influential in my life, but, like most influences, you don’t always want to hear what they have to say. At this point in my life, I don’t hear very much anymore, but I understand how to listen to myself and am working very hard to listen to others better. I’ve concluded that we will never be what we know but will always become something we understand. As time has gone on and reality has thrown a lot of my plans and ideas into the dirt, I’ve developed my own mantra, which is “The end is the beginning”. I’ve concluded that, like most things in life, “Forever Onward” and “The end is the beginning” are two of the same but just on different ends of the spectrum. Like, take one for the team, and karma is the same; it comes down to which one gets there first.
I’ve concluded that we will never be what we know but will always become something we understand.
I have a lot of patients questioning the usefulness of therapy and integrated health in general. They quote, “don’t get anything out of it”. My patented “WTF” expression often gives away the gigantic counter-intuitive thinking they are conveying. I explain to them that therapy and health are about pouring usefulness into us because much of life is about encountering people, places, and things that want to extract something from us. After all, emotional non-starters mostly end up being emotional non-enders in our lives. This book is mostly about “the bite of the thought,” which keeps the mind going back to being repeatedly bitten. In my observation as a therapist, there are no random thoughts but missed opportunities to understand the details within us. It doesn’t matter if you move forward through a problem or situation if you leave the same unhealthy thought behind. Understanding small details within ourselves is much better than trying to be transparent to everything on the outside. The singular thought will always be “the detail” within psychology. And just like the doormat and the traffic cone, its influence will always be bypassed for more complex constructs and systems within the integrated behavioral health field. Transparency shows us how something appears to work, but details show it doesn’t even exist. No matter how sophisticated or complex something is, if it doesn’t acknowledge the smallest detail within the system, it’s doomed to fail. I came to understand this while running and flailing from deck to deck on the “Titanic.” Wearing water wings during the anatomy and medical terminology/pathology courses within my doctoral program. I understood that the majority of the most lethal and chronic diseases started from the microscopic cellular levels, which parallels the singular thought in the body of psychology. The reason a lot of my patient’s state that they don’t get anything out of therapy or health and self-help is because connected doesn’t mean integrated. It’s right up there with building Long John Silver’s and Popeye’s together, only separated by a wall. This should come as no surprise when systems set up other systems, along with the absurd accusation that people are thoughtless. Well, never give a self-starter a head start. What you read in this book will be my attempt to not only explain what the Severe and Profound is, but also to develop an integrative behavioral model through the lens of a singular thought within each reader. The goal of this book is to take integrated behavioral health and empower the reader to directly apply it to a singular thought through the (STTT )model. Everyone who makes “shit up” needs someone around who doesn’t, and I have plenty of those people in my life. So, no worries, there will definitely be an intellectual floorboard built for the big-foreheaded people who don’t like to use their knuckles and feet for breaks. Honestly, I want to make the conventional behavioral health academia stand up on its collective hind legs and howl loud enough so I can still hear it in my bad ear because of the overproduction of Frame- logy by definition, putting a pretty frame around an otherwise ugly ass picture. Still, that discussion is for another patient portal. If I can convince you to run your own fate, destiny, and karma, without outsourcing all three to the stupidest things out there, as our sponsor, the internet that gives every moment tutorials on “ How to F” your life up, then the proverbial rubber will hit the road. Keep in mind that sometimes a question doesn’t need an immediate answer but a journey and a future to gather the collective solution, and that will happen one thought at a time.