Principles

No one gets their needs met all of the time. We all share this struggle and stress — meeting it with anxiety, anger, and sadness. Often people start their mental health journey aiming to eliminate problems and negative emotions. Progress usually starts when we stop trying to change our emotions, instead accepting them, learning to expect them, and building a tolerance — even respect — for them as a part of a fulsome emotional landscape that guides a robust life.

Grief means you lost something you lost something you valued. One of the most powerful things you can do is acknowledge and mourn losses: what you never had, what changed, what’s gone…Not mourning losses means that you’re still trying to live in the fantasy that something exists when it doesn’t. This cognitive dissonance can make you panicked, frantic, rigid, defensive, angry…in other words, not very effective at living in reality. We strongly support owning the sh*ttiness of reality, really grieving how sad it is, and then learning how to live with it anyway. We promise the sadness will diminish over time, but only if you grieve it properly.

People change because they want something and can’t get it in the current state of the world. It’s critically important not to protect people from the consequences of their actions – the only way change occurs is when those consequences prevent the individual from getting what they want. This goes for you too.

Anger as an emotion means you aren’t getting what you want and need. Our goal in training is to help you get what you want and need, so anger helps us understand what exactly that might be. We’ll work with anger to better understand you.

Work and love are the two pillars of life (Freud said it, we agree). We all want love, but it’s hard to be lovable if you, at core, don’t believe you are worthy of it. Love without self esteem leads to problematic relationships that are dependent (both emotionally and practically), volatile, and can be abusive. Without a solid, independent sense of self (and finances / activities / social circle) outside of the relationship, loss of a relationship can lead a person to collapse and can be deadly. So in our program, we always recommend consistently working and taking care of yourself before you focus on anyone else.

Perhaps you don’t have the most robust self esteem. Good, healthy self esteem doesn’t come from practicing empty affirmations – it comes from watching yourself do things well in reality. Often we don’t show up because we don’t believe in ourselves…At Personily, we flip that. We show up regardless of how we feel about ourselves, and that in turn teaches us to believe in ourselves.

Too often, we treat ourselves as if there’s only so much pain we can tolerate before we run out…like our pain tolerance and life tolerance is a finite resource. But that’s the wrong mental model. Life and pain tolerance are a muscle; not using them is a recipe for atrophy. If you want to live more, you have to use pain as a guide for where work, where strength building, is required. Only by working through the pain does it diminish.

If your yard is overgrown with weeds, you’re the only one who can weed it. You must take an active role in your safety, your recovery, and your future – no one can keep you safe but you, and no one can give you the life you want. Conversely, don’t spend too much time worrying about the state of someone else’s yard. You can’t control others. The only thing you can influence is your contribution and response to the situation.

It’s a simple principle of all animal behavior: we do what we are rewarded to do. If you’re doing a behavior, it’s because you currently are rewarded for it or were trained previously to be rewarded for it. If there’s a behavior you don’t like, we must figure out what is rewarding that behavior. Understanding the reward clearly will allow you to gain control over your behaviors and do what your better self wants you to do.