The chief issue in the mind of the psychotherapy patient is: Who is the cause of my pain? my hurt? my symptom? The answer is "No One." No one else could cause your pain and your symptoms, and you would not. So then we are driven to ask "What then is the cause of such suffering?" The answer is "Our unconscious beliefs, misunderstandings, misjudgments, and misdiagnoses are the cause of our symptoms and our hurts." Where then do our pain and our symptoms arise from? "From the gap between our limited story and the infinite truth."  Although the patient believes that he or she has correctly diagnosed the problem, there is a flaw.  The patient has usually overlooked the infinite context in which the finite story is cast.

When we act from our unconscious beliefs in separateness, lack and entrapment, we act in self-defense and with compulsion. Self-protectiveness and addiction are inevitable within the story. Self-defense occurs in the position of the victim and so does addiction. Self-defense is a position of fear, the fear of losing what you have. Addiction is also based upon a position of fear, the fear of not being fulfilled. Anything that promises relief from the fears and pain of separateness, deficiency and entrapment is addictive. Self-defense and addiction are fear-based "solutions" to fear-based "problems" . These two primary solutions do not work in spite of our constant effort. We perceive danger and we self-protect. When we self-protect we are cut off from self-fulfillment and so we become addicted to something which promises us fulfillment, security and symptom-control.

Generally, the significance of these three unconscious beliefs have to be taught to the client, to the story-teller. But even so, the client must then investigate for herself to find out what the programming is that accompanies her pain and her symptoms. "My son’s life is doomed to failure" at 14, said a distraught mother. "My violent son has to be controlled," she exclaimed. She has to "own up to" the fearful sense of failure and violence in her own thinking: "I am failing myself; I am violent to myself. How would my life be if I let go of failure thinking and violent thoughts?" She believes that she is separated from her son, deficient in love and wisdom, and trapped with his misbehavior. But is she separated from herself, not loving herself, and trapped with her own misbehavior toward herself? Perhaps her own beliefs are causing her pain and symptoms. She must claim her spirituality and envision her infinite nature before she can deal with her son’s misbehavior. She cannot see his true self when she has not seen her own.

What is the cause of your pain and your symptoms? If you are defensive and addicted, what are you protecting and what are you addicted to? Are you protecting your need to see your story as right, and are you addicted to the rightness of your story? You can’t be happy/successful/symptom-free and continue to self-protect your story and be addicted to being right in your story. You are not defending your self, but only your story about yourself. You are not addicted to anything but your story’s seeming rightness. The Course in Miracles asks "Had you rather be right or happy?" Insisting on being right about your unconscious story has produced your symptoms, has it not? You want to get rid of your hurts and your symptoms, do you not? Then take a look at your victim story. Is this story the truth about who you are? Did God create a victim? No? Then where did the "Poor Me" experience come from? Perhaps from your ego story and its unconscious belief system? And where did your ego story come from? From spiritual amnesia. And so your divinity left a witness to itself in your pain and in your symptom. Be thankful for the gift and purpose of your symptom and its suffering. In a strange way, God has rigged the universe for your benefit, for your awakening.

Truth is a threat to the entire human belief system which says that guilt, fear, hurt and death are reality-based. Truth is a threat to the belief in victimization, and all of the pain and symptoms that go with it. The belief that God and his creation causes you pain puts you at seeming odds with God. As soon as you realize that all of your pain comes from incorrect beliefs, you suddenly begin to realize that you are one with God. If my beliefs are the cause of all of my pain, then I have no enemies, for they are in spiritual amnesia also. Then I can forgive and forget my illusion-based pain and the whole package of fear, guilt and punishment that goes with it. Once this whole package disappears, I am in my natural state of unconditional love and peace.

Memory, identity and story are all the same. They are a sequence of events which are woven together by the ego; they are snapshots of the infinite evolving into the finite, eternity evolving into time.

David Hawkins makes the point that you cannot experience the infinite as the infinite. You can only be the infinite, but once it comes into time, then you can experience it. Once it comes into finite form, you can experience it. You can appear to be separate enough from the infinite to experience it, but what we experience is our story, which is the way we have connected together the events of creation.

The infinite is constantly becoming finite. The Eternal is constantly becoming time. The formless is constantly becoming form. The Self is constantly becoming the self. The invisible the visible. There is nothing but the infinite and the infinite in form, and both of these are one. There is no subject and object once you reach the 600 level (on a scale from 1 to 1000 vibrations per second). The finite and the infinite are both God’s will. There is nothing we can do outside of His will. There is no separate finite world. We are always moving in and out of the infinite whether we recognize it or not. The merely finite does not exist. Anything that appears to be merely finite is an illusion. Anything that appears to be finitely caused is an illusion. Anything that happens, happens in consciousness, and is an activity of consciousness or spirit. That is why we say that symptoms arise from within consciousness, and not merely from an act of one finite thing upon another. No act is merely finite. All events and acts are the result of infinite consciousness since we are infinite/finite beings in an infinite/finite world.

In any single moment, there cannot be a problem, only if events are strung together in a story about the past or future, which do not exist.

"What if and then what" is a tool for self-awareness. What if I let go of something I want or value? Then what? brings up the next obstacle. What if I let go of that? brings up the next obstacle, etc

In the Hawkins model, only 4% of the world’s population is able to get past the 500 level. The level of unconditional love is 540, which is lovingness toward all life and dedication to its support. One is forgiving, charitable, benign, peaceful and easy going. Happiness is independent of external circumstances or events. Judgmentalism disappears and is replaced by desire for understanding and compassion. The innate beauty and perfection of all things begins to surface. The recurrence of any thoughts or feelings which are less than loving is experienced as painful or unwelcome.

Pattie is unable to sleep or eat much because of her extreme stress. Her husband is having his third affair. She has begun to accept some responsibility for her part in the marital discord which feeds into his acting out. She seems to feel that she has not given him the attention he needed, and he agrees and blames her for his affair. He refuses to give up his friendship with this woman at work, insisting that the affair is over. Regular phone calls between her husband and the woman upset Pattie and feed her distrust. We attempted to re-define the problem in such a way that she sees that he has a codependency problem which he is trying to solve with two women. He doesn’t trust himself. Pattie feels now that she can focus on the problem differently, without telling herself that he is acting out due to her. She is ready now to focus on appreciating herself more.

The chief problem in psychotherapy then is the context in which the painful and problematic symptom occurs.  The context is infinity.  We usually assume and pretend that the context is finite, but it never has been and never will be. Mis-diagnosis therefore is usually due to context ignorance. The context is the fact that you are an in infinite spiritual being, and no human problem can be understood apart from that fact.