Flip the mental switch

Mental trauma and anguish can end well or very badly, but what determines the direction you go in? Michael Adamedes (www.michaeladamedes.com) is a psychotherapist who describes how his relationship breakdown ultimately changed the course of his life for the better. He now helps others understand and re-evaluate those hurdles that all of us are confronted by at some point in our lives. Michael discusses his personal experience, helpful techniques and psychedelic substances. 

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Michael Adamedes Hello. Hi Daniel. Great to be here. Michael, it's funny, over the last year or two your name is coming to my life quite regularly. And this is through people that have been to see you or friends of friends that have been to see you. And they all speak so highly of you. So it is an absolute honour for me to have you on board today. Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Daniel, you're currently a psychotherapist with over 42 years experience, but you weren't always a psychotherapist. You started off in the corporate life. What sort of corporate life were you in? What were you doing? Well, I worked as an accountant for the Commonwealth government. I did that for a while and I thought, no, this isn't really me. And then I swapped and worked as a school teacher and then I worked as an economics teacher and also an english teacher. And a surprise, surprise, they sent me back to the very school I went to in high school. And that was Enmore Boys High, which is now no longer in existence. It's now been turned into an art college, then worked in various other places. But I never really found my place until I had a relationship breakdown and going through a whole lot of problems. I went into therapy and in the process of going through therapy, surprise. It was a surprise to me. I realized I was a therapist and that's what I should have done from day one. How do you come to a conclusion like that? Well, I think I was getting a benefit from what was occurring and also, yeah, I thought I could do that. But then I looked around and thought, it's the only thing that has any meaning for me, you know, what do, do I find where I experience an intrinsic benefit other than the money? You know, it's like it was great working for the government because they paid me a lot and the school teaching wasn't great pay, but good conditions, time wise and holidays. But there was no intrinsic benefit. I didn't feel as though I was making a positive contribution. I get I was doing a job, whereas this thing, it was different. I was. I felt fulfilled. You had a marriage breakup. How long were you married for? At that time? I was married for seven years. Okay. And the emotions that you felt associated with that breakup sent you to the therapist? Yeah. I imagine that the emotions that you were feeling would be fairly common to anyone going through a significant personal relationship breakdown. So what sort of emotions would they be? For me, the primary emotion was depression. When I began to look at it, it was a sense of low self esteem, low self worth, like, because how that relationship broke up. We were having marital problems for some time, and at certain points in that experience, I contemplated leaving her. And then one day she goes off and connects with someone else and then comes back and says, it's over. And she found a connection with this other person that she didn't have with me. So because she made the decision to break the relationship off, even though on a logical level, I understood that was the right decision, on an emotional level, I was devastated and I felt I've been rejected, I was unworthy, I was inferior. And all these things came up. And the consequence of not fully being able to deal with that threw me into a depression. And I sat in that depression for about nine months. Normally, people would drink, go and see a medical practitioner, take some sort of medication, but I had this belief, no, it's not the way to go. And I tried to work with it, with yoga, with meditating, with positive thoughts and things like that. They gave me a temporary relief for a short period of time, but not enough to make a difference. And then someone, and I was living in northern New South Wales, Lismore at the time, and someone suggested the therapist in Sydney who was actually in Balmain, and said, go and see her. And she was running a weekend workshop. I came down and did the weekend workshop and it was like, this is the first thing that really worked for me. And I thought, wow, I've got to do that. And what made the difference was that there was a breathing technique, it was a breath work technique, and it was a mechanism for releasing a lot of repressed emotion. And the emotion that I had the greatest difficulty in connecting with was my sadness. I could rage and shout and scream and throw a tantrum. But when it came to feeling sad and heartbroken, I did everything I could to push it away. I didn't realize I was doing that. I thought, you know, I was just coping. But in retrospect, I understood that I was actually protecting myself from feeling heartbreak. And I was deeply sad, even though I knew this person wasn't the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with. And it was time to move on. A lot of people beat themselves up over failed relationships and failed experiences, failed businesses. And it's that self beating up which is also quite a challenge, I guess. For many people that is a real issue. And one of the mechanisms for healing this hurt is to stop beating yourself up. It's not going into denial and pretending that a problem doesn't, hasn't occurred or isn't there. It's a matter of recognizing that the problem is outside of your ability to deal with or even avoid at that time. And it is a way of thinking of it. I would say it's your destiny. It's your life journey. And so life brings us challenges. Now, those challenges we may meet at certain times, we don't, and we fall over. But the key here is to not invalidate yourself around your inability to deal with the challenge, because then you add another layer to the challenge, and that extra layer is a sense of shame, failure and unworthiness. Now, you've already got enough of a problem to deal with. Why make it more difficult? So in order to do that, it's called detachment. You've got to be able to see the problem even though you own it. It's your responsibility. You're the only one that can fix it. It's not your fault. You are not to blame, and you are not wrong. That is important because then it enables you to become a dispassionate detective into understanding your own unconscious. Now, that's a very big jump, but if you can do that, it will have a massive impact on your ability to heal yourself. So I mucked up, you know, I stuffed up, and it's. I made some mistakes. In retrospect, I would do it differently, but I could not do it differently unless I had passed through those mistakes and learned from those mistakes. And so my mistakes were the mechanism for my understanding. Michael, in that approach, you describe yourself as a psychotherapist. Yes. How does that differ and encompassing everything you've just talked about from a psychologist or a psychiatrist? Well, look, the main difference is that a psychotherapist is someone who has a clinical approach to things and a very practical approach to things. So you could say the mechanism for learning it, for me had been through kind of an apprenticeship with someone who had mastered a lot of these techniques, whereas a psychologist and a psychiatrist have had academic training. And a psychiatrist, was a medical practitioner first who then specialized in the psychological side of things, whereas psychologist started off being trained in psychology from day one, whereas a psychotherapist tended to be more an apprentice who learned by working with someone who understood it and then kind of developed and mastered it. But the terminology really doesn't matter. It comes down to the individual and the experience that I've found to be effective, two things are required. Whatever you do as a psychotherapist, a psychologist or a psychiatrist. And the first is a deep sense of compassion for the people you're working with. And secondly, that you have gone through your own pain, you need to walk the walk yourself. It can't be an academic exercise where you have gone and studied it and looked at it in a book and it's like a science experiment and it's separate from who you are. It doesn't work in a psychotherapeutic context. In a psychotherapeutic context, in order to be effective, you must walk the walk, go through the journey, you know, and if you have academic training well and good, that is an advantage. That's the icing on the cake. But if that's all you've got, all you've got is icing and no substance. And you need to have compassion, a sense of acceptance of the foibles and the vulnerability of the people you're working with and also an understanding of the difficulty of the journey by having gone through that journey yourself. But if you think of that, if I'm looking to, let's say we look at business, if I'm looking to become a successful business person, do I want to go and do an MBA and study with a professor of economics and business or do I want to go and sit with a Kerry Packer or someone who's a billionaire who has mastered it, has made lots and has, you know, had their bum burnt how many times come back from it and survived. And I would rather learn from a person who has runs on the board than, you know, certificates on the wall. At the same time, if you have runs on the board and certificates on the wall, even better. But runs on the board are really the only thing that matter. I understand completely. There are many experts out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, look, there's, there's. It's good to have an overview and to learn from other people, you know, academically who have walked that path, but you must walk it yourself and you've got to put yourself through the process. That would be the criticism, if I do have a criticism of purely an academically trained person is that they continue to keep themselves separate from the journey they're expecting the other person to go through. In some of the literature that you've put out, you describe horizontal versus vertical development. What's that all about? Well, you see, vertical development is really looking at the practical things. Now we need to say, put it towards, say, if we're looking in the context of relationship. So vertical development would be to support someone to have a greater communication skills, support people to deal with conflict, support people to speak in an appropriate way. So you are building their competency and skillset. That's vertical. Horror. Sorry, that's horizontal. That's horizontal. Vertical is really looking at how does my personality interact with the personality of my intimate other? And where is it in my personality that I'm vulnerable to this? So that's then self examination. It's looking at my psychology, my life history, my parents, the way my parents interacted in relationship. It's all those sort of things. So that I would consider an internal journey. That would be the vertical, straight up and down. And the horizontal is the external journey. Looking at how do things present in the world outside? It could be, you know, to make your relationship work. It just could be as simple as helping with the domestics, doing the washing up, cleaning, fixing things, nothing, you know, taking your partner for granted, being a little bit more romantic, going out on dates, making a greater effort, buying gifts, things like that. That would be horizontal. We're looking at how do we fix the everyday things? Both are required. You need the external things worked out and you need the internal, because if only you do that, it improves temporarily. But fundamentally, that person is a reflection of you. That person is somehow a part of you. How you interact with them is how your psychology is wired up. Change the way your psychology is wired up. The interaction will change. Yeah. Because many people have gone through either some sort of emotional trauma or physical trauma, a nasty disease, they've come through a car accident, you know, someone in the family's been killed or some sort of big turmoil. And one of the words that people describe to me is that they feel unsafe. And I'm just wondering if that's due to. Just based on what you've just said, they haven't come to terms with what they need to do practically in the horizontal sense of. Or they haven't aligned their vertical opportunities, for want of a better word. Am I on the right track there? Well, what happens is there will be certain people for whom they need to look at the practical things in their life to, you know, have. The thing that makes most people feel unsafe in our society today is financial stress and not being able to pay the bills and things like that. That's the greatest thing. You know, you got to meet the mortgage, you've got the car registration coming up, you've got house insurance, you've got kids school fees, all these sort of things. Are a massive, massive stress. And then you've got taxation and all these other costs of living, things that occur. So that would singly be the most difficult thing. The second most thing is basically health. So feeling unsafe around their health and that they're going to be vulnerable to, you know, things where people talk about COVID germs, diseases, everything, things are going on around. And thirdly, there is a physical survival that we could have, a situation where our physicality is threatened in our society, apart from old people, older people, people you would consider retirement age, they're the ones who most physically feel physically threatened. For the majority of people, younger people, working age people, it's finances. Finances are constant stress. And then as people get a little bit older, then it becomes health. Then of course, you need to be looking at basic things in your finance. The basic thing in your finance is your income cannot be exceeded by your costs. You can't be spending more money than you're earning. So there's two choices. How do you reduce your costs and how do you increase your cash flow? Sometimes it's easier to reduce your costs than it is to earn more money. So then you've got to think of, how can I do it without having a major impact on the quality of my life? That can be done. It just needs you to think outside the box. So that would be what I call horizontal. I would definitely be saying to people, if you're feeling unsafe, let's look at the areas you're unsafe around your health. Then the usual thing with health, it's diet and exercise. They're eating poorly and there is zero exercise. Well, how do you expect to stay healthy if you're eating crap and doing nothing? You know, it's like, it's impossible. You can't do that. We are physical bodies that need good nutrition and we are. We need movement. We need to be doing 2030 minutes exercise at least five times a week, minimum. And that is for the rest of your life. It's not like just to get over a hump. It's for, it's a lifestyle thing. And so, and then if you can incorporate it with something that's enjoyable, then it becomes simple. If you've got to go out there and, and do it to exercise in order, then you're going to drop it. It's like, it's the difference between having an orange and eating and having a vitamin C tablet. You do the tablet because that's going to give you the ascorbic acid you require, but far better to have a healthy diet. Where you are taking the nutrition in your everyday lifestyle and so in your work. Have you noticed that patients or clients, I'm not sure what you call them, clients have respond differently to the discussions they have with you relative to their physical health? The sort of people that would have that sort of discussion and be pushing back on the physical health aren't the sort of people that would come and see me. I'm very blessed in that I'm attracting people who are aspirational and are prepared to take personal responsibility. They're the two requirements I have of anyone working with me that firstly, they wish to improve aspirational and secondly, it's all about them. They have to be prepared to look within themselves to understand what is it in them that needs to change. That's personal responsibility. And I choose not to think of someone as a patient because then it has a subconscious victim projection. They are someone who I am treating, which I don't believe a client means. Here is someone. We together are working out a solution to a limitation that's occurring in their lives. That's all part of them claiming personal responsibility. If they come to me expecting me to fix them, then I'm not the person they need to come and see. And if they initially have that thought and then later on they don't change it, then I could say, look, I recommend you go and see Joe bloggs over there because he would probably suit you better because I'm expecting you to do something. I'm expecting you not just to sit here and listen to what I'm saying. And I'm not going to give you a pill. I'm going to ask you to examine the things that feel uncomfortable because it's those things that are creating the very inhibitions that are causing the problem. I love your realistic approach because I'm absolutely sure that so many people come to see some sort of health practitioner with ongoing stress and anxiety, which is often, I'm sure, financially related, but that is never talked about. It's change a diet, here's a tablet. No matter whether they're seeing a naturopath or a GP, it's often the same. And those practical discussions that are the deep drivers or the deep fears are often just not discussed. So, good point. Thank you for bringing that up. Well, you see, that's the horizontal. The horizontal is the external, practical things and the vertical is the internal, psychological things. Yeah, yeah. So, must be done. Just going back to you because this is about you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You went to see a psychotherapist in Balmain yes. And how did you feel going to see that practitioner? Had you heard of a psychotherapist before? No, I hadn't. And she hadn't presented herself as a psychotherapist. It was a woman. And she, her name was Arara Carrisbrooke. This was in 1981, in September of 1981. And she was just presenting herself as a personal development trainer of some sort. And the weekend workshop had been recommended to me by a friend up in Lismore in the northern New South Wales. And he said that he had been to one of her workshops and got a tremendous benefit. And he said, you should go and try it. And because I lived in Lismore, she was in Sydney, she did do private consultations. It wasn't practical for me to go for a two hour session, so it was easier to turn up for a weekend. And I did the weekend. And it was a combination of information and this breath work process. And in the breath work process, the key was I had a mechanism for releasing this blocked feeling state. And the blocked feeling state I had was a whole lot of sadness I hadn't come to terms with. So it was a breathing technique. And in the process of breathing, it brought this feeling of sadness to the surface. Initially, as it surfaces, it feels very tense, tight, nauseous, hot, cold. It doesn't feel like emotion. It just feels like I'm very uncomfortable from having done too much exercise or something or, you know, working out in the gym. And then there's a moment where it goes pop. And then suddenly I feel all this emotion. And then in the process of releasing this emotion, it's like, wow, I felt great. And it wasn't until the next day, this happened on a Saturday. It wasn't until the next day, the Sunday, that all these kind of realizations started to occur because this internal pressure had been released. I woke up the next morning feeling good. You know, good's the wrong word. I woke up the next morning not feeling bad. And so by definition it's good. I understand the distinction. And then I guess you go through a process of self analysis and understanding and decompartmentalizing all of those feelings that are coming to the surface. Do you do that yourself or do you do that in cahoots with the lifestyle counsellor, psychotherapist? You can do it with both. But what happens is in order for me to do it with myself, I have to develop a certain expertise and understanding. And in order to do that, I have to expose myself to it for a period of time. I would imagine the average person would take five or six goes to get enough expertise to be able to do it on their own. But once you have, then you'd begin to do it on your own. So it's like a sliding scale. Initially, you require a lot of external intervention, say 90% of the time to help you. As you gain expertise and you begin to sense into the feeling, then your need for it diminishes. Eventually you'll get to the point where 90% of the time you can handle it, and then 10% of the time do you need external expertise. Look, if I had a significant issue that blocked me, there would only be a limited amount that I could deal with on my own. I would go to a colleague and have them support me through the process. Now, just this week, I worked with a colleague to help me through a degree of the process. The thing that occurred in this instance, it was about just releasing everyday stress. So I had been stressing out about, we're doing a renovation, a building thing. The costs were going past what I thought they were going to be. The timeframe had changed and I'm just thinking, well, look, it's putting more pressure. Da da da da. How do I do this? And then I did this particular breathing technique under the guidance. Now, logically, rationally, I can say it's going to be okay and it is going to be okay, and. But then breathing and doing this thing, I released it and then I just got, I feel good. It doesn't matter anymore. I was just overdoing it. Like my mum and my dad had patterns of wed run out of money occasionally and we wouldnt have enough. And one or two occasions dad lost his job and mum. We had a big family, five kids. Money was tough, things were financially difficult. I grew up in that environment, so theres a lingering sense of life is a bit of a struggle. And so that just got activated. Having the breath released it and some part of me just feels more relaxed. And so I could probably, if I lay down and did the breathing on my own, I probably would have fallen asleep at this critical point where I needed to keep going, whereas with someone supporting me, they got me to just keep going past the point of where I'd fall asleep. And as a consequence, I release the stress that's there. Because part of the symptom of this is as you breathe, you come up to what's suppressed and usually it feels either physically uncomfortable or you fall asleep. My pattern is to fall asleep. So because I've got someone there, they just keep saying, keep breathing. And they will actually say, if they can't keep me, breathe, stand up and breathe. So I'll stand up and breathe. And then I'm kind of like there, in and out of it for about five minutes, and I pop through it, and then I pop through it and it's kind of like a non event. You think, what was all that about? Easier to say with retrospective vision. I mean, you had a trigger, you've got a mechanism, and then you can pop out and go, oh, that was easy. But. Yeah, it was easy. But up until that point, there's no way I could release it. And I'd sit there and I'd say, always have enough money, I'm safe. This is okay. I'd be using affirmations, I'd be positive. I'd be going back to where my mum and dad were and what happened with them. And I had a real intellectual understanding. I had the diagnosis. The diagnosis is one thing, but the cure is another. So the fact that I understand what causes it doesn't necessarily mean I've released it. Right. So you didn't have an urge to drive an uber or deliver pizzas after hours, then? You got past that? No. No. What? I've. I have enough. I have enough. It's all okay. It's more me panicking. And I have clients who are very successful and quite wealthy, and yet they still stress about money. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't that those mechanisms or beliefs that we bring from our childhood are so fascinating. I know that you can do so much work to understand all of that, but still, in moments of extreme stress, they pop up and that's just really normal. That is normal, yeah. And that's really important to note. It's normal to have it. Yeah. So your work is an ongoing process. Yes, definitely. And the ultimate is to empower the person to take greater and greater responsibility for their own process and to empower someone to have the means to release it, but also to be aware. There are occasions when you do hit a critical point and an external intervention is required, but that becomes an exception to the rule rather than the rule. And so it's an. And eventually you get to a point where there are zero issues. And I've been blessed in my life to have met six people with whom I could say there are zero issues 24/7 all the time, never an issue. And they don't have a subconscious personality to release pieces. But the more you do, the less you have to deal with. But your sensitivity to your issues means you feel it more even though there's less to feel. Yeah, yeah, I understand. We had a brief conversation some time ago and I remember that we had a little bit of discussion around just changing course slightly here. Psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. I'd be interested in your comments around that because it's such an emerging and interesting area. There's a lot of press about it, there's media. The TGA are looking at various substances, psychiatrists getting licensed in Australia to manage certain substances. What are your thoughts around that? Because you've delved into it a little bit? Yes, yes. Look, psychedelics have their place, and firstly, you require a very competent guide, someone to help you and then to take you into it. I think it's a legitimate mechanism for accessing the deep unconscious patterns. Now the breath work and the deep psychotherapy I do accesses those patterns and it requires a tremendous effort to get there, whereas with the psychedelics you can get there quite easily. And there is kind of two schools of thought with the psychedelics. One is microdosing and one is very intense. The microdosing really is only a symptomatic relief of a lot of stress. So it has its place on a day to day level to just help people code. But it really doesn't get to the core. To get to the core, it really requires massive doses and you really require a residential situation. It's not something you can do, just turn up for 2 hours or an hour in someone's clinic. You've really got to go and be there minimum of a weekend and ideally maybe three days, and you can go into a very deep thing. The difference with psychedelics is that once you open it, you really have to surrender to the process because the psychedelic opens up this very deep connection to your unconscious and it starts to pour out. You can't suddenly say in the middle of it, I don't want to do this, you've got to continue through it. Now. Now that's actually an advantage. I would consider it to be an intermediate to advanced level technique. And unless people have done some prior work, I wouldn't recommend it because you need to do something where, say, for instance, if we're doing breath work, if you were at a point where you suddenly thought, look, this is too much, I don't want to do it. Well, you've got that option. You don't have to do it because it takes the effort of breathing to take you to it. Stop making the effort, and within two or three minutes you're back out of it and you're back into normal space, into normal awareness again, whereas if you popped, you know, whatever it happens to be, LSD or something else, ayahuasca or mushrooms or something else, once you've taken it, you're on this for the next three to 4 hours and chill. Handle it. Now, that's where the guide is important, because the guide would be sitting there hand holding and saying to you, it's okay, it's a memory, take it easy. You can now that will make a difference. And that often can tip the balance to allow the person to go into it. If you truly surrender into it, the results are phenomenal. Phenomenal. And what I think is with any technique, and this is a Technique diminishing return set in so you can get some really good results from psychedelics, and after a while it stops working. You can get some really good results from the breath work, and after a while you don't get those results. You can get some really good results from in depth psychotherapy. This technique we use, dysfunctional pattern clearing, which really takes you down. It stops working. And so in my view, there are four levels to it. There's a physical level, there's an emotional level, there's a mental level, and there's a metaphysical level. And so when you're doing psychedelics, it's actually sits, comes in at the emotion. Although you ingest it physically, it actually works primarily on the emotional, and there's a strong physical reaction, and then you get a lot of mental insights. And if you can take it far enough, it actually takes you into a metaphysical realm. But initially it's a very physical, emotional thing. If I'm doing a lot of mental work with someone, one of the things I would require from them is that they had an active physical regime, that they would be working physically, exercising, they'd be caring for their diethyde. If I'm working with someone who has a lot of fear around survival, I would make sure they are working on their finances and they're making their money work, because there are five needs that there's numerous ways you can think about. This. One is finance. The other one is your career, your relationship, your health, and ultimately your life purpose. Why are you here? Who are you? What are you, what are you doing that has meaning for you? Now you need at some level to get all of those working, and it's all very well to go back into dealing with, oh, you know, why didn't it happen with my mother? Whereas you've got holes in your shoes and you can't pay the rent. Well, forget about your mother. Go and get the job. I know somebody that tried ayahuasca and they went through a fairly significant emotional catharsis whilst they were on the psychedelic. One year later, some trigger memory happened, went into rapid tachycardia, massive sweats. They thought they were going to die. They were physically immobilized and they couldn't move. Is that potentially a lack of tort mechanisms to cope with that? What do you think was happening there? Yes. Yes. Noah, what happens there? We would call that a spontaneous rebirth. What happens is it's a spontaneous release of the suppressed unconscious taking place. Now, if they were supported in the right way, this is actually an advantage. You go into ayahuasca, you go into the breath work, you go into the deep counseling in order to access that very thing that's being released. And that takes a big effort to get there. Now, he's having a spontaneous release, but he hasn't been given a context in which to deal with it. Now, the context in which to deal with it is, and you let it happen and you don't do anything. Now, if you start to interpret this as a medical condition, and this is a negative, you were jamming yourself up. If you see this as a spontaneous healing experience, which it is, then you will come out of it having released something profound, and you will feel in a better way than you've ever felt in your life. But that requires that person to have had a context in which to have put the ayahuasca experience into, to understand that the ayahuasca is really accessing a deep repressed subconscious. And this deep repressed subconscious can manifest in a number of ways. And this deep repressed unconscious, in order to be dealt with requires these mechanisms, these things. The simplest thing is complete surrender to it. Now, in order to surrender to it, you need to develop a certain degree of personal awareness. So here is my subconscious, here is my personal awareness. I had an ayahuasca thing, I released a bit. My personal awareness is there, but my personal awareness is still below the level of my subconscious. If I release a little bit more, get a little bit more experience, next thing I know, my personal awareness is greater than my subconscious, and now I can be present with it, but I can't be present with it if it still frightens me. I guess it's that fear of death that because this person thought they were just going to sit there and die, well, that's okay. The fear of death is all right. It's just not being afraid of the fear of death. Just because you feared death doesn't mean you're going to die. And just because the fear of death is real in the sense you are really feeling that you could die, you also need to be aware that that is just a symptom. He made it the reality. As soon as he made it the reality, he got lost and then he jammed up and everything went mad. But he lacked experience. He hadn't done enough prior work to be able to go this deep. That's why I say the ayahuasca is a good thing, but it needs to be managed. That's all. Yeah, anyone who's going to, and I don't even know what the legalities around all this stuff in Australia are, but if anyone's going to experiment, they, they really do need to make sure, because people talk about it, they really do need to make sure they're in safe hands and have safe mechanisms around them and coping mechanisms. I mean, for unexpected events. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the easiest thing is go and do two or three personal development experiences, you know, events, workshops, whatever, before you do the ayahuasca, so that you have a framework of psychology and how it works, so that when the ayahuasca thing happens, you have a context to place it in. At the end of the day, you do want people guiding you to have a competence, but it also. It's your responsibility to have a level of competence yourself. Yes, Michael, just moving on briefly. A lot of the work you do now is around, it seems to me, personal development, personal relationship work. You run three modules, creating loving relationships, finding your soulmate, love and power. And these are a combination, from what I understand, of learning how to love yourself, which I really think is so important. And obviously relationships, you know, there's a lot to be done for a lot of people there and finding your soulmate. So can you briefly describe what they're about, those modules? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Those three modules are finding a soulmate, which is going into a relationship with an intimate other, creating loving relationships, which is making the relationship with your intimate other, work and love and power, which is the relationship with yourself. They're all relationships. So one is discovering the relationship, one's making the existing relationship work, and the other one is having the relationship with yourself. I've ran them for many years, more than 20 years, as a weekend workshop. So I've now put them into a ten part video series there. There's three of them. So each of those is module of ten parts. So there's 30 videos in total. And all of those 30 videos can be now found on my website and people can join up and become members and you can pay $72 a year and access it to your heart's content. Prior to that they were about eleven weekend. So it really, I've just reached another point in my life where I don't want to be spending all those weekends running these workshops. But the key thing here is finding a soulmate, meaning finding the person that mattered really comes down to do you believe that someone will love you, would want you? And are you safe? Do you feel safe enough to open your heart and allow someone to love you? So you do? I believe someone will love me, yes, I do believe. But even though I believe them, I won't let them in because I don't feel safe that I'll let them in. So it's a two part thing. So in a sense it is self love, but it's in a specific context. Then when it comes to loving relationships, it's that horizontal and vertical sort of learning. The horizontal is there's some basic skills that you need to understand in a relationship with someone. And basic things is having some agreements around common things, how we're going to spend our money, agreements around how we work the house together and being very much aware about power struggles that develop in relationships, as well as some communication skills. They're basic stuff, but a lot of people don't even have the basics. Then the horizontal, this is within the relationship. The thing is, the outside of you is the inside of me. There's no one out there. I'm only ever talking to myself. It's really another way of saying that what I don't like in the other person is something that's unresolved in myself. So this requires self examination. Now in part we do some of that in the creating loving relationships thing where you look at yourself and how those patterns come about. And in particular, we're looking at the patterns of mother and father. And so it's not how your mother treated you that is the key in the role modeling effect on your personality. It's the way your mother thought about herself that is the role modeling effect on your personality. So my mother loved me, supported me, cared for me, did the best she could for me, but she thought she was worthless. And so even though my mother loved me and did the best, when I grew up to be a teenager and started interacting with women, I thought I was worthless because I had taken on the belief she had about herself, which became the belief I had about myself. So parental patterns are really important regarding what we call their primal negative beliefs. So what was her primal negative. And same with father. So that sets up a very big pattern in how I relate to my partner. And the second part of creating loving relationships with internal examination is how did mother and father relate to each other? What was the power dynamic that existed between them? How did they deal with, you know, acceptance and love and surrender and certain behaviors around supporting each other and caring for each other? Because those patterns, unless you become aware of them, play out again. All patterns can be released. All patterns can be released. But the first step usually requires an awareness of the pattern. And most people aren't aware. They think it's reality out there. And the second part is then looking to neutralize the effect that there is a completion that needs to occur around the pattern in some way. A release of emotion, an understanding, a forgiveness, a number of things that needs to occur. A nurturing in a way, because the biggest wounding that most people experience in their life is a lack of nurturing rather than a situation where people were aggressive or negative towards them. Michael, we just need to start winding up. One last question. On your website, you have a quote which I don't quite understand. Never compromise on love. Only compromise on details. And never compromise on principle. Is it miswritten? It should be. Well, look, I thought I took this off your website. Never compromise on love. Only compromise on details. No, it should be. Never compromise on principle. Compromise on detail. So that might explain why it's not making sense. I'll check to see. There's a misspelling there. No, it's never compromised on principles. So the principles define you. Who are you? What do you stand for? And details are things like, if I was going to say principles, universal principles, you wouldn't want to be in a relationship with someone who deliberately lied. You wouldn't want to be in a relationship with someone who didn't love you as much as you loved them. You wouldn't want to be in a relationship with someone who wasn't committed to you if you were committed to them. And you basically wouldn't want to be in a relationship with someone who was physically abusive. And so their principles, you never compromise on those. Whereas details would be, what movie are we going to go and see? Where are we going for dinner? What color are we painting? The living room. Room. You know, what car do we buy? That's when you learn acceptance. You know, the fact that she hasn't put the toilet seat down. Who cares? Or the cat back on the toothpaste. They're details that you're going to say all right. Okay. I'll put the thing on. Or she has her toothpaste. Toothpaste. And I have mine. Well, sir, you are an absolute delight to speak to. You're an inspirational wealth of knowledge and experience. And I'm grateful to have spent some time with you. Thank you. How do people get in touch with your website? What is your website address? My website is Michael midis.com. and. Sorry. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. Yeah. And Adamedes is Adamedes. And you can go there and you can see things and play around with the website. And we're constantly updating and fixing it. Feel free to come and be part of it. And if you want access to the videos, there's 28 videos in the physical, emotional and mental series. It's a whole lot of things about psychology and understanding how the mind works, and spirit and emotions and all this. And then there are the 30 videos on relationships. The Find your soulmate series. The creating loving relationships and love and power. The relationship with yourself. This is the time when information needs to be given away. And that's basically the strategy that I'm applying. Well, what you do is absolutely life changing. And the money you're applying to it is very little considering what people can potentially get out of it and significantly impact their life. So thank you for that. Well, Michael, I'll take care, mate. And well, we'll hopefully catch up soon. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks, Daniel. Take care.