The desire to know oneself is one of human being’s most fundamental wishes—to feel content in our own mind and body. One task of adulthood that if often overlooked is to revisit our values to discover the subtle and unquestioned narratives that have begun to constrain our daily lives. In so doing, we begin the sometime painful process of transforming our beliefs and re-valuing our lives into something that better fits where we are in life. We begin to know and honor what really matters to us rather than what we have been told to care about. Developing a safe haven inside our own mind can help us stand firm in the hurricane of anxiety, stay focused in the haze of depression, and be undisturbed by the chaos of everyday life.
Consciousness is what separates human beings from all other creatures in the world. As we grow, we traverse various stages of consciousness–from the first person awareness in which we come to know self from other, to second person in which our interpersonal and relational awareness comes online, to third when we can watch both ourselves and others, and then finally into the unbridled, re-embodied planes of meta-consciousness. Some of these developments happen naturally, but often these stages and states are ones we have to intentionally and diligently work to transcend. We may get stuck in one stage or another because of hyper-rigidity, trauma, addiction, or depression. The mind has to be “grown up” just like a child or else it runs amuck—growing up takes patience and mind-bending work.
Agency and integrity are basic human needs for healthy adult development and self-actualization. How do humans transform? How does change happen? The answers can be infinitely complex, but also very simple—do more of the good; do less of the bad. Our limbic system incentivizes pleasure and negatively reinforces pain. We could—and many do—spend our entire lives chasing comfort. Transformation begins when we develop new relationships with old experiences. As we crest into adulthood, we enter into a paradoxical relationship with pain and pleasure: one in which we understand that pain can be a wise teacher and pleasure can be a dangerous rut that stunts our growth. We see nuance in the experience of life; we honor our needs and wishes in ways we were too afraid to do before; we make new choices. We enter into a new and profound relationship with our intrinsic and our extrinsic world and eventually, they become a seamless, integrated totality.
Frog Point Therapy’s philosophy of practice draws from cutting-edge research on human development and modern philosophies that weave together psychology, consciousness studies, and theories of human development. Human beings have universal, basic needs, but they also have specialized psychic cultures of knowing and being. Dr. Barimany’s research on epistemological diversity explains meaningful differences in how people take in data from the intrinsic & extrinsic environment and how they organize & make meaning of those experiences. This research helps explain why two people can be faced with a similar situation but have different—but predictable—experiences of the same reality. These meaningful differences in personality are integrated into Frog Point Therapy’s theory of practice.
