Ep.3: Hypnosis & Therapy
Unsatisfied with the results he was getting from traditional psychotherapy, Dr. Daniel Burow spent many years traveling the world looking for better ways to help people heal and change. He will be giving us a sneak peak of his soon to be released book, “A Bigger Picture”, where he shares his discoveries about how the amazing power of hypnosis helped him finally heal himself.
During this interview, you will discover:
Thought provoking ideas about the real root causes of today’s mental health crisis, and practical suggestions for healing.
The crucial role of hands-on emulation learning in human growth and change.
How hypnosis can compliment the work of psychotherapists, social workers, counsellors, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals.
Clinical Psychologist Dr. Daniel Burow has decades of experience as a psychologist, entrepreneur, and senior executive of mental health operations across the United States. He was the Vice President of Operations with Medoptions, where he worked with a staff of over 700 Social Workers, Psychologists and Psychiatrists providing care in 21 states. In 2017 he became the Director of Sioux Falls Hypnosis.
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A Bigger Picture: How Hypnosis Can Help You Heal
Dr. Daniel Burow is a therapist who has spent many years searching for better ways to help his patients heal. He is soon to release a book called "A Bigger Picture", where he shares his discoveries about how the amazing power of hypnosis helped him finally heal himself. In this blog post, we will take a sneak peak at his book and learn about how hypnosis can help us heal.
In his book, Dr. Burow talks about how the traditional methods of psychotherapy are often not enough to help people heal. He suggests that the root causes of today's mental health crisis are often not being addressed by traditional methods. He believes that hands-on emulation learning is crucial for human growth and change. And he argues that hypnosis can complement the work of psychotherapists, social workers, counsellors, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals.
An Excerpt from “A Bigger Picture”
"The first step in any journey is always the hardest. For me, that first step was acknowledging that I needed help. I was exhausted from years of trying to find answers on my own, and I knew that I couldn't keep going down the same path. I had to be willing to try something new if I wanted to see different results. That's when I decided to seek out a therapist who could help me understand why I was struggling and what I could do to change things.
During our sessions together, my therapist would often talk about the importance of 'unpacking' my emotions. She would say that we all carry around emotional baggage from our past experiences, and that this baggage can weigh us down and prevent us from living our best lives. She encouraged me to explore my emotions and to 'unpack' them so that I could let go of the baggage I was carrying around.
I tried to do what she said, but it was difficult for me to access my emotions. They felt like they were locked away inside of me, hidden behind a wall that I couldn't break through no matter how hard I tried. That's when she suggested hypnosis as a way to help me relax and lower my defenses so that I could finally start working through my issues.
A Safe and Effective Way to Deal with Emotional Issues
I was hesitant at first, but she assured me that hypnosis was a safe and effective way to help people like me who were struggling with emotional issues. She explained that hypnosis is a state of relaxation where we are more open to suggestion, and that it can help us break through the barriers that are preventing us from moving forward in our lives.
She was right! After just a few sessions of hypnosis, I finally started to feel like I was making progress. The barrier that had been preventing me from accessing my emotions started to crumble, and for the first time in years, I felt hopeful about my future.
If you're struggling with emotional issues, don't give up hope! There are many effective treatments available, including hypnosis. Seek out a qualified hypnotist who can help you find the treatment that is right for you."
Dr. Burow's book offers thought-provoking ideas about the real root causes of today's mental health crisis, and provides practical suggestions for healing. If you are unsatisfied with traditional psychotherapy, "A Bigger Picture" may offer some insights that can help you finally heal yourself. Traditional psychotherapy combined with modern techniques such as hypnosis may be exactly what you need to finally start feeling better.
Hello everybody. I'm Robbie Spier Miller, your host for the hypnosis show podcast. Today, I'm really excited to be interviewing Daniel Burow. He is a psychologist and has really explored personally and professionally how hypnosis can help compliment people who work in traditional mental health fields. Daniel is a psychologist, hypnotist, entrepreneur, and senior executive in the mental health world. Unsatisfied with the results he was getting from traditional psychology, Dan spent many years traveling the world over looking for better ways to help people heal and change. He's here today to give us a sneak peek of his soon to be released book, ‘A Bigger Picture’, where he shares his discoveries about how the amazing power of hypnosis helped him finally heal himself.
Welcome, Dan.
Hey thank you for having me.
Yeah. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. So what I'd love to start with is for you to share with us your personal story, because all of your search for having better solutions, it stemmed from helping the people who are your clients, but it also stemmed from a personal search for you to heal and change yourself. So it would be great for our audience to hear about what that was all about for you.
Okay. Um, you know, my process really started, you know, when I was 14 years old, I lost my dad in an accident. And as you can imagine if you’ve lost someone close to you that, caused me some difficulty; left some scars. At the time I didn't process that event very well and so I moved into adulthood with some real baggage regarding myself and my place in the world and these types of things. And I joined the army and went through that process and then went to college afterward. And in college, I, you know, I studied many different things, but I started to meet people, people that were really making an impression on me. They were largely teachers, academics, intellectuals, things like this. But what I was learning was that there were people out there with ideas that really impacted the way I thought and felt. I thought at the time they were really, I felt smarter. I felt more competent. I felt like I was making progress. Like I was getting control of whatever this issue I had that I was carrying. Spoiler alert, at this point in my life I kind of have a sense that that was the wrong way to do this, but at the time it really felt very helpful. And so, you know, I began to kind of move through the world and meet these sort of amazing people and one of the byproducts of losing a parent at a young age is you will probably look for their replacement somewhere. And what I was doing was actively looking for replacement and I happened to accidentally learn that the only true way to really learn something is to form a relationship with someone and spend a great deal of time with them to really apprentice yourself to them, that there was something particular inside a mentor/mentee relationship an apprentice/teacher relationship, that that’s where it was at. And I had a couple of relationships with teachers like that during college and these people were wonderful enough to indulge me and spend a great deal of time and I was that student who would spend lots of time in your office asking you questions and reading books and doing things that weren't on the syllabus and I was sort of in this period of kind of exploration of all things intellectual and all of that. But what I actually learned was this thing about the mentor-mentee relationship, that this apprentice model was what really changed your life. And I didn't realize what I was learning at the time but that's what I was learning. And and in the process of doing that, outside of college I happened to stumble into my first real teacher and his name was father Gary Fromm and he was a retired Episcopalian priest and poet. And. I formed a relationship with him and that relationship was a decidedly not an intellectual one, at least not on his part. It was on mine, but he was one of the first people that really changed my life because I spend enough time with him to come to emulate him, to really take on the things that he thought and believed and his attitudes and values and those kinds of things. And I took them on and it profoundly changed who I was. And so I had this amazing series of learnings with him but it really kind of solidified this idea that that's how, at least for me I knew that that's what I was looking for. That's the kind of relationship I wanted to have. That's how I wanted to learn. And from father Fromm, I was in graduate school at the time, I was able to of course meet a lot more, you know, academics and graduate people. And at the same time I became interested in, alternative health care, particularly traditional Tibetan systems of medicine, traditional ayurvedic systems of medicine. During the same period of time I went to massage school. I traveled, I learned acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. Interestingly enough, looking for people to apprentice myself to, I found in the middle of the Midwest in the middle of North Dakota, a Taoist, Chinese physician who was living in Fargo because his wife was in school and he was a wonderful man who took me on and I apprenticed myself to him and, and you know, and experienced Taoism and traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture and he was a wonderful teacher. And I have been able to apprentice myself to Hindu monks and Christian mystics and a whole assortment of people. You know, all over the United States and the world who were kind enough to let me really apprentice myself to them and spend a great deal of time with them.
So when you say it profoundly changed your life, tell us, like, what do you mean by that? What happened? What changed.
You know they're basic big picture lessons that you get in a relationship like that. Being able to forgive yourself and love yourself, you know, being able to forgive and love others, at least taking steps in that direction. Taking responsibility for yourself in the world, pursuing your goals. Not being afraid, just, you know, the, the lessons that you need to mature, to grow up. And I didn't realize it at the time that those ideas came to be shaped later by my interactions with Scott McFall, which is what the bigger picture is about. But really this idea that so much of what we do as helpers or as mentors, or as teachers, or as trainers is really to mature people from, from a big picture, from a universal archetypal perspective, that what we're doing is we encounter these folks and, you know, we look at them as human beings and we figure out, you know, what experiences do they need to have to get where they need to go? And you can think about it like parenting. You can think about it like parenting, not in any kind of superior sense or anything like that, but just that that really universally has been the task of all great teachers, helpers. I think maybe that was supposed to be the path that mental health took. I just don't believe anymore that that's the perspective that they have. If we had that at one point in times of field I think we've lost track of it, which is, which is a problem. But it really is that task of growing up of having someone listen to you, really see you and then hold you accountable for who you are in the world and require that you take responsibility for yourself and say what you want to say and do what you want to do and not find a way out of that when things get hard, you know, just the tasks that you would do for your children if you think about it that way. One of the most useful pieces of information that I got from Scott McFall when I was first working with him was to treat the people that came to see me like I would treat my children and if I kept that mindset I would be fine. And that makes my work a lot clearer. I see people a lot more clearly and know what I should do a lot more effectively that way. So this has been kind of an evolving process that ultimately took me… this is a funny story and I put it in the book, but, I met Scott… I live in Sioux falls, South Dakota. I've rarely worked here, but I've lived here for 25 years. Clear back in the late 1990s Scott had a hypnosis clinic here in Sioux falls. He had an array of them across the upper Midwest. And one of them that he started was here in Sioux falls and when he opened up a hypnosis clinic… I studied hypnosis in graduate school, did my dissertation on Ericksonian hypnosis in psychotherapy supervision and I'd had a chance to really kind of cut my teeth with, well, primarily Steven Gilligan who was one of Milton Erickson's original students. And Stephen was an amazing person to learn from and be with. And I spent a good couple of years trying to really apprentice myself to him and doing as much as I could do along those lines. So I really thought I had something, you know, that I really was rolling around in hypnosis at that point in time. And so Scott McFall opens this clinic and I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to go meet him. And so I walked into his clinic and it was an entirely different experience. It was unlike anything I'd ever encountered before. The only way I, the way I explain it to people is, Scott took one look at me and I think thought about me the same way we were just talking about it. He looked at me and said, okay, you know, where is he going? And what experiences does he need to have? And then he went about giving me those experiences right then and there. And I was really rattled by that. I mean, what, he kind of saw where I wanted to go and what I was doing and told me it wasn't going to work. And I was just like, Ugh, you know, I mean can you imagine the amount of time and effort I've got in this project by that point in time? And he says, yeah, you're not going to find what you're looking for that way and here's why, and you know, you really, you know, it's not going to work. He told me many other things, but that was really, that really derailed me. And it turned the interaction very negative for me and I didn’t… I was confused. I didn't know what to do. And I became very frustrated. I left his office, didn't talk to him for a decade. 10 years, I went on and kind of was doing things the way I was originally doing them. And finally, in the process, I'm not figuring it out. I'm not making the progress I want to make. I'm going further into academic psychology and exploring that which is not getting the results. Not only to be able to change myself, but to really be able to help other people in the way I really felt like I either wanted to help them or felt like they needed. And I just, I kept looking for that set of tools, that way of seeing things… couldn't find it, never materialized. I went down a lot of rabbit holes, a lot of alleys, couldn't find anything. And one day I'm sitting around and I'm periodically thinking about Scott during this ten-year period. And finally I realized I had to call him again and I did, and this book really starts, ‘A Bigger Picture’ starts at my first interaction with him when he was running that clinic in Sioux falls.
So, I was lucky enough to get us sneak peek at the actual book. And I remember in that description of him, I think it would be really interesting and useful for people to hear about like what that was like in terms of the interaction you had and the feedback he gave you, the way the dynamics were happening. Can you tell us more about that?
Well, I'm just out of graduate school, I got my doctorate, I'm a licensed psychologist. I'm a professor of psychiatry at the university of South Dakota School of Medicine. Back to that whole smarty pants thing, right? And I waltz in to his office and introduce myself to him as one hypnosist to another, you know, “Hey, how are you doing?”, you know, just to kind of build a relationship and explore that. And… he could just, he could see me when I arrived. He kind of took one look at me and knew why I was there and what I wanted, and very quickly sort of gathered a sense of where I wanted to go. You know, and then really the thing about that first interaction with him was he challenged all of that very quickly and very completely. I mean, telling me that he knew what I was looking for and I wasn't going to find it. And that's really derailing when, you know, when you just meet somebody and they tell you, “I know what you're looking for.”, and they're right. I didn't know what to do with that at the time, other than become confused and frustrated. It's not the interaction I wanted to have with him, it's not the… that's not what I was looking for when I got there and so it really threw me off my game and I kinda made my excuses at that point in time and left. But the conversation stayed in my head for 10 years, so.
And a lot of this is that the way that you chose to cope with the emotional pain you had when your dad passed away was to be in your head and really achieve that way. And if you're in your head then it distracts you from your emotions and here, he was trying to show you, “Hey, being in your head is not going to fix this”and then you personally… because it was so uncomfortable to admit, you needed to cope with it a different way.
I couldn't, I couldn't have admitted it at that point. I didn't even understand. I couldn't even see where he was coming from at that point in time. It literally took me the better part of a decade then to really admit that, that “yeah, okay, I get it now”, He was right. This isn't going to work, you know, and I went out on my own because that's, you know, that's kind of how I learn and it's not a great way to learn, but at that point in time that's how I was doing it was I had to come up with my own answers. You know, I had to work this out for myself.
You had a huge amount of pride associated with keeping things the way they were and a whole world that supported you in that because you had all these really impressive academic credentials and accomplishments, and anybody from the outside would say, “wow”, right?, “this is impressive”.
And that’s exactly why I went in to that because I thought that that would, you know, that you learn all those things and you become all those things and that somehow, you know, you'll be able to handle it now. You you can fix whatever goes wrong, you can help people, you can deal with whatever it is you bring to the table. All of these things are just going to come with these achievements and they don't, they don't, and they never do. And you know that really, again, was a lesson that I, you know, because I'm a slow learner and I tend to learn painfully, you know, I went out and had this long lesson before I finally was able to come to the end of it and say, yeah, there are other ways to do this. I need help. I need to put down all these fancy ideas that I have about myself and apprentice myself to someone in a different way, you know, to actually go and say, listen, I don't know… I can't do this thing you do and I need help. And I just need to put down any idea I might have about myself, how smart I am, how educated I am, how professional I am, and really kind of step into that space and say, you know, I'm here to learn, I'm going to… that's how I'm coming into this. And that was very different than how I'd done anything before. And it was really how it was set up and it had to be that way. Which, you know, Scott knew right at the get go that that's how it had to be. And so when I reinitiated contact with him, you know, that was really the starting point. It was for him. For me, I was still trying to negotiate a place in there where I knew what I was talking about, but he was very direct and honest with me from the very beginning, even then. And I had to… the first part of the book, ‘A Bigger Picture’ is really me, you know, I had learned that lesson on my own, that I didn't know and I wasn't going to find out and I needed help, but you know, you can admit things to yourself in your head and then you step into trying to fix it but it's another thing to be able to say it out loud, because of course, when it's in your head it's not real yet because you can make excuses or rationalizations or you can ce around different things. But the first part of ‘A Bigger Picture’ is just me really coming to terms with the fact that I have to put that out in the world now and actually take feedback, you know, to be able to say, “I don't know”. And you know, the first, the first couple of chapters of the book are really my first trip to see Scott when he was in Cape Coral, Florida, where we spent three days, sum total, with him working with me just really to get me to say, “I don't know what the hell I'm talking about or what I'm doing, and I really need help”, you know, and you know, you can read that story and it’s… it was a challenging experience to go through. You know what I tell people is this is also the point in my life where I actually started to learn for the first time. Before then I was gathering information and was educating myself and was, you know, and was feeling smart, but it was only at that place where I had to say, “listen, I don't know, I just don't know. I don't understand and I need help”. That was the point where I actually started to learn. That was a huge, huge deal at the time. I didn't really realize it because again, I'm a slow learner, so I tend to learn these incredible lessons and then I have to move down the road, a piece, turn around and look at them and to be able to see them. And it was a very long process of this that went on like a chess match of sorts, not much of a chess match, you know, but a chess match. And it went on like this until, you know… it was a drama and Scott calls it a maturity drama, is really what it was because he knew where he wanted me to be at the end and he just simply held me in one spot and didn't allow me to act out. He didn't allow me to rationalize. He didn't allow me to do all of the things I normally did in order to get my needs met in order to get what I wanted which was to feel like the smartest guy in the room. Or to feel intelligent, to feel like I had a hold of things.
And he basically kept me in a situation where I couldn't get that need met and then he kept demanding that I feel something in the middle of that. And when you're an intellectual and you're that disassociated from your feelings, that's an incredibly stressful dynamic. And we simply stayed in that place until I felt… until I could level into my feelings. You may have talked about this in your program already but that idea about leveling… when the words that come out of your mouth match how you actually feel, the reality of what's going on inside you, The words that come out of your mouth aren't an effort to hide that or to distort it or to change it in some way. And it wasn't until I got to that point, and then, from there could actually say out loud, you know, “I can't do this. I can't do what you do. I need help”.
So he basically took away all of your magic tricks, right? All of the ways you were distracting from the other thing. I've been through my own personal version of this with Scott. The thing about him is he is so passionate about you getting what you need, more so than you are. So he'll keep going and helping. How long does it take? As long as it takes, whatever it takes. And he knows that it's worth it because once you get to the other end, that's when things change.
And that is really one of the lessons in ‘A Bigger Picture’ is, it really… that idea that as long it takes is as long as it takes. And, and as a helper, one of the things we need to be able to do is whatever needs to be done in there. It was an amazingly intricate, caring, process that took me where I needed to be. It was just a matter of how much fight I had in me before we got there. And for anybody who knows Scott, you can have as much fight as you want in you. He's got a little more, so you know, you're eventually going to get where you need to be. And you figure that out as you go along.
Tell us a little bit about, when you look at psychology and traditional therapy and the work that you did with your patients or that your colleagues did, tell us now that you know what you know, and you've had this experience, how do you view that?
There's just so much anger and aggression and frustration and violence and just kind of nastiness. We don't really know how to get along with each other anymore. We don't really know how to take responsibility for ourselves in the world. We've lost track of this. And one of the things that psychology… mental health at least in the States has always done is really looked at, you know, that our rates of anxiety and depression, relationship problems, marital issues, you know, the whole gamut of psychopathology. And they're looking at this like it's a mental health problem, you know in the States now you'll get these stories that we're having as a mental health crisis because of course 2020 really wore us down to the nub. We're just not coping well anymore. And now we have this ‘crisis’ of depression and anxiety and all of these other problems that are Psychological disorders. And the big thing that I've gotten from my work with Scott is that I don't think any more that we have a mental health crisis, what I think we have is a crisis of maturity and that what has happened over time is that sometime in the 1980s, this idea began to show up that you as an individual shouldn't ever have to experience anything you don't want to experience, you shouldn’t ever have to feel anything you don't want to feel. You shouldn't ever have to take feedback that you find iky to hear, you shouldn't ever have to have to deal with ideas or perspectives that you don't like listening to or that don't make you feel good. And this idea kind of grew and mutated until the culture changed with it. You know we're in a place now where these really… it started as an idea but it really is the norm here now, that nobody should have to feel anything they don't want to feel or do anything they don't want to do. No one should ever be exposed to feedback from reality. As a matter of fact, you don't have to take anything from reality at all. You can simply deny it or criminalize it, or you know, you can refuse it outright, you know, whatever it is. And over time, you know, the culture has changed and we're raising our children differently now and, you know, at least two generations of children have come into the world thinking that this is the way life's supposed to work. And what's even more disturbing is even the folks that are old enough to have known this lesson, I mean, I'm in my fifties. So when I grew up you were responsible for yourself. You didn't tattle. You always carried your own water. No one else had to take care of you. You never acted out. You never made other human beings carry you when times were tough. This was a different place. But even people are my age who learned those lessons growing up are starting to kind of surrender into this idea that they shouldn't have to feel these things anymore, which is kind of common sense because the idea that you don't have to take responsibility for yourself in the world is really an idea that sells itself. You know and what we are right now is we have a crisis of maturity that we're inside a system now where, you know, the definition of maturity is the ability to tolerate frustrated desire alone. Nobody should have to tolerate frustrated desire at all. If you're tolerating frustrated desire something's wrong with them or something's wrong with you. But it's not an expectation anymore of the way people should be and the result of that is what we call a mental health… now not all. I'm not saying that. Please hear that there are mental health issues. There are actual biological mental health problems. And we could go into that on another thing if you wanted to. But there are actual mental health disorders that appear to be largely biological in nature, but a great deal of what we're calling a mental health problem now is really a maturity problem. People are unable to tolerate frustrated desire alone and unwilling to tolerate frustrated desire alone. And the result of that is epic rates of depression and anxiety and unhappiness and anger and interpersonal problems and the inability to get along with others. The inability to find your way in the world to make something out of your life, you know, more existential types of things. The struggle to find meaning… these are all side effects. They're not the problem they're the symptoms of the problem. Which is ironic when you think about it. They're the symptoms of a cultural lack of maturity. That's really, as far as how I think about psychology and my work with Scott, from a big picture that's what I would describe it.
If we look at the world of psychology or therapy or people who are mental health professionals, there's so many well meaning people who are very passionate about what they do and they really care, often they're attracted to that kind of work because they had struggles and I know that would be true for me. I was attracted to helping people with hypnosis because I had my own struggles and it helped me, and so if they haven't had this maturing experience and they've been trained a certain way that doesn't look at things this way then they can’t deliver that experience to their clients either.
Well, and, you as somebody who has a long history of working with people inside this system, you know, so much of what is needed in the world and so much of what we do is really a process just helping them mature, dealing with some big picture, universal maturity tasks and we help them deal with that and then whatever the… the smoking, the weight, the stress, is kind of details around that. Does that make sense to you? You know, the task really is to help people mature and help them grow up and learn to tolerate frustrated desire alone, and generally speaking from a big picture, what human beings tend to do if they're not going to tolerate frustrated desire alone is they, they tend to move either into anger or in to self self-pity of some kind. And so our place, very frequently, when they come in with the complaint of, “I want to change X”, is to help them be able to deal with frustrated desire without either moving into anger and then using that as the rationalization for why X, Y, and Z happened or moving into self-pity and using that as the reason for why X, Y, and Z… why I do this or don't do that or think this, or think that. And it really is, from the big picture, just a task of parenting people, of helping them grow up. And I don't mean any disrespect when I say that but there is a definition, a workable definition of maturity, a functional definition of maturity, that idea, it's the ability to tolerate frustrated desire alone. And that one sentence is so important. And it's so absent, you know, if someone asked me what are the causes of human suffering… one of them is that they can't tolerate frustrated desire alone and secondly they think they're special and therefore they're an exemption to the idea that they should have to tolerate frustrated is our alone. I think those two things are responsible for 99% of human suffering from a big picture. I think it's kind of that simple. And our task is to get in and take care of that and what experiences do they need to have to step beyond that. And in the process of doing that they learn all kinds of fabulous things and interesting skills and other problems that they're able to deal with more effectively, whatever that is.
But the core of what we do is somewhere in the orbit of those two things, I think.
So I know part of your mission is to educate people in the mental health field in this so that they can be more prepared to genuinely give people this experience and this growth and I'm curious about what kind of reception you've gotten from people who work in mental health.
Well, you know, if you listen to… If I think back to the first part of this interview where I talked about how smart I needed to be, how intellectual I was, and how when you think you're that smart it's hard to learn anything which is why to this day I'm still a slow learner because of just the gravity of having had that in me for so long. That is the problem with moving something like this into the helping field, to psychology, to clinicians… is the idea that in order to really learn these ideas we're talking about, you have to believe a couple of things and one is that you don't already know it, you know, which is a knee-jerk reaction for many people, is that, “Oh, I kind of know that, I get it”, you know, they hear what you're saying and it registers with them a little bit and so, “Oh, well, yeah, I got what you're saying”. And that's always really hard for me to hear because when I hear that I become concerned that maybe they didn't really hear me. So that's one piece and the second piece is to actually be able to take in a bit of information and not feel like you're entitled to judge it as right or wrong. To really be able to take in a learning and to try it, to take it in, surrender into it, accept it, and then try to live it and then learn the lesson that needs to be learned rather than deciding upfront what it is and then determining what you're going to do or not do at that point in time, which is so much of what academically educated people do. “Oh, I get this, this makes sense, this doesn't, I'm going to use this, I know where I'm going to do that, the rest of this isn't of any importance”, boom done. But back to that idea of apprenticeship of mentorship, the real genius of what we call emulation learning is to take in a learning, put yourself in the back seat, your fancy ideas about you, get rid of them for a second, take that in, surrender into it and then go out and live that, do it. And it's inside that piece is where the real world learning is. That's where the interesting things happen. That's where the change is, that's where the growth is, that's where everything valuable is. And if you show up at the beginning and shortcut that whole process, you know, all you're doing is robbing yourself.
A lot of people have had the experience in their life and let's take, you know, people who have, like here we have colleges, so we have the college of psychotherapists, we have a, you know, a medical college for example. And so because they have their degree and that recognition from the college and they're following the rules of the college there's this illusion that it gives some, uh, it actually means that what they're doing is the most useful. And so I think that that's a big thing that gets in the way because people have a lot of pride caught up in that or like they're afraid and they're used to the way things are and so the idea of switching that can be very jarring and I'm thinking of one student I had who was working in the mental health field and for her, the idea of giving people a guarantee, like as hypnotized, when we deliver our services we give people a written guarantee that says, if they do need extra help then it's free, It's part of their program for their original income. And her reaction to that was really negative because she was just used to being paid by the hour and that's just the way it is and there was no attachment between the work she was doing and actual proof that the person was getting results and not to her… she is a very well-meaning person it wasn't her fault at all but because her whole profession does it that way, and the college says this is how you do it and the insurance companies take care of it that way and the third party pay is something that gets in the way too because if somebody says, “Oh, sure insurance will cover it, I’ll go see a therapist”, they don't really have enough skin in the game to take responsibility for what's going on. And so there's a whole systemic issue here. And because people are forced to follow these rules they become less resilient because they're relying on the rules instead of having them make it happen themselves.
And I think you're right, I mean, you talked about pride, you talked about, you know, not knowing how else to do it and then the rules, all the education that’s been poured into you about the right way to do things, the only way to do things. And, you know, and it's a combination of all of that that makes it difficult to be open enough to even consider something else, you know, not to mention just the fear of the unknown, you know? But I agree with you in what you said that one of the problems that the psychology field has is a lack of skin in the game. Shout out here to Nassim Taleb who talks about this idea of skin in the game and if you've never read his books consider doing so, they're amazing. But one of the things that I would say about that is back to your talking about the guarantee, you know, psychology, we spend a lot of time talking about professionalism and ethics and things like that. I think that offering a guarantee is one of the most ethical things you could do. Absolutely. I mean, to say listen, we're going to agree on something here and if I can't get you to it in what we agreed on then this is what I'm going to do to make that whole again. And the fact that psychology really struggles with that, you know, is in my head a sign of how muddled things have become, you know, there's lots of pieces of what happens in psych therapy that reflects the fact that the field doesn't have the kind of skin in the game that it should have. Simply put, from a big picture perspective, psychotherapy doesn't really accept responsibility for the outcome that the other person came in for. You know, hypnotists, one of the first things you do is you figure out what the outcome is and you say, okay, this is how, you know, I'm going to help you with this and this is what it's going to look like and this is how long we're going to do it and this is how much it's going to cost. And then there’s the guarantee at the end of that, you need extra help we're going to do that and it's not going to cost you anything and however you're going to handle that. Psychology doesn't do that in any real sense. And it's back to that fear that we talked about a minute ago that makes learning difficult is the act of actually accepting responsibility, just a reasonable amount of responsibility. You know, I'm not suggesting that the client or patient doesn't have skin in the game either, they need to and hypnotism when done right keeps them in that place. But the clinician has to have responsibility for the outcome. And one of the things is that psychology really has put itself together in a way and functions in a way that allows it to really avoid any actual responsibility for the outcome and I think, I mean, if we're going to talk about professionalism and ethics and things like that, that's a discussion that needs to be had because there isn't any actual reality-based responsibility on behalf of a psychotherapist for what happens. I mean not in any real sense as far as the outcome of the person and the money they're spending. And the things that we would expect in any other market transaction that we engage in, you know, any other, for some reason: education therapy, medicine, we see them as kind of a different ball game when one of the things we need to do is we all need to have skin in the game the same way if we went to a mechanic, the same way if you got a carpenter to come and work on your house, the same rules. If the same rules apply tomorrow, by the end of next week, the only people that would be working in the field would be the ones who were effective.
We're the ones who are willing to learn and realize, wow, this shows me how much I have to learn, because I know for me, like early in my career as a hypnotist, the thing that got me to learn the most was when things weren’t working with clients and I realized, huh, I have to get better at this. And, you know, I had to face that it was right there in front of me. The truth is that a lot of hypnotists don't operate this way either. So there's this whole philosophy we have with Master Hypnotists Society about the idea of maturity and having that accountability that helps people really hone their skills and focus on results and being willing to honestly look at what's really happening. A lot of people really want to learn but what it turns into is that they're shopping for more techniques, that they're going to learn this technique and that technique and take this course and that course and so they're having this illusion of learning or making progress but they're just doing the same thing over and over again.
And you know the sad thing about it is it, you know, I think a lot of people realize there's things that they need to learn or there's things that they should get better at or there’s skills that they should have. But one of the things that's happened to us is we don't even know anymore how to learn. You know, this idea of emulation learning and then really in all seriousness, emulation learning is the only learning there is. Real learning. Everything else is just information. That's all it is. And we've forgotten that, we don't realize it anymore. And so people are really to a large degree kind of flying blind. They may think that something's missing, they may want something else but they don't really know how to do it. And so, you know, when we meet them, we kind of have to just show them relatively quickly, the value of this and hope that they catch on because, you know, we really have forgotten how to learn. We've lost track of it and we don't know. And so even if you are looking for help it makes help harder to find and harder to take when you do find it. And, you know, I wish it wasn't that way but it is but that can be different, right?
Yup, yeah. And listen, you and I both have gone through this and I get it and I really feel for people who are stuck this way, I think it's a really uncomfortable place to be. I'm very thankful that I found Scott and this approach because it gave me a path to feel really good about the service I'm delivering to people and know that I'm giving value and have challenges for myself to keep growing. And so, you know, my hope is that more and more people will be able to get this kind of help so that we can help more people because the more hypnotists or therapists that get trained in this ability to give people a maturity experience, the more people we can actually help.
Right. You can reach me at Sioux Falls Hypnosis, is the name of my website and my phone number and information is right there. I also have a Facebook page, you can look up my name, Daniel Burow, and that's B U R O W, I look forward to hearing from anybody, happy to answer any questions anyone has.
Well thanks so much. I know I learned a lot today and also from reading your books so I strongly encourage people to, as soon as Dan's book comes out, which is, is it mid may that it's coming out?
Yeah, it should be maybe I'm guessing six or seven weeks. Keep fingers crossed.
Yeah. So stay in touch with Dan so you can get a copy of his book and you will learn a lot. And my hope is that it inspires people to seek out the kind of learning experiences that will help them truly live a meaningful life and a connected life. And that this is true not just as a therapist or a hypnotist but your personal relationships, you’re ability to realize your potential is at stake.
So the book again is called ‘A Bigger Picture’, it should be available at Amazon and I think Barnesandnoble.com, you'll be able to search it by my name again, B U R O W. And have a read and if you do get a chance to read it in the future send me an email or give me a call, I'd love to hear what you think, but thanks for your time today, I appreciate it.
Great. Thanks Dan.
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