Sharp - The Insight Cure: Change Your Story, Transform Your Life

Praise for The Insight Cure

Dr. Sharp is a brilliant and articulate physician. He is an extraordinarily gifted teacher and passionate about helping people. The Insight Cure is filled with much wisdom and compelling stories.

Sanjiv Chopra, M.D., professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, best-selling author, and inspirational speaker

Mental health is an issue close to my heart. There is a staggering need for more information, education, and application of better mental health in America. We need more outstanding physicians who are smart and passionate, clever and caring. Dr. John Sharp is one of those physicians. He tunes in to a patients unique individuality and guides the way to healing. Dr. Sharp stands out in his field as truly a doctors doctor.

Kristen Bell, actor, The Good Place, Veronica Mars, Frozen, and House of Lies

In the 30 years I have known Dr. John Sharp, I have rarely encountered a colleague with his combination of insight, warmth, and creativity. Beyond his excellence in caring for the person, he brings to his work an astounding breadth of knowledge and wisdom, and his writing is practical and engaging.

John M. Talmadge, M.D., senior medical advisor, Brain Performance Institute at the Center for BrainHealth; clinical professor of psychiatry & addiction medicine at the University of Texas at Dallas

ALSO BY JOHN SHARP

The Emotional Calendar

Copyright 2018 by John Sharp

Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast Books: www.raincoast.com Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

Cover design: Ploy Siripant Interior design: Riann Bender
Indexer: Joan D. Shapiro Interior illustrations: Grace Tobin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private useother than for fair use as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviewswithout prior written permission of the publisher.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4019-5324-9

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1st edition, February 2018

Printed in the United States of America

To my m om and my dad

CONTENTS

The word truth is overused in our culture these days. People claim to be truth tellers or to speak their truth. But for most of us, our truthour sense of self, our assessment of our abilities, our assumptions about the way things play out, and our concept of how we fit into the worldis founded on a lie.

If youve ever said, I dont know why I do it, but I cant help myself, your truth is false.

If you make the same mistakes over and over again or have noticed that certain situations trigger intense reactions that overwhelm or paralyze you, your truth is false.

If you are stuck in a rutin your career, marriage, weight, or habitsyour truth is false.

You have been telling yourself one central false truth since you were a very young child. It was installed in your mind at a time of life when you didnt know the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy reaction to something that scared or upset you. You just felt bad, and you self-soothed by telling yourself a story. The story was about you and how you should change your actions or assumptions about yourself and other people in order to feel safe. Since the story gave you comfort at the time, you told it to yourself over and over again, so many times that it played like a loop in your head. By now, youve stopped even hearing it, but its still in there, still playing, decades later. In psychological terms, this story is your unconscious narrative. And its a lie.

This unconscious narrative has shaped your psychology and inhibited you from pursuing life with confidence and strength. You are not all you can be because of it. You cant even imagine all you could be because of it.

Basically, something bad happenedor something you perceived as badwhen you were very young, and it really messed you up. Most people know that childhood sets the stage for adulthoods problems. What most people dont know, however, is what set off the chain of reactions that created the faulty and damaging unconscious narrative. They certainly dont know how to figure it out or how to change their old narrative for a new, better one in order to live a happier, healthier life.

In my 20-plus years of clinical practice, treating hundreds of patients, not one of them could at first accurately identify the false truth that was the root cause of all their suffering.

If you were one of my patients, and I asked you, What misconception from childhood is still defining you now, as an adult? would you able to come up with an answer? Its a tough question, absolutely. People look at big-picture problems, like their parents divorce, a death, or bullying. As important as those things are, they are events that occurred. Theyre not the big lie you told yourself about your role in the event. The event itself is different from how you changed because of it having happened. Your perception of the event and how it changed your behavior and sense of self are the issues at hand that are still causing problems for you now as an adult.

So what is this big lie?

Figuring out your false truth is the most important work you can do to unlock change in your life. Its been the work of my career to help patients discover the lie that defines them.

One patient referred to me as the False-Truth Detector. Ill take it.

Why is this work so important? If you discover your false truth, you gain valuable insight. And what, exactly, is insight in a psychological sense?

At its most simple, insight is the ability to recognize cause and effect. You already have the superficial insight to recognize that, for example, if you lie to your spouse, you will get in serious trouble when they find out. The lie (cause) leads to trouble (effect). The kind of insight Im talking about in this book goes much deeper than that. In this example, the cause is actually the false truth formed in childhood that tells you to lie. The lie itself is the effect, and by extension, so are your unstable relationships. By gaining insight, you will have a clear understanding of where your impulse to lie comes from, and from that knowledge, you can work to uproot the cause and the effect, the childhood false truth and the adult self-sabotaging. When you are insightful about why you do what you do, you can change your behavior to live a healthier, happier life.

Insight can also be an epiphany, a realization when suddenly everything makes sense. For an insight to have a real impact, it has to go back to the false truth from childhood. Once you discover what that is and think about how it has affected your attitude and behavior, you will get that aha! feeling, when the fog lifts and you suddenly see and understand so many things that you couldnt explain before.