All traits serve, or they would go extinct in human behavior therefore finding the meaning of what you may at first perceive to be a negative trait can help you to love and appreciate all of yourself and others. Join Dr Demartini and learn why every trait you have serves some purpose, why you don't need to get rid of any of them, the reason why certain traits push your buttons, and the valuable lessons and feedback they provide.

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The Breakthrough Experience

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Through time and space, these things we call good and evil, these

moralities and ethics that we learn, sometimes murky, they're a little gray.

This particular week I'm going to talk about revealing the truth

about all the traits that you might have as a human being.

And you probably think, what, how's that going to be related to? Well,

in most cases,

people are trying to get rid of half of themselves and trying to only be

one-sided. And as a result of it,

they're becoming elated and proud when they're one side and shamed on the other

side,

and they split themselves apart and disempower themselves

perception of themselves.

And I'd like to address that topic about human behavior and traits,

because it's very pertinent. At first you may not think it's significant,

but it's very significant. And I'd like to give you a background on that.

About 38 years ago, I was realizing, well,

prior to that, up until about 38 years ago,

I was realizing that when I would interact with people and I would judge people,

sometimes silently inside,

I would look down on people or look up at people.

I didn't always want to admit it,

but I was too proud or too humble sometimes to admit what I

saw in them inside me. But I didn't want to speak up about it.

But I was realizing that what I was saying to them many times was for me.

And the thing I was thinking about them was also about me and it was making me

reflect on my own life.

So I was realizing that instead of waiting for somebody to push

my buttons and initiate a reaction that would hook me with

an elation or depression or an infatuation or resentment,

and then have them occupy my mind and run me,

I thought that maybe I might want to go to the dictionary.

And I went to the Oxford English dictionary because

could find. And I went through and I underlined or circled,

mainly underlined,

every possible human behavioral trait that I could find in

English. And there may be other ones in different languages, but in English.

And I underlined them.

And put a little dot out next to the dictionary.

And then once I underlined them, there were 4,628 traits I found.

Now, Gordon Allport, who's a psychologist that predated me,

I didn't know until a few years ago that he'd done something similar.

He was looking at traits and he wanted to know what are all the human traits too

in the English language. And he came up with 4,000 at the time,

so possibly because of his time, the number of words have expanded,

but I came up with 4,628 traits.

Now these were like nice, mean, kind, cruel, labels,

you know, considerate, inconsiderate, honest, dishonest, outspoken,

withdrawn, considerate, inconsiderate, as I said.

But any possible trait, deceptive, integral, you know,

forthright, holding things back, procrastinated, hesitated, you name it.

I went through 4,628 traits,

and I underlined them. And then I thought,

who do I know when I think of that trait, who comes to mind,

who do I think of that's got the most extreme display of that trait,

that when I think of that trait, I think of them?

And I put their initials out to the side and kind of wrote their name out to the

side. And then I looked inside myself,

and I probably wasn't as thorough as I would be today,

but I looked at where do I and when do I display that trait?

And I found when I was honest,

and some of them were painful and some were pleasureful,

some I was proud of owning and some I was ashamed of owning.

But I went and I realized, I got them all.

I had all 4,628 traits.

And even when I looked under murder,

I realized that I was murdering personalities in my work with people.

They'd have a persona and I would challenge them and

transform them in my programs. And I was murdering their personas,

their identities, and transforming their lives and I thought, wow,

I'm a murderer too, in that respect, at least metaphorically.

But I owned every one of those traits.

And therefore when I would see them,

instead of me reacting and being too proud or too humble to admit what I saw in

them, I looked at myself and I had a little less reaction,

I can't say I eliminated the reactions,

but I noticed that at least I was reflective enough to

and kind of pause and think a bit with my executive function a bit,

before I reacted. Sometimes I just reacted, and then I had to go, oops.

And by hindsight, look and see, oh yeah, that's me too.

But it really did assist me in being more broadened in my

perspective and less narrow and rigid about my reactions to people.

Because then I realized that when I was pointing my finger at them,

I was looking back at myself. There was a Romans in the New Testament,

there was a Romans statement under Romans 2-1 or,

you know,

chapter two verse one or whatever about that whatever we judge and others we

have in ourselves, and you know, who are you to judge basically,

got a pointing finger out, three pointing back. And I realized this was true.

I saw it firsthand. And then I realized, wait a minute now,

I have been programmed from childhood, from mothers, fathers, preachers,

teachers, conventions, traditions, school teachers, you name it,

that I'm 'good' if I'm one side and I'm 'bad' if I'm another,

and I'm trying to get rid of half of it.

And I thought that's an interesting thing. You know, your mom says, be nice,

don't be mean, be kind, don't be cruel, be positive, don't be negative,

be generous, don't be stingy, be positive, you know, be peaceful,

don't be warful. And yet, I found that everybody who was telling me that,

it's almost like they were talking to themselves because within minutes or days

or hours or whatever, I would find the hypocrisy of that.

They would end up being yelling at dad or they'd be being negative,

or they'd be, you know, inconsiderate. And I thought, wait a minute now,

we're all going around pointing our fingers,

we're all living by these so-called social idealisms, these moral hypocrisies,

but yet no one's really living it.

I remember reading Alasdair MacIntyre in his history of ethics showing that the

purpose was moralities were things that we all strive for but never obtained.

And then I thought, but why?

Why are we striving for something that's not obtainable? I,

when I was 18 years old, I started reading books on positive thinking. And I,

no matter what I did, I still had negative thinking,

and I couldn't seem to get rid of it, and I would try to cancel it out,

I'd try to negate it. I would try to pretend like it wasn't there.

I'd try to put on a facade that I wasn't negative,

but the truth was I was negating people and negating parts of myself and

negative towards certain things in the world.

And then I started to meet the individuals that were supposedly positive

thinking leaders, you know, the Norman Vincent Peale,

I met all these top leaders in the area of positive thinking,

and I got to meet them and hang out with them and I found out they weren't

positive thinking, they were positive and negative. So was I. And I thought,

well, wait a minute now.

Then it reminded me of something I read when I was 18 by Paul Dirac;

it's not that we don't know so much, it's that we know so much that it isn't so.

So I thought, well wait a minute,

are we being hoodwinked by these ideas that we're supposed to be one-sided?

And I tell people in my seminars all the time, you know,

if you're trying to get rid of half of yourself to love yourself,

it's going to be futile. You're not going to get rid of it.

And I ask people in seminars sometimes,

how many have been trying to get rid of negative thinking?

They all put their hands up. And I said,

how many of you still have negative thinking? They all put their hands up.

How many of you been trying to get rid of anger? They all put their hands up.

How many of you still have anger?

And I found out you don't really ever get rid of anything.

You just suppress it and then it explodes.

Or you pivot over into a form that you're denying in your mind because you don't

think it's the old way. And then you realize that you have all these behaviors.

And then I kind of went, wait a minute now,

are these behaviors really bad or good?

Because if I go and study comparative moralities around the world,

what's good in one country is bad in another. In South Africa, the leader,

Zuma the president a few years back, was married to I think nine wives.

In America, you go to prison for it. But over there you're honored as a king.

That's interesting. What's good over there is bad over here.

And then smoking I saw in France for many years still continued even though

America had made it banned in restaurants, but they were doing it there.

So I thought, well now we're, if you raised in that period, you think, well,

that's a bad thing and over there it's, you'd see it's a good thing.

And the same thing at one time in church, they used to say,

you're not allowed to eat meat on Fridays. But then people ate meat on Fridays,

they changed it,

and you weren't supposed to have businesses open with

until after a certain time or any time during the day.

And then finally 7-11 and all these businesses came on,

and then it wasn't evil. So I realized that through time and space,

these things we call good and evil these,

these moralities and ethics that we learn sometimes murky,

they're a little gray.

And then you've got situational ethics and situational ethics makes things that

were normally not good, okay.

And then I started realizing that we're going around and judging ourselves and

other people based on murky information. And sometimes,

when you look at the moralities and the ethics on there,

sometimes they're just created by those that have power and things that they

don't like, in their needs,

even though it's supposed to be democratically

has anybody here ever decided the morals and ethics of society?

And nobody puts their hand up unless they're in politics or in some sort of

legal area. And then I realize that it's kind of an illusion.

There's only a handful of people that are actually selecting those things we

call good and evil, and it's a social contract that we label.

And so these judgments of these traits are social contracts that we think is

going to make society more functional. And some of them seem to be, you know,

running a red light is not to our advantage, so we put a rule in there,

if you run a red light, you get in trouble. If you don't red a red light,

but if there's nobody there and you're in middle of nowhere and you run a red

light, nobody gets hurt. So, but ideally that's sort of an ideal.

It's a social idealism,

it's a social contract that we think is going to be very helpful and it serves a

lot of purposes. But it also, when it comes to judging personalities,

it can also cause a split in your personality and make

And by the way, when you're proud,

you're exaggerating yourself and not really being authentic.

And when you're shamed,

you're minimizing yourself and not really being authentic.

So those moralities and those social contracts are

keeps people from being authentic. And then we say, so help me God,

I'm being honest,

but really it's these personas that are basically displaying these perceptions.

We know that when we are actually perceiving things from these personas,

we skew our reality and what we think is opinion, we think is truth.

It's actually just an opinion and it's subjectively biased.

And there's a lot of subjective bias.

There's about 170 different types of subjective biases that we have on labeling

these things. So what am I saying here?

What if you found out that every trait in a human being was part of our journey?

And what if you found out that if it didn't serve, it would've gone extinct?

Just like vestigial organs in our body, you know, if they don't have any use,

they tend to diminish their function. Kind of an evolutionary necessity.

But these traits we still have.

If we go read Sumerian Doctrines and Doctorate you know,

and we read Egyptian, you know, scrolls,

or you read some of the temple walls, or you go and read the Greeks,

you'll see that some of the same behavior is hanging out in 2,000,

3,000 years ago. Hasn't changed. We haven't gotten rid of those traits,

but we label them bad in our society, but they're still there.

So what if you found out that every trait was part of a journey?

What if you didn't need to get rid of any part of yourself to love yourself?

What if all of the traits, at times, have a place?

And knowing when to use them is wisdom. You know,

if all of a sudden somebody's about to attack your child,

you may want to use force and brute and bit aggressive and beat somebody or

protect a child or kill somebody even. And then under those situations,

situational ethics, you might find, well, that's a good thing,

but that's an arbitrary thing, what they want verse what you want.

And these are murky and they're very murky situations,

and you could go and go down and play with these things until you're,

drive yourself crazy with all the, you know, the situational changes.

But I'm just going to make a statement here.

And I've been doing the Breakthrough Experience Program,

which is my signature program for 34 years.

And I've been taking people that come in to the program and I ask them to take

somebody they admire and take somebody they despise and identify what specific

trait,

action or inactions that they displayed or demonstrate that they admire most or

despise most, they label good or bad, they're attracted to repelled from,

impulsively or instinctively. And then I go, okay,

let's take that trait we admire and let's find the downsides,

and let's take that trait we despise and let's find the upsides.

And I've taken well over a hundred thousand people through that process.

And surprisingly, even though the program says otherwise,

our conventions, traditions and mores say one thing,

the truth is we can find downsides to things that we are enamored

with and we think are good and we can find upsides.

And when you actually look at it, you can actually see both sides.

And when you see both sides, you're more neutral and objective about it.

You know, Plato used to, in his dialogues,

there's a story of a man saying something and you know,

he was condemning Plato and the guy was saying,

this is good and what he's doing is wrong.

And Plato way outwitted him and basically asked him some questions to make him

realize that maybe the thing he was thinking was good, was bad.

And then the guy thought, well, Plato was actually brilliant,

and he was just oversighting.

And then Plato turned around and then showed how it was bad again.

And then he was, then he was confused,

and then he showed him how it was good again.

He took him back around on this dialogue, back and forth until the guy goes,

I know not which is good or bad in this situation.

And Plato was trying to point out that the broader the mind, the less you judge.

In a narrow mind, you make it black or white.

But in a broader mind you see kind of a gray. You see both sides.

You have a relativism instead of an absolutism in your perspective.

A narrow mindedness is very black and white, but a broad minded is more gray,

more sees both sides, simultaneously. Wilhelm Wundt, the psychologist,

about 1896 said, that when you see simultaneous contrast,

you have full awareness, you're mindful. When you see sequential contrast,

where you see the positives without the negatives,

or the negatives without the positives, you don't have full awareness. See,

when you're infatuated with somebody and you think they're all positive and

good, you're blind to the downsides. You're unconscious of the downsides.

You're ignoring, blind, and missing information.

So what you think is an opinion and you're now reacting to it emotionally.

And what you think is bad thing is something you resent,

you're conscious of the downsides, unconscious of the upsides,

and you're ignoring and missing information about the upsides.

And your intuition is trying to whisper to you the both sides.

So you can see both sides.

So you can be set free from the thing you infatuate or resent,

because it occupies space and time in your mind. But once you see both sides,

you're poised, you're present, you feel purposeful,

you see the hidden order in what was happening,

you've extracted the mean out of the, the meaning out of those experiences.

And all of a sudden you realize that, you know, it transcend it, it's

metaethical. It's beyond the pair of opposites,

beyond the positive and negative, beyond the good and evil,

beyond the right and wrong. It's just, two sides, simultaneously.

And therefore neither side.

I wonder what would happen if we actually saw that in all of our traits.

In the Breakthrough Experience I have people, like I say,

come and they are infatuated with people or resentful to people. They walk in,

they have one opinion, when they walk out,

they see both sides and they have tears of gratitude and they feel love and they

feel more present and they feel more certain that they can embrace this

individual for their wholeness,

instead of their subjective biased interpretation that's usually, you know,

socially, you know, mothers, fathers, preachers, teachers, conventions, mores,

traditions, telling them about how this is good and bad.

But the truth is it's not. It's just an event.

I'd rather see life as specific events and then extract out both sides

of it, see it for what it fully is, what's actually there,

instead of what I realize through my senses,

which is subjectively biased in many cases,

and then I'm impulsively attracted to it and I'm run by it extrinsically,

or I'm instinctfully avoiding it and I'm running extrinsically.

And then the world outside me runs me. And if I have to be run from the outside,

that means I have to be governed and controlled from the outside.

So therefore religion and politics have to run my life instead of me

intrinsically, with my physiology and psychology running my life.

I'd much rather have my physiology and psychology running me and be autotelic

instead of the sociology, politics and theology,

religions running me with things that may be outdated and may polarized.

We see on the social media a lot of polarization and misinformation campaigns.

I don't want to be run by misinformation. I'd rather see things objectively.

You know,

it's like balancing out the mathematical equation and seeing a more abstract

awareness of both sides than being caught into the trivia and

trivial pursuits, if you will. So what I'm saying in this,

this little dissertation here,

is that you have inside you the capacity to ask questions,

to make you consciously aware of what you've been unconscious of and see both

sides of an event and take the traits that you've been judging as positive or

negative, and see both sides and see them neither positive or negative,

and see them as just essential components of your being and part of what makes

you whole.

And stop making yourself proud or shamed and bipolarized,

and allow yourself to love yourself for both sides. You know,

when you get in a marriage you may start out with an infatuation.

You may go vacillating back and forth with some resentments,

and infatuation resentments, and eventually you settle down and realize,

there's things I like and dislike about the individual.

There's things you're going to like and dislike about yourself,

but primarily because of the social,

injected mores that you have taken into your life from mother's,

father's, preachers, teachers, and then you thought,

well that's why I'm liking and disliking.

But what happens if you transcended that and loved all of it?

What happens if you love the time when you're kind and cruel?

I have people when they support my values, I'm nice as a pussycat.

When they challenge my values, I'm mean as a tiger.

I used to want to get rid of that one side and be only one side and put on a

facade,

but I kept attracting events that forced out the other side that I was trying to

repress. And most psychologists know that there's this suppression, repression,

conscious or unconsciously of these sides that we think we're supposed to

getting to fit into society for socialization. Well,

I stopped doing that about age 30,

about 38 years ago when I realized it was futile.

Because when I really did an inventory on myself on my life,

I found I had all the behaviors. I was sometimes nice, sometimes mean,

sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, sometimes generous, sometimes stingy.

You supported my values, I was very generous, challenged my values,

I didn't pay for it. People come to me and ask for money for charity,

if it didn't match my values, I go, no thank you.

If it came and matched my values, I was very generous. I watched my values,

which underlies all behavior, dictate how I was responding.

But I wasn't nice without being mean. I wasn't kind without being cruel.

I wasn't generous without being stingy.

I wasn't being honest without being dishonest. When I was honest with myself,

I had dishonesties too.

And I finally realized what's the benefit of those sides?

And I found the benefits of all those behaviors that I thought were wrong.

And that liberated me from the illusion of one sidedness.

The fastest way to control the masses is to create a

social idealism,

a moral hypocrisy that nobody can live by that everybody feels guilt trying to.

So then,

then they make decisions by offloading them onto authorities that like to give

you those rules so they have governance over the country or governance over the

religious group.

So beware of the moral hypocricies that you may trap yourself in and be aware

that all the traits inside your life may serve a purpose,

or they might have gone extinct. And I found out, in order to love myself,

I got to love all the parts.

How you going to love all of you if you're trying to get rid of half of you?

How you going to love the person,

the individual you're married to if you're trying to get rid of half of them?

And your kids, and your friends, and the world?

You can be very ungrateful for the world because it's not matching the fantasy

or you can be grateful for the world in understanding that it has both sides.

There's honesty and dishonesty and kind and cruel and positive and negative and

peace and war, and there's all pairs of opposites. The global peace index,

which you can go and read up on it,

which basically looks at 99.7% of the world's population,

use 23 parameters about peace and war and looks at each country and the ratios

of peace and war that are going on, keeps a nice balanced slate. Support,

challenge, build, destroy, just like in our body, anabolic catabolic.

In the Breakthrough Experience program,

what I do is I help people love all parts of themselves.

I help them love the people around them that they've been having difficulty

loving. I show them how physiology, psychology, physics,

everything points to the understanding of understanding and appreciating both

sides.

Trying to get rid of half of your life or anybody else's life is going to be

futile. If you project your values,

self righteously onto others because you're too proud to admit what you see in

them is inside you and try to get them to live in your values, it's futile.

If you minimize yourself and try to be like somebody else that you admire and

you think you're too humble to admit what you see in them is inside you,

you're trying to be like them, it's futile.

But if you love all parts of you and all them, you have utility, not futility.

And utility creates a sustainable fair exchange and allows you to grow.

And in the Breakthrough Experience, I teach people how to have utility.

I teach people how to love both sides of themselves and others.

I teach them how to see it and be fully conscious,

mindful as the Buddhist described. I teach them how to have the, you know,

turn the cheek and embrace the people in life because they're challenging you.

I explain to you how whenever you're addicted to one side,

you attract the other to break your addictions.

If you're addicted to to protection, you attract the aggressive.

If your addiction to the peace all the time,

you end up with somebody that plays the confront. Why?

Because you don't grow on one side.

Maximum growth and development occurs when there's both sides.

And the more you're addicted to one side,

the more you attract the opposite to break the addiction, to give you,

to correlate the two sides simultaneously, as Willhelm Wundt said.

So I'm here to teach that. Because I found the other was futile.

So I'm not here to try to make you one-sided.

I'm not here to try to get rid of half yourself.

You don't need to fix or improve yourself.

It's time to love and appreciate yourself.

And that's why I teach people the Breakthrough Experience.

That's why I teach them the Demartini Method.

That's why I help them get into their executive center where they're more

objective and live in their forebrain,

which is the most advanced part of the brain where they're able to have

foresight and see things from a balanced perspective.

That's when you have true objectives.

That's when you're not pursuing fantasies and then having nightmares as a

compensation. That's when you end up loving yourself in life.

That's when you have more gratitude, inspiration, enthusiasm,

certainty and presence in life.

That's why I tell people to come to the Breakthrough Experience every week when

I do these little programs,

because I'm absolutely certain that the information there can liberate people

from all the years of self-judgment, self depreciation, fantasies,

and their phobias, their anxieties. They have more resilience,

they have more adaptability, their physiology rallies,

all areas of their life are impacted by it. I've been doing it for 34 years,

I've watched the repercussions of it.

I see what happens and I get thousands of letters showing that.

So I speak up about it because it transformed my life 38 years ago when I

realized I had all the traits,

and you don't need to get rid of any part of yourself to love all that.

So if you'd love to love all of you and love the people around you and love your

life and the world for that matter,

instead of sitting there and being caught in the vicissitudes of all the

emotional games that different people with their highly subjectively biased,

try to impose on life and all the worries that they create and all the fantasies

that they promote, why not get grounded? The magnificence of the way life is,

the magnificence of the way you are, is far greater than all those delusions.

As Paul Dirac said, it's not that we don't know so much,

we know so much that it isn't so.

So I wanted to take a few moments to just remind you about all of the human

traits that you have serve.

And that may go against everything you've been taught, but that's okay.

Contemplate it, think about it,

and join me at the Breakthrough Experience so I can prove to you how true that

is. I can show you and you will do it. I'm going to ask you questions,

I'm going to hold you accountable. You're going to answer questions,

you're going to see both sides of things.

You're going to have certainty when you're done,

a tear of gratitude and you're going to realize, wow,

this liberates me from a lot of myths.

There's so many myths that we run our life by,

and then torture our lives because we trying to be something we're not going to

be. I want you to be able to love you for who you are,

not who for you think you're supposed to be all the time.

So if you're interested in that,

come and join me at the Breakthrough Experience and thank you for joining me

today for this little presentation. I look forward to seeing you next week.

I'm Dr Demartini. Till next week, have an inspiring

week and sign up for the Breakthrough Experience.

I'll spend 26 hours with you and I'll have you show you this

experience and you will have it for life.

And it'll change the trajectory of your life and it'll give you more empowerment

and less reaction, more proaction, more foresight, less hindsight,

and you'll be able to be more of your angelic self and not your

animal self, if you will.

Your animal self is always under impulses and instincts.

Your angelic self is poised and enlightened, fully

If you want that, come and join me at the Breakthrough Experience.