The Simplicity of Idenics

Since all of the information about people exists within them, some may wonder why a person couldn’t just deal with mental and emotional impediments on their own. It is not that they can’t, but handling one’s issues themselves can be extremely difficult. The expression, “You can’t see the forest for the trees,” applies to the difficulties of going it alone. Submerged in the confusion of one’s condition, it is hard to take an outside or objective perspective in order to ask oneself the right questions. This difficulty is most often demonstrated by clients from the beginning – when they first go into a session.

A client usually comes into a session with some personal unwanted condition they consider bad and want to get rid of – an understandable and logical viewpoint under the circumstances. But I don’t know that a person gets rid of anything except for the automatic nature of the condition. For example, anger is neither good nor bad; it is only a matter of whether it is appropriate or not in a particular situation. If one is getting beat up by three guys it might be appropriate to get angry. But if a person whacks his kid across the room for spilling his milk, that anger would be inappropriate. For the person with an anger problem who is losing his family because of it, there aren’t two sides to the issue. For this individual anger is of no use and must be eliminated. Although it may be of some benefit to inspect the apparent value of the condition; how he may have used anger or how it might have served him, such questions would probably never occur to the person on their own who was so vehemently objecting to his condition.

John Galusha used to give an example of a person coming to him with an issue where every time he goes outside, he must count every second story window in town. The condition is not debilitating, but it causes the client to be late for appointments. The condition is addressed in session and it gets handled. But this does not mean that the person can’t count second story windows if he chooses. Resolution means that he doesn’t have to perform this action whenever he goes outdoors.

As an Idenics practitioner, it is my purpose to assist the client in achieving true freedom with regards to an unwanted personal condition. True freedom means freedom to as well as freedom from. In other words, when a condition is fully resolved, the individual then has a choice with regards to that condition. Some previously compulsive action can now be done or not done at the person’s discretion.

As an Idenics practitioner, it is my job to ask the right questions, but these questions are not based on any preconceived ideas I have about a client or anything that I think I have figured out about the individual. All that I can know about a client is what that person tells me. My know-how is in the general area of how people take on and get stuck with unwanted conditions, and the questions that I ask are based on these concepts. But I never base my questions on anything that I think I know about any individual. The purpose of every question is simply to get the client to look, but what they see is what they see. The best I can usually hope for is that a question will be close to the mark; that it gets close enough to how it actually is for that person so that the individual is able to look at what they really need to see in order to reach a resolution.

Our questions were hard-won, taking more than fifty years to develop. But the best question only produces results about eighty percent of the time. Fortunately we have enough questions, as well as an expertise at creating new questions during a session. Combined, those resources enable us to achieve good results about ninety-five percent of the time.

In Idenics every question is just another way of saying, “Have a look.” The complete job of the Idenics practitioner can be described as follows: to get the client to look, and keep their noses in what they are looking at long enough for them to fully inspect what is there. This makes the client’s job equally as simple. The entire job of the Idenics client is to look.

Most people have done a lot of thinking about their issues. They have probably spent quite a bit of time cogitating and ruminating about their conditions to no avail. It is not that the activity of thinking is bad. Thinking is appropriate when one is trying to solve a problem in math, but it is not too useful when it comes to resolving one’s unwanted personal conditions. This endeavor requires looking.

When we talk about “looking” in Idenics we simply mean “noticing what is there.” It is as uncomplicated as my asking you to look at the floor and tell me what you see. You look and see an ant and a piece of string. That’s looking. When the practitioner asks a question the client looks and sees what pops up. It is really just that simple. Any realization, epiphany or “letting go” experience a person ever had was preceded by simply taking a look.

Mike Goldstein