What is Breakthrough?
The Regressive Process
BreakThrough does not make judgments. It is not a seminar that promises to make you a “better person.” It also is not a seminar that makes you believe you are perfect just the way you are. BreakThrough merely seeks to unshackle you from long-held beliefs that have created your current self-image and put boundaries on your ability to thrive.
In BreakThrough, participants start where they are, often in a place of self-doubt, self-criticism and self-blame, exhausted from trying to hide and cope with the persons they have become and perhaps do not like. From this place, they begin the regressive process, again not trying to become better or different, but only seeking to understand.
BreakThrough’s Seven Steps are a deductive, not an analytical, process. It is rather like being a detective, seeking clues to a crime, with the “crime” being that, quite involuntarily in the first few years of life, we often “learned” that we were lacking and needed to be different or better, i.e. more intelligent, more beautiful, more this or more that.
In the Steps process, we take a single incident of conflict only, but, as we continue, we see that this one story follows a thread backward – all the way to childhood – and that life patterns and habits, time and again, repeat themselves in all kinds of conflicting situations as a result of this one deep-seated, unconscious belief.
The Steps help us to see what is really going on in any conflict – and it is both a relief and a shock to discover that ALL our conflicts are triggered by beliefs that happened back when we were just tiny children. The beliefs seem so ridiculous to us as adults, but it’s easy to understand the kind of trauma that they would have been to the child – even if that trauma was somewhat unconscious way back then.
We also come to understand that in each conflict, every time one of our childhood beliefs is triggered, the trauma we experience has very little to do with the present-day situation and everything to do with the past event. Thus, in going through a regressive process, we put our past and present selves into perspective. The results are insights that are nothing short of extraordinary.
It is really exciting work. Each time we do a Step and discover a core belief, it is like pulling a thread that begins with the story of conflict we are having as an adult and ends when we discover learned beliefs that have been dictating self-destructive behavior all the way up to the present day.
As we discover these beliefs, we see how ridiculous and damaging they are. As we put them into perspective and acknowledge their effect on our behavior, something remarkable happens as our emotions begin to change.
Suddenly we start to understand our behavior and our experience of others in a different way. Thus, when conflict occurs, our new perspective does not allow us to react in the same old way. We start to be far more conscious of what we are doing and why we are doing it, and, increasingly, the concepts of blame and victim consciousness show themselves to be totally unjustified – no matter the situation.
Again, with the regressive process of BreakThrough we don’t become better people in the sense of a new and improved self. Our focus, by working with the Steps, is to simply uncover what is quite naturally already there and was there right at the very beginning of our lives. As we more deeply understand what it is that has kept the faulty beliefs, defensive armor and personality masks so rigidly in place all our lives, a mental flexibility begins to be felt. Obviously this makes for a dramatic change in how we deal with conflict, as we confront it in an increasingly conscious, responsible way.
Thus, when we say BreakThrough is a regressive process, we mean it is a process of coming home to the self, coming back to our natural way of being, which can be very different from how we’ve come to live our lives.
Rather than encouraging us constantly to aim for a “new and improved” self, BreakThrough gives us a tool that allows us to come home to ourselves and make peace with our humanness and life in general. Working with the Steps, we have the possibility of leaving childish, needy behavior and false identities behind and rediscovering the ability to experience life in a truly childlike, honest and open way – a way that is truly natural to us.