The Hidden Link Between Trauma and Gratitude
Interview By Brandi Fleck
Dr. John Demartini explores how gratitude, perception, and emotional reframing may transform the way people experience trauma, grief, panic attacks, and healing.
Gratitude is easy when life feels supportive. The harder question is whether gratitude is possible during experiences people would normally label traumatic.
Dr. John Demartini explores trauma, grief, panic attacks, emotional resilience, and the role our perception plays in creating suffering. Through stories involving kidnapping, violent assault, prison inmates, family conflict, and fear of death, he challenges the idea that emotional pain is only created by the event itself.
We explore gratitude as more than a mindset practice, along with nervous system balance, victimhood, prolonged grief, emotional healing, and the stories people carry about painful experiences.
If you’ve ever wondered why certain experiences stay emotionally charged for years, he offers a thought-provoking perspective on trauma recovery, gratitude, and healing.
Listen to Dr. John Demartini’s Interview
Watch Dr. John Demartini’s Interview
How Perception Shapes Emotional Healing
Brandi Fleck: I'm your host, Brandi Fleck, and this is Human Amplified. We're on a mission to revamp society by amplifying your humanity.
Dr. John Demartini: Hi, I'm Dr. John Demartini, and I am based out of Houston, Texas, at least I have an office there. Trauma has nothing to do with what happens to you. Trauma is a choice of perception. Anything that you have that's imbalanced in your mind is going to keep dominating your mind until you bring it to balance. I label things events that are neutral, and then I help people see the other side and balance it out so they can be grateful. There's something to love in anybody if you look, and when you know how to ask the question, "Where's the other side on the contrast?" the story changes.
Brandi Fleck: Today we're talking to Dr. John Demartini. He's a human behavior expert, educator, international bestselling author, and founder of The Demartini Institute. And get this, he's a man who was born on Thanksgiving Day, and he now works in gratitude to transform lives.
Dr. John Demartini is a returning guest to Human Amplified. He was featured on the blog this past summer. For a more foundational understanding of the gratitude topics discussed in today's podcast episode, you may find it helpful to read his blog interview titled "On the Way, Not in the Way."
Today, however, we get straight to the point in answering the question: How can you love every experience you've had in life, even when you've experienced trauma?
Dr. Demartini immediately and vividly details examples of how this is possible and what his unidentified clients have done to implement his advice in their specific difficult scenarios. The answers involve big mindset shifts, understanding how deep gratitude works, and then being able to find gratitude in all of life, regardless of if you deem the experience to be, in Dr. Demartini's words, terrible or terrific.
Dr. Demartini's gratitude work seems to be taking people out of a victim mentality. In this episode, we discuss topics like perception, the impact of becoming aware of the unconscious, why you may not see the benefit of a trauma, the benefits of gratitude, Dr. Demartini's own personal gratitude journaling practice that he's had for over 39 years, and cultural feelings around death.
You'll leave this episode with inspiration and empowerment. Specifically, you'll get a lot of food for thought, actionable advice to explore your own perceptions around past trauma you've experienced, and tips for finding gratitude to help you move forward and rewrite your story.
This episode does come with a trigger warning. Real stories of healing from violent abductions and rape are discussed in detail. Listener discretion is advised.
Today on the show, I would love to welcome back Dr. John Demartini. He was on the blog earlier this year, and now he's back and we're going to dive even deeper into gratitude. Welcome back, Dr. Demartini. How are you doing today?
Dr. John Demartini: I'm doing great, thank you.
Brandi Fleck: For the listeners who have not familiarized themselves with your article on our site, can you just introduce yourself? Tell them who you are and what you do.
Dr. John Demartini: Well, I'm John Demartini, Dr. John Demartini. I'm involved in human behavior. I've been an educator for 49-plus years, and I research, write, travel, and teach. I love anything to do with maximizing human awareness and potential, and then helping people evolve their objectives in life to create the life that they would really love to do. I love helping people do that.
And that's sort of what I do every day. I'm researching, writing, traveling, and teaching, doing that every day, seven days a week.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Wow. Okay, and that's amazing.
But let's just dive right in. When you came on the show in the fall, you said several times, "There's nothing the mortal body can experience that the mortal soul can't love." And I really love that. I think it's been really helpful for some folks.
Can you break this down for us, though, for, say specifically, people who have been through abuse and trauma? How does this statement apply?
Dr. John Demartini: Well, there's no such thing as abuse and trauma until you decide to call it that. It's just an event in your life. You can choose to make a mountain out of a molehill, a heaven out of a hell, a hell out of heaven. You can choose to see the downsides or the upsides and make it terrific or terrible.
And that's the thing that makes us distinct, is we don't have to let the external world run our lives. We can change our perception, change our decision, and change our actions around things.
William James said the greatest discovery of his generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their perceptions and attitudes of mind.
Could I share a story that might be very helpful in this arena?
Brandi Fleck: Absolutely.
The Stories We Carry About Trauma
Dr. John Demartini: I have had the opportunity to work with people who have been through pretty amazing labeled traumas, okay? People blown up in military situations, rape cases, beatings. I mean, I've seen amazing stuff.
But recently, I had a client that contacted me that was kidnapped.
He was driving down the highway and four cars pulled up around him, stopped the traffic, knocked out his windows, opened the doors, grabbed him, put a sack over his head, stuck him in the back of one of the vehicles, and then drove off.
For five and a half hours, he was in the back of the vehicle, then taken to a place, and then a ransom was set. Millions of dollars had to be transferred in order to be able to see his family again and to live.
It was quite an interesting thing. When I first got on with him, he was ranting the story, the typical story: "This is a trauma. I've been traumatized. I can't sleep. It's hard to get out of my head. I'm running this thing," etc.
And I said, "Okay, stop. Can I ask you a simple question?
"Go to the moment when you actually remember the windows being crashed in and you're now taken, etc. Let's go in there, and you're now in the boot of the car or whatever."
I said, "What's the benefit of that?"
He said, "There is no benefit to that."
I said, "If you see no benefit to that, you're going to be traumatized. You're going to label it something terrible, and you're going to be stuck in that model for the rest of your life. What's the benefit of that?"
He said, "I can't see any."
I said, "If you can't see any, it means you chose not to look because you said that within about half a second, which means you didn't even try to look. Look again. What's the benefit of that? How could it be a benefit?"
"I'm not interested."
Now you've got this moral idea that that's absolute evil and there's no relative benefits to it, so look again.
And he stopped and he looked, and then all of a sudden he got a little teary-eyed and he said, "It brought me incredibly close to my family, which I've never experienced before."
Great. What's another benefit?
"I'm now really present with my kids."
Sort of the same thing.
He says, "While I was in the boot, the only thing I could see in my mind is my family, and I was taking them for granted. And right now they're the absolute top of the list."
I said, "Great. What's another benefit?"
"Well, because I was hidden for almost six weeks, my business had to rise to the occasion, and all the people that I was hoping to rise up and be leaders, they all took it over. My business is more profitable now since I'm out of it and only kind of sidearms instead of in it every day trying to control everything. So I've now freed up my system and I'm able to now not have to be there, and my business is flourishing where it's actually more profitable than it was, and I was in its way and I didn't realize that."
I said, "Great. What's the benefit of that?"
"Well, I'm now able to have a vacation with my family. I'm closer to my wife. My father and I weren't even talking, and my father's now close to me again, and my mom's close to me again, and they're helping in the family. They weren't even really acknowledging the family."
And I just kept going through this.
"What's another benefit? How did it help you socially?"
"I found out who really cared. I found out who was really priority to spend time with."
"And how did it help you financially?"
He says, "I'm making more money now, working more efficiently and hardly working and just overseeing."
I said, "Did you have a goal to do that?"
He says, "I have been sitting there with anxiety, knowing that I was walking on eggshells, in a sense, with my family dynamic and probably on the verge of a potential divorce because my wife was warning me more and I wasn't doing it, and I was ignoring it and cocky and arrogant. I've been humbled, and I'm now close, and it's a level field. We actually have a relationship today. And I did have an anxiety about what would happen if we divorced, the economics of that and the cost of that, and all that's gone."
And he said this, and he got teary-eyed. He said, "I actually did a prayer." Right? He's got a religious background.
"So I did a prayer. How do I solve this situation?"
Four days before these four men came.
"Oh wow."
So did these four men actually fulfill two basic prayers: how to get people in your company to rise into power so you could be free to do things, and also be close to your family?
And he got teary-eyed. He just said, "I feel like I want to thank them right now."
I said, "Keep going. What's another benefit?"
I made him go around the wheel of life.
"Spiritually, how did it help you? Mentally, how did it help you? Health-wise?"
He said, "Health-wise, since this has occurred, the first thing I wanted to do..." Well, he first lost weight, which he'd been trying to do. "That was another benefit. But I'm now doing meditation. I'm now eating differently. My wife is now making sure I'm eating differently. I was always in a hurry, and I was eating just quick stuff, and I wasn't paying attention to my health. I'm now conscious of that. I'm now listening to my kids. I'm now finding out what they're doing. I've actually been to their school and I've watched them in functions."
And he just started bawling.
He said, "These are dreams that I had that came true because of these guys. They were the catalyst."
And I went on through this, and he just bawled with gratitude.
I said, "Trauma has nothing to do with what happens to you. Trauma is a choice of perception, and an unwillingness to look for the unconscious information that is always present that you haven't looked for.
"Your mind will automatically, in a freeze response, dissociate from what you think is trauma and create a fantasy, an ecstatic fantasy, to compensate for it in order to maintain homeostasis in the brain. Your brain will always have a pair of opposites.
"And if you can ask the question and make yourself conscious about what was unconscious and be fully conscious, you will realize that the traumas are not traumas. They're experiences that are on the way, not in the way, until you choose to distort them with some sort of subjective bias and moral hypocrisy."
And when he got through, in two hours we cleared this thing. Months of so-called therapy, two hours to clear it. Nobody ever asked him, "What were the upsides and benefits?" They just let him run his story of his trauma.
And I said, "So what's the benefits?"
And he just got up to the point where he was in tears of gratitude.
He went home and he shared all those benefits with the family and had them in their arms around each other and thanked them. And they said, "These are the benefits. We've got our dad back."
And they all cried together. It was a thing. The so-called trauma to the family was over with, and there was a thank you energy around it, realizing that they actually felt like there was some sort of divine intervention going on because the wishes of all the people in the family were all met by these four men.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah.
Dr. John Demartini: And you think, "Well, that's a bizarre way of looking at life."
No, it isn't. It's a smart way to look at life because then you realize that no matter what happens in your life, you can be grateful.
Anything you're not grateful for in your life is baggage. Anything you are grateful for is fuel.
Now he's fueled by the experience, and now it doesn't have to linger in his mind with a post-traumatic stress disorder label that's preoccupying your mind because anything that you have that's imbalanced in your mind is going to keep dominating your mind until you bring it to balance.
When people want to run their story and be victims of history, I stop them. I say, "If you run that story, you're going to stay stuck. I'm going to hit them with reality and ask them some questions that they haven't been asking and help them see things they haven't been seeing."
And when they're done, they're going to say thank you, okay? Because the more challenging thing you've been through, the more inspired you could be if you balanced it out.
And when you realize that...
I had a lady that was raped by 100 men by a motorcycle gang, tied to a block in New Zealand. In four hours, in front of a television crew, we worked until all of that was tears of gratitude.
And the moment she did that, she freed up her voice because her voice was raspy and sounded like a male. It sounded like Wolfman Jack because of the screaming.
And she was dressed in a little girl's outfit because she never got past that, which is a kind of remembrance system of the thing.
And she freed that up. She's now empowering people, bestselling author, and is married to a man that has tattoos that looked like the leader and has no fear anymore.
And she says, "One of the greatest things to happen is I don't walk around with fear."
Most people live in anxieties and constantly avoiding things and stuff like that.
"I'm now, if I could transform that situation into something to be grateful for and found out people love me no matter what, which the man who is now in my life loves me no matter what. I told him what happened and he just loved me."
He said, "That's worth it."
And that's how to perceive life. To sit there, like Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps, you can sit and become a wallowing pity party or in trauma drama, or you can sit down and turn it into something to be meaningful.
And to be able to extract meaning out of existence is what differentiates us from the animals.
Animals have an impulse towards things and an instinct away, but they can't neutralize those with an intuitive meaningful extractor and see the hidden order in their apparent chaos.
So I don't label things terrific or terrible. I label things events that are neutral, and then I help people see the other side and balance it out so they can be grateful.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah, that's really powerful. Thank you for sharing those stories because I think that'll help a lot of people.
I just want to dig a little deeper into this because I know there are probably a lot of people who would not be able to see the benefit of something that they label as trauma.
Dr. John Demartini: So they're choosing to say they're not able to, okay? It's not true, okay? They're getting still more advantage than disadvantage by not seeing it.
Because when we have more advantages than disadvantages by not seeing it, we don't see it.
I've seen that sometimes in government-supported post-traumatic stress conditions. They get so many benefits and agenda from not getting it resolved that they will stay with that because they're getting too many benefits.
If all of a sudden that trauma was taken away, then they have to go back to work. They think that that's more difficulty than what they've got right now, so they'll avoid that answer, okay?
As long as there's more advantages than disadvantages staying in that story, they're going to keep that story, okay? Unless somebody like me knows how to ask the questions to help them see a different perspective.
Brandi Fleck: Gotcha. All right, and so you're just going to keep asking the questions, "What's the benefit?" until they see how the benefits outweigh...
Dr. John Demartini: Yeah, and you can also do it in reverse. "What's the drawback if this hadn't happened?" Well, he felt that he would have been divorced. It would have cost him half of his fortune.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah.
Dr. John Demartini: I said, "Would you rather give up 10 million or 60 million? What would you prefer? Because 10..."
I said, "I've paid that much in consulting fees, but I didn't get the same results this gave me. This guy gave me real results for a 10 million dollar consulting fee."
Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Okay. Well, I hope he wouldn't want to lose his wife too. I mean, that would be sad.
Dr. John Demartini: He was headed toward a situation that would have led him to divorce and not seeing his kids, and then running himself ragged and his health down. He saw what was going down once this happened, okay? He couldn't see it beforehand, or he didn't want to listen to what his body and physiology and psychology was telling him.
Gratitude as a Healing Practice
Brandi Fleck: Okay, let's shift into the types of gratitude.
So while you talked about, last time we talked, you talked about what happens when distress is transformed into eustress. Since we have that foundation of a definition already, can you tell us what some of the day-to-day tangible benefits of practicing gratitude in this way are?
Dr. John Demartini: Well, there's a superficial gratitude and a deep gratitude. The deep gratitude I sometimes call grace, just to differentiate it.
When somebody comes up to you and says, "Oh, you look nice," gives you a nice little gift or something, and you say, "Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you," that's easy. Any amygdala-based individual can do that.
When something supports your values, thank you. When something challenges you, you have a completely different word for that.
But when something challenges you and you can reframe that and see the other side to it, become conscious of the upsides to it, and see a gratitude for the things that challenge you, you have a deeper gratitude.
Because it's easy to be grateful when things go your way. It's when they're not seemingly going your way that actually, in a hidden way, is going your way, but you can't see it. That form of gratitude is more profound and more in-depth, and that's the one that requires looking and discovering unconscious information that you're overlooking.
That gratitude, once you bring things into balance, brings homeostasis to the body. It helps us wake up our executive center, which governs impulses and instincts and makes us more poised and present and productive. It helps us have less noise in the brain. It helps us in having more equanimity within ourselves and equity between others, which is a sustainable fair exchange position in business for a growing business that grows wealth.
It helps grow wealth because until you can manage emotions, don't expect to manage money. And if you can manage your emotions and take whatever happens to you and balance it, you're in command.
It helps relationships because when you're cocky and self-righteous, looking down on people, wanting them to live in your values, it doesn't work. And minimizing yourself and walking on eggshells, it doesn't work for you.
But when you're actually in a level balanced state and you're grateful for the individual, people want to be loved and appreciated for who they are. If you're grateful for them and you love them for who they are, you are going to have a much more profound relationship.
In leadership roles, anybody who can do that has a high EQ as well as IQ because they're able to take in an abstraction of perception, not just be stuck with phenomenological sensory data, but they're able to conceptualize abstractions and see both sides of things, which is a higher IQ and EQ, and be able to manage your emotions.
And physiologically, when you do that, you are literally bringing autonomic balance, epigenetic balance, and changing physiology to maximize human resilience to adaptation.
Your heart rate variability goes up. And spiritually, what is spirituality but grace? Human will not having to change you relative to others or others relative to you because you see the order of it, and you're now in a state of thank you as it is.
We're disgraced when we're trying to fix the universe. We're graced when we realize the way the universe is at this moment, I wouldn't change. Thank you.
So, I mean, every area of life is impacted by gratitude and asking quality questions that make you fully conscious.
Full consciousness is seeing the hidden order in the apparent chaos, and partial consciousness, or subjective bias, is when you are polarizing and dramatizing the misperceptions and then running your racket story about how it's something that's caused you pleasure or pain instead of an event that's neutral that you chose to bias your interpretation.
When you're infatuated, you're consciously aware of the upside and unconscious of the downside. You have a subjective bias towards the positives and you have a confirmation-disconfirmation bias on the negatives. That's your reality.
And then your intuition is trying to whisper, "Hey, that person you're infatuated with has got downsides," but you're ignoring it at that moment. And that ignorance is what's getting you polarized into these emotional states.
Same thing for when you resent somebody. There's nobody worth putting on pedestals or in pits. There's something to love in anybody if you look.
And I've gotten to work in prisons, the maximum security prisons, and I tell you, I've seen people transform their lives by realizing that there was a hidden order in their life after all. People just don't take the time to look.
Brandi Fleck: Okay. I could go, I could tell you a story on that one. It's a mind blower too. It's a tearjerker.
I would love to hear it, please.
What Personal Transformation Really Looks Like
Dr. John Demartini: So I was asked to speak at Krugersdorp Prison, maximum security prison in Johannesburg, at Krugersdorp.
I spoke to the warden and about 400 of the faculty and teams and people there first, and then they took me three stories underground, literally down a ramp three stories underground where there's no windows or anything. It's just underneath, so the maximum security area.
And there we went into a holding cell. We had the Al Jazeera television crew there. They were filming the whole thing. I had my publicist, my director, the warden, six guards, and another man.
We went in this holding cell, and they had to lock behind us and had to open up the main entrance into the main holding area where all the prisoners are. There's 1,000 prisoners in orange uniforms.
So I had to walk, and I was led with three guards on either side of me, and we had to walk through the center and go right into the center of the room.
And I had to stand on this plastic stool kind of thing upside down. It's facing where I'm standing on top of it, and the film crew is around there. They're kind of anxious because they're right in the middle of all these people, but we're surrounded by these guards.
And I start to speak, and I ask people, "No matter what you've been through, no matter what you're going through, no matter what's happening in your life, how many of you deep inside have a desire to want to make a difference in the world?"
Every hand went up in a billionth of a second. One hundred percent of that room went up, which was mind-blowing. Most people wouldn't believe that would be the case, but that's what was there.
And as I was speaking for the next 15 minutes, all of a sudden I got a heckler. A guy said, "You know, that's easy for you. That's easy for you. But what have you had? No mama, no daddy."
"Yeah, yeah, it's easy for you, man."
And he started giving this thing.
And for some reason, just without thinking, I stepped off the stool and walked towards him. Now that's something they told me not to do. "Do not walk amongst the group because they can grab you and try to escape that way."
But it was spontaneous. I just started walking over to this guy, and the guards are trying to keep up with me. I'm walking firmly toward him, and people are moving out of the way.
And I get right in front of this guy, and I had the microphone. I said, "Nothing's missing in your life.
"When you didn't have a mama, somebody else played those roles of a mama if you look really carefully. Somebody else stepped up to play that role. Well, you took on a piece, your father took on a piece, a friend took on a piece, a gang leader took on a piece, a mother of a friend took on a piece.
"If you made a list of everything you thought you missed out on and looked at who took it on, you will find out that nothing is missing. It's in a form, and if you look really carefully, you can find the benefits of that form and then the drawbacks if your mom had done it.
But if you compare your current reality to a fantasy of how it should have been, you'll never appreciate your life. It'll make you angry and bitter, and you'll think the world's against you.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah.
Dr. John Demartini: And I just kind of went into it. He just listened because I was so firm with him and so certain about it. He just listened.
And all of a sudden, a yelling, a howling cry comes from two-thirds of the way across the room. A man starts bawling.
And when I heard it, again a spontaneous approach, I started heading to where this guy was, and everybody got out of the way. They just let me come through this thing to get to this guy.
And this guy is bawling, just bawling, and the wardens are trying to keep up with me and the guards are trying to keep up with me because I walk fast. I just had plowed through this thing and didn't really focus.
When you're doing that, they're not interested in attacking. You're trying to help them.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah.
Dr. John Demartini: Right? They could sense it.
So I went right over to this guy, and this guy's bawling. He's a big tall guy, probably 6'3" or something like that. He's just bawling and crying.
And finally the warden and the team's right there, and this guy says, "I know who my mama is. I know who my mama is.
"I had a mama all this time."
And he'd been 26 years in prison for a life sentence.
And he points to the warden. She's a short little lady. He says, "You have been my mama for 26 years. I've had a mama this whole time.
"If it wasn't for you, Mama, I would be dead. You kept me from killing myself. You kept me from all those drugs. You have been making sure I've been fed and I've been clothed. You've been my mama."
The warden is bawling. The men are crying. That room had no dry eyes in that room.
I mean, it was just tear-jerking bawling all over that room, people realizing that nothing was missing.
That guy, that heckler, was sitting there hugging another guy, realizing that everybody was authentic. Nobody was in fear. The warden, the guards, none of them. They were all not on defense. They were just present.
And there was a healing in that day.
And 10 years later, I went back to that prison to speak again, and some of those guys were still there and still remembered me, and I remembered them.
And they asked if they could take a picture with me because it changed their life.
The warden said, "Yes, get a picture. You changed these people's lives last time."
So it has nothing to do with what you've been through or going through. What matters is how you perceive from this moment forward.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah.
Dr. John Demartini: They changed their perception and changed their story.
The story is a racket we run when it's emotional, when we are choosing not to see the whole. We're seeing parts but not the whole.
And the unconscious part, when it's brought up and you're fully conscious, there's going to be grace. There's going to be a gratitude level that's deep.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah.
Dr. John Demartini: And that's what these men experienced.
So when somebody comes to me and says, "Well, I've been traumatized," I say, "Okay."
Panic Attacks and Trauma Recovery
I had a lady in London, a 15-year-old girl standing on the street corner with a guy that she had a crush on. There's a taller guy with a few friends, and they were doing what some teenagers do. They're smoking pot and they're getting high and having some liquor or wine or whatever they're drinking.
And all of a sudden, a car pulls up. They're right on the edge of the sidewalk, and the car pulls up and asks if they could come to the car and get instructions.
And when the girl goes over there to try to give them instructions on where something was, they grabbed her into the car and pulled her down. They were trying to get her in the car to steal her away or rape her. I don't know what was going to happen.
And the guy that she fantasized she could be with rescued her and grabbed her and fought with them and pulled her out and back onto the sidewalk. She got bruised a bit, but they finally drove off.
And in that moment, in her state of mind, she was quote traumatized. That's what they labeled it.
So now she's not able to sleep, she's having panic attacks, she's now being put on medication, she's now been given a title and a label and all this other stuff.
So somebody had told the mother to bring her to me, and I sat in one of the hotels there with the mother and her.
I said, "Go to the moment."
And I took frame by frame by frame this whole thing. This whole thing was less than four minutes.
I took each frame in her perception for four minutes and looked at where her mind created the opposite.
So I said, "At that exact moment they're pulling you down into the car, who's trying to lift you up away from the car?"
"The guy that I dreamed about, the boyfriend."
"So that means you were being pulled down and lifted up?"
"Yes."
"And who is trying to hurt you and who is trying to keep you from being hurt? And who was forcing you to do something you didn't want to do, and who was doing something you wanted them to do?"
And I just took the pairs of opposites because our mind deals with sequential and/or simultaneous contrast.
When you have sequential contrast, you store that in a subconscious mind and you end up with all kinds of polarized perceptions and emotions. When we have simultaneous pair of contrasts, you liberate yourself into a superconscious state, a mindful state.
And all of a sudden, you realize there's nothing there except something to be thankful for.
So I went through and took every one of those frames in that four-minute segment and found out frame by frame by frame every one of the opposite things that went on.
And the moment we did, from somebody trying to constrain me, somebody set me free. All of the pairs of opposites, we went and balanced them all out. They were all there.
And I've done this God knows how many hundreds of times, thousand times. It's always there.
And people don't believe it, but you can't even perceive without perceiving contrast. That's how perceptions are.
And when you know how to ask the question, "Where's the other side of the contrast?" the story changes.
So I went through that. It took two hours to go through that entire thing.
And when we got through, I then said, "What's the benefit of this?"
She got her boyfriend.
And who came home with her? Who went to the hospital with her? Who's been her boyfriend ever since?
I said, "You got what you wanted. And if this hadn't happened, would you have gotten him?"
And she says, "I don't know. I wouldn't have had the courage to speak up."
"So did these people help you actually get what you wanted, the boyfriend that you dreamed of?"
"Yes."
"Did you get closer to your mother? You were alienating your mother and your father. Are they now closer to you?"
"Yes. I'm now able to say anything without them judging it."
I said, "What's that worth?"
She had tears in her eyes. She said, "What can I say? I got what I wanted. The very things that I was hoping for came about because of those people."
And I said, "Somehow the universe works in mysterious ways to help us become authentic and live by what's deeply meaningful to us and what's unconsciously going to be expressed. Wisdom is seeing that."
Anyway, we finished that and I said, "Now try to become panic. Try to create a panic attack."
She couldn't come up with it.
So I gave her a big hug and I said, "Thank you. Great job. You did a great job."
Her mother was just going, "That's it?"
I said, "She's not going to have any more panic attacks now. Stop the freaking medication. Tell that guy to go put it up his butt."
Yeah, labeling people and putting them on psychiatric drugs sometimes is useful in some cases, but not always needed if you know what you're doing.
So that was on a Friday. I did a presentation, the Breakthrough Experience, on the weekend, which is my signature program.
And then on Tuesday, I did a free evening presentation in London.
Front row, there was the mother and the daughter, and I didn't see them at first. Then I looked down and there they were.
And I came off the stage and I gave them both a hug.
I said, "So how are we doing?"
They put both their thumbs up.
"Not one panic attack. I just slept like a baby. I don't have any issues. Thank you. I can't believe that it's over with."
Brandi Fleck: That's awesome.
Dr. John Demartini: So don't put a label on things and say that it's an event out there. Take command of your life because people that are extrinsically oriented become victims of history.
People that are intrinsically accountable for perceptions and can realize that whatever is going on on the outside, there's a new interpretation of it, they can become extremely resourceful and completely transform their perceptions.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah.
Dr. John Demartini: Why not ask the right question? Whatever life's basically, the quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask. We are not asking the right questions if we're going to label things trauma, and I'm certain. I've been doing this a long time.
And people say, "Well, but what about..." Running your story is going to keep you stuck for the rest of your life. Transforming the story is going to liberate you and exemplify what's possible as a human being with resilience and adaptability.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah, becoming unstuck is really important. I mean, so I think you've given us a lot of examples of how to do that and talking about the opposites and perception and all of those things, so thank you for that.
I would like to sort of get to know a little bit more about you for a second. Does doing these events, like when you were in that prison and these things were happening, is there also a healing for you that goes on?
Dr. John Demartini: I don't know. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to watch lives transform, okay? That means a lot to me.
I don't care what the issue is. I can't say that all those issues are ones that I've experienced personally.
And so I don't know if it's a healing as much as it's an inspiration and it's a confirmation because I don't feel like I'm having to heal from something to do that. I feel grateful for the opportunity to watch lives change.
I get to watch it every day. I mean, I do this seven days a week. So yeah, it's a dream come true because I had a dream when I was a teenager to travel the world and research and write and teach and help people transform their lives.
Somebody helped me doing that at one time, and I've made a commitment in my mind that when I'm his age someday, I'm going to be doing the same thing.
And I'm not at that age yet. I'm 67. This guy was in his 80s, almost 90s. So I figure I've got another 20, 30 years, and maybe when I'm that age I want to pass the torch to another 17-year-old like he did to me.
So it's meaningful and inspiring and something to be grateful for. That is healing to any physiology, but it's not a healing of a specific event because there's thousands of different issues, and I don't have those experiences.
I have never been kidnapped, per se. Had fantasies of a girl that I liked kidnapping me, but it never worked.
Gratitude Journaling and Mindset Shifts
Brandi Fleck: All right. Well, okay, so let's pivot into gratitude journaling for a moment. How long have you been gratitude journaling?
Dr. John Demartini: Really formally, about almost 39 years.
Brandi Fleck: Okay.
Dr. John Demartini: But before that, it was not as structured and not as consistent.
The moment we started having an IBM Selectric typewriter with every erasable ball on the top where I could type it, and the first handy computer came out, it's when it became formalized for me. Then transferred that from floppy disk into finally the new drives and eventually onto things, and it's been with me ever since.
It's now 30 volumes, and some of those volumes are 900 pages. So there's thousands and thousands of pages of gratitude.
Brandi Fleck: Thousands. Yeah.
Describe for us what exactly gratitude journaling is, and is it a tool that can help someone change their perspective?
Dr. John Demartini: Well, what it does, I was told when I was 23 by a gentleman who had six PhDs. He was 35 years old. He was one of the brightest men I ever met.
He said, "Don't ever go to bed at night until you've reviewed your day, and anything in the day you can't say thank you for, review again and look deeper until you can find the order to it and then be grateful for it."
So at 23, I did that. So I was already doing gratitude processes. I was born on Thanksgiving Day. My mom, when I was four, told me to count my blessings because those that are grateful for what they got get more to be grateful for.
So it's been in my system all that time. And it was written down on little pieces of paper up until the time I put it on the IBM and the dot matrix, but it got formalized then.
So yeah, what I write down today, it's got more standardized. And what I've done now is: "Had the opportunity to..."
It started that way.
"Had the opportunity to meet this individual. Had the opportunity to go into this place. Had the opportunity to listen to this lecture. Had the opportunity to go to dinner with this individual. Had the opportunity to be challenged and criticized and look back and refine my procedures. Had the opportunity to travel around the world and happen to stop in this port."
You know, I live on a ship.
So "had the opportunity..." I usually start out that way, and that gives me some structure.
And then there may be other spontaneous things. Much of my gratitudes today are letters of thanks from my students. Today I got a notice that one of my students just died. He had a heart give out on him.
So the gratitude was having the opportunity to know this individual and learn from this individual and share with this individual.
I tried to reach his wife, but she's probably too busy. I just tried to reach out, and I want to say thank you for their contribution because they've been a student of mine for 37 years.
Brandi Fleck: Okay. Wow.
Dr. John Demartini: Yeah. So I do have gratitude for things, but most of it today is students. I mean, I could pull it up and show it to you if you want.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah, I was actually going to ask you if you could read us a recent entry to give us insight.
Dr. John Demartini: So here's one:
"Had the opportunity to find out my long-term friend and student Gene died today from Alexandria. Had the opportunity to consult with Mark Petrovic in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Had the opportunity to receive a lovely letter from my student Louise who's thanking me and saying what's happened in her life since she's been doing the work. Had the opportunity to get present Beyond Criticism, a worldwide presentation this morning. Then I had the opportunity to receive a great thank you letter from Laura."
So a lot of things are coming in from students on a daily basis.
Then, "Had the opportunity to receive a blog that I had done on love in its many forms."
And it just goes on and on.
There's a guy that sent me and said, "Look, when you're in San Diego, can you go surfing with us?" He sent me his surfboard. He says, "This is the surfboard..." and I'm doing that.
So I keep records as I travel, places I go. I do this every day, and it's just a running list pretty much.
Brandi Fleck: A running thing. Okay. It's a constant gratitude.
Dr. John Demartini: I mean, as I go and travel the world, thank you letters, experiences, podcasts, webinars, books I get to do, articles I get to write. I'm constantly...
That's an interesting one. I created Demartini underwear. That was for Italian Vogue. I put my name on it with John Malkovich. We sold it. We got Mick Jagger to do the music for the promotion.
Brandi Fleck: That's awesome.
Do you put dates on it? How do you keep track of when it all...
Dr. John Demartini: Well, I can put a date on it. I don't always date it every day. I could easily put it in because I know exactly what date it is, okay? But I don't know. I just keep it running.
Brandi Fleck: Okay, so this is ongoing.
Yeah, I was going to say, it doesn't have to be a super complex thing. It can be as simple as someone would want to make it, I would say.
Dr. John Demartini: Yeah.
Here's a guy named John Dimartino that came and sang here on the ship, and everybody thought it was me with a misspelling. They were thinking, "If he's going to play piano, I got to see this."
And it's another guy, but I took advantage of that. We had pictures taken.
Here's... I was up on the balcony of the ship and I looked out and here's the Milky Way. How about that?
Brandi Fleck: Beautiful. What a nice sky. Amazing.
Dr. John Demartini: Yeah. So I just have so much to be grateful for. I mean, I meet amazing people. I get to go to amazing places, and I believe that gratitude is the key to this thing, okay?
I don't miss a day. Never. Okay, here's my former girlfriend and my daughter. They're having dinner together.
Brandi Fleck: This is just amazing. So I think that you've given us a really good example of how to do this.
If someone wanted to just start gratitude journaling today, how long do you think it would take for them to start shifting their mindset?
Dr. John Demartini: Well, there's a basic law of psychology. If you don't fill your day with high-priority actions that inspire you, your day is going to fill up with low-priority distractions that don't.
It's called Parkinson's Law, and work always expands to fill the time allotted, is another way of saying it.
And the same thing: if you don't pay yourself first, you're going to have unexpected bills that will keep you from ever being able to pay yourself.
And if you don't fill your mind with things that you're grateful for, it's going to fill up with things that are ungrateful. It's that simple.
If you don't concentrate on how you want your life, it goes into what you don't want.
And if you don't empower yourself, you're going to be overpowered by others.
So there's a basic principle that if you don't take command and live by design, you're going to live by duty, subordinating to external sources and influences.
So I'm a firm believer in taking command of your space, taking command of your time, taking command of your resources, your energy and your material resources, and taking command of what you feed your mind and read.
You only have so many books in your life. I've read 30,600 books. I read a lot, but some people don't, and there's only a finite number.
You might as well select them and think about what you want to feed your mind. Do you want to feed it escapism or do you want to feed it something meaningful?
So I'm a firm believer that if you take the time to do gratitude, the more gratitude you fill your mind with, the less ingratitude you're going to be dealing with. It's that simple. It's not rocket science.
Fear of Death and the Psychology of Grief
Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Okay, what about the fear of death? I know before you have actually said to us, "Your fear of death is your infatuation with life."
But if somebody's grateful for their life and they love life, how would they combat fear?
Dr. John Demartini: It's different from infatuation.
Love of something is embracing both sides of it, okay? Infatuation is addiction to one side.
When you've got an oxytocin and vasopressin rush and you've got this bonding thing of an infatuation and a dopamine fixation, that's not love. That's an infatuation with a fantasy you have about it.
You're going to fear their loss. You're going to be jealous. The green-eyed monster is going to take over you because you're going to be frightened of losing them.
When you love somebody, you see both sides.
Think about somebody you've been with for a long period of time that you feel love for. They have things you like and things you dislike. Welcome to life.
So if you have a real balanced view on somebody, you're more resilient because neutrality doesn't fear the loss of the positive and doesn't fear the gain of the negative.
It's when you're highly polarized you feel the loss of the positives and the gain of the negatives.
Now, I've taken 4,000 people through death processes. Four thousand, including Kübler-Ross herself.
What's interesting is these people swear, "There's no way I'd get over this grief and this anxiety about it."
I give a money-back guarantee I can dissolve it, and most of it will take us three hours. Most of them are one hour and 45 minutes to two hours.
And they go, "What?"
I did that at Q University, and the professors, two professors that said it's impossible, I said, "Watch it."
And they go, "They just did it in front of our eyes."
I did it at three universities joined together in an amphitheater in Prince Edward Island. Three psychology departments from three universities, and I did it there in front of them, and they still couldn't fathom it because the paradigm is so antiquated.
The paradigm is animalistic, and animals are grieving because they don't know how to find meaning in things. They don't know how to neutralize things.
When you die, I guarantee you, the truth is you don't really want people to be grieving. You want them to get on with their life and live their life to the fullest if you care about them.
And so it's really a selfish act, really, and it's an animal behavior. And it's so standard that that's the way it was.
But see, I learned something different in 1976.
I was down in El Salvador, and all of a sudden I'm walking down the street. I'm down there surfing. I'm a surfer kid down there.
And all of a sudden a procession of 200 people, 300 people, are walking down the main street and they're celebrating and having a party. There's colorful shirts and whites and stuff.
And I go, "Qué pasa? What's happening here?"
"Oh, our mayor died. We're celebrating his freeing of his body into the spirit world."
And I go, "Oh, that's interesting. That's a new perspective."
So I followed them down there because I thought there's some free food.
And I went down to this place and listened to them. They were celebrating and having a party, and the guy was put in the ground, and it was a celebration.
Then I was over in Greece working with the woman that was once married to the Greek dictator, and there was a death in that family. It was two years of black covering their face.
Two years.
I thought, "Death. Complete polar opposite viewpoints."
So that means there must be some socialization component here. These are two different perspectives here.
And that started me on a journey to try to figure out how it was.
By 1984, I had developed an absolute science, guaranteed to dissolve it. And I'm absolutely certain about it.
And people... I've done it on TV, I've done it in university settings, I mean I did it in the Christchurch earthquake. I did it in the tsunami in Phuket, the tsunami and earthquake in Ishinomaki, Japan a few years ago. I was asked to do it in the China earthquake.
I'm absolutely certain about it, and people don't know it's available to them. They're just programmed by old paradigms and worldviews that are keeping them stuck.
And you really want to honor somebody, love them.
When you love somebody, they become present. When you're infatuated with them and they're gone, you grieve their loss. When you're resentful and they're gone, you relieve their loss.
When Soleimani, the Iranian dictator, died, when Trump knocked him out, five million people in Iran were grieving in the streets because he was a hero there.
To many of the people in America, he was a villain. He was one of the biggest terrorists. So people are celebrating it and going, "Wow, what a relief," in America over the same death.
It has nothing to do with what happens in the death. It has everything to do with the perceptions you have about that individual.
If they're a hero, you grieve the loss. If they're a villain, you relieve the loss.
Healing From Prolonged Grief
So what I did is I figured out the neurochemistry and how the psychology works and asked some questions and liberated people from this enduring, and by the way, prolonged grief symptoms cause cardiovascular problems, digestive problems, kidney problems. It goes on. Skin problems. There are a lot of health concerns of prolonged grief syndrome.
And supporting people in their grief is actually helping them cause illness in their body. But relieving it, and it's done in two hours, healing changes right on the spot.
I mean, I've seen it right there on the spot. We've actually demonstrated it. We've actually done tests on it. We've done heart rate variability, we've done things and shown the before and after in less than two hours in some cases.
Okay, so yeah, I'm pretty firm about it. People don't comprehend that until they see it. They don't believe it until they see it. When they actually see it done, they go, "Okay, now you got my attention."
Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Do you have videos on your website of some of these processes?
Dr. John Demartini: We show it in our training programs. We don't do it to the general audience.
Brandi Fleck: Okay.
Dr. John Demartini: We do it in the training programs that are facilitated. I've trained 7,000 people to do this, and they're now out there doing the same thing. They get the same results.
Because some people say, "Well, it's just you."
I had some psychologists in the back of the room one time, and they watched this done. They said, "Well, is that going to last?"
I said, "Follow it up for the next year."
They followed up for 18 months and found no grief at 18 months after we finished it in Japan.
And the psychologist six months later said, "So far, there has been no grief. Okay, you got my attention." He decided to come to the training program to learn how to do it.
Most of them just don't really want to know. They've got their blinders on. They don't even know because they make money off keeping people in their grief. I like to set them free, free them up, get it over with, and get on with life.
I'd rather have new clients and transform their lives than the same client working on the same issue for any period of time. That's ridiculous.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Where can everybody find your website and all of your interviews and all those amazing things you have out there?
Dr. John Demartini: Just go to drdemartini.com. And on there, you can do the value determination process to determine what's really important to you in your life because sometimes you lie to yourself without even knowing it.
And you can go on the media, and there are hundreds... I've done probably 10,000 interviews in my life. There's hundreds of radio, television, newspapers, magazines, podcasts, YouTube videos, all kinds of stuff.
So if you want to go learn, you're going to have to believe in reincarnation because it's going to take you four or five lives to get through it all.
Brandi Fleck: Awesome. Okay, guys, well go check out the show notes, get those links, go look at all those resources, and as always, it's been really nice talking to you today.
Dr. John Demartini: Yes, thank you for the interview again.
Explore More With Dr. John Demartini
Is Suffering Optional? How to Find Meaning, Purpose, and Gratitude in Life
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Hi, I’m the founder of Human Amplified. I’m Brandi Fleck, a recognized communications and interviewing expert, a writer, an artist, and a private practice, certified trauma-informed life coach and Reiki healer. No matter how you interact with me, I help you tell and change your story so you can feel more like yourself. So welcome!
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