Dr. Robert F. Mullen
Director/ReChanneling

Numbers generate contributions that support scholarships for workshops.

“Dr. Mullen is doing impressive work helping the world. He is the pioneer of proactive neuroplasticity utilizing DRNI—deliberate, repetitive, neural information.” — WeVoice (Madrid)

Philautia

Healthy philautia is an integrative platform specifically designed to address the deficit of self-esteem caused by our dysfunction or discomfort, and the disruption in human development. While healthy philautia is synonymous with self-esteem, it illustrates that narcissism and self-esteem are opposites on the same spectrum, which helps strategize recovery.

Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is mindfulness (recognition and acceptance) of our value to ourselves, society, and the world. Self-esteem can be further understood as a complex interrelationship between how we think about ourselves, how we think others perceive us, and how we process or present that information.

Self-esteem deficits are the consequence of disapproval, criticism, and apathy of influential others—family, colleagues, ministers, and teachers. Any number of factors impact self-esteem including our environment, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, and education.

• Our negative self-image is generated by our deficit of self-esteem.
• Self-esteem administers and is determined by our self-properties. Positive self-properties: self -reliant, -compassionate, -confidant, -worth, etc. Negative self-properties: self -destructive, -loathing, -denigrating, etc.
• Our positive self-properties tell us we are of value, consequential, and desirable. 
• Our intrinsic self-esteem is never fully depleted or lost; however, underutilized self-properties can be dormant like the unexercised muscle in our arm or leg.
• Self-esteem impacts our mind, body, spirit, and emotions separately and in concert. Mindfulness of this complementarity is important to emotional and behavioral control as we learn to subvert the distress of one component by engaging another.
• We rediscover and reinvigorate our self-esteem through exercises designed to help us become mindful of our inherent strengths, virtues, and attributes. 

We achieve this through an integration of historically and clinically practical approaches that serve as focused revitalization tools for self-esteem by recognizing and replacing negative self-perspectives and behavior. 

How emotional dysfunction impacts self-esteem. 

The vast majority of dysfunctional onset (or susceptibility to onset) happens during childhood/adolescence, negatively impacting the development of self-esteem. This is best illustrated by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which reveals how childhood physical, emotional, or sexual disturbance disrupts natural human development. The perception of detachment, exploitation, or neglect disenables the child’s safety and security as well as the sense of belonging and being loved, which impacts the acquisition of self-esteem. The adult symptoms and characteristics of the dysfunction continue or augment that deficit. 

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Maslow’s Hierarchy

Illustrating how childhood disturbance subverts the satisfaction of self-esteem.

Why Healthy Philautia? The Greeks categorized love by its objective. For philia, the objective is comradeship, eros is sexuality, storge is familial affection, and so on. Philautia is the dichotomy of self-love: the love of oneself (narcissism), and the love that is within oneself (self-esteem). 

Narcissism is a psychological condition in which people function with an inflated and irrational sense of their importance, often expressed by haughtiness or arrogance. It is the need for excessive attention and admiration, masking an unconscious sense of inferiority and inadequacy. 

Healthy philautia is the recognition of our value and potential, the realization that we are necessary to this life and of incomprehensible worth. To feel joy and fulfillment at being you is the experience of healthy philautia, and such feelings cannot be bound. Accepting and embracing our self-worth compels us to share it with others and the world, to love and be loved. 

The deprivation of our fundamental needs caused by our dysfunction detrimentally impacts our acquisition of self-esteem. It is not lost but hidden, undeveloped, and subverted by our negative self-perspectives. The rediscovery and rejuvenation of self-esteem are essential components of recovery. ReChanneling advocates and utilizes a Wellness Model over the etiology-driven disease or medical model of mental healthcare. The Wellness Model emphasizes the character strengths and virtues that generate the motivation, persistence, and perseverance to function optimally through the substantial alleviation of the symptoms of dysfunction. 

Among the integrative approaches utilized in the reacquisition of self-esteem are:

• Positive personal affirmations and CBT. Positive personal affirmations and the cognitive aspect of cognitive-behavioral therapy utilize DRNI, the deliberate, repetitious, neural information input of positive thought and behavior to replace the toxicity generated by our dysfunction. Neuroplasticity increases activity in the self-processing systems of the cortex, which counteracts the negative input that threatens self-esteem. The behavioral component of CBT involves activities that reinforce the process.
• Proactive neuroplasticity. Our neural network responds to stimuli by transmitting the hormones that sustain and provide us comfort and pleasure. Deliberate repetitious stimuli compel neurons to fire repeatedly causing them to wire together. The more repetitions, the stronger the new connections. Hormonal rewards of comfort and pleasure motivate us to continue the repetitive practice that, over time, reconstruct our brain’s neural pathways. 
• Mindfulness is a state of active, open recognition and acceptance of present realities. It is the act of embracing our flaws as well as our inherent character strengths, virtues, and attributes. Mindfulness is the key to re-engaging our positive self-properties that constitute healthy self-esteem.
• Abhidharma presents a clear system for understanding our psychological dispositions, processes, habits, and challenges. The Buddhist psychology of the eightfold path is a profile of the requisites for rational living. Right views, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration have an additional implicit component, that of making the right choice. Evidence suggests we experience a physiological reaction when choosing to do something irrational or self-destructive because it conflicts with our inherent awareness of what is beneficial to ourselves and our community.
• Positive psychology can be defined as the science of optimal functioning. Its objective is to identify the character strengths and virtues that generate our motivation, persistence, and perseverance to recover. Mindfulness of our attributes generates the psychological, physical, and social well-being that buffer against dysfunction. The objective is to achieve our potential, becoming the best that we can be. Research shows that positive psychology interventions improve overall well-being and decrease physiological distress in persons with anxiety, mood, and depressive disorders.
• Recovered memory process is utilized to recall hidden memories and the emotions they embrace. Our dysfunction sustains itself on our irrationality and negative self-perceptions. It encourages us to repress feelings, thoughts, and desires unacceptable to our conscious mind, storing them in the archives of our memory. It is useful to retrieve and address the emotions hidden in these repressed memories.

The rediscovery and revitalization of self-esteem is an essential part of recovery and cannot be second-tiered. Due to our dysfunction and subsequent disruption in natural human development, we are subject to significantly lower implicit and explicit self-esteem relative to healthy controls. One-size-fits-all methods are inadequate to a multiple-pronged approach. Our recovery practicum incorporates activities such as roleplay, interactive exercises, and games. Clinically-proven self-esteem exercises, questionnaires, and scales are utilized. Utilizing the platform of methods outlined, we collaboratively create a blueprint that emphasizes our inherent strengths, virtues, and attributes to implement the crucial reacquisition of self-esteem and its positive self-qualities.

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