Robert F Mullen, PhD
Director/ReChanneling

Subscriber numbers generate contributions that support scholarships for workshops.

The distinction between social anxiety disorder and social anxiety is a matter of severity; reference to one includes the other. The recovery tools and techniques provided are applicable to most emotional malfunctions including depression, substance abuse, panic disorder, ADHD, PTSD, generalized anxiety, and issues of self-esteem and motivation. These malfunctions originate homogeneously, their trajectories differentiated by environment, experience, and the diversity of human thought and behavior. 

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

The Character Resume

“Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power,
but in character and goodness. People are just people,
and all people have faults and shortcomings,
but all of us are born with a basic goodness.”
– Anne Frank

A character resume is a written compilation of our positive qualities, achievements, and memories. Mindfully retrieving and cataloging these qualities compels us to embrace our value, confirming we are desirable, consequential, and worthy.

Mindfulness is recognition, cognition, and acceptance of reality, as opposed to an opinion or belief lacking evidence or foundation. Self-esteem is mindfulness of our value to self, society, and the world. The trajectory of our negative self-beliefs disrupts the development of our positive self-qualities. This, then, erodes mindfulness of our inherent and acquired character strengths, virtues, and attributes. Fortunately, these qualities are not erased but misplaced, lost, stolen, or compartmentalized away from our consciousness.

The definition of recovery is regaining possession or control of something stolen or lost. In social anxiety and comorbidities, what has been stolen or lost is our emotional well-being and quality of life.

Insufficient Satisfaction of Needs

Self-esteem can further be understood as a complex interrelationship between how we think about ourselves, how we think others perceive us, and how we process and present that information. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs reveals how childhood disturbance and subsequent negative self-beliefs disrupt our emotional development by denying us satisfaction of certain fundamental needs.

Core beliefs of abandonment, detachment, exploitation, and neglect subvert certain biological, physiological, and emotional support. This lacuna negatively impacts our self-esteem which we express by undervaluing our positive qualities. Again, this does not signify obliteration, but diminishment or latency due to inactivity or suppression. 

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Purpose of the Character Resume

In his examination of anxiety and depression, Aaron Beck, the pioneer of cognitive-behavioral therapy, maintained that social anxiety provokes feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and unworthiness. The concept of undesirability revealed itself in our SAD recovery workshops. Until we commit to recovery, we continue to be manipulated by these destructive self-beliefs. 

Again, to emphasize Sun Tzu’s words of wisdom, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” I am continually amazed at how little SAD persons know their symptoms. It is as if, by ignoring them, they do not exist or will somehow go away. Ignorance is a major impediment to recovery. How can we fix something if we do not know why it malfunctions? How do we regenerate our character qualities if we remain blissfully unaware of what they are? Thus, the value of the character resume.

An objective of recovery is to become mindful of our inherent and acquired character strengths, virtues, attributes, and achievements. This includes mutual consideration of our shortfalls, as well. Again, we are repairing our brokenness.

Elements of a Character Resume

What goes into our character resume? The simple answer is anything and everything that stimulates a positive personal response including our successes, achievements, contributions, personal milestones, talents, charitable deeds, and happy memories.

How does building a character resume support our recovery?

Overwhelming Negativity

Childhood disturbance generates negative core beliefs that influence our intermediate attitudes, rules, and assumptions. These attributions produce a cognitive bias that compels us to misinterpret information and make self-destructive decisions. Since we humans are hard-wired with a negativity bias, we already respond more favorably to adversity. Add our SAD symptomatology and our neural network is replete with toxic information.

We convey this in our thoughts, behaviors, and the words we use to express them.

Throughout our lives, we are consumed and conditioned by adversity. SAD sustains itself through our negative self-beliefs and image. By the age of sixteen, we have heard the word no from our parents, roughly, 135,000 times. Some of us use the same unfortunate characterizations repeatedly. It is not just the words we say aloud in criticism and conversations. The self-annihilating words we silently call ourselves support our adverse thoughts and behaviors.

Additionally, we are continuously impacted by outside negative forces over which we have limited to no control, such as life’s vicissitudes, physical deterioration, and subjected hostilities.

Our neural network is replete with negative information. A character resume is a constant, visual reminder of our value and significance.

Utilizing Our Character Resume

The primary goal of recovery from social anxiety is the moderation of our irrational fears and anxieties. This is best achieved through a three-pronged approach. To (1) replace or overwhelm our negative thoughts and behaviors with healthy, productive ones, (2) produce rapid, neurological stimulation to change the polarity of our neural network, and (3) regenerate our self-esteem.

These comprise our overall strategy.

Replace

The goal is to replace or overwhelm our adverse thoughts and behaviors with positive ones. Our character resume is constructed with our positive qualities, achievements, and memories. It is these attributions that replace the abundance of negative self-beliefs acquired throughout life. These qualities that were lost, misplaced, or compartmentalized, are retrieved and recognized through recovery approaches, e.g., personal introspection and inventory, memory work, cognitive comprehension, and other tools and techniques. They are subsequently input into our character resume.

Restructure

Proactive neuroplasticity produces rapid, neurological stimulation to change the polarity of our neural network. Our brain receives around two million bits of data per second but is capable of processing roughly 126 bits, so it is important to provide substantial information. DRNI is the deliberate, repetitive, neural input of Information. A deliberate act is a premeditated one; we initiate and control the process. Repetition accelerates and consolidates neural renewal and connectivity. Information that is sound, reasonable, goal-focused, and unconditional determines its strength and integrity. The information we assemble in our character resume generates the most efficient words and statements to accelerate and consolidate the process of neural restructuring.

Regenerate

Regenerate means to renew or restore something, especially after it has been damaged or lost. The qualities that comprise our self-esteem have been misplaced, lost, stolen, or compartmentalized away from our consciousness due to the disruption in our psychological development.

The process of regeneration in recovery is supported by clinically practical tools and techniques designed for the process. Also, the three goals or strategies of recovery – replace, restructure, and regenerate – are complementary and mutually interactive.

What Goes Into our Character Resume?

Some of the entries into our character resume include our positive personal affirmations, rational response to our ANTs, affirmative visualizations, character strengths, virtues, and attributes rediscovered through various exercises, retrievable happy memories, and self-esteem attributes from various inventories.

One additional and equally important benefit of a character resume is the constant and renewed reminder of what we have complied on the written page. It is an invaluable resource to moderate those situations that may continue to generate automatic negative thoughts, behaviors, and other adverse self-beliefs.

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