The one thing that people who have been perusing the fields of therapy and self-improvement have in common is that they all have something about themselves that they want to handle, resolve, change or improve. We refer to such things as “unwanted personal conditions;” which can be expressed by a person in two different ways:
1. Something that is present but is not wanted, such as an individual’s issue with anger or fear.
2. Something that is not present but is wanted, such as an ability that a person desires.
It may not seem to make sense categorizing a desire to attain an ability as an unwanted condition, but usually, if a practitioner asks a client if there is anything that holds them back or gets in their way from achieving or demonstrating that ability, the client comes up with more than one unwanted condition to be addressed. One of the primary discoveries is that an unwanted condition is the “property” of some identity, and that by properly addressing the identity the unwanted condition can, in most cases, be easily resolved.
These are called ‘personal’ unwanted conditions because they will be absolutely unique for each person, and can only be handled by that person. We couldn’t take up something that isn’t personal. For instance we couldn’t take up ‘the trouble with the economy’, but can certainly address ‘my fears about the trouble with the economy’.