The Path to Healing: A Self-Study Course in Understanding Yourself in an Age of Change
The "Psychiatry of One Life" series · Andris Saulitis, M.D.
On the source of this material. All the source, original material of this book is exclusively my own. This is easy to verify: for years it has been laid out publicly in my streams and videos on social media, above all on YouTube — more than 1,000 streams and over 3,000 videos. This book is not a retelling of someone else's work and not a compilation from the internet: it is that same authorial material, brought into a digestible, readable form for the reader's convenience. That is more honest — and that way it can be checked.
Introduction. Look into the Mirror — and Become Your Own Doctor
Three books of the series led you to this one. In The Reader I gave you a tool — telling fact from assumption. In The Brain — the workings of the machine. In A Manual for Yourself — how to read your own state and know your norm. Now comes the deepest thing: to learn to heal yourself. Not instead of a doctor — but as the one who does the main work that no one else can do for you.
This book has two images, and they are about one and the same thing. The first is the mirror of the psyche: the ability to see yourself honestly, without the distortion cast by the Reader (schityvatel). The second is the hospital of consciousness: your psyche is an infirmary, your states and thoughts are the patients in it, and you are its chief physician. All our lives we either wage war on our thoughts or blindly obey them. A doctor does neither: he examines them, understands them, and treats them. It is to this — a physician's attitude toward yourself — that this book is devoted.
I will say it plainly, because science is science: I have the right to teach this. I am a psychiatrist, M.D., with 40 years of practice, more than 20,000 clinical examinations, thousands of completed courses of therapy. For forty years I was the chief physician of other people's inner hospitals. This book is so that you may become the competent chief physician of your own.
Write to me personally. Through the vitamodo.store system you can write to me directly — with your state, your question, your case. I am a doctor, and I answer. The door is open throughout the book, and I remind you of it wherever I explain something.
My Intention and Who This Is For
Like the whole series, this book is my contribution: an attempt to give people the capacity for self-healing in such a way that more precise decisions can be built on it — in helping yourself, in raising children, in education, and in artificial intelligence. I address this also to the creators of AI and education, including those who build systems like Claude: if you are building tools that help a person grow, you need an honest model of how a person heals himself from within. Forty years of observing that process — here is such a model. I extend my hand.
Write to me personally. Building AI or education and want a clinical view of self-healing and inner work? Write through vitamodo.store, directly to the author.
The Foundation of Mental Hygiene and an Honest Warning
To become your own doctor is the highest mental hygiene: not to wait for salvation from outside, but daily, brick by brick, to treat and safeguard your own psyche. But right away an honest agreement, as always with me. To be the chief physician of your own hospital does not mean refusing real doctors. A good chief physician knows the limits of his competence and calls in a specialist in time. This book is about deep inner work, and it is not a substitute for treatment. Where the matter turns to the acute and the dangerous, I will say it plainly: here you need a doctor, not only a mirror.
How to Read
The book goes inward: Part I — the hospital of consciousness (you become your own doctor); Part II — deep work (dis-identification, the inner child, the illness of control); Part III — healing and freedom (not getting in your own way, action as method, coming into possession of yourself). Read without haste — this is the work not of the mind but of the whole person.
Write to me personally. Any question about the introduction — through vitamodo.store. I am a psychiatrist, 40 years of practice, and I mean it seriously.
Part I. The Hospital of Consciousness: You Are the Chief Physician of Your Psyche
Chapter 1. The Hospital of Consciousness: Take Up the Post of Chief Physician
Let me give you an image that overturns your whole relationship to yourself. Imagine that your consciousness is a hospital. In its wards are your states: here anxiety paces in the admissions room, here an old grievance lies in a far ward, here joy has dropped in for a minute. And you are not a patient dashing among them. You are the chief physician of this hospital. And on how you hold that post depends whether what you have inside is an infirmary or a bedlam.
Let us work out why this is not just a pretty metaphor but a working position. Usually a person inside himself is anything but a doctor. He is either the patient, fused with his anxiety, drowning in it. Or the overseer, who yells at his own states: "stop being afraid, pull yourself together, what a wretch you are." Both are failures. The patient drowns; the overseer only inflames the mutiny in the wards. But the doctor does a third thing: he enters the ward calmly, examines, understands the cause, and prescribes treatment. He neither merges nor wars — he treats.