Dr. Robert Leichtman is a physician, author, and intuitive who has worked for decades in the fields of mental health, energy medicine, and the ministry. He firmly believes that both psychology and spirituality are incomplete without the support of each other. Good mental health procedures need to include the use of our spiritual resources. Effective spiritual development must collaborate with the best of psychology to help build more mature attitudes, values, understanding, and coping skills.
Mainstream psychological ideas and practices can lead the way to connecting to our deep human and spiritual potentials, but only if they are oriented to healthy themes rather than the more common problem-based orientation. Slicing and dicing our traumas and the causes of our anxiety-depression or anger can easily trap us in perpetual victim consciousness. A health-oriented psychology can provide insights and methods that build healthy attitudes and coping skills. Instead of accepting our hurts and adjusting to suffering, it is possible to move beyond these limits and create the qualities which establish confidence, optimism, and competence in living.
As an intuitive, Dr. Leichtman has investigated various psychological states to discern the dynamic influence of the energies of thoughts and attitudes. He is firmly convinced that managing our beliefs and emotions requires a thorough understanding how to deal with our emotions and thoughts as subtle but powerful types of energy. These forces can exert a major impact on the health and welfare of our self and others. His observations reveal the deadliness of habits of chronic anger, guilt, fear, and despair. Expressing these emotions is far from safe or therapeutic because these activities actually increase these dark moods and diminish our wellbeing. Our resentment or disappointment about of bad experiences in our life can rapidly add to our distress and the conflicts associated with them. The energies of cheerfulness, hope, and confidence have the opposite effect of building health, confidence, and competence in living.
In his books, Psychic Vandalism and Psychic Self-Destruction & How To Reverse It, he describes in detail how the invisible energies of anger, grief, fear, and guilt are very real and powerful in their own dimension. They are created and increased by our use of them, and they can be focused and projected as figurative missiles to the people and situations that irritate us. As a consequence, many chronically angry people sabotage themselves as they engage in prolonged resentment and self-pity. They also are doing the equivalent of throwing “energy rocks of hatred” toward their adversaries who may respond by returning them to the sender.
A close study of these energy exchanges reveal that—while key people and events can hurt us a few times—our angry or mournful review of these experiences can also wound us even more. As we ruminate in despair or anger we are perpetuating these dark moods. Likewise, chronic discouragement drains the energy of thought and vitality from us, increasing our lethargy and tendency to feel helpless and useless. This is the type of self-destruction that each person must learn to control and replace with methods for building confidence, self-worth, and goodwill. These are the processes that can reverse the damage we can create for others and our self.
Dr. Leichtman believes far too much time is spent on analyzing our problems instead of fixing them. He has written several other books that describe the outlook and skills that are needed to cope with the loss of faith, hope, joy, and self-respect. These qualities are the basic building blocks for coping with and healing any type of stress or illness. These approaches are described in his book, Recovering From Death and Other Disasters.
Because genuine spiritual resources are of valuable in healing and for a successful life, it is essential to learn to work with our deep potentials for insight, peace, goodwill and courage. Faith and belief can only take us to the edge of this contact. We need intelligent knowledge and skills to actively pursue our connection to these higher qualities in us. Much of this information is described in his books, The Light Behind the Dogma, Building the Bridge to Heaven, and The Third Great Commandment.
