An interview with Barry Neil Kaufman

Reprinted from Science of Mind Magazine

By Ron Nelson

Science of Mind: You and your wife Suzi teach what you call the "Option Process." What exactly is it?

Barry Neil Kaufman: "Basically, the Option Process is a totally nonjudgmental approach to personal growth that helps people confront their problems and come to accept themselves as their own best source of solutions to those problems. It is based on an attitude of complete acceptance which we describe as 'to love is to be happy with.' This means you decide to love other people - and yourself too, of course - by being happy with them just as they are, without needing to change them in any way, although you certainly could want and try to help others to be all that they want to be for themselves. And that's the essential nature of what we live and teach at the Option Institute, whether we're working with individuals, groups, or families."

How has this process of unconditional loving affected your own personal life?

BNK: "For my wife Suzi and me, it has been a magnificent and insightful gift which we have used to transform ourselves and our personal lives - even in the face of tragedy - and to help others to do the same. I feel a sense of wonder that something so beautifully simple could yield such powerful results."

Is there a spiritual component in the Option Process that helps it to be so effective?

BNK: "In my view, being happy and unconditionally loving to yourself and others is the same as loving God. If I decided to really take God into my heart, to love God, what would my consciousness be like? I think I would be accepting and non-judgmental of myself and everyone else. I would just love unconditionally.

"There's a wonderful story which illustrated that. In one part of the Old Testament that was discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there's a different version of Moses receiving the ten commandments from God than the one we're accustomed to. In this translation, God says to Moses on Mount Sinai, if you take me into your heart, this is what will happen: you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not commit adultery, you shall honor your mother and father, and so on. They weren't commandments at all, but descriptions of how a person would be if he truly took God into his heart. And that's the way we are when we unconditionally love ourselves and others."

How did you and your wife come to learn and then teach the Option Process?

BNK: "We were living near New York City, where I ran an advertising agency. Although I was very, successful financially, inside I was angry, confused, and just plain miserable. As a result, I suffered from frequent headaches which sometimes literally blinded me. In my confusion and unhappiness, I searched for answers endlessly outside my myself, mainly by taking courses in many different subjects. One day, I met a university professor who was to become a very important teacher for both Suzi and me, although I must admit that he didn't exactly look the part. He was profoundly overweight. He was a chain-smoker. And he seemed to be addicted to carbonated soda. But he had an extraordinarily childlike and impish demeanor. When I asked him once why he looked and behaved as he did, he laughed and said that if he looked like someone who was special, a "perfect person" then what he had to say and teach might appear unattainable to most people.

"I was very attracted to his ideas, particularly, about searching for the solutions to my problems within myself instead of out in the world. Over a period of years, he taught Suzi and me that each one of us is a creature of our own beliefs, and that if we change those beliefs, we can change the kind of creature we are. And we learned how to do that. The Option Process is based on his teachings, and out of gratitude for his help in changing our lives, we began to teach it to others."

You are probably best known for your work with autistic children, and particularly your own son Raun, as a result of the television special based on your book Son-Rise. What is autism and how do you treat it?

BNK: "Autism is the label applied to children who totally withdraw into themselves. They are literally encapsulated inside their own world. They have no eye contact or rapport with other people. They spend endless hours spinning in circles, rocking back and forth, or flipping their fingers in front of their eyes. They are considered functionally retarded, with IQs of 30 or less, and they usually don't develop any speech capability. They're viewed as uneducable and incurable.

"That description fit our on Raun exactly when he was just over a year old. When Suzi and I first became aware of Raun's condition, we went on a search for medical help across the country. But we were given no hope that he would ever develop into a normal human being, and we were advised to institutionalize him. During our search, however, we had seen so many autistic children being treated in unbelievably inhumane ways in various institutions, that institutionalizing Raun was the last thing we wanted to do. So we decided to try helping him ourselves, using the attitude of unconditional love that we were teaching in our Option Process program and trying to practice in our own lives."

How did you work with Raun?

BNK: "For more than three years, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, Suzi or I would be with Raun during every waking hour, trying to let him know in a variety of ways that he was okay and we loved him just the way he was. Instead of making him conform to our world, which is the approach we saw taken in most institutions we visited, we literally joined him in his world. When he spun in circles endlessly, we spun in circles with him. When he sat for hours flipping his fingers in front of his face, we did the same. When he pushed us away and spurned our affection, we just loved him without touching him. And gradually we watched this mute, totally non-involved little boy change into an extroverted, highly verbal young man with a demonstrated IQ of 150. Today he's in the ninth grade in public school. He has been a straight A student for five years, and so gregarious and involved with life that if you met him you would never know that he was once diagnosed as classically autistic."

How do you account for this transformation in the light of the traditionally accepted medical opinion that autism is generally incurable?

BNK: "I think Raun cured himself. What Suzi and I did was to rebirth him by creating a safe, loving environment that allowed him to somehow seek and find his own healing answers. You see, we live in a culture that says. "Ask the doctor, ask the lawyer, ask the teacher, ask the president. But don't ask yourself, because you don't know a thing.' So what we did with Raun, and now do with other people who have catastrophic problems, is to help them take their own personal truth out of the hands of others and take charge of it themselves.

"One of my favorite quotes is the line that's attributed to Jesus: 'The Kingdom of God is within.' You hear that a lot, but most of us continue to run around looking for answers to our life problems outside of ourselves. My experience is that if we can create this unconditionally loving environment where we can find our own answers, that will take us a lot further toward harnessing our own power and healing energy than any external answer could."

Since you helped Raun, you've worked successfully with many other children who have suffered from autism of other catastrophic problems.

BNK: "Yes, and with their parents, too. In fact, a significant part of our work is with parents and siblings, as well as with the special child. We have found that the parents are often the child's best resource, not only for their insight and understanding, but also for the drive, determination, and devotion they bring to the child's problem. This is essential for real change and healing.

But the most significant thing we provide is a loving, accepting, and happy, environment for the child."

Can you give me an example of this?

BNK: "Yes. Several years ago, a woman named Paula contacted us about her young daughter Mimi, who appears to be the first person in medical history to be born anorexic, that is, without the apparent will to eat and to stay alive. When Paula first discovered this about her infant daughter, she was naturally concerned and consulted her doctor, who immediately put Mimi into a hospital. For the next four years, this seriously undernourished little girl received the most bizarre series of medical treatments you can imagine. She was fed intravenously.

She was force-fed with a tube down her throat. She had a tube surgically implanted in her side leading directly into her stomach. And all this time, Mimi was consistently resisting all those efforts to feed her. It was as if she somehow knew exactly what was best for her, but of course nobody could believe that. Finally, the doctors recommended that Mimi be moved to a nursing home, where they expected her to die shortly.

"At that point, Paula learned about the Option Institute and asked if we could help her, In our first interview, I realized that Paula was totally committed to getting Mimi to eat and to keeping her alive, as any parent would be. And I told her if we could help Mimi at all, it would not be by forcing her to eat. We were only interested in helping Mimi do what Mimi wanted, and if that meant no eating, and subsequently dying, was Paula prepared to accept that? In other words, was it okay with Paula if Mimi didn't eat? Well, Paula was not ready to accept that, but she was open to learning how to accept it. So Paula and Mimi came to the Option Institute.

"When I first saw Mimi, she looked like a little emaciated doll, about half her actual age, with sunken cheeks and dark circles under her eyes. She didn't talk or participate in any way. She just wasn't available. For three or four weeks, we worked with Mimi simply by being with her in an unconditionally loving, accepting way, trying to make non-judgmental contact with this little person. Meanwhile, Paula continued to force-feed Mimi, because we were not about to tell Paula how she should deal with her own child. It soon became obvious that, for the first time, Mimi realized she was with people who were not interested in force-feeding her, and so she began reaching out to us, while still literally pushing her mother away.

"At the same time, I was having sessions with Paula, and she was gradually coming to believe that perhaps she could let Mimi decide what was best for herself. One morning she told me she had force-fed her daughter for the last time. Paula had decided she would be a more loving mother if she could let go of Mimi, let go of the feeding, and let her die, something that would have been inconceivable for her just a few weeks before. And at almost the same moment Paula made that decision in another building on the property, Mimi reached for her first piece of food, calmly put it in her mouth. and chewed and swallowed it just as if she had been eating normally all her life. Within three months, Mimi was eating three to five meals a day all on her own. It was the most amazing sight to see this little child, who had seemed like such a locked door, be totally unlocked by a shift in her mother's attitude, which somehow created a very different environment."

Tell me more about how you work with children like Mimi.

BNK: "We begin by observing where the child is. If the child is nonverbal, or is not reached by outside stimulation, or is having physical difficulties such as motor problems-whatever it is-we try to observe it and catalog what we see. How is the child moving? What is he capable of doing? What is he interested in doing?

"Once we've answered these questions, we design a program within the context of the Option attitude of total acceptance and non-judgment that involves the entire Option Institute family in a nurturing and unconditionally loving way. Such a program is built around what the child seems to be interested in. So each program is really child-centered and child-directed. If we had a child who wasn't capable of speaking or reading, for example, we wouldn't necessarily set up a priority that we had to teach that child to speak or read. But we might notice that the child was fascinated with doorknobs or how desk drawers work. The program might begin around that natural interest as a way of nurturing the child's own curiosity, so he begins to learn from his own motivation and sense of wanting to know something. In doing that, we've seen children who couldn't talk at all begin talking within three or four months of starting such a self-stimulating program.

"One two-year-old child who came here with his family was diagnosed as deaf, blind, and suffering from cerebral palsy. This child didn't do anything, didn't move, didn't respond in any way. We decided to just suspend all our judgments and beliefs about the child's condition, and treat him as if he were totally aware in the same way you and I are. We cooed with him, played with him, rubbed him, stimulated him, tickled him, and just expressed our acceptance, joy, and love for him in all kinds of little actions. both verbal and nonverbal. Within two days, the child was following us with his face and eyes, and responding in ways that his diagnosis said were impossible for him to do.

"Instead of assuming he couldn't respond because of his condition, we approached him the way any child would, with that childlike sense of awe and unknowing. We became like little children ourselves, and when we did that, the most amazing and unpredictable things began to happen.

"You see, most of us are taught to believe that the past shapes the present. That's worldly logic. But my experience is that the past really isn't relevant in this moment unless you believe it is. By dropping the past, which is really a kind of illusion anyway because it's all just a compression of ideas we carry in our heads, we can make new choices right in the moment and the past does indeed become irrelevant."

What about all of the theories of child development that say the first few years of life shape who we become for the rest of our lives?

BNK: "That's simply not our experience. Let me tell you about two of the children we've adopted. When Ravi came to us at the age of five from Colombia, South America, he hardly spoke at all, he went to sleep standing up, and he had been diagnosed as psychotic. Well, I guess he had a right to be psychotic. When he was three and-a-half, his mother died and his father tried to kill him by slitting his throat twice from ear to ear. Somehow he survived that, and he was placed in an orphanage. Then he came to our attention.

"When Suzi and I picked him up at the airport, we felt an immediate bond to him. We had already adopted him, sight unseen, and I was going to be his father.

Well, I put him up on my shoulders walking through the airport and I remember experiencing all the feelings of fatherhood to this total stranger. For me it was a real affirmation of the idea that love is a decision we make. I had decided I was going to be Ravi's loving father.

"Anyway, we worked with Ravi in our unconditionally loving way for three or four months and he responded. Today he's nine years old and one of the strongest and most verbal of our six children. He gets straight A's in school and he's doing just wonderfully.

"The other example is Tayo, who was born in the jungles of South America. He was apparently abandoned when he was very young, became seriously malnourished, and was put in a hospital. He couldn't move in many of the ways an infant his age would be expected to, which suggested that he had possible brain damage. So here was a little boy who, for the first year and a half of his life, had no stimulation whatsoever and was nutritionally and emotionally deprived.

"We worked with Tayo pretty intensely for more than a year. Now he's eight years old. His teacher doesn't know what to do with him because he seems smarter than all the other children. He absorbs information so quickly the teacher has trouble keeping him interested. He's doing marvelously. He's extraordinarily curious and into everything.

"So here are two children whose early histories were totally against them. Throw-away children, I call them. They probably shouldn't have survived at all, but since they did, they should be dull, retarded, and loaded down with problems, according to the child development theories. Yet here they both are today, living wonderfully fulfilling lives and doing just great."

You have obviously experienced unconditional love as a very powerful force for good. Can so-called "ordinary people" learn to express this kind of accepting, non-judgmental love in their lives?

BNK: "Yes, and I'm glad you said 'so-called,' because my experience is that there are no ordinary people in the world. We are all unique, wonderful beings, with all of the answers for our own lives within us. We are all our own experts, if we can just learn to accept that. We call the Option Institute 'a place for miracles,' and most people think that refers to what we do here. Actually, it refers to the people here, and by extension, to people everywhere. We are all miracles, just as we are."

Does the Option Process help people get in touch with their inner perfection?

BNK: "The Option Process offers a way of discovering the path to happiness that lies within each one of us. Basically, there are three steps, three building blocks to happiness, I call them. The first is an awareness that I want to be happy. That may sound simplistic, but very few of us ever seem to make that statement clearly and directly to ourselves. Over the years, I've worked with people who have beaten small children, who have killed others, who have embezzled, who have left their families. And in all that time, I've never found anyone who didn't want to be happy.

"Second is the acknowledgment I can be happy. Somehow that's an amazing thing for people to say. We haven't been brought up to believe we can be profoundly, irrevocably, continuously happy. So when we remind ourselves that it is indeed possible, it can be very exciting and life affirming.

"Third, I simply decide to do it. I let go of those old messages that say, 'I don't deserve it, it's just not possible,' and all the rest of what the world teaches us... and I just do it.

"Now the weak link in this is that middle step. For most of us, to really believe 'I can be happy' is a major shift in our perspective. We have to change the way we see ourselves and the world, and all through history, shifting the human perspective usually comes with great travail and a grinding of gears. We're so attached to our current way of seeing things that we resist change, sometimes to the death. That's what all the wars in history. have been about, all the suffering and religious sacrifice, all the angst the history of mankind is filled with."

How does the Option Process help people make that shift in their perception?

BNK: "The Option Process begins by placing the person in the presence of a totally loving and accepting counselor or mentor. In many cases, this is the first time that the person has ever experienced such total respect and support from another human being. Within that uniquely supportive relationship, the Option counselor gently and without judgments helps the individual find his own best path. It's not a teaching process where advice or interpretation is given. Rather, the Option Process celebrates each person's absolute uniqueness and respects his ability to find and implement his own solutions.

"Basically, what people discover by exploring themselves through the Option Process is that unhappiness is based on judgments and decisions they can change when they realize that their unhappiness doesn't work for them. It's a process of self-understanding and re-choosing. But it requires a willingness to change attitudes that have been held for a long time.

"Let me make it really dramatic. If you get cancer tomorrow, could you possibly see that as a potentially useful opportunity? If you lose your business or get fired from your job, could this be an exciting new possibility? If your wife or husband leaves you, or your child turns his back on you, could this be transformed into a profoundly marvelous learning? Now that might sound wildly unrealistic. And yet, over and over again, we have worked with people who have been able to convert such apparently difficult and 'tragic' experiences into joyful and life affirming events. When we hold onto our unhappiness and see such things as bad, difficult, or impossible, we create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. See it as bad and it will be bad. But when we let go of those judgments and see ourselves as capable of being happy in spite of what's happening to us, then we begin to see opportunities and possibilities that never occurred to us before. It can become a delightful adventure.

"Did yon ever notice that when you see something as being good, you have all these warm, exhilarating feelings! You really give yourself a certain kind of happy experience. But when you see something as bad, awful, hurtful, then you create another kind of experience, which you call discomfort, tension, anxiety, or unhappiness.

"One way out of this up-and-down pattern is to decide not to judge things any longer. If that seems like an unattainable ideal, then perhaps you can take a step toward it by deciding to only judge things in one direction. If you know that when you judge something as good, you feel good-and when you judge it as bad, you feel bad-then judge everything as good. That needn't mean that you become insensitive or uncaring, or some kind of a Pollyanna, but simply that you have decided to see the people and events in your life in a new and positive way. You will probably be happier and more loving, and embrace life more energetically."

Is it actually possible to put that into practice in the real world of injustice and suffering?

BNK: "Let me tell you about one of our experiences with that. Suzi and I have worked in South America and seen many children who were nutritionally deprived, emotionally deprived, even dying. Many of these kids would have just one thing on their mind whenever they saw us. They would crowd around us and shout in Spanish, 'Be my Mommy, be my Poppy, take me home with you.' When I tell this story to people, they kind of shudder or grimace and say, 'That must have been an awful experience.' But that wasn't the way we saw it. Instead of finding it terrible and unjust, we chose to see kids who knew exactly what they wanted and weren't bashful about telling us. Because we did not judge their situation as 'bad,' we were free to be genuinely, playful with them and try to help them in whatever way we could. As a result, our experience was utterly joyful. And we also took one of those children home with us.

"I think it's possible to see good in even the worst events and situations, although I'm certainly not saying it's always easy. But for myself, I find that if I'm looking for that good, even it I don't understand it completely, I'm more likely to find ways to at least live comfortable, with what I might otherwise call bad and untenable.

"My experience in observing myself and other people is that when we call something bad, wrong, or evil, we make an enemy of it and limit our ability to understand it, deal with it, and perhaps change it. But if we come from a frame of mind in which we are happy with everything and everyone, and especially happy with ourselves, then the possibilities for change are literally unlimited. In other words, miraculous change does not come from being unhappy with ourselves,

but from letting go of all the things we think make us unhappy and just deciding to be happy no matter what happens."

Does that imply you are not committed to getting results with people who come to the Option Institute for help?

BNK: "No, not at all. We are intensely committed to helping people create what they want for themselves. The paradox is that while we accept and even embrace the current situation -whether it's an impaired relationship, a stalled career, a physical disability, a special child, or whatever -at the same time we also harness our own creative resources to make a difference and facilitate change.

"The important lesson is that my happiness does not depend on that change. I can be happy now while I am still in the process of making the changes I wish to make. Perhaps that is the ultimate liberation.

"I am very aware that what Suzi and I did for our son Raun, we actually did for ourselves. Raun didn't ask us to take him out of his closed-in private world and bring him into ours. He didn't even know our world existed. But somehow we were able to trust in the idea that this mute, one-and-a-half-year-old little person knew somewhere inside himself what was best for him. And we were able to create an environment of unconditional love in which he could manifest that answer for himself.

"So the miracle is not that someone may be cured at the Option Institute. The miracle is that we human beings can actually extend and respond to unconditional love in wonderful, miraculous ways. Jesus said, 'As we become like little children, so we enter the kingdom of heaven.' And perhaps that's the real lesson for us all."