their troubled thinking calms down. When this happens, according to HR, people also gain access to common sense, and they can tap into the universal capacity for creative problem solving or "inner wisdom." Anecdotal reports suggest that, when a person grasps the understanding behind HR in an experiential way, an expansive sense of emotional freedom and well-being can result. Health realization as therapy In contrast to psychotherapies that focus on the content of the clients' dysfunctional thinking, HR focuses on "innate health" and the role of "Mind, Thought, and Consciousness" in creating the clients' experience of life. The HR counselor does not attempt to get clients to change their thoughts, "think positive", or "reframe" negative thoughts to positive ones. According to HR, one's ability to control one's thoughts is limited and the effort to do so can itself be a source of stress. Instead, clients are encouraged to consider that their "minds are using thought to continuously determine personal reality at each moment." HR characterizes feelings and emotions as indicators of the quality of one's thinking. Within the HR model, unpleasant feelings or emotions, or stressful feelings, indicate that one's thinking is based on insecurity, negative beliefs, conditioning or learned patterns that are not necessarily appropriate to the live moment here and now. They simultaneously indicate that the individual has temporarily lost sight of what HR asserts is his or her own role in creating experience. Pleasant or desired feelings (such as a sense of well-being, gratitude, compassion, peace, etc.) indicate, within the HR model, that the quality of one's thinking is exactly as it needs to be. HR holds that the therapeutic "working through" of personal issues from the past to achieve wholeness is unnecessary. According to the HR model, people are already whole and healthy. The traumas of the past are only important to the extent that the individual lets them influence his or her thoughts in the present. According to HR, one's "issues" and memories are just thoughts, and the individual can react to them or not. The more the clients' experience is that they themselves are creating their own painful feelings via their own "power of Thought," HR suggests, the less these feelings bother them. Sedgeman has compared this to what happens when we make scary faces at ourselves in the mirror: because we know it is just us, it is impossible to scare ourselves that