Although each of the three spheres (Self, Intimacy and Achievement) is fundamental to the experience of well-being or happiness, the central and most difficult challenge for adults is the struggle to become and remain close in a close interdepenent relationship.

Our capacity to love grows with us.  As an adult, the most interdependent and meaningful human relationship is the couple.  As this relationship has an intellectual, emotional and physical dimension it has the potential for the greatest level of human intimacy. Conversely when this adult relationship fails, disappoints or is lost altogether, it becomes the most important source of stress, pain or suffering.

Find Love, Marriage Intimacy, a Happy Close Relationship

To love a man or woman in a couple relationship is not easy.  It encompasses the capacity and willingness to give and receive acceptance, dependence, commitment, concern, affection, love, companionship, sensual pleasures and sexual excitement.  After the initial stages of ‘infatuated love’ or ‘passive fusional love,’ relationships require effort.  An individual will encounter defenses or stress symptoms in oneself (anxiety, anger, physical symptoms, depression or sometimes psychosis) and in one’s partner as he or she becomes far closer in the nine elements of intimacy (love definition).

When defenses are too strong, a breakthrough in intimacy may require the help of a third party.  To achieve a closer relationship than ever before, one has to be open to a new experience of intimacy that goes beyond our traditional experience of passive love.

New Love Definition

Intimacy or closeness goes far beyond understanding better marriage communication.  It is not just how you communicate in a close intimate relationship, but what you communicate that is important (see love definition).  To understand our fear of rejection or getting hurt in close intimate relationships is not enough.  We must overcome our defenses (anxiety, anger, physical symptoms, depression or psychosis) provoked by increasing levels of intimacy.  It is only after breaking through in all nine elements of intimacy at a far greater level than our previous best, that inner transformation and a release from stressful symptoms occurs.

The experience of breakthrough intimacy is life changing.  It does far more than save marriages.  Intimacy is central to an individual’s quest for inner well-being (peace, friendliness, physical health, happiness and mastery).   For this reason, in Lifetrack therapy breakthrough intimacy is an integral part of marriage or family therapy, as well as a fundamental experience in all individual therapy with adults.

Intimacy: Largest Impact on Human Psyche

Dr. Ishizuka has found that regardless of the problem (self, intimacy or achievement), working on the intimacy sphere (a close intimate relationship) creates the largest impact on the human psyche.

Even if the problem arises in the self sphere (being in touch, at peace and in control of the self) or the achievement sphere (difficult job, work goals, the desire for work first, the compulsive need for weekend work, loss of a job), intensive work on human intimacy can create a breakthrough in all three spheres of one’s life.

Intimacy Increases Self and Achievement More than Direct Work on Achievement Sphere

In fact, despite the many reasons people come to see a psychiatrist (they are as varied as your imagination will allow you to suppose), Dr. Ishizuka has found that working intensively and almost exclusively on the intimacy sphere produces the most dramatic and long-term change–particularly on a person’s sense of self and achievement.  To examine the four stages of transformation through intimacy and its effect on self and achievement read Stages of Inner Transformation.

There is something about human intimacy at a much higher level that has a profound healing effect.  This baffling phenomena convinced Dr. Ishizuka that a close loving relationship is the critical factor in experiencing individual happiness and optimal adjustment.

Self and Achievement must Catch up to Rising Intimacy

Although intimacy is an important lever for fundamental personality change, alone it is not sufficient to sustain internal adjustment.  A sense of self and achievement must catch up with a high level of intimacy for well-being to be experienced and maintained.

Breakthrough Intimacy Eliminates Symptoms

Breakthrough intimacy (closeness beyond a previous best) eliminates symptoms by making them unnecessary.  This is done by repeatedly focusing on improving closeness until defenses such as anxiety, anger, physical symptoms, depression or psychosis disappear altogether.

To succeed one must help both individuals in the couple, regardless of the person who initially sought help.  Breakthrough intimacy consists of getting the couple several times closer than their previous best (or when they were happiest).

Success entails helping the couple overcome symptoms on both sides, to attain a much higher level of intimacy where defenses such as anxiety, anger, physical symptoms, depression or psychosis become unnecessary.  Symptom elimination of anxiety, anger, physical symptoms, depression or psychosis is a by-product of a successful Lifetrack therapy, but it is neither its goal nor the criteria by which it measures its result.

Copyright © 2010 Lifetrack Corporation

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Dr. Yukio Ishizuka was born in 1938 in Hakodate, Japan.  He experienced WWII as a child and grew up during the American occupation.  It was a time of cross-fertilization of ideas of East and West.

In 1961, he entered Keio Medical School in Tokyo, where he taught himself English and founded the Japan International Medical Student Association (JIMSA) with the support of Dr. Taro Takemi—the long-standing President of the Japanese Medical Association and a well-respected physician and nuclear physicist.  Upon his graduation from Keio, Ishizuka informed Dr. Takemi of his plans to pursue post-graduate training in the United States.  “You should not return to Japan,” advised Dr. Takemi.  Yukio Ishizuka understood that he was being set free.

In 1965, the young graduate left Japan to complete a rotating internship at Jefferson Medical College Hospital in Philadelphia.  The following year, he was one of 25 physicians accepted for residency in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center of Harvard Medical School.  Elated, Dr. Ishizuka took a trip to Europe on a two-week discount ticket, spending much of his savings in the process.  During this trip he fell in love with a French woman, Colette, who would follow him to the US several months later, marry him, and inspire much of his work.

Towards the end of his residency in Boston, Harvard Professors Elvin Semrad and David Riesman encouraged Dr. Ishizuka to undergo further training in psycho-analysis.  Dr. Ishizuka briefly considered going to Mexico City to study under Erich Fromm.  Unconvinced, however, that psychoanalysis could enable people to become healthier and happier, he left psychiatry and was hired by McKinsey, and international business consulting firm.  After several years of consulting for McKinsey in Paris, Amsterdam, Toronto, and New York, he did mergers and acquisitions.  It was during his fourth year of mergers that one of his work colleagues became depressed.  Dr. Ishizuka’s rewarding experience helping his friend led him to return to the field of psychiatry in 1976.

Having been taught to approach complex problems as a whole by defining and measuring ‘objectives’ critical for organizational survival and success, he returned to his own field eager to understand the existing criteria for positive mental health.  Instead, he found a growing list of mental diseases and disorders (Diagnostic Statistic Manual of Psychiatry).  Whether one suffered from anxiety or depression, successful psychiatric treatment demanded the elimination, reduction, or containment of disease.  To be healthy is not to be sick.  There was little if anything on positive mental health, well-being, and happiness.

At that time, Dr. Ishizuka remembered the work of the American psychologist Maria Jahoda, who in 1958 published “Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health.”  The monograph introduced guidelines for the evaluation of models of positive psychology.  Unfortunately, in 1976 little work had followed.  No model of positive psychological health was developed or tested with patients.  It was his mentor, Dr. Jack R. Ewalt, the man who was in charge of the study by Jahoda, who pushed him and others not to give up on health.  As Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Ewalt continued to challenge his students to question prevailing medical doctrine and conceptions on health by learning directly from patients, rather than using their own words to define and treat illness.

Dr. Ishizuka, drawing both on the East and the West, his experience in psychiatry, and most importantly, his patients, developed a science of health.  That paradigm incorporates both an understanding of the mind in distress and optimal well-being.  Over the years, he used and tested the model with different nationalities and people from all walks of life.  Rather than examining stress, disease, and illnesses, Ishizuka asks different questions of his field: What is the objective of therapy?  What does it mean to be well? How do we measure wellbeing as a part of a cycle of life?

The model of human personality and experience that he developed incorporates man’s search for self, the need for intimacy and the quest for achievement.  It also incorporates peak positive and negative experiences and an understanding of physical health.  The tripod model has withstood the demanding criteria put forth by the American psychologist Maria Jahoda in 1958 on “Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health” for the creation of new models of health defined in positive terms.  Dr. Ishizuka’s work helps us to build health far beyond a previous best level of health, happiness and optimal adjustment.  Working to overcome a fear of the unknown, he has defined and quantified the subjective nature of wellbeing and one working model of positive mental health and human personality (objective subjective).

Dr. Ishizuka’s has been using, refining, and testing the model of positive mental health with over 2000 patients in the last 35 years of his daily practice.  With a good sense of humor, a great sense of balance, and over 40,000 session hours examining millions of graphs on health and happiness, he has fine tuned a science of health and well-being.  His approach on healthy human beings has been presented to numerous fields including economic man, war/crisis/health, national health, Japan and organizations.

Today through his busy private practice, he continues the work that Dr. Ewalt incited him and other residents to undertake.  He hopes that insights that arose during Lifetrack therapy can contribute to each person’s life purpose ; the experience of much higher levels of self, intimacy and meaningful achievement.   Through this website and future books he hopes to share with other psychiatrists, psychologists, practitioners, academics, and most importantly the general public.

Dr. Yukio Ishizuka graduated from Keio University Medical School, Tokyo, Japan in 1964.  He completed his residency in Psychiatry at Mass Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School in 1969.  He is the founder of Japan International Medical Students Association (JIMSA), which received the coveted Japanese Health Culture Award in 2007 by the Minister of Japanese Health at the Japanese Imperial Palace. Happily Married for 44 years with three children, he is also a member of the Salmagundi Club of N.Y. as a resident artist.

Visit the Positive Mental Health Foundation to support a study of human beings at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

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Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, A Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist presents a new model of Health and Happiness. Explore a science of happiness, the cycle of life, life purpose, objective subjective, stress types, and a life way that integrates both East and West.
http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/about/yukio-ishizuka/

Happiness and Health, Excellence and Well-being
Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, a Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist who left psychiatry to work at McKinsey (management consulting) and later mergers and acquisitions, returns to his field with a new question: what does it mean to be well?   Explore individual and organizational excellence and wellbeing.
http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/about/yukio-ishizuka/

Happiness and Health
Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, A Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist presents a science of happiness, a new life way or life purpose.
http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/about/yukio-ishizuka/