Breaking Free: How Dr. Leah Zitter Escaped Mental Programming and Created the As-Is Method
Episode #0017
Breaking Free: How Dr. Leah Zitter Escaped Mental Programming and Created the As-Is Method
Have you ever wondered how deeply your upbringing shapes the way you see the world? Not just your opinions or preferences, but the actual way your brain processes information?
That's exactly what Dr. Leah Zitter discovered on her remarkable journey from being raised in an isolated religious cult to becoming a behavioral neuroscientist with a revolutionary approach to rewiring the brain.
Born Into Isolation
Leah was born in London, England. Her family was part of a closed Jewish community founded by Holocaust survivors, including her grandparents. This community completely isolated itself from the outside world. This wasn't just cultural separation – it was total disconnection.
"I did not know that Margaret Thatcher was my Prime Minister or that I was even living in a country called Britain. This was up to my late teens," Leah explains. "We didn't speak English either. We were just totally in our own community."
In this environment, questioning was forbidden. When young Leah's natural curiosity emerged, her parents claimed she had "a bad spirit." Her school principal told her that "God gave me a man's brain as a challenge to suppress it."
Her punishment for asking questions? Being confined to her grandmother's attic for about a year.
The Window to Freedom
It was during this isolation that the first seeds of her liberation were planted. Looking out the attic window, she observed different groups of people – students from Catholic schools, Muslims with their distinctive dress, and members of her own community.
"I would imagine taking the clothes from this group, putting them onto the other, putting a fishing pole in the hands of the man from my group and a gun in the hands of the woman from my group," she recalls.
This simple mental exercise led to a profound realization: each person from these groups was programmed from childhood to spend their money a certain way, marry specific types of people, worship particular beings – all according to their group's rules.
"And then I began to think, well, maybe that's what's happening to me also. How can I know that what I've been taught is true or false?" This question eventually evolved into: "How can I know what is good for me and what is not good for me?"
Programmed Like ChatGPT
Through her later studies in neuroscience, Leah came to understand that humans are literally programmed by their environments.
"Each and every one of us are literally programmed, just like ChatGPT you could say, are literally programmed by the rules, the methodology, the lifestyle of the group that we're brought up in," she explains.
This programming isn't just about behavior – it's about our entire worldview:
"Not only was my brain programmed into what is good and bad for me, but also what is true and false, what my goals should be, where I come from... my whole perspective was programmed into me."
The Escape Journey
Leah's path out wasn't straightforward. After being pushed to marry within the community, she eventually managed to escape with her children, despite attempts by her family to kidnap her sons.
She fled to remote Virginia, where she faced new challenges: "I knew nothing about the outside world. I didn't know how to use a bank then. I had no connections... I didn't have a car, I didn't know how to drive."
Despite these overwhelming obstacles, Leah never considered returning to her former life. "Never, never," she says firmly. "Because you see, now I'm in control of my life. If I would go back, it's like going back to being a robot."
Instead, she focused on building a new life – starting a business, earning a PhD in behavioral neuroscience, and developing what she now calls the "As-Is Method."
The As-Is Method: Seeing Reality
Through her studies and personal experiments, Leah discovered how emotional triggers prevent rational thinking. When we're emotionally triggered, our amygdala gets flooded with brain fluid, preventing our prefrontal cortex (the rational part) from thinking clearly.
Her breakthrough came when she learned about semantic research showing that breaking down emotional concepts into their component parts allowed for more rational processing. For example, when shown the word "LOVE," people had emotional reactions, but when shown just the letters "L-O-V-E" separately, they could think more rationally.
Leah applied this principle to her own triggers. When seeing someone who resembled people from her former community, instead of reacting with panic, she trained herself to see the person simply as shapes: "his nose is a triangle, his eyes are vertical, his beard is like this."
This is the essence of the As-Is Method – taking the mental models programmed into us and breaking down external stimuli into basic facts, separate from our emotional associations.
Rewiring the Brain
Can our brains actually change after years of programming? According to Leah, absolutely yes – but it requires several key steps:
Change your environment: "As long as you stay in the old environment, you're going to be exposed to the same triggers, and those same cells are going to be entrenched."
See things as they really are: Focus on the actual physical reality in front of you, not what you've been programmed to believe about it.
Repetition creates new neural pathways: "Constantly, over and over again, seeing things as they are entrenches those cells, makes connections, deepens them."
This process creates what Leah calls "upward neuroplasticity" – building new neural pathways – while simultaneously causing "downward neuroplasticity" as old thought patterns fade.
Cultural Understanding Through Brain Science
Today, Leah applies her understanding to build bridges across cultures. She recognizes that everyone's brain is programmed differently based on their upbringing.
"I understand that when they grew up, it has wired their brains in a certain way. So they perceive the world, they see things in a very different way than I may do."
This awareness helps her connect with people from vastly different backgrounds without judgment. She compares it to how our stomachs get used to certain foods:
"When the person's brain has been reared on cultural food for 20, 30 years of its life, and it's fed different kinds of stuff, usually the brain spits that out. That's called myconformation – when the brain likes to accept things that it's used to."
The Path Forward
For those trapped in limiting belief systems or struggling to adapt to new cultures, Leah offers this perspective: breaking free doesn't mean losing yourself.
"They need not lose their old self. They are just developing, maximizing their potential, maximizing their lives."
She likens her method to the 1980s movie "They Live," where special glasses revealed hidden messages in advertising. By seeing past our programming, we can make choices that truly benefit us instead of blindly following what we've been taught.
The Power of Leaving
When asked what advice she would give to someone in a situation like hers, Leah doesn't hesitate:
"I would just tell them to leave their environment because the longer they are in that environment, there's no chance for them, it's virtually impossible for them to change."
It's a simple but profound message: sometimes the bravest thing we can do is walk away from everything we've known, toward a future where we can finally see the world – and ourselves – as we truly are.
Have you ever had to break free from limiting beliefs or adapt to a new culture? What techniques helped you see things more clearly? Share your experiences in the comments below.
