Alternative Health Blog

Get To Know Lynn Kesselman



Psychotherapist
cert. Chemical Dependency


Lynn Kesselman began his professional career as a research mathematician at Douglas Aircraft in 1960 where he worked four years on developing computer based models of laminated reactor shielding for organic cargo in outer space. As an adjunct to this project he also integrated thermodynamic models for rocket nozzle thermal stability, discovering in 1963 that it would be unlikely for the foreseeable future that rockets functioning in outer space could be fueled by fission reactor power. Lynn then turned his interests to computer applications in science and business, eventually founding his own software company Compumedia, Inc. in 1967. He remained a computer entrepreneur and consultant until 1978 when his interests turned to real estate development and law.


In 1978, Lynn founded a real estate investment and redevelopment company in Dallas, Texas, Appletree Construction, Inc., where he lost almost all of his money when the prime rate went to 21%. He then relocated back to New York City in 1981, where he purchased in its bankruptcy a fashion design and manufacturing company, Marvela Tennenbaum Designs, which he turned around and sold in 1982 in order to return to the real estate investment and redevelopment field. In 1985, Lynn founded Kesselman Consulting Group, which he operated in New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida, his base, until he suffered debilitating depression 1993-1995.

Lynn’s severe depression was brought upon him by a combination of factors: his first business failure, the betrayal of his best friend, and his failed marriage Looking back upon this experience, Lynn feels that he was progressively ground to despair by five long years of tireless but useless effort to save his business, and his realizations that his marriage could not provide him with the emotional support he needed and that his wife would surely leave him, as she did. When on July 15, 1995, when Lynn was ready to end his life, he suddenly realized that he was emotionally ill and needed help. This help came from a 12-step recovery fellowship which gave him the opportunity to talk about his feelings as he also tried to work the 12-step program of recovery. The comfort of being able to learn from those who had repaired their lives was very helpful to him, but it seemed to him that the 90% failure rate for the 12-step recovery program was no accident. Lynn resolved that if he ever truly understood the 12-step program of recovery he would write a book that would logically and simply explain it in a step-by-step way. In 1998 he accomplished this.

Lynn began his recovery on July 15, 1995, and restarted his broken professional life in March 1996 when he returned briefly to management consulting in Orange County, California. A few months later he was appointed President of DEAP International, a research and development company in the petroleum mining field. He then made the decision that his true interest was to help other people with broken lives recover and to learn the true causes and best treatment modalities for anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder including addictions. He later accomplished this as well.

Lynn established New Hope Village, a halfway house for alcoholics and drug addicts to which he retreated in order to work with suffering people and learn what his 1,500+ hours of classroom attendance at the American Psychiatric Association Symposia (1984-1998) couldn’t teach him; how to help people get truly well and not just medicate symptoms. In 1998, Lynn’s book “Recover With Me,” now regarded by experts to be a classic on 12-step recovery, was published. Lynn completely removed every bit of superstition, judgmentalness, and lack of logic and transformed the 12-step program into a user-friendly action-oriented manual for the use of others suffering as he had. But to him this was not enough because at its best the 12-step recovery program was leaving too many people still unhappy, unproductive, and relapsing. Lynn resolved to find a better program. Experience has shown that he accomplished this as well.

Lynn has always been fascinated by psychology and Bible studies, in addition to his life long professional development as a scientist. He was forced to accept that very few people became well by any method he could find and turned his attention to taking the best of all that was available to start his new recovery program. Suddenly, he had a breakthrough. This breakthrough is today called the Five Gates Training Program (patent-pending) with which he considers himself blessed to be able to bring healing to more than 80% of his clients, most of who are hard-core addicts, severely depressed and anxiety ridden people and sufferers of ADD, sociopathology, and narcissism. Because he is not an M.D. or a Ph.D only those who were given up as hopeless by all the other treatment options were those with whom he built, refined, and ultimately successfully developed and demonstrated a more than 80% recovery rate for sufferers who take the Five Gates Program.

Another remarkable, actually hard to believe fact is the speed with which his clients get well. Lynn attributes this to his complete rejection of the traditional “peel the onion” form of psychotherapy. He discovered that if all threatening and judgmental elements were removed and suffering were assisted in regressing through the client’s life events starting in early childhood, the “inverted pyramid effect” would clear the fear-producing core beliefs that were holding his clients prisoner and ruining their lives. Over the years Lynn has established two New Hope Villages, his television show “Joyful Recovery” and public demonstrations of his Five Gates Program for recovery centers, as well as his honor, Mayor Daly for the city of Chicago, served as a consultant to the Drug Court in Gainesville, Florida, lectured on Bible and Kaballah studies in both Christian and Jewish centers, and now is presenting his new book “Five Gates – The Science of Healing the Spirit” in order to give to the world how he has been able to help so many people who were considered to be hopeless cases.

The Five Gates Training Program, called “Training” in order to place the emphasis on self-therapy and self-management, and to remove the stigma often associated with “recovery” programs. The Five Gates Program is also noteworthy because it its exceptionally fast-acting and highly reliable ability to rectify the causes of anxiety disorder, clinical and milder forms of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (which he says includes all addictions), ADD, and many other fear driven symptomatic disorders of the dysfunction in reality processing which underlie each of these problems, even though he also acknowledges the organic nature of their effects on suffering clients. To Lynn’s knowledge no one has had a manic episode after completing the core training (first week) of the Five Gates Program.

Lynn Kesselman has expressed three major goals for the Five Gates Training Program. He wishes to open his first Five Gates Center in Orange County, California, where he would also like to open the Five Gates Institute, an internship program for new Five Gates Trainers. His third major goal is to open a free clinic in at least one major inner-city where it can be shown how the entire culture of a dysfunctional community can be transformed as the result of bringing healing and happiness to those who have been a major source of crime, suffering for children, and public expense.


for more information
Call Toll Free: (888) 551-4243
or write: Lynn Kesselman at Five Gates, The Science of Healing the Spirit