Dr. John Demartini's Values Determination Process: The Black Sheep View

You Are Not Living Your Values. You're Living Someone Else's.

Here's the contrarian truth almost nobody in wellness wants to say out loud: most of your "health goals" aren't yours. They're injected — by a parent who praised thinness, a culture that worships hustle, a partner who shamed your appetite, a doctor who told you what "normal" looks like.

When you try to execute on borrowed values, your nervous system fights you the whole way. You self-sabotage. You "fall off the protocol." You burn out and call yourself lazy. You're not lazy. You're misaligned.

That's where Dr. John Demartini's Values Determination Process becomes one of the most clinically useful tools we've ever met.

What Is the Demartini Values Determination Process?

The Values Determination Process is a 13-question audit Dr. John Demartini developed to surface your true hierarchy of values — the actual, demonstrated priorities your life is already organized around, not the ones you think you should have.

It works by examining what you spontaneously fill your space with, where your money goes, what you think about, what you talk about, what energizes you, what you're disciplined about. The pattern reveals itself. You don't get to pick your values; you uncover them.

Why We Studied With Him

We're integrative practitioners. We could have stayed inside functional medicine. Instead, we sat in Dr. Demartini's Breakthrough Experience — twice — and then went deeper into the work over years of self-study and live trainings.

Why? Because we kept watching Foundation members do everything "right" — perfect labs, dialed protocols, clean diet — and still get derailed. The missing variable wasn't biochemistry. It was values misalignment. They were chasing a body, a relationship, or a career that wasn't actually theirs to want.

Once we layered the Values Determination Process onto our intake, the no-show rate dropped, supplement compliance went up, and outcomes accelerated. People weren't fighting themselves anymore.

How We Use Values Determination Inside Integrative Medicine

Conventional medicine treats the body like a machine. Functional medicine adds systems thinking. Integrative medicine adds mind, emotion, and lifestyle. Black Sheep adds values architecture.

Here's the stack:

Layer	What It Surfaces
Labs (DUTCH, GI-MAP, OAT)	Biochemistry and toxic burden
Genomics (DNA Precision)	Predispositions and detox capacity
Psychosomatic mapping	Emotional patterns held in tissue
Values Determination	The internal hierarchy driving every behavior

When all four layers agree, change becomes inevitable. When they disagree, the body wins — and people relapse.

The Three Patterns We See Most Often

1. The "Should" Patient. They list health as a top value. Their actual life shows them prioritizing work, family, and image. Their cortisol pattern reflects the contradiction. The fix isn't more discipline — it's restructuring how health serves what they truly value.

2. The Borrowed Body. They want a physique their partner, parent, or social feed admires. The metabolic resistance is fierce. We use Demartini's process to either reclaim the goal as authentically theirs or release it without shame.

3. The Misaligned Career. Chronic illness often correlates with vocational mismatch. When the work doesn't honor the top three values, the immune system pays the rent.

The Black Sheep Difference

Most "mindset" work in wellness is fluffy affirmation theater. Demartini's work is the opposite — it's surgical, philosophical, almost mathematical. It doesn't ask you to believe anything. It asks you to observe what's already true.

That's why it pairs so well with root-cause medicine. We don't tell members what's wrong. We hand them the tools to see clearly. The body reveals biochemistry. The Values Determination Process reveals architecture. Both are root cause.

Why We Made the Documentary

We're producing a documentary on Dr. Demartini's body of work — because most people will never sit in The Breakthrough Experience, and that's a tragedy. Film can carry the methodology to the people who need it most: chronically ill, chronically stuck, chronically misaligned. (Read more: Why We Filmed the Demartini Documentary.)

Try It on Yourself

You can run the Values Determination Process on yourself today. Start with these prompts (the full 13 are in Dr. Demartini's book The Values Factor):

1. How do you fill your personal space?
2. How do you spend your time?
3. How do you spend your energy?
4. How do you spend your money?
5. Where are you most organized?
6. Where are you most disciplined?
7. What do you think about?
8. What do you visualize?
9. What do you talk to yourself about?
10. What do you talk to others about?
11. What inspires you?
12. What goals have you set that consistently come true?
13. What do you love to learn about?

The first three to five themes that repeat across answers — that's your real value hierarchy.

Where This Lives in Our Work

• Free Health Assessment → — 5 minutes, blind-spot map
• Foundation Program → — root-cause medicine with values architecture built in
• The Demartini Method explained → — the emotional resolution technique
• Why we studied with Demartini → — the origin story

Stop Chasing Someone Else's Health

The fastest health intervention nobody prescribes: figure out what you actually value, then build the protocol around that — not against it.

That's the Black Sheep way. It's also why our members stay.