Depression can be hell. Basically three scenarios contribute to depression. The first is an identity crisis. Example: John, my client, (referred to me by his doctor), sheepishly looked at me and said, “I just can’t get the energy to get up from bed in the morning. As I look at my 90 yr. old mother I know that in just another twenty years or so my body will look like hers. And what’s worse whenever I visit her she says, ‘I just want to die and get it over with.'”
He went on to say, “We all observed President Regan, a powerful man, reduced to the limitations of Alzheimer’s disease. At one time in my life I thought I’d become a successful business man and instead I am now retired owing a lot of money with a only a few nest eggs that will never make me rich. One of the commentators in the movie The Secret said the purpose of life is what we make it. It seems to me that my purpose has come and gone. Some people owe me money and I doubt that I’ll ever receive it. Yet, I have to ask myself why it matters anyway? There are a lot of people that would give their ‘eye teeth” to have what I have. They would ask, ‘Why’s he depressed, he is CEO of his own company that runs itself, has a beautiful young fun-to-be-with wife, and a gorgeous home that many would die for…?'”
It’s easy to see that John was in the midst of an identity crisis brought on by his semi retirement. He had relinquished control of his business to someone else and unlike most clients who are in denial, he acknowledged he was depressed and felt guilty for being depressed. He noticed that no mater how much he fought it, it persisted.
The second scenario that leads to depression is that with many clients there is a love hate dichotomy. There’s a person or situation which for some reason (for a variety of reasons) they feel that they should like but in reality they hate the situation or person and can’t allow themselves to acknowledge or feel the hatred.
Example: After Lyn’s mother passed away, her father came to live with her and her family. Strangely though, as a child she hated her dad and in many ways blamed him for his mother’s passing. I found it quite ironic that she’d take him in and asked her how she feels about her father today. Her answer was, “You’re supposed to love your father, aren’t you?”
Her inability to resolve this conflict of feeling led to her depression.
Back to John. I had him list all the reasons why he shouldn’t feel depressed. Some of them were:”I feel like I’m an ingrate.””It’s no fun.””I don’t even like being around myself.”
The third scenario that contributes to depression is a string of stressful events (situational depression) such as change in supervisors (from a good one to a bad one), financial loss, uncertainty in business, worry… It’s easy for some of these to be connected with identity crisis, but generally when the stressors are resolved or disappear, the depression lifts.
On a physical level, among several dietary recommendations, I had John add Vitamin B complex, Vitamin D, and Magnesium Citrate to facilitate the production of tryptophan. Tryptophan is instrumental in the creation of serotonin.
Next we worked with his sudden loss of self esteem. And, rather than continue the path of fighting depression I taught John how to embrace the emotion of depression, acknowledge his resistance to it and practice option training.
Option training is for him to remind himself on a regular basis that he has options such as learning from the experience, benefiting somehow from it, moving beyond it, generating new interests…
After the third session of option training he said, “I received a photo of a toddler my cousin just adopted–it was angelic. I placed it on the dining table where every time I looked at it I smiled. Then other things began happening. I began picking up tid bits of wisdom from the things I read. Sometimes I actually forgot what it felt like to be depressed and the times I do feel depressed, I stopped resisting it and simply went with it. As I stopped fighting it I generated some enthusiasm to do something.”
But what really contributed to his depression was that he knew the man who he chose to operate his company was not the right man for the job. The company was not going in the right direction and eventually by terminating that employee and taking back the reins of his company he lifted a tremendous weight from his being.
Look at the word “Depress ed” It’s like a weight depressing one–the weight being the pressures of life. He wanted the employee to work out but it didn’t. He lost control of his company and didn’t like it’s direction and by taking back the reins the depression was “lifted.” Actually the weight that held him down was lifted.
In summary, conquering depression is to:1. Acknowledge being depressed.2. Learn to embrace the emotion.3. Acknowledge the resistance to feeling depressed. 4. Aim the creative intelligence for options.
This along with creative hypnosis releases the subconscious mind to find enthusiasm and meaning in life to lift depression.
