Showing posts with label Pain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pain. Show all posts

Sunday, 25 July 2010

Emotional Healing – Can You Find the Courage to Observe Within?

Have you ever seen a ‘back to the floor’ television programme where the senior manager of an organisation has decided to pose as a lower-level employee in order to see how things are really working out on the ground-floor of their day to day business?

Usually these managers would make their emotion-free decisions by looking at graphs and reports filtered and distorted by lower level staff in the organisational hierarchy.  What will be missing from those reports are all the little things – the faulty water cooler; the angry employee forever upsetting customers; the stink in the customer waiting room created by who-knows-what in the ventilator.

In almost all cases of these television programmes the senior manager willing to experience the nitty-gritty of the ground-floor comes away with a wealth of ideas and having a greater respect for those staff who operate ‘down below’ in the organisation.

They usually also see where their own previous attitudes and instructions, or a lack of them, dispensed to their lower-level staff have caused the problems they now have to resolve.

With a much clearer view of what needs to be done they commit to a complete turnaround in approach.

We celebrate their adventure as an act of bravery and maybe sit there thinking ‘that is what all management need to do’.  Yet not all senior managers do this – because they do not wish their minds to be changed.  Having our mind changed in this way is almost always a painful experience.  This applies to all of us when it comes to facing up to the realities in our lives.

When a senior manager goes back to the shop-floor they expect to be made uncomfortable yet are willing to do it because they associate discomfort with the sharp and necessary learning curve to be followed if their organisation is going to improve.

Not only does the senior manage undergo a change process – so does the ground-floor work force who feel a mixture of relief, mutual respect and a wish to help the senior manager further by changing the way they themselves function operationally. 

Often when the benefits of this way of working come to fruition the approach is cascaded to all other managers as a permanent change in organisational culture.  But the decision has to start at the top.

The same thing happens when we take our Conscious Point of Focus down to the level of our Unconscious Mind to observe what goes on down there when facing up to an emotional disorder.

Observation is everything.

Not just observation of the things you observe, but of the way in which you observe yourself, as you observe.  Let me ask you a question here: are you aware of the viewpoint from which you currently observe your emotional system and do you think it gets the job of making you happy done?

Put yourself in front of that television programme as you watch the manager mixing with staff on the ground floor.  Do you admire what the manager is doing?  Most likely you do.  Not often we see senior managers willing to face reality in this way, is it?

Now imagine that you watch yourself in the same way - observing what you are willing to do in order to position yourself so you can see your internal reality as it really is.  This is your self image – your view of yourself that decides whether or not you admire and like how you go about observing your inner world - or not.

When you do not admire the way you observe, because you see yourself as a ‘manager who runs away’, you develop a lack of self-confidence and a poor self-image.

When you watch the manager in the television programme taking these risks, feeling their embarrassment and being changed as a result, do you have greater confidence or less confidence in them?  Do you think of them as being stupid or courageous?

This is where confidence in emotional healing comes in.  Not from always getting things right but from having the knowledge that when things do not feel right inside you have the courage to take your Conscious Point of Focus, your brain-changing attention system, inwards so you can observe first hand what is going on.

Strangely enough, despite the emotional pain or maybe because of it, as you watch yourself taking the risks necessary to ensure the overall ‘organisation’ called you gets back on track towards becoming happier you actually end up really liking yourself into the bargain, emotional problems or no emotional problems

Once you discover that taking your Conscious Point of Focus into the centre of your emotional pain causes beneficial change to happen merely as a result of being willing to go there and observe no matter what, you become more determined to do so again in the future – and do it much earlier so you can avoid the hard slog that results when you do not do this for long periods of time.

What goes wrong in the relationship between your Conscious and Unconscious when they refuse to come together on a regular basis?

Basically the same types of things that happen when senior managers and ground-floor workers in an organisation fail to communicate effectively.  They:

  • start interpreting information incorrectly
  • develop a non-accepting attitude to each other and believe neither knows what is really going on producing a sense of overall mistrust and lack of confidence
  • work to different value systems and
  • become entrenched in unhelpful viewpoints, which they fight to hold onto when external change demands new flexibility.

In order to undo all this you have to take your Executive, planning brain down into your Unconscious ground floor brain.  You do this by entering the emotional responses being presented by your Unconscious Mind – by allowing the feelings to come through.

Now you start to:

  • Re-interpret life events in such a way as to reduce their emotional impact on you (for example if you blame yourself for a life event over which you had no real control you can start to see this and let yourself off the guilt-hook)
  • normalise and accept even the most intense emotional experiences (my favourite metaphor for emotional disorders is they are like broken legs: undesirable but normal; if they were not normal we would not be able to have them)
  • re-prioritise your value systems (for example make your emotional happiness your priority rather than making the emotional happiness of everyone else your priority) and eventually:
  • develop and alternate between different viewpoints so effectively you can see all the viewpoints available and then select the appropriate viewpoint at the appropriate time (for example if you have an obsession you have a viewpoint that says thinking about this thing is unacceptable – but you can eventually move to a different viewpoint by discharging the emotional energy attached; there comes a point it stops bothering you).

The rule of observation is whatever we pay close enough attention to automatically starts to change for the better, even when ‘better’ means something we never thought of as being ‘better’ before.

But that rule comes at a price and not all of us are willing to pay.

How about you?

Regards - Carl

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Sunday, 25 April 2010

Obsessions – Five Questions Answered


  • What is an Obsession?

  • What Drives an Obsession?

  • Why is an Obsession so Difficult to Remove?

  • How Can I Remove an Obsession?

  • How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?


What is an Obsession?

An obsession is a secondary emotional response designed to try and remove or hold back the sensations produced by an intense primary emotional response. The primary emotional response is attached to an image of the issue it was originally produced to deal with; these primary responses are usually concerned with preventing something terrible happening.

The secondary response is created when your logical mind does not accept the need for the primary response or the image to which it is attached and begins to fight it. It fights both the emotional response by 'squeezing it down' and also the image by trying to get it out of the brain.  Both of these approaches fail to work.

Attempting to remove a thought-based image from your brain just repeatedly re-creates the thought you are trying to remove because you have to think about what you want to remove before you can remove it.  This loop goes round and round in our thinking.  Fortunately, you do not have to succeed in this goal in order to remove an obsession because obsessions are not driven by thoughts.

What Drives an Obsession?

Obsessions are driven by the trapped emotional responses held in place by the refusal of your logical mind to grant them release.  This is the only thing that drives an obsession.  Just so we are clear:

Obsessions are maintained and driven by emotional responses only.

They are not driven by your thinking – your thoughts are a by-product of the emotional response looking for a way out of your body.  Release the emotional energy attached to the image and the image disappears from your conscious mind as a side-affect.

Why is it so difficult to heal obsessions?

The answer to this question is complex; here are three main reasons obsessions are difficult to get rid of:

  • Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs

  • The Difficulty of Changing the Visual Beliefs Held by Your Six Minds

  • Painful Physical Symptoms


Current Incorrect Embedded Visual Beliefs

The majority of your brain works with visual signals.  How you ‘see’ your overall emotional system decides whether or not you allow or block certain types of emotional responses to pass through it.

One of the first things I ask people suffering with emotional problems is ‘how do you see your response – what shape does it have for you?’.  If you regard your obsession as a predator, approaching with  an arched back preparing to once again suffocate you into submission, your unconscious will naturally try to hold it back from approaching.

As you start to heal from an obsession your visually based belief systems are unable to deny the new patterns emerging and these patterns create new thinking pathways in your brain – new physical links through which fresh thinking patterns send their signals – old neural links are decommissioned and eventually fade altogether.  The price of this re-writing of the brain, if we use Exposure Therapy, is intense emotional pain for various periods of time.

To your Unconscious seeing is believing and, if you decide to heal your obsession using Exposure Therapy, you will see quite a lot of things in ways difficult to explain to others and which may seem silly.

Your visual belief systems are difficult to access because they are spread out, and reinforced, by the conversations going on between, at least, six minds.

The Difficulty of Changing the Visual Beliefs Held by Six Minds

Your overall ‘mind’ is actually a combination of the workings of several sub-minds. A mind is a mechanism that either blocks or allows electrical stimulation to flow through it to the next mind in line.  When it comes to a particular obsession at least five sub-minds are involved in the blocking process and all 5 need to be persuaded to change how they see your obsession.

Out of your six minds only your Body-mind feels compelled to deal with the issue and the other five are at war with it.  The six minds are:

  1. your Body-mind (when your Body is emotionally charged it is the most powerful mind of the six – it is the mind that generates the most emotional energy you will ever feel; once produced this energy either floods or, if held back threatens to flood and dominate, the work of the other five minds until the energy is fully discharged – when it fails to achieve discharge your body feels tense)

  2. your Reptilian-mind (this mind observes both what is going on in your upper minds as well as ensuring your body is geared up to meet the challenges coming downwards – your Reptilian-mind has no contact with the external world other than what it sees second hand through your upper minds - it observes these signals in limited terms of predator versus prey and cannot tell the different between real or imagined threats)

  3. your Emotional-mind (Limbic System – this mind is designed to store both specific images of threats and also general images of the environments surrounding those specific threats – the emotional-mind is the home of the mechanism that maintains both normal fears and anxiety disorders such as obsessions – this mind can be moulded and managed through indirect behaviours and is the core of your Unconscious)

  4. your Logical-mind (left Neo-Cortex  - this mind thinks in words and what I like to think of as ‘low-level imagery’ built from words - this mind is the source of both the original problem in emotional blocking but can also become leader in applying the solution when dealing with obsessions once it understands and accepts a new way of seeing the emotional process as logical in its own right)

  5. your conscious Pattern-mind (right Neo-Cortex – your pattern mind releases emotional energy faster and more effectively than any of your other minds when consciously applied – working with your unconscious it is able to recognise and consciously use new imagery forced into being by the healing process)

  6. your Ascending Reticular Activation System (this is a net-like structure connecting your brain minds; it acts both as a resistance system and an activation system – using this system you are able to allow or block emotional responses from entering the brain; some scientists believe the ARAS is the home of your sense of self).


All six minds need retraining, both as individual minds and in how they work with each other, in order to bring about and maintain healing from an obsession.

Thankfully, if you decide to use Exposure Therapy in order to heal your obsession, only one general approach is needed to ensure this retraining happens.

Painful Physical Symptoms

Obsessions ‘pressure-cook’ your emotional responses in such a way as to make them some of the most intensely painful emotional experiences you can endure.  Should you decide to take the Exposure Therapy route to healing you can expect physical and mental symptoms like these:

  • your current intense feelings get much worse (things feeling much worse is actually an indicator you’re doing it the right way)

  • sleeplessness and extremely lurid, frightening nightmares

  • additional emotional responses previously hidden from your conscious such as frequent panic and rage attacks – issues that did not affect you previously may suddenly start looming large

  • overwhelm of your thinking processes to the point all you can do is sit or lay down and ‘feel’ – probably accompanied by intense imagery and the regurgitation of long-lost painful memories or feared imaginings

  • palpitations; high blood pressure (mine doubled for several months); a change in stomach acid balance


I do not sell it well, I know.  Here is one more:

  • Mammalian Disassociation Response; the symptoms of this include sensations of being pulled to the ground and, when looking at your hands getting the distinct impression they are not attached to your body.  The cause of this is a mechanism all mammals have designed to reduce the sensations of pain when being eaten by a predator.


How Can I Remove an Obsession?

Exposure Therapy can heal most anxiety disorders and simply involves changing your mental direction.  Your brain is a mapping system and the pen that draws the maps is your conscious focus.  Obsessions are maintained by our minds repeatedly trying to run away from the natural affects of our own emotional energies.  Change the direction of your focus by 'going in' and the pen starts drawing a different type of map.

By consciously taking your point of focus into the emotional response and then observing, without prejudicial judgement, what happens when you remain in the response for long enough, you will force your different minds to adjust.  You will see trapped energy begin to move; you will see that the responses hurt, but they do not kill you.

To succeed you must eventually surrender to your emotional process totally and trust your body to know what it is doing; this is difficult because we are socially programmed not to trust our bodies.

Because it is so difficult I recommend you try other options first before trying Exposure Therapy – try hypnotherapy or counselling and see if anything like that helps.  I have been told by an EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) practitioner, an ex-NHS nurse whom I completely trust, that EFT can be used to clear obsessions gently.

So try other options first if you can and then, if you find yourself at a point of despondency and extreme frustration - so extreme you are willing to try anything - then try Exposure Therapy.

A word of caution: establish a foundational support system before you begin to experiment with this approach.

Once you start the Exposure Therapy approach to healing an obsession you may find it very difficult to stop yourself.  I found myself working on this process in my sleep and because I had 27 obsessions to remove it went on for several years.

If you do exposure therapy in regards to a phobia, for example, your perception tells you the object you fear is external to you – you have to imagine yourself approaching, or actually approach, the related external object.   With an obsession you are both blessed and cursed by the fact your perception sees the problem as being ‘inside’ and, if you are desperate enough, you will work night and day to get rid of it whether you want to or not.  You literally turn your trapped emotional energy in on itself.

Once you get to this stage you will find yourself so enraged by the condition, so determined, so aggressive and attacking towards it you will want to destroy it.  You will think about nothing else but destroying it.

In order to remove an obsession you must become more obsessed about thinking about it than you previously were about not thinking about it.  Does that make sense?

How Should I Prepare Myself for Removing an Obsession?

Three main steps:

  • Get professional support in place

  • Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place

  • Share your plan with those who can be trusted


Get professional support in place

I recommend the following as a minimum:


  • your doctor

  • a counsellor

  • a psychiatrist (maybe – usually recommended by your doctor)


I found the advice of my doctors invaluable – one of them was the most supportive person I had in my life until I met my counsellor.  She recommended a psychiatrist who tried to put me on heavy doses of Prozac but agreed I could stick to low doses during my self-healing programme – the psychiatrist was amazed at my progress. My doctor was able to reassure me at various times when the physical symptoms I experienced were particularly worrying (the symptoms of anxiety disorders can mask other conditions so it is important to get reassurance from your doctor).

The counsellor I found I still see today on a monthly basis – this lady supported me every step of the way during healing and has been invaluable as my ‘self-acceptance coach; milestone marker and cheerleader’.

You need the support of these people if you can get them.

Set aside private, undisturbed time in a safe place

For a number of reasons you may not be able to do direct work on yourself unless it is in private.  This work will be time-consuming and you do not want to be disturbed.  That is not to say you will not need a break or a distraction now and again - this work is exhausting – but the more focused and concentrated your self-work is the faster you will make progress.

A couple of other good reasons for working this way is to remove the danger of taking your moods out on others (and you will get moody – that is really the whole point!) and, even more importantly, doing this work while out and about can be life-threatening, especially when crossing roads or using machinery, as it can completely dominate your attention.

Share your plan with those who can be trusted

I have no problem sharing my experience with anyone – but there are people who are made uncomfortable by friends who tell them they have strong emotional responses to everyday inanimate objects and I have lost so-called friends due to this.

There are also malicious gossips around, so you may want to keep an eye out for those too.  However, if your primary concern is getting well you are going to have to get really courageous and be willing to pay any social price that presents itself.

Pay attention to how others react to you – but remain true to yourself.

Any questions or comments?

Regards - Carl
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Sunday, 20 September 2009

The Thalamus - a Brain Part that Can Make Liars of Us All

Do you get angry when you'd rather not?  Have you tried 'shouting an obsession or phobia out?' - you know, that old trick about going 'STOP!' and that's supposed to interrupt the response before it happens (but it still happens).

Are you frustrated you have emotional responses before you can consciously control them?  Do you feel angry towards others who challenge you to face up to the pain within, particularly when they seem to have no such pain?  This inner-world-versus-outer-world conflict is caused partly by the work of the Thalamus.

It's the job of the Thalamus to make the decision whether or not you get to react mostly emotionally or mostly with thinking to a situation.

Unfortunately how you think about how you feel makes very little difference to how you currently feel - it's whether or not you're willing to feel that decides if one day you will be able to just think about an issue.

The reason we can't change our emotional responses using our thinking is because all of our senses are routed to enter 'behind' our conscious thinking brains.  Your visual centre, for example, is at the rear of your brain and visual signals entering your brain do so below your thinking neocortex.  The decision as to whether it is your upper thinking brain or your lower emotional brain that gets to respond to a stimulus is decided before your thinking brain receives the signals.  The fact our eyes are at the front of our heads maybe creates the illusion that our visual and sound signals go straight into our thinking brains, but it isn't so.  For people suffering with emotional disorders this is an extremely confusing and frustrating fact of our biology.

You cannot directly affect this routing process through thinking - but you can indirectly change it through feeling.

I firmly believe the decision to send sensory signals upwards or downwards is made purely on the basis of the levels of currently held emotional charge in the body produced in regard to particular sensations/images/sounds.

The job of which direction incoming signals are sent in is made by your Thalamus.

The Thalamus (or Thalami)


All sensory information entering the brain is routed through the Thalami - two walnut sized structures that sit side by side and lay between the conscious thinking brains and the unconscious, emotionally responding Limbic Brain.

Your Thalamus receives all the information coming in from your senses.  It filters these signals for information relating to those images, sounds and sensations already attached to strong emotional responses.

If your emotional responses are already firing in response to related information it sends the signals downwards into the emotional brain before your thinking brains have any say in the decision.  Your thinking brains are informed of the decision by the fact your body produces physical symptoms.

The Thalamus believes the more emotionally charged your body is in regard to an issue the more life threatening a situation actually is.  If this is not the case in reality your entire emotional system begins living a lie.  Your conscious thinking brain picks up on the fact these reactions are liars and in most cases it does the opposite of what it needs to do to release the lie (ie feel and release the painful feelings) - it refuses to allow the feelings release from the body and this just perpetuates the signals-being-sent-downwards cycle.

The feelings are real but the triggers to which they relate don't exist.

Have you noticed how people who habitually lie put up a terrific fight before allowing themselves to go through the 'truth recognition process'?  Quite often we think of such people as 'devout and deliberate liars' but most liars are just people craving pleasant feelings while trying to escape the build-up of emotional pain that accompanies the 'reality shifts' involved in feeling negative emotions such as guilt and loss of social power that the Thalamus has been producing for them.  They started one lie that produced pain for them, which they didn't face, and they've been running ever since.  Even people who don't habitually lie can have this problem. In obsessions, for example, the life threatening image or sound they believe will kill them is completely harmless.  Consciously they know this; unconsciously they don't.

Lies may appear manipulative, 'evil', or things produced by  people living on a planet completely opposite in nature to our own - but it's really their Thalamus and their inability to manage it's decisional process causing this false reality to be maintained.

The emotional release required to adjust the Thalami settings is always intensely painful and involves a shift in our perception of 'reality' that can be quite a blow to the ego.

The pay-off of tuning into true reality and reversing the polarity of the Thalamus so it sends the signals upwards for thinking instead of downwards for emoting is the release of current negative emotional energy, prevention of the further build-up of unnecessary negative responses.  This is a huge step closer to being unconditionally happy.

Hurts like hell, but it does the job.

Regards - Carl

How the Body Works : The Thalamus

The Thalamus The thalamus, shown in red, is part of the forebrain. It plays an integral part in relaying sensory information from the sense organs to the cortex. Acting as a major relay center, the thalamus passes incoming messages on to higher centers in the cortex. A thalamus with its nuclei color coded is represented here. Some nuclei deal with several different types of messages, while other nuclei deal with only one type. The lateral geniculate body relays information to the visual ...

Saturday, 8 August 2009

Depression - Retreating Towards the Enemy

So when about five years ago I was diagnosed with a complex form of OCD (that came as no surprise) I was also told I was suffering with severe depression (that was a surprise).  I remember telling my psychiatrist I couldn't have depression because I'd always been 'positive minded'.

Depression had been with me so long I just couldn't see it - to heal it I had to re-visit various experiences in my past and the idea of that terrified me.  Could I risk getting into the same emotional state again that had led to my attempted suicide when I was 19?

I agreed with my psychiatrist to go onto a low dose of Prozac for a year (I had a very 'funny turn' about two weeks into the drug where I suddenly felt connected up to an absolutely agonising emotional response that had me running round the house looking for 'a child in danger' - the illusion was so strong I phoned NHS Direct for advice).  That episode disappeared within days and I carried on with the drug for the remainder of the year without anything similar happening.

At the same time I also continued with my self-designed 'exposure therapy' programme - it was this that actually led to my healing, with support mostly from a Person-Centred Counsellor and my GP.  I can't say whether the Prozac helped but I can say seeing the psychiatrist to discuss whether or not the Prozac was helping did!

I also did quite a bit of 'research on the research'.  Between the psychiatrist, the counsellor, my doctor and my personal self-work I was able to put together a simple picture of what 'depression' is about (I'm not suggesting depression is a simple thing - just that my model of it is - I like things simple).

At first I thought depression was about about feeling very sad; a sense of loss; a feeling of helplessness; because those were the symptoms I could readily see.  Drawing on what the professionals I saw told me, and my experience of other people with depression, I now see depression as more of an attempt at physical retraction by the brain.   My personal take is that:

Depression is :

  • a normal reaction of the brain to an overwhelmingly painful emotional response

  • a physical attempt to withdraw and disconnect which affects the physical location of our brain patterns and the chemical connections in our brain

  • caused by an error of perception that tells us by doing this withdrawing and disconnecting  we  are protecting ourselves when in fact we are retreating into the arms of the enemy (ie the emotional responses we're trying to avoid)

  • healed by setting up a 'healing cycle' in which the sufferer transitions backwards and forwards between feeling and releasing the emotional pain within and also building new, exciting life options in the world without.


Depression as a Protective Response that Goes Too Far

If you put your hand in boiling water and you retract your hand quickly due to the pain; would you call that 'abnormal'?  Initially depression works the same way.

Brain scans show that during depression cognitive electrical brain activity (ie our thinking) in our upper brains pulls back into the limbic or mammalian mid-brain.  The functioning of these upper minds, which work mostly in developing our possible futures and how we see the patterns of our external lives, is cut off.  I have often come across people who are angry at depressed people because they only 'think about themselves' - well, they don't have an immediate choice.  They just pulled back into a living nightmare and are trying to figure out how to escape it.

When our withdrawn thinking process stays stuck in the new, lower brain position we achieve a state of severe on-going mental isolation; refusing to bring ourselves out of it for fear of making things worse.  We do this, paradoxically, because our perception tells us there's still danger 'outside' whilst at the same time pulling our thinking down into the painful feelings we are trying to avoid.  We get stuck.



I have friends who live with the threat of deeper depression always dictating what they can do - a few years ago I was in the same situation.  A  person in this position can still live a worthwhile and productive life - but it's a restricted one.  Not everyone 'should' make the effort to get out of this trap but they should get themselves to a 'safe state' and use professional support where available; it's a personal choice that  depends on your situation.  If you live in a 'safe' place now emotionally you may not want to take the risk of doing the hard emotional self-work required to remove the threat of further depression altogether.  But if you do want to eradicate it, I believe you can.

How do you see your internal emotional responses and process?

Emotional responses, regardless of how intense they are, are designed to be felt and released - usually not all at once.  If you go through a life event that runs its course over a long period of time (eg a marriage) and acquire a set of emotional responses linked to important memories and value systems held in your brain,  suddenly losing the situation to which those emotional responses are attached is naturally going to mean you're going to grieve; get angry; want things back the way they were.  Unfortunately you have to feel the feelings involved, sometimes for months, until they're gone.

If, when these feelings come up for attention, you back away from them you then risk becoming depressed - unwittingly backing even further into them because your perception tells you they're 'outside', when in fact they're inside.  You are the only person having these responses, but they appear to colour the entire external world for you.

If instead of doing this wholesale withdrawal you deliberately go into your painful feelings with the intention of accepting, feeling and releasing them over a given period of time this undermines the depression process. You may still get depressed, but it will eventually be relieved and you can come back out of it.

How do you see your external world?  It's All About Options



I had an 'aha!' moment when reading Susan Jeffers' book Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway: How to Turn Your Fear and Indecision into Confidence and Action in which she tells us we need to have at least nine areas of our lives under development at any one time so if one area comes to an end (albeit temporarily) we have other options to work on.

When my marriage came to an end in 1993 I only had two life areas I was focused on: home (my children) and work.  I had an identity crisis that lasted almost five years after the divorce.  I went to work but no longer knew why. I had married at 19 and to me outside of my marriage was 'nothing'.  In the years preceding the split I tried frantically to make the marriage work because I could see no options outside of it, it was the marriage - or nothing.  If you think this is an admirable and morally right position to be in, it's actually a very dangerous, potentially suicidally depressing approach to life.

I've read books by many respected authors who reinforce this message.  In order to reduce your chance of serious depression you must provide yourself with more external life options and to do this you must take repeated measured risks.  If instead of working on creating external options you are solely focused on avoiding external stimulation because it may lead to internal emotional pain you're just reinforcing the depressed state.

In order to get the thinking minds to return to our higher level brains we've got to take them out for experiential walks - we've got to show them experiential options are available other than the ones we've had so far.  We have to coax our minds out from their painful positions into the outside world.

By setting up a rhythmic approach that allows us some time to experience and release our trapped emotions and then move into new external options we can gradually eradicate the frozen state of depression from our lives.

Psychologist Steve Ilardi believes his approach can naturally heal depression:

Anti-Depression "Stone Age" Remedy




Hidden caves in the brain explain sleep

'Hidden caves' that open up in the brain may help explain sleep’s amazing restorative powers.  Click here  to read the article. ...