Our Thoughts Are Just Thoughts and Our Emotions Are Just Emotions

We watch the most horrific true stories on the news and we take almost all of it for granted without having an emotional response – yet we can watch the same kind of information float through our internal thoughts and feelings and declare ourselves to have ‘gone wrong’ and try to grab hold of these thoughts and feelings as though they were more real and more life threatening than real external events .

This leads to us giving our internal thoughts and feelings much more credence than maybe we should.  Michael Neill explains one of his own experiences below.

THE ULTIMATE PSYCHOTHERAPY

 




Over the past few days, I've had the pleasure of spending time with Dr. Robert Holden, the UK's preeminent happiness psychologist and a regular guest on the Oprah Winfrey show.

During the course of our conversations, which have covered everything from positive psychology to wine tasting and from the true meaning of enlightenment to the secrets of playing "happy golf", he said one thing which has been sitting in my mind ever since.

"In many ways," said Robert, just before driving a golf ball 240 yards down the center of the fairway, "the ultimate psychotherapy is simply to relax about things."

While it was just a passing comment, the reason it has been humming along inside my mind ever since is that it so directly mirrors the experience I have with my own clients. The moment they relax about what it is going on in their heads or in their lives, things start to change for the better.  Their mood lifts, they begin to enjoy themselves and their work and their friends and their partners more, and before long they begin having a stream of insights into whatever it was that was bothering them in the first place.

It's almost as though the more weight and gravitas we bring to bear on something, the harder it is for us to hear our own wisdom in relation to it.  The more lightness of touch we are willing to allow, the more easily and naturally that thing begins to shift, seemingly all by itself.

One of the most profound examples of that in my own life came when I was dealing with the suicidal thoughts that filled my head throughout my teens and on into my university years.  I had fallen afoul of a bizarre paradox of university policy which insisted that as I had "confessed" to suicidal thoughts I had to have mandatory psychotherapy to stay enrolled in the school, but if I actually spoke about having suicidal thoughts during that therapy they were duty bound to report me to the powers that be and I would be automatically expelled.

This led to an awful lot of time talking about nothing and getting wound up tighter and tighter as we danced around what was going on without ever once going to the heart of the matter.  I worked my way through the school's team of psychotherapists one by one (in fairness, I wasn't very nice to them) until one doctor actually did something bizarrely effective.

She told me that to her ears, I sounded absolutely fine, and that it was quite normal for people to think about suicide from time to time.  She pointed out to me that there was a huge distinction between thinking about suicide and actually wanting to kill myself - and for the first time in nearly six years I began to relax about the whole thing.

Up until that point, everyone (including me) had been so frightened about the content of my thinking that none of us had noticed that the only problem I actually had in my life at that point was my thinking.  A few days later, I had an insight which confirmed that distinction in an extremely visceral way, and as I wrote in You Can Have What You Want:

From that day forward, rather than continuing to treat the "suicide thought" as a problem to be solved, I recognized it for what it was: just a thought, no more significant than "chicken or beef", "plaid or stripes", or "I wonder what she's wearing under that?" (Hey, I was 19!)

On reflection, I can see that I had benefited from the ultimate psychotherapy. I had been given permission to just relax about my problems instead of driving myself crazy trying to solve them.  And as is so often the case, the moment I allowed myself to relax, my wisdom bubbled up to the surface and the problem dis-solved in the light of my own insight.

One of my favorite analogies for this phenomenon comes from the amazing Dr. George Pransky, whom Colin Wilson once described as "(a) modern psychologist who seems to me as important as William James, Abraham Maslow, and Howard Miller."

He describes our wisdom as being like a flute that is constantly playing in the background of our lives.  The reason we can't hear it is that we tend to have a brass band playing full volume inside our heads.  In order for us to hear and be guided by wisdom, we need only allow the brass band to quiet from time to time and we will hear the flute almost immediately.

And while relaxing into a quiet mind may seem like a difficult thing to do in the midst of a challenging time in your life, it becomes exponentially easier the moment you begin to see that the solution to our most difficult problems nearly always shows up the moment we stop looking for it. Worst case, you get to take a bit of time off from your problems and enjoy your life a bit more. Best case, you create the space for insight, laughter, and miracles.
Have fun, learn heaps, and enjoy your day!

With love,

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