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Monday, October 14, 2013

One of your Paragraphs Wiped out my Hope

Dear A. B. Curtiss

"The way we dissociate ourselves from our painful feelings is by switching to thinking about something else rather than what is happening in our present reality. But dissociating from painful feelings isn’t escaping from painful feelings. These repressed feelings hang around and drag us down in many ways, including depression."

What is brain switching but dissociating from our painful feelings?  Depression causes physical pain in current time.

I read your books a while back and just revisited  many of your ideas in an Internet article. After reading through the whole thing and being convinced, I came to the end to have you state the exact opposite in the above paragraph.

Also about foods. All this fear of food is part of our current paranoia and fear-based culture.

You advocate replacing painful thoughts (which create physical pain) with a neutral or nonsense or positive thought pattern to escape depression so how is this different from "dissociating" from our physical and mental pain and thus causing ourselves more depression.

My depression as you state is that nothing will work and with one paragraph you wiped out any hope I had that your method would work either.

From experience I have come to fear psychotropic drugs. I can no longer take them. I keep trying your method, mindfulness meditation, tai chai, positive affirmations and a plethora of self-help stuff trying to find the common thread. Self-help, except 12-step, seems to leave out God or a higher power which in itself scares me. I am constantly suspicious that all this "new age" stuff is just the wicked one saying "you can fix yourself, you don't need God." I'm so tired of looking for answers.

Sent from my iPhone. R.

Dear R,

Thank you so much for your letter. I would never be one to say you can get rid of depression without God. I consider my own reliance on a higher power, call it what you will, to be an ever-present mainstay. There is always help for anyone, believe what they will, who falls on their knees in a state of true supplication and humility and asks for help. To be sure they can add "by the Grace of God and for the good of humanity" to guard against dark powers. People who took courses in Silva Mind Control always included this phrase when they went to "alpha level."

I think I understand your quandary about depression being current reality. Just because you are, at any particular present moment, experiencing the pain being produced in the subcortex as a result of the triggering of the fight-or-flight response which has, in turn, triggered the neural pattern response we call depression, that doesn't mean that depression is present reality (your upon-the-instant interaction with your surround.) Depression masquerades as present reality because it is so painful it immediately gets our full attention. But depression is, in fact, not true present reality. Depression and the pain caused by depression is a state of alarm from which you need to recover as soon as possible. Depression actually blocks out the true reality which is that, (as other people can plainly see) you are reallyperfectly all right and not in any real present danger.

I have found that the quickest way to recover is to use some (already chosen so as to have it at the ready) brainswitch exercise which prevents the present acknowledgment in the neocortex that depression is being produced in the subcortex. Remember that present reality includes our connected with our fellow human being. Depression alienates us from our fellow human beings and the regular workaday world and hurls us into a painful world which we continue to self-create all by our selves. Also remember that the processof pain perception means that all pain is produced in the subcortex but those signals have to go up the brain to be not only received but acknowledged in the neocortex before a human being can feel any pain.

This is important to remember. The fight-or-flight system does not trigger because we are in a dangerous situation. It triggers because we think we are in danger. It is our THOUGHTS that cause our emotions, NOT REALITY. In real estate you need to fully understand three words-- location, location and location. In depression you need to fully understand three words--  perception, perception and perception. We could be in a real life-and-death situation and not realize it, and our fight-or-flight system will not activate. Or, we could be perfectly safe and start feeling anxious, and off it will go!


So it is no surprise that depression can occur in the absence of any reality-based concrete problems. Depression is a psychological “This is the house that Jack built.” This is the anxious thought, that connected with the terrible thought, that sparked up the fearful thought, that branched into two terrible memories, that triggered the fight-or-flight response, that caused the chemical imbalance, that caused the depression.


If you are confident enough to "hang" with the pain of depression in a state of calm acceptance of it, that calm acceptance is neocortical activity and neocortical activity beefs up the neural activity in the neocortex and lesses neural activity in the subcortex. However it is more difficult to "get" how to be in a state of calm acceptance (instead ofthinking "Oh no, not again) than it is to use the help of a small mind exercise that
dissociates you from the acknowledgement that you are experiencing the pain of depression, until, no longer agitated and producing more stress chemicals because you are experiening the pain of stress chemicals already produced, the stress chemicals will dissipate and the depressive neural pattern will calm down and ceased to "jangle." Only then can you be in true present reality, the world and surround you share with other people.

This acceptance of anxiety is extremely difficult but necessary to learn in order to recover from PTSD cause by drug use which has over-sensitised your nerves. This is slightly different from depression. When I was prescribed too much oxycodene I had to learn this. The book, Hope and Help for Your Nerves by Dr. Claire Weekes is invaluable help for this.

Don't give up hope. If you still have a question, please don't hesitate to ask.


A. B. Curtiss

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