MobyJane

I've Been Off Zoloft for a few Weeks

2012-02-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

Dear Mrs. Curtiss,

I am thrilled to have stumbled upon your book, Depression is a Choice, after having taken Zoloft for postpartum blues and later dsythmia/PMDD. My doctor agreed to wean me off Zoloft but the withdrawal is horrendous -headaches, nightmares, lethargy to name a few. Do you think Directed Thinking will work in countering drug discontinuation primal brain feelings in the same way it does with mania and depression?

Thank you for your time.

Kindly,

Dear M,

It will help somewhat. The nightmares can definitely be alleviated by thought-jamming them (and the downer thoughts that they initiate) by nonsense rhymes or some mantra. The one I use lately is an old high school cheer (one,two,three, four who are we for? Back in the day then you would supply the name of your high school)). This works great for me when I wake in the middle of the night with nightmares or depression. I go right back to sleep.

Headaches too can be lessened by distracting yourself with some mantra. Lethargy may be a sympton that your body is missing some nutrients. With Directed Thinking, your behavior will be under your control and allow you to lead a normal life. With headaches you can also visualize constricting the blood vessels in the brain and relaxing your body, letting it go limp. However, if the drugs have depleted some of the amino acids that you need for the brain to make serotonin or if the drugs have your hormones off kilter you may be experiencing some pain of anxiety and this can't be cured by an act of will.

If your nerves are strung out because the drugs have depleted some of your body's nutrients, you may need some nutritional supplements. I suggest a doctor of Chinese Medicine or a good nutritionist to assess your body's needs. If you're in the San Diego area I can suggest Bret Mosher Health Clinic tel 858-679 2995.

I had a terrible time when I took oxycodene for 3 weeks for a back injury this year. It fried my brain. And it took me 6 months to get over the non-stop anxiety. The mind tricks helped for sleep and hypnosis helped a lot during that awful time. And if I hadn't had all the tools of Directed Thinking and Brainswitching I think I might have just caved in. However I'm back to normal and now take about 11 different supplements. Since I am 77 years old, some of my organs no longer produce with the same degree of efficiency so I will be on supplements from now on. Just remember this, a negative thought is never a good option. The minute you notice you are negative, either go positive or do some mind trick. And as quickly as possible get into some more productive thinking, work, reading, entertainment, social activity, exercise. You can't just go with the flow on this, you have to be really pro-active. And reach out to others, you need the love. A. B. Curtiss

Hello,

I have scores of questions as I continue to struggle with headaches, lethargy, irritability, and the wilting will to forge ahead without drugs. I do have a support group of women who cheer me on as we walk an hour a day. I also try to laugh as much as possible to combat random bouts of tears. It's only been a few weeks without Zoloft (after years on the drug), so I know I should be patient, but its very hard. M

Dear M

You also might want to read Brainswitch out of Depression, my sequel to Depression is a Choice. It's full of mind exercises and gives a better idea of how the brain works. I also suggest reading Claire Weekes book Hope and Health for Your Nerves. You need the belief that you will get better. A. B.

More on Roles and Goals

2012-02-01T21:21:00.000-08:00

Dear AB,

Your last blog essay really spoke to me. I enjoyed the quote from Moby Dick very much, and read it over and over. The English is beautiful, and difficult, (not modern) but I think I draw the meaning. What I hear is, "Who we are is whatever is in front of us at the moment. Why shift our attention and effort to what is elsewhere, imagining that other paths and prizes are more satisfying? What we are confronted by, presented with, comprises the life we are meant to live, in spite of our protestations to the contrary."

I understand what you mean about avoiding identification with a role, but I'm not sure that identification with a goal is so much better. Would you clarify? Maybe I am not defining "goal" broadly enough. I am thinking that orienting ourselves with goals can still easily get us hung up on the success/failure duality.

Is it possible to not identify with anything, to simply move forward moment to moment embracing whatever is? Yes, we need to set appointments, tackle assignments, complete our work, meet deadlines, & I suppose those objectives could be lumped under the heading "goals." However things turn out though; and whatever unexpected turn things take, even if a "goal" is not reached, we are to be open to the lesson, the teacher, that is imbedded in the twist of fate brings peace within. Ishmael thought perhaps, that only such openness would bring true contentment. Thoreau said, "Success is when you feel contented with only a sense of existence." That would be a pretty tall order for most modern-day folk. Still, I hear the wisdom in the notion that our "being" should trump our "doing" as we reflect on what gives our lives meaning.

...we are evolving beings who must continue to risk ourselves and fail in order to learn.

So, if we refrain from judging the painful moments, the fearful moments, we might learn something? If we lean in and listen, instead of labeling, escaping or disassociating, we might make friends with our fear and our pain?

Thanks for the wonderful essay, AB.

G

Dear G

After I received you email I wrote another paragraph that I added to the essay.

"Mostly what we want in life has more to do with roles than goals. Think about it. We want success in business, to get to be a CEO or vice-president of the widget factory we work for. We want to be a married woman. We want to be a mother. We want to be a rich dad, not a poor dad, a college graduate not a drop-out. There’s nothing wrong with wanting these things except to the extent that we are skewed away from who we are in favor of what we want. There is a danger in wanting to be seen as popular by our friends, rather than wanting to be just seen by our friends."

And your final question I think can be answered by one of my favorite quotes although I like your quote from Thoreau "Success is when you feel contented with only a sense of existence." As a matter of fact your quote makes me want to pick up Thoreau's book Walden Pond which I have never read.

At any rate, the quote which helps with the idea of getting stuck in roles or goals for that matter is the following:

"Duties are ours, events are God's. This removes an infinite burden from the shoulders of a miserable, tempted, dying creature. On this consideration only can he securely lay down his head and close his eyes." Richard Cecil

And ancient wisdom says it this way. We should identify with the painting and not the picture, the dancing and not the dance. In other words, we should put our totality of being into what we are doing without any thought of the ultimate success or failure of our effort. Another quote comes to mind: "virtue is its own reward." A. B. Curtiss

Dear AB

Wow, I love your new paragraph! It adds much clarity.

So we can get so involved thinking about the what that we forget about the how. "What are we going to be when we grow up?" we are usually asked as children, not "How are you going to live your life?" Ironically, the what, in the final analysis, accounts for little, to the extent that the how is disregarded. That's a key understanding that seems to be lost today. If one has the title, the degrees, the fame & fortune, what could be missing? Oh, maybe peace, contentment, kindness, compassion, character, integrity?

Could also be, "... danger in wanting to be seen as popular by our friends," rather than in wanting to simply be a friend. Yes, friendship can deteriorate into an exercise in adding another notch to our belts, a grasping for evidence of our worth, rather than seen as an opportunity to be kinder, more patient, more compassionate, indeed an opportunity to be friendly, to be a friend!

Duties are ours, events are God's. How liberating. What a great quote. We do our best & let the outcome rest.

We should identify with the painting and not the picture, the dancing and not the dance. Beautifully said!

I will try to remember these teachings.
Thanks so much for sharing further thoughts!

G

I Just Learned my Relative has Been on Anti-depressants for 15-20 Years

2012-01-31T10:56:00.000-08:00

Ms. Curtiss,

I recently became close to my one of my relatives, and found out that she has been on antidepressants for some 15-20 years. I feel taken aback, and slightly betrayed (is that the right word) like I haven't grown to know the real her, rather the medicated her.

I know you have these two great books and was wondering what is a tactful way of incorporating your thinking into our lives? I don't want to appear insensitive or judgmental, but there are people who are changing their lives and becoming medication-free because of your books. Are there implications with coming off of these types of meds after these years?

Thank you.

TT

Dear TT

In a way, there is no necessity to be tactful about suggesting that people use my methods. You can use them whether you are on anti-depressants or not. There is no downside risk to learning how to think on purpose rather than just letting your thinking wander into back and forth into depression or anxiety. My books teach you how your brain works, how depression, anxiety and stress can be alleviated by cognitive techniques such as brainswitching out of the subcortex (the part of the brain where depression and emotional pain is produced) to the neocortex (which is the part of the brain that never contains depression.)

Cognitive behavior techniques such as thought-jamming are very helpful even if you are on anti-depressants. You will be learning coping mechanisms that make you less vulnerable to depressive episodes and will be relying less on anti-depressants to feel better. But it's not a case of either/or. The more tools you have in your pro-active kit bag, the better.

I don't know the effects of each drug but if you want to come off your medication you should do it under the care of a medial doctor. All these drugs have a chemical effect on the brain which may dump you into anxiety or depression if you quit cold turkey. . Many people do just stop taking them without undue distress. However better to be safe than sorry. A. B. Curtiss

Getting Lost in What we Want, we Forget to Be Who We Are

2012-01-30T22:59:00.000-08:00

As Moby Dick’s Ishmael said, “in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country." Who we are is really what we strive to do and be in our daily life. Who we are does not reside in our title, or our material, social, or public success.

Mostly what we want in life has more to do with roles than goals. Think about it. We want success in business, to get to be a CEO or vice-president of the widget factory we work for. We want to be a married woman. We want to be a mother. We want to be a rich dad, not a poor dad, a college graduate not a drop-out. There’s nothing wrong with wanting these things except to the extent that we are skewed away from who we are in favor of what we want. There is a danger in wanting to be seen as popular by our friends, rather than wanting to be just seen by our friends.

When we identify ourselves with roles instead of goals, we end up labeling ourselves as successes or failures. We see ourselves as commodities that must be protected against loss of value, instead of understanding that we are evolving beings who must continue to risk ourselves and fail in order to learn.

Roles are interchangeable; people are not. We are more solid than our roles, which are only important to the extent that we make use of them. Roles must be constantly nourished by our energy since they have none of their own. The Queen must service the crown with honoring it in the same way that victims must service their perpetrators with wanting something from them.

If we didn’t want anything we couldn’t possibly be a victim. We are all really victims of what we want, which is how most of us become victims of happiness. And we transfer that onto to other people and think we are victims of them. We get to thinking “they owe us” what we need. Now we can be totally frustrated because we have no power to make them give us what we think they owe us.

We have no power to get other people to do what we want. Ultimately we have only the power to take care of ourselves. We can look at chronic adverse situations as projects instead of insults, and decide in advance what a reasonable response on our part would be: if they do “x”, then I am going to do “y”.

I can remember how difficult it was for me, at first, controlled by my primal mind feelings and frozen in depression the way I was, to withdraw my attention from what my husband was “doing to me” and say to myself: “Okay. In this adverse situation, what can I do to take care of myself?”

I had no idea that the main reason taking care of myself had always been so difficult was that I simply never got around to thinking about it. Complaining about my husband was so easy and natural that I never could tear myself away from it. Committing the above italicized sentence to memory and “tagging” by learned association to the feeling of helplessness as a reminder (so that the sentence would come to mind whenever a feeling of victimhood came over me) is one of my first triumphs of self-understanding and self-responsibility.

Hating Your Negative Thoughts is Not Being Positive

2012-01-23T11:14:00.000-08:00

The bad news is that our mind is so complex and tricky we have to be on our toes or we outsmart ourselves every time. There is nothing worse than a negative thought. It sends your whole mental and physical self in the wrong direction. But we often don't recognize when we are in a negative mode of thinking. It's not easy but try this.

When you are not feeling great, you are probably going down a negative path. At any point in the day you can decide to be objective rather than subjective. That is, notice the world around you. The texture of bricks on the sidewalk, the clouds in the sky, the weave on a sofa. This gets you out of the self-focus mode. All self-focus ultimately turns negative and the way you avoid self-focus is to be objective rather than subjective. All objective thought ultimately turns positive in some way, simply because it is objective. Objective thinking sparks up the neurons in the neocortex, and wakes up our lazy awareness of the cosmos that we have allowed to sink into self-focus of all that is wrong with us. Re-focus on the world. Contrary to what we think when we don't feel great, the world is a wonderful place. A. B. Curtiss

More on the Fight that Didn't Go Anywhere

2012-01-16T09:47:00.000-08:00

Dear A.B.,

Thanks so much for sharing this little story of triumph over the primal mind! You could have acted from your Primal Mind, but chose to move from your Higher Mind.

When coming from the Primal Mind, even a little discord over a spoonful of sugar can lead us to feel our "status" is being threatened, & a threat to our status could lead to being kicked out of the tribe, which could leave our very survival in peril! To our Primal Mind, this whole sugary discussion could feel rather deadly, yes?

Instead, you questioned & challenged your thoughts...thoughts that were bouncing around in your head like so much popcorn in a popper, and refused to latch on to the negative, venegeful, self-preservation-geared ones. You embraced the thoughts that helped you move with peace, love & dignity.

I suppose that as far as being "right" or connecting with truth is concerned, maybe Ultimate truth can only be perceived & experienced directly, immediately, not conceptualized & put in a box? Since you were awake & open to what was happening, you experienced Ultimate truth through really looking at & seeing the deeper meaning of the sugar episode. What a wonderful example of being present to your life!

I also see in this story that our attempts at control are futile. Life is living us, really. The sugar episode, while perhaps rather unpleasant at first, makes me wonder if we need to trust that life is offering us what we need, moment to moment, even through unpleasant experiences. Living with an insistence that life must bend to our will, we strive to keep "unpleasantness" at bay. Alternatively, we may be view ourselves as being "above" such trivia, & remain aloof from the lessons ordinary experience can teach us.

But if we just watch & listen, see, experience, & take it in, we open to the fluidity of experience & even when something "dreadful" is happening like an ugly marital dispute, we can say "this too," & recognize that it's all of a piece, it all belongs.

Thanks again for the illuminating story.

Sincerely, G

Dear G,

I told the story to someone the other day who immediately could match it with one of her own. She had asked her husband to help her put some Christmas glasses away. He agreed but proceeded to put them in the box without, as she was annoyed to observe, the same care and effort that she thought necessary. When she upbraided him for his inadequacy, he just got mad and even more haphazard in his efforts.

"You asked me to help, and I'm helping!!"

He was insistant on doing it "his way."

I suggested that instead of getting mad and telling him "forget it" or criticizing his efforts, another option would be to realize that she had made him defensive (men are notoriously sensitive to criticism) and the line of least resistance would be to straighten out the mess he made, after the fact, without saying anything. What was the big crime anyway? Was it worth a big upset?

And the other thing to think about is this. What is it, exactly, that you win when you “win” these dumb little interactions. And what is it that you lose if you simply let them go on by.Do you prove that you are the one who is right, and therefore, the other has to be wrong? Is this really what our sense of marital justice is dependent upon? We always have to make the assessment of who is right? This is a really good example of the old cliché, would you rather be right or be loved.

A. B.

Dear A. B.

I don’t need respect from my husband, thank you very much. I already respect myself.

So, the only real refuge & sanctuary is found within. We are responsible for going within to soothe ourselves. Waiting for someone else to calm us, soothe us, or somehow bolster us & make everything okay is an unreasonable demand.

You've noted how we can slip into the nasty habit of looking at our relationships & other people as vehicles for getting our needs met, for getting something or another. You've said that it is more important to love than to be loved. I see these notions come to life in your story too.

Thank you. Yes. Seems there is much we can "win" or gain from letting them go by. We can only "lose" or suffer, if we resist. Your unvarnished description of this slice of your life has provided much food for thought.

Reminds me too of how I get caught up in the trance of "I want this ...I don't want that! This shouldn't be happening! What happened to lasting, unchanging serenity within my hearth & home?" But life persists in not being fixed & static. It's always in flux & fluid. A difficult state of affairs for one who wants everything to be "all nice, all the time." Guess the key is to accept whatever is, & even embrace it, since a fixed state of bliss, or maybe better stated, our belief about what we think bliss is, is not in the cards for any of us. In every life, the sugar must hit the fan, & maybe real Nirvana is being able to let it fly rather than contain it. A lesson in surrender!

I was right there with you in your kitchen! I could imagine how I'd be feeling, the thoughts that would unravel in my head, & they weren't pretty. Loved your self-inquiry & insights.

G

The Fight that Didn’t Go Anywhere

2012-01-11T21:40:00.000-08:00

I use brown sugar in my hot cereal every morning. About l ½” of brown sugar was left in the sugar container but it was hard and lumpy and I asked my husband (he does all the grocery shopping) to get some more brown sugar. Looking in the cupboard he answered, “There’s plenty of brown sugar right here. Use this up first. “

“It’s lumpy and hard.” I complained. I don’t want to wrestle with it.

“I’m not buying more brown sugar when there’s plenty here.”

“Don’t give me a hard time, just get me some more brown sugar, for God’s sake “

“No,” he shouted angrily as he stormed out of the kitchen leaving me smoldering with anger.

We’re all adults here, right?

I had a booksigning that morning and I left shortly after my husband did. I thought about the brown sugar later in the day. This was an old, old scene we had played for decades, the particulars changing but the same case of totally illogical emotional outburst without restraint on my husband’s part yelling and refusals coming down upon my usually reasonable and innocent head. Of course, I'm the psychotherapist, right?

I felt around for the anger. I could certainly dredge it up if I wanted. In any court or public opinion he would be judged totally unreasonable and illogical that he should refuse to get me 50 cents worth of sugar for whatever the hell reason I wanted. We are both extremely frugal but this was an insult, wasn’t it?

What were my options? I could get really mad, no problem. But did I want to get mad ? What was my husband’s crime? He was just emotional and illogical and had no trepidation about pissing me off. Not so terribly criminal, was it? What was I supposed to do, retrain him so he “worked better.”

Or should I just ignore him. Repressing anger wasn’t good so I kept looking to acknowledge any of that.

Should I feel bad and ruin my day over it? What were my options. I could buy my own damn sugar. I could dump the sugar down the drain. I could throw the damn sugar bowl on the floor and break it. Or throw it at my husband. Not my personality.

Or I could use what was left somehow by fixing the lumps and set the whole anger business aside.

Or I could be furious with my husband and be surly and nasty when I got home.

I knew my husband would have forgotten all about the sugar “incident” by then. His anger was always a flash in the pan, quickly started and quickly over. I could just set the whole thing aside, couldn’t I, and use forbearance? A word out of fashion in today’s world. I didn’t really feel threatened or unable to take care of myself. Just how did I want to take care of myself was the question.

I’ll think I’ll just let it ride, I thought.

When I got home, it occurred to me that I could pour the sugar out on the chopping block and use the rolling pin on it. It took about 30 seconds. I scooped it up with a pancake turner and put it back in the sugar bowl. Problem solved.

When my husband got home I casually informed him how I had fixed the sugar. He gave me a big smile and a hug. I guess some would call me a wimp for not standing my ground and demanding respect from my husband. But, in a way, I don’t need respect from my husband, thank you very much. I already respect myself. Day saved, argument avoided.

It really is an epiphany to realize that "being right" is not necessarily the answer to anything. Being right is not the way to any kind of essential truth. "The truth," as Joel Goldsmith often admonished us, "cannot be reached through the reasoning process." In a way, I think he is saying that the truth is always a surprise.

We’re all adults? Not really. We’re all children of the universe bumbling and struggling along a little narrow path of togetherness. Sometimes we can make space for one another’s flaws. Forbearance is a great word.

Would You Help Me with my Writing Project?

2011-12-30T23:32:00.000-08:00

Dear Ms. Curtiss,

My name is Amy, and I am 11 years old. For a school project, I am working on a career I-search about how to become an author of children’s fiction books. As part of my project, I have been asked to interview an author, and I would like to interview you by email. If this is ok with you, could you please help me by answering the questions below?

Thank you for your help. Also, thank you for the autographed copy of your poster on the Legend of the Giant Panda!

Sincerely,

Amy

How to Be a Writer

1. What are the best colleges and universities to become a writer?

2. What kinds of classes do you have to take to be a writer?

3. What kind of college degrees do you need to be a writer?

4. What can I do as an 11-year old to prepare to become a children’s fiction writer?

Career Description

5. What is the process to get a book published?

6. How do you know if the people who read your books like them?

7. What is a typical day for an author like?

8. How did you decide to become a writer?

9. How do writers develop their own style of writing?

10. Do children’s fiction authors need to be able to write well in all styles of writing (such as persuasive writing, compare and contrast, and response to literature) to be a good children’s fiction writer?

11. Since children read at different skill levels, how does a children’s author adjust their writing style and content to each particular skill level?

12. Is it easy being an author? Why or Why not?

13. Do good authors tend to love writing when they are very young and just know that they want to write books someday?

14. How do you find new topics and story ideas to write about?

15. What time of the day do you usually create your best writing?

16. How many years do authors tend to continue to write books before they decide to retire from writing?

17. Could you write your whole life because you want to? Do you think that you will ever retire from writing books?

18. What are some advantages of being an author?

19. What are some disadvantages of being an author?

20. What is the average amount of time that you usually spend writing every day?

21. Is it possible to be a successful author and also a devoted mother raising kids?

22. Do you have to travel a lot to be an author? If so, where do you travel to?

23. What is the average salary of a writer?

24. What is the range of salaries for children’s book writers?

25. What is a good alternative job if it is too difficult to get a book published?

Dear Amy,

1. The best colleges to become a writer are those colleges that teach you how to think, not what to think. Hillsdale College is the best for this.

2. Take a humanities course, and great literature courses. Shakespeare is a must!

3. You don't need any degrees to be a writer. But you need to know how to think and the process of writing. I would recommend Robert McKee's book Story and John Truby's book Anatomy of Story

4. Read everything, especially myths and legends, and fables.

5. In the past you sent query letters out to get and agent, an agent would get your work published. Now so much is on the Internet that you can publish yourself directly on amazon.com. However, the important thing is to form or join a writer's group so you can get feedback for your work. My next book, Hanner and the Bullies, went through over a hundred drafts and was read several times by more than a dozen people.

6. People write me and tell me how much they like my books.

7. My days vary. Many days I am booksigning and do not write. On days when I'm not booksigning I write several hours a day.

8. I knew by the time I was four years old that I was supposed to write. You can read my bio on my website www.abcurtiss.com

9. Your style develops according to your personality.

10. I write simple books for younger children and more complicated books for older children. No children's book is any good unless adults can enjoy it as well.

11. The main thing is to have a good story to tell.

12. Writing is very difficult to do it well. You have to keep plugging on even when you get discouraged.

13. Yes

14. They come to me from observing ordinary life. To be a writer you must be the kind of person who notices everything.

15. I write anytime. No time is better than another.

16. Writers never retire. Writing is a craft not a career

17. I will write as long as I can think straight. I'm 77 now and am working on three novels.

18. I don't know any disadvantages.

19. The advantage in being a writer is that you get paid for doing something you love

20. Sometimes I write for 4 to 5 hours at a time. I have no set schedule. Other authors have a set time when they sit down to the computer.

21. Yes.

22. Authors mainly travel in their imagination and create their own worlds.

23. There is no average salary. Few writers can support themselves on their writing along.

24. There is no average range of salary for any writer. Many children's books these days are self-published.

25. Many writers have other careers as doctors, lawyers, mothers. There is no alternative to having a craft. A craft is a talent that you pursue.

Good luck with your project. A. B. Curtiss

I was Taken Aback by Your Response to my Letter

2011-12-29T07:37:00.000-08:00

This letter is a response to the post on December 24, 2011.

Dear A. B.

Thank you so much for replying so thoughtfully to my message. Your books have helped me so much. My sister gave me her copy of Brainswitch and I love it. At first, when you wrote that I was
probably very angry that my life wasn't working out the way I wanted, I was taken aback. I never think of myself as angry but I guess I am. .Some things in life cannot be willed or forced...like the big ones. I want...marriage and family. And it definitely bothers me that it has come easily to friends and not to me.

I am really going to take your advice to heart. I'm going to join a toast masters group because I am doing a toast at my sister's wedding. And I am going to take French classes so that I can pursue my dream of working in Africa with Doctors without Borders. And, I'm going to take art classes because I love art and miss it.

Meanwhile, I'm just living minute by minute...praying a lot, talking to my family a lot, being fully present and compassionate with my patients...and planning to not spend much time alone until I feel better. With some searching and being present, I hope my next step in life will be a good one.

Thank you so much for your kindness and help. T.

Dear T,

Sounds like you are headed in a very positive direction. A. B. Curtiss

Emitons are not Logical or Intelligent, just Powerful

2011-12-27T21:26:00.001-08:00

Dear AB,

Hope you had a Merry Christmas! I did, though my Christmas Eve was rather crazy and full of drama, courtesy of my husband.

He has been on his "best behavior" for the last several months. I have appreciated his supportive, friendly presence and have tried to let him know that over this period. As I've told you before, I try very hard to be a good wife, and to keep our household orderly, functional, attractive, clean etc. I try to be emotionally supportive and nurturing. Marriage and home life are my priorities. My husband is very important to me.

As I mentioned, Christmas Eve was chaotic. Everything changed. Dr. Jeckyl exited and Mr. Hyde arrived full throttle. This happened last Xmas Eve too. Long story short, he told me both this year & last that he was afraid that I would get grumpy, sad or depressed, so he felt undue pressure and made things miserable before they had a chance to get miserable on their own, I guess you could say. He picked a fight with me. It took a while, but I finally caved in, lost my patience. He blamed me for it all, of course, and said vicious, malicious, nasty things to me in the heat of it. He also brought up things (tender feelings, self-doubts, etc.) I had shared with him during good times, and acted as if I was horrible for having those feelings. At the time I originally shared these details, he had behaved as a friend and confidant, but now was holding my weaknesses against me in a brutal verbal assault.

We ate dinner with my family at a restaurant the following day, then all came to our house for dessert. He was on his best behavior, and was helpful preparing the house and food early Christmas morning. He gave me a couple of Christmas gifts, & a nice visit unfolded with my family that evening.

I guess my question is...how can I trust him again? Should I trust him again? He says he didn't want to hear me whine or get depressed if the evening with my family went poorly. Indeed, if it had, I would have wanted to talk about it. Is that so bad? How much should I keep to myself in this life?   Aren't partners for sharing our inner selves with? Do I have to suffer some disappointment or confusion and keep it all inside? I think he's smart and I want his feedback a lot of times. To me this sort of disclosure and sharing of vulnerability is part of intimacy, being married, being human.

HE seems to want a more superficial existence. He doesn't want to hear any bad news. He doesn't seem terribly interested in my process of personal growth and changes and revelations I experience regarding family and others in my life.  How much is healthy to keep within ourselves? Point me in a direction please, that will help me understand what is normal & healthy!

I wanted to create a nice evening for my family. Yes, I was fearful of criticism, of being laughed at, of not doing something "right." Would the house be clean enough, my food good enough, etc. ? I shared those thoughts with him.  Wasn't the end of the world though...I was going forward with my plans, cheerfully too, for better or worse.

I don't know if I am making sense. Can you shed any light on this mess?

Thanks, AB!

Hi,

I'm very tired at the moment--been booksigning everyday. But I wanted to send you a short reply at least. First, I think most men are not interested in the "personal growth" of their wives, or hearing minutia of their emotional experiences. Only men who have been feminized or are in the psychotherapy field are deeply interested in this. Most men barely tolerate it.

The best place for this kind of conversation is women friends. Unfortunately, as we have moved out of the small-town kind of existence, it is often difficult to maintain a "best friend" when we move every couple of years. But we must actively seek for such friendship. Being fearful of criticism, of being laughed at, of worrying about whether your house is clean enough or your food good enough is perfect conversation for girlfriends but may be threatening to menfolk who tend to feel guilty if their womenfolk are unhappy because they immediately think they are going to be blamed for the shortfall. This is why they get so short-tempered—out of fear of getting blamed for your unhappiness, they become defensive and attack you before you can attack them. Of course it doesn’t make any sense. Our emotions are not intelligent, just
powerful.

Men generally are ready to die for you, to spend their whole life working to support you, to jump in front of a car to save your life, to take on the charging grizzly that threatens you. But they can't bear to hear you complain. And the saddest thing of all is that although they might walk all over your feelings in their haste to take care of you, they are super sensitive to the slightest rebuke or hint of criticism from you. It's a wonder any marriage ever survives its occupants.

A. B. Curtiss

Thank you, thank you so much, AB! I so appreciate your replies. Your ideas make a great deal of sense. These thoughts will help me re-frame my perspective to one that is less stressful. You did indeed point me in a better direction!

Sorry I caught you at a time when you were tired. Of course...I'm sure your holiday was very full. Hope it was full of fun and love!

Again, I appreciate your time, thought & effort very much.

Sincerely,

G.

I Am Suffering from Anxiety because I Can't Find a Life Partner.

2011-12-24T08:59:00.000-08:00

Dear A. B.:

Thank you so much for your book, Depression is a Choice. Your book helps me enormously. I have written to you before a couple of times. I think for the most part I have only experienced major depression once.This was when I was 22. I wrote to you a few years ago because I was feeling down about living in New York and having difficulty making friends and meeting a man for a long-term relationship.

I'm writing to you now because I am in the throes of another problem. I finished my masters in nursing in January and thought that I wanted to move from New York. I blamed living in New York for my problems with meeting friends and a partner. People constantly talk about how hard it is to meet people here. Since my sister had moved recently, I decided I would try where she lived. I went on job interviews.

About 2 weeks ago, I went for interviews. I felt very anxious prior to going and went I got there, the anxiety intensified. I have never felt so anxious. I was offered the job but turned it down. I felt so consumed with anxiety about moving and just really had no desire to move. This put me into some kind of a tailspin. My sister prescribed Effexor. I have never taken anti-depressants but I just could not deal with the panic. Even though I am home, I am still panicking and waking up in the middle of the night, vomitting, etc.

When I am working (I am working as a nurse), I am ok. And last night I slept through the night with no panic. However, I still feel shaky in the mornings. I also wonder if my feelings about New York are validand I do need to leave. Or if that is just depression talking. I am shaken from all of this.

I guess there are certain things I want in life and am not getting...friends that I have are having children and moving on and so I feel the friendships I do have are dwindling. Also, I am 32 and still haven't met a life partner.

Do you have any advice for me? I don't want to self-focus. I really do want to just be a good person and make a difference but I also need community and relationships. I have a big supportive family but they are mostly in NJ and have children and their own lives. One of my sisters moved to Brazil and at 39 met someone and is getting married. She spent many years in New York single. I guess this was a big incentive for me to move too.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Thank you,

Dear T,

If I were you I would not take any drugs for anxiety. If you are lacking in body nutrients that causes anxiety then go to a nutritionist or a doctor of Chinese medicine to see what nutritional supplements or hormones you need.

It seems to me from your description that you are probably very angry that life is not going the way you want. This is perfectly normal. We all hate it when things aren't going the way we want. But this emotion does set us up for depression and anxiety. The chemical imbalance is caused by our own anxious thinking and can be cured by curbing our anxious thinking and choosing more productive thinking.

Generally speaking, to rush all around until we find the "right spot" where our life is waiting for us is like chasing our own tail. We get wound up and make no progress. Life is always right where we are. That does not mean that if some opportunity arises at a distance--a job, a group we want to join, etc., that we can't pick up and go there. Or even, if we have some desire to move to some other place "on a whim" we can't go for it. Or to go where friends and family are there already may make sense as well. It makes sense to assess your opportunities and chose the best option.

In every city there are small groups of like -minded people. You seek them out through their interests: church, book groups, dance groups, philosophical lecture groups, local choirs, hiking or biking clubs, or singing choruses you can join. People met in Starbucks all the time or Barnes and Noble. You can volunteer for various groups and meet other volunteers. Many people meet over the internet these days. I met two wonderful friends when I took a course in public speaking through Toastmaster's International which is in every town. One of my friends met her life partner by signing up for dance lessons. Through your work as a nurse you should be meeting people where you work. Set your mind that every day is an opportunity. If not today, then tomorrow. Do magical thinking rathing than anxious thinking. You can get an idea of magical thinking exercises from my book Brainswitch out of Depression.

There may be some opportunities in chat rooms, I'm not too familiar with internet opportunities. There are men who are also looking for someone. But taking drugs because you don't like how your life is going does not make any sense at all. If you're in a Sushi Bar, or waiting in line, start talking to strangers. You never know. And be sure and let everyone in your family know you are looking for someone.

A. B. Curtiss

I used the Green Frog Thing this Morning and it WORKED!

2011-12-20T20:32:00.000-08:00

Hi,

I read your brainswitch book. I used the green frog thing this morning and it actually worked. I live in Orange county. Is there anyone to go to here that uses your stuff- are you still counseling? I related so much to the descriptions in your book- the pain is excruciating- but I am gonna get out of it. K.

Dear K.

I'm sorry but I don't know anyone in your area who uses my techniques and I no longer take private patients. However, I will always answer any question you have via email and I do not charge for that.

Getting out of depression is a matter of training your brain and making the neural patterns of getting out of depression stronger than the neural patterns that get you into depression. No one can do the work for you. You have to do it yourself.

I still get downer thoughts now and then and I am so used to immediately turning my mind to another thought pattern that I just don't get depression anymore. Now I seem to be able to stop it before it even gets started. The big hits don't seem to come anymore.

Works for insomnia as well. For instance, I have used the really simple rhyme so often to get to sleep that it just gets stronger and stronger and I never have insomnia anymore. An old high school cheer "One two three four who are we for." It's like my brain is trained now to immediately power down when I start the rhyme. I might get into a bunch of heavy thinking and notice I'm not getting to sleep. I ask my self "Do you want to think or do you want to sleep?" It is a matter of insistence upon your own thought rather than the thought that pops up. A. B. Curtiss

How Will Anti Depressants Affect My Baby? Please advise.

2011-12-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

Dear Ms.Curtiss,

At first, I wuold like apologise of my English.I am Lina. I am from Lithuania, it is east Europe. I have read your book "BRAIN SWITCH". It is a wonderful book. I believe yuo are the best doctor- psychotherapists that I have ever meet. I have got very big problem. Can yuo advice me, please. I am 35 years old. Depression came into my life when I was 29.

Now I am pregnant and I use drugs (Cipralex 10 mg). I know yuo was in depression for along time.Did you drink the medicine when you were pregnant?Do yuo know what is the antidepressant effects for a baby. I started use drugs 23 week of pregnancy. I am very much afraid of my baby. Maybe you can share your experiences, please.Your book helps me very, but I am very afraid to refuse drug.I think this will take time.I know yuo are very busy, but I wuold like ask yuo respond to my letter, please. It is very important for me.Thanks in advance.

Dear L

I never took any drugs for my depression because I was more afraid of the drugs than the depression. In this country there are now big suits because Prozac and other anti-depressants have caused problems for pregnant women. On the other hand, many women took these drugs and had no problem so all may be well with you and your baby. I don't know how to advise you because I don't know anything about drugs. I don't think anti-depressants do any good. I do think that hormonal problems and lack of nutrients in some people can cause depression which can than be alleviated by natural homeopathic supplements such as vitamins, hormone replacement etc. I hope all goes well for you and I'm sorry I can't be of more help.

A. B. Curtiss -

Drug Work, but in My Case They Stopped Working

2011-12-05T08:59:00.001-08:00

Dear Ms. Curtiss,

I bought the Kindle version of your "Brainswitch" book, and found it very helpful. I do believe that many of us suffering from depression have a "wrong thinking" problem, and your "green frog" technique is very helpful. I am wondering if the words one recites have to necessarily have to be nonsense words. For instance, I am memorizing some phrases of Moroccan Arabic for when I visit my daughter who is teaching there this winter. As long as I am reciting the phrases, it seems to work. The one caveat here is that depression definitely makes it hard to memorize.

Well, thank you for this great book. I am sure drugs do work, but in my case, they stopped working.

Shokran, (thank you!)

Dear D,

Any cognitive activity works to 'thoughtjam" and distract the neocortex from acknowledging that depression is taking place in the subcortex. Moroccan phrases or mathematical formulas, nonsense rhymes, anything works. Without that acknowledgment and concentration on it, depression soon weakens.

A. B. Curtiss

More Your Book Title Changed My Life

2011-11-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

This is a response to the third comment on my October 23, 2011 post "Your Book Title Changed my Life"

THE COMMENT:

The name of your book has confirmed a suspicion I've always had about my own. Before, when I was younger, depression was not entirely a choice; it was a defensive reaction. At the time, the negativity came at me from my own parent (I will not say which here) and they refused to let it end until I started sobbing. Loudly.

I believe as I got older it started becoming something I chose to do, because I thought there was no option (for example I could always let the same parent know that it was just not the time for them to be spewing negativity at me).

These days I've learned to let people know when to leave me alone, as opposed to only crying about it (never learned how to stop the tears from flowing! Any suggestions?). After having worked out most causes of my depression, it now hits the hardest whenever I feel like I've failed to meet a milestone in life, like possibly getting fired, or passing a professional exam. How can I mitigate that and move on with life faster so I can work toward finding another job or finally passing that professional exam?

MY RESPONSE TO COMMENT:

Dear R.

My training and practice in psychotherapy would first lead me to say that the depression you experienced as a helpless child is being recreated as a not-helpless adult whenever you are put in a “down “ social situation. Either when you are “put down” in some way by somebody else, or when you feel guilty ( which is putting yourself down).

Pop psychology would say that you are replaying the old tapes in your brain that were created as a helpless child and, since you are an adult now, and no longer helpless, the tapes are being erroneously re-played.

The way you stop reacting to present situations habitually, is first of all to recognize the fact intellectually. Next you have to start correcting your mistake when you catch yourself doing it.

So, the next time someone “disses” you and you feel like crying, remember that you are no longer that helpless child. You can come to your own defense.

The interesting thing is that you did come to your own defense as a child when you told your parent that now was not the time. And you have learned to ask people to stop hasseling you as an adult. However, it seems that, although behaviorally you handle the situation, emotionally you have not progressed to the same extent. You still BELIEVE yourself to be helpless, and are somehow identifying with the opinion of the person berating you (even yourself when you are feeling guilty).

Identification is a very difficult psychological tenet to understand. I’m going to quote from my book something that might help you understand identification.

FROM MY BOOK DEPRESSION IS A CHOICE

But when we are in the throes of it, the power of depression seems so much greater than our own power. How can this be? How can we be done in by our own depression? What is this "dark beast" that we know has to be us, and yet at the same time is trying to devour us? And if it’s just a part of us, why can’t we just turn the damn thing off?

A wise man once told me, “enlightenment is just a deep understanding that there is no problem.” We think we are not all right because it is the job of the subcortex-driven primal mind to be worried and paranoid, and we, who cannot differentiate ourselves as separate from our agitated primal mind, therefore believe it is we who are worried.

The feeling that we are empty and lifeless and the feeling that nothing matters are temporary feelings occurring to our primal mind. These feelings are not a true representation of our present reality. They are the autonomic fears of the primal mind when its chemistry is skewed by passive thinking and negative thoughts that trigger the fight or flight that dumps an overload of stress chemicals in our brain. The primal mind does not know any better. And we cannot teach it any better. But we can teach ourselves that we are not our primal mind.

The reason we feel so strongly is that we are more closely bonded with the primal mind than with our dearest loved one, even our own child. At her wedding rehearsal my husband spoke of our daughter as “a piece of my heart walking around.” We hurt when our children hurt, we are happy when they are happy, but we can see that they are not us. We can differentiate our body from theirs.

We hurt when our primal mind hurts, we are happy when our primal mind is happy, but we cannot see that our primal mind is not us, that it is simply a part of our brain from which we are functioning at the moment, and we can force ourselves to function from another part of our brain that does not contain depression.

Depression is a chemical paradigm shift in our energy power source, our primal mind. It is something that happens to us. We are not supposed to be something that happens to it. But if we are not forearmed, that is exactly what occurs. Before we know it, we don’t just have a depression, we become depressed. It’s not like a cold. If we have a cold, we never become colded like we become depressed.

Actually, it is a triple whammy that works to strengthen depression. First the chemical hit itself, which is the result of fearful thinking triggering the fight or flight response and dumping stress chemical in our brain. Then, second, the fact that we unwittingly, through self-talk, keep imaging to ourselves that we “feel terrible,” or “are so depressed” which tends, by repetition to make the thought dominant in the brain, like cement, which means the stress chemicals keep being produced. Then, third, there is a pathological defense mechanism at work here in addition to the biochemical defense mechanism of depression itself. The defense mechanism gone awry is called identification with the aggressor. It was first recognized and named by Sandor Ferenczi⁷, a close colleague of Sigmund Freud.

Identification with the aggressor works this way: The strongest instinct we have is the instinct for self-preservation. Of course we are able, through freedom of the will, to override this basic instinct with learned values of patriotism and self-sacrifice in acts of heroism. We are also able to override it with the learned values of committing suicide.

Given the exceptions of the learned values of altruism, patriotism, and suicide, when we are overwhelmed by some attack against us, our feeling of complete helplessness will trigger our instinct for self-preservation and our brain logic initiates thoughts that we “need” and must therefore “protect” any other possible source of power that might “save us;” even if the only available source of power is the offending aggressor. (This is another example of how separated the mind is from present reality. We must remember that the duty of the self is to re-connect the mind with present reality.)

This autonomic defense mechanism of identification acquired the nickname the “Stockholm syndrome” where prisoners of war identify with their captors, and “the Patty Hearst Syndrome” after the young heiress who was kidnapped in 1974 by a group of terrorists later joined them and helped them rob a bank.

This is also partly the reason that women who are raped keep it a secret for years, rather than “tell.” Guilt is another reason. In any interaction within a particular culture to which shame ordinarily would be attached, says Ferenczi, there is a certain finite amount of guilt to be assumed. Each of us seems to be cosmically hooked into the unsplittable atom of us all.

Whatever guilt the perpetrator does not assume will be automatically assumed by the victim. Since we must hide our guilt to protect our status, we are further separated from our legitimate fellows. Ferenczi formulated his identification theory after two decades of studying child-abuse victims who protected their predators instead of telling on them. But I think it is not out of line to apply Ferenczi’s theory to the feeling of complete helplessness that we experience during a depressive episode, where we seem to be taken over by a force stronger than our own, even though that force is inside our own body.

So from the first, depression seems to have power over us. And we can immediately proceed to make this worse by identifying with our own depression as the only source of power (reality). Our brain, corrupted by over-whelming emotion with which we identify, and thinking depression is a “safe place” for us as the only source of power, prevents us from considering any other reality than our depression.

For instance, we do not consider we are okay and the depression is a “wrong signal.” We think we are not okay and depression is our only reality..

When we become our own depression by identifying with it, by merging with it, and then trying to escape from it, we end up fighting ourselves. There is really no aggressor; there is only our fighting. We exhaust ourselves, and then, tired and defeated, we attribute overwhelming power to that which has defeated us. Our depression seems mighty and prevailing. But what has defeated us is not our depression; our own fighting has defeated us.

Thus it is that people who are more intelligent usually have the worst time of it since their whole intelligence is in league against them. When people tell us depressed people to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps,” it is really no more of an order of difficulty than what we are already doing to ourselves in reverse--pulling ourselves down by our own bootstraps.

Over-identification is the reason, I am convinced, that so many people have not learned to “take care of business” with respect to depression as they are able to do with other systemic pain, like a broken arm or leg. We do not identify with wounds and viruses. We do not let our arms and legs boss us around the way we do our mind. I mean, one wouldn't take to one's bed with a fractured bone and sigh disconsolately, “I'm so terribly broken.”

We seldom ask penetrating questions about or otherwise investigate our depression because it is not easy to be objective about it while we are undergoing it. Mostly it seems like unbearable, unalterable pain. When it's over, we feel lucky to have escaped with our lives; we don't want to call it back for a chat.

But if we really study depression, our own depression, as I have trained myself to do, we find that although it looms wide and high, like an inescapable solitary confinement of hopeless doom, it is also as easily shifted away from as a movie or a TV show As powerful a phenomenon as it is, we can learn very quickly that depression is totally dependent upon our rapt attention to it. If we are depressed, there is one sure thing we know about ourselves; no one is sawing off one of our arms.

So if depression is dependent on our rapt attention to it, how is it that we can become its prisoner against our will? We can’t, if we know how to assert our will. In depression or mania, the fight for precedence is between us and our subcortex-driven primal mind, however, not between us and our neocortex-driven higher mind. We are not so identified with our higher mind. We do not have as much trouble distinguishing ourselves from our principles as we have distinguishing ourselves from our feelings.

Unlike the subcortex, we can more easily separate ourselves out from our neocortex, and our neocortex takes direction quite well. It is a hard-working, intelligent Marian the Librarian. It is the subcortex driven primal-mind guardian, rash Sir Lancelot, whose strategies must be rigorously contended with. Wise, transcendent Merlin, whom we all secretly hope lives in the penthouse of our cranial tower, is never there. He simply visits us when we invite him by our silence.

But we can only achieve silence if we wait quietly in the library with Marian. If Sir Lancelot gets too noisy, we can get the librarian to show him the door simply by refusing to grant him an audience. He can then conduct his necessary but distracting antics, like the defense mechanisms of fear and depression, down in the subcortical basement, out of earshot, where he belongs, and where it is easier to tune him out.

It is a continuing intrigue. Primal Sir Lancelot, the first mind system to evolve, mistakenly believes that as original “Godfather,” he should be in charge of us. He is absolutely dedicated, and is not going to give way without cunning on our part to limit the over-extension of his dangerous strategies of fear, pain and paranoia, which we can do only by taking action to access the neocortex of the higher-mind.

If, instead of moving to action and accessing the neocortex, we pay attention to depression, we will be doing the converse of successful positive affirmation. Depression is successful negative affirmation. It has been common knowledge for years to anyone familiar with hypnosis that the mind cannot judge whether any particular memory is from an imagined or a real event.

Recently Henry L. Roediger III of Washington University in St. Louis proved that, given a few bogus details and a little prodding, 25 percent of adults could be convinced they remembered childhood adventures that never happened.⁸

All of us are susceptible to memory contamination. That’s the reason all those motivation seminars work, the ones that have us mentally visualizing our perfect golf swing or our successful speech. The mind, in retrospect, experiences these imaginings as real practice. Unfortunately, that is also how our own random imaginings and fears work against us. We actually “practice” depression for years and then wonder how we become masters of it.

The reason that the mind cannot tell the difference between a real and an imagined event is that we do not retain memories in any kind of a facsimile storage-and-retrieval software system. Our memory is tentatively held in the always slightly different patterns of the firing of neurons that, once jump-started, are re-created and serially echoed throughout the brain, somewhat like a living tissue hologram of electrical arcing, “like” continually attracting and sparking “like” by learned association. As neuroscientist Demasio explains, experience shapes the changing design of these memory circuits. The circuits are not only receptive to first experiences, but are modifiable by continued experiences throughout our entire lifetime.

What this all means, as far as our habitual addiction to depression goes, is that we are eminently capable of establishing new responses and new neural patterns for ourselves and bypassing the depressive ones by insisting upon making willed, rather than autonomic connections between our behavior and our physical and emotional environment. We don’t have to “peel ourselves” like an onion in psychoanalysis to uncover childhood neural response patterns that disturb us; we can simply forge new ones that nourish us, and the old patterns will fade with disuse.

So my answer as to how to stop crying is to retrain your brain to “get” that you are no longer helpless. That you are a good and decent person like everybody else and, as the old poem Desiderata puts it, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the stars and the trees, you have a right to be here.”

It also helps to have some faith in a higher power, as they say in all the 12 step groups—you can’t do it alone. That whoever or whatever put you here remains as a help to be called upon when you are at a loss as to what to do next or suffering fear. If you are an atheist and deride any kind of faith, you can still help yourself with imaginary thinking. The brain cannot tell the difference between reality or imagining so for atheists I would recommend that they help themselves with a little “magical thinking.” Or, to put it another way as those who follow the law of attraction (a la books like The Secret, or Your Empowering Self) “Bring those things into being that be not as though they are.”

For myself, whenever I feel shaky about moving forward I think of the Founding Fathers starting a new country and their pledge to each other in the Declaration of Independence: “With firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

I just use the first part and say to myself “Okay, here I go, with firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.

Hope this helps.

If I can answer anymore questions don’t hesitate to ask.

A.B. Curtiss

The Doorway Meditation

2011-11-26T20:34:00.000-08:00

I was sent an email from a friend who related a sermon she had heard on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. I really liked the idea and thought I would pass it along.

Make a commitment to yourself that whenever you walk through a doorway you will think about your life at that moment and find things to be grateful for. One of the things about this doorway practice is that it not only helps center us in gratitude when we are entering our homes to be with those we love, but also when we are leaving our homes facing a stressful or tough day. It helps expand our horizons of gratitude by asking us to be grateful throughout our lives and not just in the good times.

My Response to Critical Comments about my Work

2011-11-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Three More Questions":

I acknowlege your experience and credentials but respectfully disagree with your position on depression. Moreover, your advice to readers that depression is a weakness and that it is a learned/habit behavior is very disappointing. Depression took me by surprise and brought me to my knees. I spent more than a year fighting feelings and physical ailments that I had never experienced before.

Yes, I know what you mean. Depression took me by surprise and brought me to my knees as well when I was 12 years old. I didn’t tell anybody because I didn’t want anyone to think I was “not normal.” In a way it was like hiding from sight an ugly, hideous, infected wound which would turn everyone away from me in disgust. I periodically got episodes of depression and spent many years in chronic agony, sometimes lasting for months at a time, until I was in my 40s and had become a cognitive therapist.

The harder I fought the stronger the depression(I didn't know it was depression at the time) persisted until my body just gave out. I do not agree with your take that depression is due to weakness, lack of exercise skills etc. I sought help once I realized I couldn't fight this thing on my own (still not knowing what was making me feel and act this way.) I acted on all recommendations and excercises learned in cogitive therapy. I attended several sessions of 8 week classes. Even with all my natural strengh, perseverence and dedication to applying the cognitive skills, depression still took over. I am certainly not weak. I completed my MBA in the middle of having my second daughter,even nursing her between classes. I finished a marathon after pulling my groin on mile 13. I climed the corporate ladder passing my male peers. I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture.

Yes, again, I know what you mean. I was always an overachiever myself. Had my own local television program for a short while , had most of my writings published. But my success in life did nothing to help my depression when it came on.

I am not weak but I was still taken down. I spent a long period of time in the hospital. Of course many combinations of medication and nothing worked. Finally after deep soul searching and research I decided to try ECT. My doctor and ECT saved my life. Everyday is still a very difficult road. I have had three relaspes including the one I am fighting now. Reading your comments on weakness, brain habit etc. are offensive and quite frankly demotivating.

A lot of the pain of depression is caused by the habit of habitually succumbing (surrendering) to the intense neural patterns that automatically trigger. Depression is a syndrome that has its own course. You can, most often, change the course of the syndrome with some pro-active responses to it. Our moods grow imperceptibly from the intense, if unconscious, concentration on particular lines of thinking that pop up and habitual behavior that lead us into either a positive or a negative mode--these body modes are called the parasympathetic or the sympathetic mode. The first is a state of body alarm, or stress. The second mode is our essential sense of laid-back well-being or okayness.

You can go along with the patterns and let the depression run its course, or you can apply distractions such as re-engagement with others, mind techniques, physical exercise to turn you brain to alternative neural patterns. The brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. You make a thought dominant by thinking it over and over. We can make depression dominant by thinking, over and over, "I am depressed. I feel terrible." Some depression episodes can be averted entirely if you turn immediately from concentration on your downer thinking to more productive thinking activity. It is very difficult to do, but it is doable.

I just hope someone at the bottom of their rope does not read your site because you may be responsible for pushing them over the edge by insinuating it is their fault.

At the bottom of our rope, whether it is our fault or not that we are depressed, it is our responsibility to seek help as you did. The idea that depression might be my fault, or helped by my changing my way of thinking was of great comfort to me when I was first presented with the idea because it meant that I could also do something about it. I was no longer a helpless victim.

We are lucky enough to live in the USA so we have freedom of speech, but I fear that your advice may push people over ledge. Your advice for the people closest to depression sufferers is irresponsible at best. You are communicating that depression is in the head of the sufferer as a learned habit and due to weakness they choose to live this way.

Depression is absolutely in our head because it is in our brain and in our neurons and the result of our neurotransmitters going bonkers on us. But, no, I did not say depression is a learned habit due to weakness. Depression is a learned habit because we do it over and over and the neural pattern gets stronger and stronger. We can choose to help ourselves in many different ways. You chose one way. There are other ways.

People with depression need love, support and understanding and those closest to sufferers need love, support and understanding too! It is not the fault of anyone and weakness has nothing to do with it. Your thoughts are as silly as saying someone who died of cancer died becuase they were too weak to fight it, so it is their fault that they died.

Many people die of cancer because they will not give up the lifestyle that caused the cancer in the first place, like smoking for instance, or obesity due to overeating or heavy drinking. That does not mean they are bad people. No one knows what cosmic work we each have to do in this life. I don’t believe anybody’s depression is by accident. It is happening for some reason. If there is a will to find a way out of it, we will find a way.

I expect that you will tell me I AM being strong becuase I keep fighting. You make it sound so easy to just fight the "learned habit brain behavior". I don't know how long you have suffered from depression (I assume you suffer since you have such a bold opinion)but your approach and view on depression is in the minority. God Bless any readers suffering from depression. It is an illness no different from other illnesses and it is NOT your fault or due to any weakness.

Overcoming learned-habit behavior is not easy. Again, it is doable. A lot of depression may be avoided entirely by mind techniques. Some depression may also be alleviated by better nutrition or hormone replacement that has become necessary due to aging.

When we are depressed we need not see ourselves as helpless or hopeless. Once we have some basic idea how our brain works , and we are remiss if we do not educate ourselves about our own brain functions, there is always something we can do to alleviate our pain, someone to talk to, to give us encouragement, to teach us mind techniques, lifestyle changes or thinking changes that will help bring us again into a peaceful and loving place. A. B. Curtiss

Will the Adreniline Stop Completely One Day?

2011-11-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Ms Curtiss

After reading the books that you advised to read I understand now whats anxiety and I feel today much much better.

MY question, DO you advise me to go to the public speaking program beside the anxiety that I have?. I still feel fear and have hard time talking to small groups of people.

Regards

Dear R,

Yes, absolutely. GO. It will be a wonderful, horizon expanding experience for you. You will be afraid, but do it anyway. A. B. Curtiss

Dear MS Curtiss

Today I can say the life came to me again after spending long time in anxiety. Thanks so much Ms Curtiss.

My question is about the adrenaline. Is it going to stop completely one day?

Regards

Dear R

You need the adrenaline. It will never go away. However the painful anxiety that you speak of can go away. Never completely. You need the capacity for anxiety to be a well-functioning human being. But you will, more and more, have control over it so that it may appear now and then but will not have the power to interrupt and intrude upon your life. A. B. Curtiss

Three More Questions

2011-11-12T08:07:00.000-08:00

There are three more questions that I wanted to answer from the letter in the last post.

3. If someone asked you in less than one minute explain to me the best you can what depression is and why you think it is choice, what would you say?

3. ANSWER: Depression is a neural pattern (habit) of despair and hopelessness that triggers off suddenly or when the fight or flight response is triggered by downer thinking. There is a chemical consequence in the brain for every thought one thinks. The depressive neural pattern will be stronger and more compelling the longer one stays in depressive behavior—thinking about how depressed you are, concentrating on how bad you feel, withdrawing from interacting with people, talking in a sad, weak voice, and withdrawing from physical or mental activity that might lead to more positive thinking and therefore more positive emotions. The choice concerns one’s behavior when depression hits. You can get busy with exercise, work, entertainment or interacting with others to distract yourself from your painful feelings and pursue positive activity which can lead to better feelings. When you stop thinking depressive thoughts, the brain is not encouraged to continue to produce stress chemicals because the fight or flight response powers down.

4. Will my mom most likely be like this for the rest of my life? If so, will she ever be able to have a normal relationship with me?

4 ANSWER: Not every one has the intellectual understanding, the knowledge of helpful mind techniques, the sustenance of some faith in a higher power which can come to one's aid, or the physical stamina to pull themselves out of depressive thinking. If you are self-consumed with depressive thinking and behavior, it is almost impossible to get out of depression. The neural pattern continues to re-trigger. It is not possible to have a reciprocal loving connection with someone who is depressed because depression is an extreme disconnect from present reality and a shared reality with others in favor of an extreme concentration upon one’s own painful inner emotional experience.

It is possible to have a fairly normal relationship with a depressed person but the non-depressed person will have to take the more active role. It is more difficult to connect with a depressed person. But there are many other reasons that make it difficult to connect to another person. We are all a varied combination of good qualities and the seven deadly sins. Once we reach adulthood, we start to understand that our happiness does not depend upon our relationship with another person. Our happiness depends upon self-handling our own negative emotions, accepting them, and moving forward with our day in some positive direction by learning how to take care of ourselves despite our very real and frustrating difficulties.

5. How will this most likely affect me and my younger sisters as we continue to grow up with a mom who is never quite 'there' (physically and mentally)?

5 ANSWER: The answer to children of families whose parents have failed them is for the older ones to help the younger ones and draw the family circle together to include the failed parent to the extent possible but not to count on the failed parent for guidance and nurturing because it is beyond their capability. Guidance and nurturing will have to come from others, from other relatives, from caring friends, from mentors, from self-education and books and from ones own developing spiritual strength as one steps forward with hope and faith in a higher power that can be continually called upon. The only option should be to proceed in a positive direction both physically, mentally and spiritually. Negative thinking and negative behavior should never be an option. Negative thinking and negative behavior will occur. They should be acknowledged, accepted and one should move forward anyway, in a more positive direction.

I am convinced that the truth of life is available to any human being, but they must find it by continually turning away from the negative toward the positive. Nothing good comes from bad. Good only comes from good. Nothing positive comes from the negative. Ever. Hope this helps.

A. B. Curtiss

How Would you Describe Depression in One Word?

2011-11-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

Hello,

For English class, we are writing essays on a topic of our choice. I decided to write mine on Depression and whether it is a true mental disease or a state of mind that results from weak will and negative thoughts and actions. This is a topic I am very curious and sensitive towards, and came across your website during research and I was wondering if I could get your input on a few things.

My mom is clinically depressed, and quite frankly I just don't understand.

About 2-3 years ago, she was admitted into a mental hospital for depression and for being 'mentally unstable'. She remained in mental hospitals for a year (she was switched into state hospitals after a few weeks). My dad rarely took us to see her, and I don't blame him. I still can remember the way it felt and the way things looked when I entered into that building. It's something I will never forget. They tried countless medications and did brain shocks and all sorts of stuff that did nothing but turn her into a 'vegetable'. She became like the exoskeleton of a bug. On the outside she looked like a normal person, but on the inside she seemed completely empty.

Now, she is currently back in the hospital and they have threatened to put her back into the state hospital if she doesn't 'get herself under control'.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't upset or angry at my mother. In a way, I resent her for leaving me and my sisters so many times to fend for ourselves. The worst part about it is that she doesn't know how angry I really feel. Quite frankly, I'm afraid to let her know.
She once asked me if I was angry and for some reason I just couldn't force myself to answer-that only made it worse. She took my silence as a yes and started to cry and blame me. She said I had no right being angry.

One of my biggest fears is that one day my mom will do something serious that will affect my whole family (not that what she does now doesn't). I don't want to lose my mom to a battle I know she could win if she tried. What really upsets me the most is that she does not see the damage she is causing in the relationships between herself and her family. I am the middle child of five. I have two older sisters and two younger sisters. I worry about my younger sisters the most. At this point, at sixteen, I have learned how to move on and manage my life around her problems when she is here and when she isn't, but my little sisters haven't. They need her.

So I guess here are a few of the many questions I have:

1. Is it wrong for me to be mad at my mother? Is she right in the statement that I have no right to be angry? Is this really something she cannot control (she doesn't have any unbalanced chemicals or anything like that)?

2. In one word how would you best describe depression?

3. If someone asked you in less than one minute explain to me the best you can what depression is and why you think it is choice, what would you say?

4. Will my mom most likely be like this for the rest of my life? If so, will she ever be able to have a normal relationship with me?

5. How will this most likely affect me and my younger sisters as we continue to grow up with a mom who is never quite 'there' (physically and mentally)?

I appreciate you taking the time to read this, and I hope that you will be able to provide me with a little more knowledge about this 'sickness' that is slowly becoming my mom. I hope to be able to buy your book when I save up enough money! Do you sign books?

I wish you the best of success in all your endeavors,

J.

Dear J.

I will try to answer your questions . If you have further questions about my answers be sure to email me again.

1. Is it wrong for me to be mad at my mother? Is she right in the statement that I have no right to be angry? Is this really something she cannot control (she doesn't have any unbalanced chemicals or anything like that)?

ANSWER: Whether it is right or wrong of you to be mad at your mother is not the point. The point is: is it helpful to your life to be mad at your mother. What would help your life is to accept your natural anger at your mom and let it finish as an emotion. Anger is just another name for fear. The best thing to do with fear is to feel it, accept if fully, and move forward in some positive way despite the fear. Generally speaking it is not helpful to your life to put your fear out on others in the form of anger.

The other thing is that you don’t know for sure whether your mother has an imbalance of chemicals or nutrients in her body. Unless she has been seen by a nutritionist or Doctor of Chinese medicine (which I always recommend) most Western doctors don’t know that much about testing for nutritional imbalances or an imbalance or insufficiency of amino acids which are the precursors to neurotransmitters.

2. In one word how would you best describe depression?

2. ANSWER. If I had to describe depression in one word I would say “unconnected.”

I’ll have to continue answering your questions a little later. A. B. Curtiss

My Favorite Subject--FEAR

2011-11-03T07:26:00.001-07:00

Hi A.B.!

This article reminds me of your recent blog posts about one of my favorite subjects...fear!

I still have so much to learn and explore regarding fear. It plays a major role in my life...at least I recoginize that now!

Thanks for repeatedly addressing this topic! Some of us really benefit from regular reminders and guidance!

Sincerely,

G

How Do I Discover What my Fears are All About?

2011-10-31T23:05:00.000-07:00

I would like to respond to the comment left on the last post. Here is the comment:

You mention that we can become free from old habitual fear responses once we know what they are and stop believing in them.'

My question is; How do I discover / understand those fears? Your books have helped me immensely. I'm no longer troubled that 'Depression' will overcome me because I now know, that Depression is something I do to myself.

However I often drift into that zone of where I feel a sense of nothingness and helplessness. It's often some time till I recognize I'm there, and then once again I recognize I must use the 'tools' to begin my climb back out.

I have strong fears that have stayed with me from childhood. I'm afraid of people. Relatives have told me that at age 4, I was "a very well behaved boy." My recollections were that I was always scared of people and always needed permission to do things, which has carried through well into adulthood.

My parents were gentle people. So this has always perplexed me as to where these fears came from.

Here is my response:

If your parents were timid themselves they could have been kind without being able to teach you social skills that could have meant a smoother path in life.They could have been kind without understanding that they should have been proactive in telling you what a wonderful person you were from babyhood so that you would feel "worthy" because your parents felt you were worthy. Perhaps your parents thought it went without saying. When we are very young we believe everything our parents tell us. If they say "you're smart" we believe it. If they say, you're beautiful, we believe it. When we are older, if we don't feel smart and beautiful already, no matter how much people tell us how great we are, we simply don't believe it. The age of introjection has passed.

If we don't feel "worthy," we are afraid of people because we fear they are judging us as being "less than." Nobody wants to feel "less than." If we can learn to recognize "I'm unworthy" as a foolish judgment about ourselves, we can learn to face that we are feeling and thinking of ourselves as "less than," we can accept the feeling and the thinking as erroneous and unnecessary and move ahead to a different place of attitude. We can tell ourselves a different story about ourselves like "I'm perfectly okay." Something different is always a bit scary until you get used to it.

If you haven't read Wayne Dyers Your Erroneous Zones, this might help.

Some of us feel entitled to "take our space" in life and some of us feel we must somehow “earn” that entitlement for ourselves. My husband, for instance, has always pushed right ahead just as if everybody liked him. I suspect he cares somewhat whether or not people like him, but it is not necessary for him to "push ahead." I think he just expects people to like him, for he is pretty satisfied with himself.

Whereas I, like you, for most of my early life felt unsure to "push ahead" like I was feeling “already accepted. I needed to prove myself somehow. Some of us have mild social anxiety until we risk ourselves often enough and see that it doesn't "kill us." It is possible to get to the point of feeling comfortable in our own skin: "hey we're all just people here, aren't we, and I'm a people, too, so there!!

I'm much better at that now. I see other people move ahead without dwelling on their flaws. Good for them. And good for you that you have "tools." Our fears, for the most part, are "old childhood stuff," kind of an old story we don't have to keep telling ourselves. Remember that fear is our default mode. When we are not actively pursuing the positive in life, we gravitate toward the "nothingness and helplessness" that is always the opposite of positive.

I always suggest Toastmaster's International as a good way to learn how to feel comfortable in a group. It's a wonderful way to exercise our "social risk factor" by practicing public speaking. Generally speaking, we never suffer from an excess of nothingness so much as we suffer from a lack of fullness. I do love this quote so I'll put it here even though I've put it on my blog before. As long as we can connect with our fellow man, we can be okay. We are here to help each other.

“To complain that life has no joy as long as there is a single creature that we can relieve by our bounty, assist by our counsels, or enliven by our presence is to lament a loss of that which we possess, and just as irrational as to die of thirst with the cup in our hand.” Sir Thomas Fitzosborne

You Never Know What Will Be the Exact Moment of Insight

2011-10-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

R has been struggling for years with anxiety and depression. My Brainswitch book helped R with his depression and helped his motivation. But anxiety and fear were still ruling his life. I suggested many things, nutrition, other books, a course in public speaking. Each pursuit helped a bit. And now this letter: Another insight from Dr. Abraham Low's book Mental Health Through Will Training.

Hi Ms Curtiss

Yes, it was anxiety with fear for all this long. I spent long years in unreality life that causes me fear. Dr Abraham Low book helps me a lot.

I could recognize whats going with me from the stories in the book. It is amazing book.

Thanks SO much Ms Curtiss

Dear R.

You are welcome. We can become free from old habitual fear responses once we know what they are and stop believing in them as if they are reality. A. B. Curtiss

Your Book Title Changed my Life

2011-10-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

Hi,

I just wanted you to know that even though I've never read your book, it changed my life. In 2002 I noticed a coworker reading your book "Depression is a Choice" and that was the day my life changed forever.

With your four words as my motto, I was able to transform a lifetime of self loathing and negativity and give myself permission to be happy. It was all up to me...

Thank You,
L.

Dear L.

Thank you for your letter. For many years I have regretted my publisher's choice of title because so many people told me they felt "insulted" by it. As far as sales ere concerned it was not the title, therefore, that people felt comfortable recommending to a friend for fear of offending them. Because of you letter, well, maybe the title was perfect after all.

If you ever have any specific questions, I will be glad to answer them. A. B. Curtiss

What does it mean to be Self-responsible?

2011-10-15T13:31:00.000-07:00

In order to be self-responsible, you first have to come to the intellectual understanding that your behavior is not being done to you, you are doing it. This may seem like it goes without saying but don't toss it out, think about it. What or whom do you blame for behavior which is now causing problems for you? The answer will show you in what direction you are headed. Don't forget, you can always turn around.

I've had my own Struggles with Depression and Victimhood

2011-10-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

Hi,

I want to thank you for your book Depression is a Choice. I have had my own struggles with depression and victim hood, and as a result, I did some research and wrote a book of my own called Strategies for Happiness (www.S4HTheBook.com). I am in the process of developing a workshop - I am calling it a playshop - which is based on my book, and in the process of doing more research for concepts and ideas I can use for the playshop, I came across your book - and I am loving it. Not only does is resonate with many of the ideas I talk about in my book, but it takes the ideas to the next level.

I am writing to ask you for permission to use your book and information on your website in the development of my workshop. I would of course give you credit, and also promote your book as well.

The basic theme of my workshop is what I call Ownership - that we must own all aspects of our life in order to break free - in other words, personal responsibility. That is the basic premise I get from your works. The way you have worded things have made so much sense to me, and I know is going to help me in my own life, as well as - if you will allow me to - help all that I share through my workshop.

Although I primarily wrote my book for my own learning experience, I am happy to have published it and let people take from it what they will. I am not out to fix people, just share some ideas that I have come across that have helped me, and let them decide if it is of use to them. I have found that I have sometimes just overheard a conversation or a speech and maybe just one line they said spoke to me and I got an idea and went in a different direction then I was going, and because of that I am living a happier life.

As I read your book, I am constantly being hit with concepts that either really enforces what I have come to believe, or opened my mind even further to understanding. For example, you mentioned in your book that even after all you learned, you still wake up depressed, but that you now recognize it and take action, quickly snapping out of it. This small concept really hit home with me. Lately, I have been experiencing a mild depression when I get up in the morning. When this happens, I get worried that I am doing something wrong and there is something wrong with me. Sometimes I snap out of it, other times I let it colour my day. But when I read your experience, I thought to myself, I am OK, I just need to be aware and take the proper action and I will overcome this. That has lifted such a weight from my shoulders.

I especially love the chapter on blame. That really opened my eyes. I have not yet finished the book, but I could not wait to connect with you.

So, let me know if I can use your material and what would the parameters be.

Thanks again for a great read.

Sincerely,

Donna Hedley

Dear Donna,

Good for you that you are taking control of your own life. It is a scary thing to accept the fact that no one is going to save us. We try, in vain, to pretend that we are not afraid. Once we accept the fear, however, we start to see that there are like-minded people struggling by our side as we go about our daily lives. The fact that we can turn to each other on the journey, and help each other, makes it all worthwhile.

You have my permission to use any material from my books (Depression is a Choice and Brainswitch out of Depression and my blog) as long as you give me credit and a link to my author website http://www.abcurtiss.com

A. B. Curtiss

You are a Free Person

2011-10-12T21:40:00.000-07:00

Dear A. B.

I had picked up a copy of your book in the used book bin at our library. I had been diagnosed bipolar when about 19, as I understand is common. I was hospitalized involuntarily by my father. I continued to proceed through life and had several mania type cycles years apart. I am in my sixties now. After reading your book I took Lithium less and less. I had reduced my intake by half and had been very stable. I found I could think more clearly about everything including clutter in the basement and shed and what to do about it all.

My relationship with my wife is now under stress. We have a teen-aged daughter who in eight months will graduate and go to college so we will be empty nesters. She is a honor student and marching band member.

I was a landscaping gardener for many years and then went into wildlife managemet. I retired and became a house husband so that we could take our daughter out of day care and be there for her when she came home. I found myself unhappy and going to a therapist who said do something you like not for the money. I studied sharpening and started sharpening hair scissors and kitchen knives. I now operate a sharpening service at various locations.

As I started thinking more clearly I started doing things around the house. Getting things done is a constant mantra from my wife,

We don't make love physically much to my disappointment except maybe once a year. I had at times been at my wits end what to do with this lack of lovemaking. I have some how clung to the hope that she would start making love more again. Once going to work was the great joy of her life. Now she just has a few years when she can retire. Things have gotten tense at work and she often comes home and yells at me about things like making a "mess in the kitchen". I might make lunch and being I guess more of a slob leave a dish on the counter or a onion skin will fall to the floor and not get picked up. She is very severe at yelling. I am sensitive and it really hurts me.

I like to cook. but I don't like the way she keeps the spices on plastic see thru shoe boxes. I have to dig them all out and then she again accuses me of making a mess. I wanted to build some shelves but she won't let me. I thought a solution would be for me to buils a little kitchen in the basement where she rarely went and I could cook without her being disturbed about Mess making. I started locking my Man cave up but she broke through the door with an ax.

She says I drink which I do. She doesn't want to have anyone over because the house is in such a mess.

As I go ahead and try to fix up things around the house she is getting more and more frightened that I am in the mania stage.

She's off with my daugther looking at a college. I had a festival to go to where I sharpened. She called and has been very unhappy with me and our declining marriag. She told me I better go to a doctor and start taking my lithium again. I have gone to our family physician and told all of this stuff to him. He had been prescribing the Lithium. He did not think I was in the mania state.

I have been spending money but I am working harder and earning more too.

I want her to go to a doctor because she seems unhappy, not exercising and sleepless when she yells at me If I am up late which I have been a lot lately. I try to keep quiet.

Tonight she said I better do what she says or I will be very unhappy. she will divorce me.

I could add more I guess but maybe I said enough.

I am in an election here in town planning a trip where I will attend a church convention. Then a few weeks later I will go to a sharpening convention and want to expand my business.

Do you have any advice? I'm planning now to consult a lawyer and go back and see my therapist.

Dear R.

I don't have any real advice for you. I will tell you what comes to mind.

If your house is messy just put away one thing at a time until it is tidy again. Your environment should be nourishing your spirit, and when it is a mess, it saps the energy from your spirit. You are a free person. You are free to be messy and you are free to be neat and tidy. There are consequences for which of these you choose.

You are free to feel perfectly okay if your wife yells at you and is unkind and mean. You are free to be hurt by her meanness. There are consequences for which of these you choose.

You are free to leave your wife and you are free to stay. There are difficulties and consequences for which of these you choose. You are free to allow your wife to make you unhappy and you are free to be happy and okay while your wife struggles with her own demons. You are free to be kind and caring to your wife even though she is unkind and uncaring to you. Or, you are free to be as unkind and uncaring to your wife as she is to you.

Ultimately you are free to make choices. If you make a choice out of fear (anger is the same as fear) of something, it will end up being in some way inappropriate to your life. If you make a choice based on love of something (love of doing the right thing, love of being tidy, love of the world in which you are now living and adding your own energy to it daily) it will ultimately be appropriate in some way to your life, win or lose any particular battle. No one has the answer for what we should do. No one is going to save us. But at every point in our life, we can always reach out to one another in hope and friendship. There is always some person that can profit, in some small way, for our being in the world. I had a quote about this very thing once that I loved. If I can find it on my blog, I'll send it to you. A. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B.

Thank you.

Dear R.

You are welcome. I found the quote

I have found this quotation comforting.

Remember that at every moment we can choose to do something positive, or something negative. If we find ourselves negative, we can always insist on some kind of a "do over." We always have that choice. A. B. Curtiss

Could I Post your Letter and Pix or Would you Rather not?

2011-10-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Tom,

Thank you so much for your letter. I laughed out loud when I saw the green frog. I still use all the little mind tricks myself. That quick downshift is a bummer. However, for me it's not as sharp as it used to be. I just don't get the bad hits anymore, just the little mood shifts which are easy to knock
off with green frogs. I had a bad reaction this year to oxycodene which Kaiser prescribed for a back problem. I took it for four weeks.

My brain was fried (horrible anxiety and muscle spasms) for about 6 months. Swimming, yoga and massage therapy fixed the back problem and muscle spasms, but nothing helped the anxiety except hypnosis which kept wearing off. I knew if I went back to Kaiser all they had to offer me was Paxil or the like.

So I opted for Chinese medicine instead. Best thing I ever did for myself. I'm now on 8 different vitamins and supplements and never felt better. My nutritionist expert in Chinese medicine (Bret Moser, Poway, CA) said that my hormones were probably out of balance all my life and that's what positioned me for the big hits. Plus I learned depressive behavior from my father. Make sure your
nutrition is spot on. We're especially needing vitamin D and B complex as we age. Can I post your pix and letter on my blog or would you rather not.?

A. B. Curtiss

Dear A.B.,

What is this? A renowned author responding to my little note? If you were trying to influence my serotonin levels it worked! Ha! Thanks for sharing your hormone/vitamin experience, and yes, please post my pix and letter! After all, my health insurer can't drop me for reading a book about depression, right?

Tom Queally

The Green Frog

2011-10-08T20:48:00.000-07:00

Hi A.B. Curtiss,

I am a photographer and was photographing a house for a realtor this week when I finally came across "the" green frog.

Paxil and Celexa were prescribed to me on different occasions years apart and years ago. They were semi-adequate, but each time I came off them, things got way worse. So I read your book, Depression is a choice. I tried to green frog it and it worked great. It was so effective I had no symptoms for over a year. When the symptoms returned, I green frogged it again. Again it worked. The bummer is depression onset never goes away, but I don't stress because for me green frogging always extinguishes the symptoms.

Thanks for writing a great book!

T.Q.

Good Health Comes from being Self-responsible for it

2011-10-03T12:56:00.001-07:00

Dear Ms Curtiss

I am reading a book its name is Treating Depression Naturally with Chinese Medicine.

I found Chinese have a different opinion about the causes of depression. They relate depression to the weak functions from the Spleen, Kidney and the liver and their stagnant.

I think this is very different from the western medicine which say the main cause is the brain and the serotonin deficiency in the brain.

Dear R.

Yes, they both may be right. Remember that depression can be caused by any nutritional deficiency. I also want to give a response to another of your emails. I’m not sure I answered it.

Dear Ms Curtiss

After one month from feeling super active and high level of interest in joyful activity I came again to where I was before this month.

I have good control of depression today but still I have a question about the low interest in joining life activities.

Three days a go within maybe one hour only I felt the big change from a super active person and having high self esteem to suddenly different person.

I am trying to find out what causes chemistry imbalance within one hour after one month from being active. I can say I really physically felt the brain chemistry changing at that moment but no control.

I think there must be an answer for this moment why this happened R.

Dear R.

Of course there is a definitive answer for the extreme change in mood but I cannot give it to you. I do not know your emotional balance or your nutritional balance at the moment nor how effectively you are maintaining these balances. The only thing I can do is point out possibilities for you to investigate.

In the light of this, since I have already suggested Chinese medicine, homeopathic medicine and acupuncture, let me introduce another idea. This comes from the work of Abraham Low and Claire Weekes and I always suggest anyone might find reading both their book profitable as far as self-responsibility for one's own health is concerned. Claire Weekes book is called Hope and Help for Your Nerves, Low’s book is called Mental Health Through Will Training.

Both doctors suggest that many ailments that plague us with great pain and urgency can be mitigated by not paying attention to them. Symptoms like anxiety and sleeplessness and your description of your head sweating “from the inside, for instance” are distressing but may not, indeed, be at all dangerous. This is similar to my work in depression where I found much depression can be mitigated by simply ignoring it. But, as Low goes on to say in his book, “people treat such suggestions with great hostility until they have trained themselves to follow such a program of “will training” “They rebel against the ‘indignity’ of being treated with a too simple method for such long term, debilitating problems. And yet, in his clinics, he showed success after success of such training.

Low goes on to say that the body (as well as the mind) is always registering sensations which we notice in passing, such as an itch, a need to cough, headache, fear of crowds, fear of people looking at us, fear of jumping off high places, sweaty hands, stomach ache etc. Many of these sensations come and go and we simple pay little attention to them. However if we concentrate on them due to some fear that they are the start of something dangerous or indicative of some health problem, these small sensations can build in importance until they can literally control us. He trained people to see that they could control the build up such life-spoiling body ills like obsessive compulsion, depression, anxiety, sleeplessness and headaches with training themselves not to respond to the early sensations that led to them.

This type of self-responsibility is not in fashion these days. People are very insistent that they deserve health care for diabetes, dementia, high blood pressure, cancer, and depression no matter how costly, and yet the last thing many people want to hear is what they are doing that has been causing their problem and what life-style changes they can make to cure their own ailments. Take sodas as just one example. You see overweight people walking down the street with diet sodas all the time and yet there is hardly anything that promotes weight gain more than diet sodas. A. B. Curtiss

Thanks so much Ms Curtiss for the great info

Nutrition is Very Important if you are Depressed

2011-09-19T18:17:00.001-07:00

Dear Ms A.B

I cannot imagine how the eggs worsen my mood and the cabbage helps me in getting red of depression hit much easier.

Regards

Good for you that you are finding out which foods are helpful for you.

Dear Ms Curtiss

Thanks so much for going with me all the way till I reached here with a better understanding of whats depression.

I still curious about the liquid that accumulates around the scalp of my head that causes me depressed and I have to get red of it by walking in order to feel much better.

Once depression hits, this water start to accumulate unless I used a nursery reheme in order to stop this.

I am still looking for help in this because hospitals did not help.

I wounder if any one that you have connection with can help me in this.

Regards

One of the symptoms of depression and anxiety can be excessive sweating.

Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Chemical imbalances in the brain are caused by chemical imbalances and nutritional deficiencies in the body. Anyone with depression should seek out a holistic health practitioner and nutritionist. Or a doctor of Chinese medicine. A. B.

Dear A.B Curtiss

I am noticing that depression hits decreases since I changed the type of food I eat everyday. I do not know if eating meat is one thing that help on getting depression hits.

I am watching my food and see how it affects the number of depression hits everyday.

Regards

Dear R.

This is taking responsibility for yourself. Great work.

Dear Ms Curtiss

I made a blood iron test and the results was I am anemic and I have iron deficiency. I do not know if this is related to the symptoms

Regards

It certainly could be related. What does your doctor say? A. B. Curtiss

Dear Ms Curtiss

I finally discovered the severe depression was mostly from iron deficiency for about 13 years. Whats left now is the depression hits three times a day

and I get red of it through the books that I read.

My Q is can iron deficiency for this many years create cyclical depression like what I have.

Thanks

Dear R,

If the cells in our body do not receive the nutrition they need, depression can be the result. Many people do not make the effort, as you did, to consult a nutritionist to make sure they are getting what they need to be a healthy person. If the cells get what they need you will have a sense of well being.

I credit my own doctor of Chinese medicine for helping me out of a sick body to a well one after my bout with a back injury and taking too many drugs because of the back problem. Took me six months to fully recover from all the side effects of the drugs I took but I have been totally well now for three months. The time and effort was well worth it.

A. B. Curtiss

Your Book Had a Profound Effect on my Education

2011-09-14T10:44:00.000-07:00

Dear AB,

We spoke during my graduate education at the University of Illinois,
where I was studying narratives of psychiatric treatment. Your book
had a profound impact on my education & I've shared it with many
people since.

I'm writing for two reasons. The first, is that I'm coming to
California at the end of October for a conference of an organization
that has been working hard to establish and disseminate more holistic
and hopeful interventions for mental illness. I'm presenting at the
conference, and personally know the organizer. I wanted to see if you
had any availability in your schedule to make it to L.A. to join us.
If so, in addition to being delighted to meet you, I would love to
introduce you to a number of people at the conference--and even
possibly have you say a brief word during my own presentation (see
attached conference flyer).

Secondly, I'm attending a symposium on the east coast at the end of
the month of an organization that funding for innovative
mental health projects. Perhaps when I'm in California, I wanted to
talk with you about potentially collaborating in that. Among other
ideas would be to secure funds sufficient to produce an
ongoing series of quality video shorts on individuals who have
progressed through your treatment and others like you--to illustrate
the powerful and enduring changes that can happen.

That's all. I understand you will surely be busy already in October.
I'm hopeful we might be able to meet you--on at least one of the days.

With admiration,
-Dr.-J, PhD Research Director____________

Dear Dr. J.

I shouldn't be too busy the end of October and I would be happy to make the
trip to L.A. if I possibly can. You would have to tell me what day. Speaking
of low cost videos. You may not know that I also write children's books and
I made a 17 min video of one of them for 9/11. A teacher asked me if I could
just send her an email of the text and I said I would and would think about
maybe scanning some pictures to send her. Then I got the idea of doing the
video. Very last minute as I did it that very night. It cost me $262.50
including putting it on youtube. Here's the link. AB Curtiss

Dear AB

Nicely done! (: If my gut is right, this North Carolina organization
would give us enough to do some high-level profiles of people who have
had these changes. I think your profile would be exciting to do. I
often share it during my conference presentations--'green frog, green
frog...' (:

I would be thrilled to have you at the conference. I'm not sure which
day I'm speaking, but perhaps you could decide based on the other
presenters. Either day, I'll be happy to introduce you to a number of
like-minded people who would love your work.
--J

The Little Chapel that Stood--what happened on 9/11

2011-09-09T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Little Chapel that Stood

http://youtu.be/Q3REzmuzdxE

9 pm and I went over. We just shot it all at once, awkward pauses and all and hopefully it will get out there. Anything you can do to help pass the link along I will really appreciate. Thanks, Arline

The Little Chapel that Stood--what happened on 9/11

2011-09-07T20:40:00.000-07:00

Life is so interesting. I've had plenty of these Little Chapel books enough to supply Barnes and Noble and amazon.com and I told them about Smithsonian Institution choosing it as the best book written for children about 9/11 and as the feature book in its interactive program about 9/11 to teach the history of that event for schools and libraries. And I told B&N and amazon about the story about me appearing in the Sept issue of Guideposts Magazine, but they only ordered a small amount. The demand was greater than they thought. And the hurricane slowed deliveries and my big chance for huge sales kind of melted away with the rain. Must be I'm not fated to be all that famous after all. Oh, well.

The Little Chapel that Stood has been around since 2003 but I guess everybody just heard about it this month because of Guideposts and the Smithsonian. So what happened is that I've been inundated with calls from teachers and school principles trying to get the book by this Friday. There is no way I can do it.

Finally, this afternoon one teacher asked if I couldn't at least email her the text. I said I could do that and she could get some of the pictures on my website, abcurtiss.com . I thought to myself how sad that so many would not hear about the courage of the American people on that tragic day and be proud of the extraordinary history of the self-reliant and self-responsible and courageous people of this great country as evidenced by how everybody, young and old, responded to the events of that day.

Then I had an idea. So tonight at 10:30 I'm having someone videotape me reading the book and will put it on youtube. I won't sell a huge bunch of books but at least the inspiring and historical message will have a chance of getting out. We should not forget what happened that day, and we should celebrate the extraordinary courage of the American people. I'll let you know how it comes out. Please wish me luck. A. B. Curtiss

Need Short Descriptions of Depression Help for my Students

2011-08-27T08:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve been very busy this summer with traveling and booksigning. I’m going to start blogging every week instead of every day because of the time constraints but I’ll answer any questions right away.

Dear A. B.

Several months ago we inquired about apps Is there any developments? On another topic I am finding difficulties in a brief description of depression or the feeling of depression I can use in counseling students. JM

Dear JM

The emotional brain is not intelligent--it's like a 4 year old. You can distract the emotional brain away from depressive thinking by thought jamming with nursery rhymes--higglety pigglety, row, row, row your boat.

Women have more trouble with depression because men produce more serotonin than women and women have more trouble with hormone imbalance due to menstrual cycle. Holistic health practitioners, homeopathic medicine, especially Chinese medicine, is good for checking out hormone imbalance and alleviating it.

Also there is much happening in neuro-imaging to change neural patterns in the brain.

A. B. Curtiss