Wallowing in Feelings is Not the Same Thing as Feeling Your Feelings

Dear A. B. Curtiss

I wrote to you a few years back (Feb 10 2010) and found your reply really helpful. I hope  you don't mind me writing again but recently my mother died  and since then I  have been finding a return of panic symptoms which I used to  experience a  lot when I was younger. I know your book and the exercises  are designed to  help with depression but do these exercises have the same  effect on panic? I  passed out while having a cup of tea with a friend a few  weeks ago and am so  afraid that it might happen again that I have started to  create a cycle of  fear where I know that my mind is busy ensuring that I do  feel faint quite  often. Is it possible to deal with grief by using distraction techniques or  is it better to face the anxiety it causes head on. I am really struggling and would welcome your advice.

 Sincere Thanks

 G

Dear G.

The best thing to do with grief over loss is to mourn your loss when the mourning presents itself in the form of painful feeling. When the horrible pain comes down upon you, simply accept it as part of the  ceremony of loss. We hurt when we lose what we love. It is a normal part of the experience of every human being. Feel it all the way. It is a feeling. It will not harm us in any way. After all, we are not our feelings. We are having feelings. We are in charge of those feelings. There is no need to allow our feelings to have charge over us. Fainting or getting a panic attack is a way of refusing to feel the pain of loss.

If you have been fearful of feeling the pain of loss, the first time you  undertake to accept and feel the pain, it may take a few  minutes to get the  hang of it.

You can even have a conversation with the pain if you like. Every time it comes down upon you, you can say.  Have I had this feeling before?

Yes or no

If yes, Is there anything hidden in this feeling that I haven't felt before?

Yes or No

If yes, feel around for any hidden and repressed part of the fearful pain  and feel it now. Just feel it, no need to do anything about it  except feel  it. Allow the complete painful feeling to express itself and  spread out into  the neurons of your body. Like an exercise stretch.  The feelings themselves are caused by adrenalin. They are part of the fight or flight response. The fight or flight response causes a surge of adrenalin in our  body. Adrenalin  can only affect certain of our organs and only in certain  ways.

Therefore  this pain is not  unlimited, nor is it all-powerful. This chemically-caused pain has limitations beyond which it cannot continue. If you allow yourself to feel this pain, it won't get worse. It will reach a completion, diminish  and fade away. Sometimes you can get so good at this acceptance of painful  feeling that it is almost like loving it. Immediate acceptance of painful  feelings keeps them from escalating into panic. Panic attack is cause by the fear of feeling the pain and the refusal to feel the pain. Repressed fear ends up in panic attacks.

Wallowing in fearful feelings is not the same thing as simply accepting and feeling them.

Wallowiing in painful feelings is continuing to be resistant to feeling them but continuing to engage in thoughts about how you don't like what you are feeling.  And continuing, over and over, to think about how you don't like it. And can't stand it anymore. And can't somebody do something to help you. And, oh not again. And why can't I have some relief. Why can't I be happy. And so on.

Every time the wallowing begins, you should have a conversation with it.

    Is there any new idea or data that we can add to this wallowing that will change anything?

    Or make it better.

    Is continuing to wallow in this pain making me a better person?

    Is it making me a more connected person or a more disconnected one?

    Is it making my heart more closed. Or open-hearted.

    Is wallowing in this fearful pain making me a bright shining light of healing love to shed on those               around me. Or not.

So every time the wallowing comes, have the conversation, or just simply allow the pain to spread out and stretch itself to completion in your  neurons.

    Open your hands to it.

    Relax your shoulders to it.

Bow your head, or get down on your knees if you want to, in holy acceptance of your humanity.

  You are never alone in your acceptance of and your loving surrender to your humanity.

The conversation itself soon becomes a kind of distracting device for the mind. Remember: the mind always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. At first, the pain is the dominant  thought. Your dominant thought is instructions to the brain (your obedient servant) to put you in touch with everything  associated with that dominant thought. If the dominant thought is pain, the brain will put you in touch with everything painfully negative in your memory banks.

As you continue to use the conversation exercise, later the conversation becomes the dominant thought. After doing the “conversation” for a couple of weeks, the feelings don't seem to persist. The dominant thought will change to being open, connected, accepting and will be instructions to  your brain to put you in touch with all the positive things  in your memory  bank. Pain + the conversation= okayness. Kind of like oil on troubled waters = tranquil waters.

 Hope this helps. A. B. Curtiss

   

Thank you so much Ms Curtiss, I will do as you suggest and am grateful for the suggestions which absolutely make sense.  Over the years I have tried to practice what you advise regarding depression and as a result I am rarely ever depressed and have found my mood is usually calm and positive. I guess grief is a bit different and we live in a culture which doesn't really approve of outright expressions to loss but in private I will try to apply your strategies. It is kind of you to spend the time to reply in such depth.

With Best Wishes

G

Dear G

You are welcome. For myself, I find if I am hit by a sudden real surge to the bottom, either method actually works--distraction with simple nonsense mantras, or complete acceptance and allowing the pain to finish itself. But grief over loss is a little different. Mourning the loss of a loved one, in a way, is a beautiful expression of our shared humanity. But when it escalates into mere chemical imbalance, then we must "treat" it. The thing we should always remember, but never seem to remember when it hits us, is that pain is a thought which cannot think itself. We must think it in order to feel any pain. And we can choose not to think it. That is also true of physical pain and that is why, for chronic physical pain, self-hypnosis is the best remedy. A. B. Curtiss

Depression is a Kind of Self-hypnosis

Tim Webber has left a new comment on your post "Help, I'm Sliding into Depression Again":

Wow! Just this one concept, "depression is a kind of self-hypnosis" has just lightened my entire day. I never thought of it that way before. It gives me a handle on depressive moods that I think I can use. Thank you!

Dear Tim,

Thank you so much for your comment. As a matter of fact it was a good reminder to me this morning. It reminded me that to recognize that the pain of depression that I got just hit with myself this morning was a kind of self-hypnosis. For me, just that small reminder was all I needed. When we think of our pain as self-hypnosis it helps remind us immediately that we can either suffer this automatically triggered pain (oh no, not again) or we can side-step it just as automatically. (Hey, time to think something else, and be quick about it.) So I did. Thank you.

We are often in a state of self-hypnosis. When we drive to work, the mind takes over automatically. Any time we want, we can wake up out of this hypnotic habitual drive and decide to notice where we are. Or we can simply mindlessly arrive at the parking lot before we turn our thinking onto something else--like our daily workload, and then the automatic-driving mind state ceases. It ceases because we have ON PURPOSE decided to think something else. When you decide to think something, whatever automatic thinking you were doing takes a back seat. We are the master of our thoughts and the captain of our brain.

You can't decide to NOT THINK something. The way you DON'T THINK what is painful is to turn your focus onto another thought in your mind that is not painful. This is where the automatic mental techniques of brainswitching come in handy.The weak link in that vicious bully of depression which seems to be overpowering us is that we can choose to think something else OTHER THAN IT. 

We have to learn how to do that, of course, but it can be done. I know that it can be done because not only have I learned how to do it myself, I have taught other people how to do it as well. I declined drug treatment for depression for reasons that were unclear to me at the time, but which have led me safely to a right relationship with depression that has eluded other bipolar sufferers in my family. I get hit all the time. It hurts. But now I'm out of that pain in minutes instead of the weeks and months it once took. I suffered with bipolar for thirty years, but I haven't been bipolar for the past 25 years.

The other thing to remember is that we can't "cure" depression in the same way we can cure measles. Those painful neural patterns can't be erased from our memory banks. But when we learn to choose to put our focus on things and thoughts other than our pain, the depressive neural patterns take a back seat to the new neural patterns we choose to focus on. Getting out of depression is like brushing your teeth. It's something you learn how to do. And you get better at it the more you do it. There is no way to get your teeth "clean." You have to clean them every day. Depression is the same. We need to clean up our thinking every day.

Most people find it hard to think of body pain as a thought but the fact is that pain is a thought. Which is why you can use hypnosis for surgery. The patient is in a state of relaxation (hypnosis) where the pain that is being produced in the sub-cortex is not being acknowledged in the neo-cortex. All pain is produced in the sub-cortex, the pain of depression as well as the pain of a cut on the arm. Remember that the process of pain progression is that the signals that pain is being produced in the subcortex can't be felt until those signals  go up and brain and are not only received but ACKNOWLEDGED in the neo-cortex. There is never any pain in the neo-cortex. We can learn to brainswitch our focus from the pain going on in the subcortex to the neocortex and hang out there until the chemistry changes. There is a chemical consequence in the brain for every thought we think. Bad thoughts, bad chemistry. Better thoughts, better chemistry.

Over the years in my own struggle to "cure my depression," it seemed to me that my psychiatrists and psychotherapists counseling me were intent upon a combination of two ineffective “cures.” They were either trying to anesthetize me from feeling anything at all, or they were trying to drag me back, kicking and screaming, into a painful, emotional re-experience of my childhood for clues as to what, or who, might be “at fault” for why I was the way I was. Certainly the past can EXPLAIN the present, but the past can never TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for the present. That belongs only to us.

Becoming increasingly dissatisfied with psychotherapists who themselves suffered from suicidal depression, broken marriages, extramarital affairs and nervous tics, I stopped going to them, went back to graduate school, and became a psychotherapist myself. And I found a third alternative. The point is not whether we might be, or might not be, at fault for the way we are. The point is that WE ARE ALWAYS AND INIMITABLY THE REMEDY. .

We just need to recognize that depression is never OBJECTIVE REALITY (as everyone else around us can plainly see but us). Depression is a body state of alarm in which our fight or fight response has triggered automatically.

The good news is that we don’t need any grand and glorious plans. We just need to experience ourselves as okay, even if depressed, and connect ourselves to some small positive act or some nonsense or objective thought that focuses us away from the subcortex-driven primal mind’s erroneous fear that we are not okay but lost and disconnected in a never-ending bottomless pit of despair and we are helpless to do anything. Here's a story from my book DEPRESSION IS A CHOICE that can illustrate what I mean about turning the focus of your attention away from the pain of your depression with simple actions:

A Kansas lawyer says he healed his depression with “the power of work,” after being on a steady regimen of antidepressants “from Prozac to Serzone” for almost five years. He now sells newspapers  for a living and says, “the truth is, this job is saving my life.”¹³ Except for some side effects, he said, drugs “have been my safety net, stopping my free fall into madness.” But no more.  After he lost his law practice, a friend “threw him a life-line” and offered him a job delivering newspapers.  To his surprise the lawyer found the hard physical work cheering. When he left the warehouse to deliver the papers to vending machines, gas stations and supermarkets he began to “catch glimpses of small joys.”

“With friendly greetings and idle conversation,” says the lawyer, “these people (customers) whose names I still don’t know began to draw me out of my darkness...For all the insight and help I received from drug therapy and psychotherapy, I still have feelings of worthlessness.” But with this new hands-on, physical work that hard grounds him in the routine workaday world with his fellows, day by day, little by little, the lawyer-turned-paperboy begins to feel more and more “confident.”

It's never to late to save yourself from depression, true, but you don't have to wait, either, like the lawyer, until you're deep into it to the point of losing your career. Think of anything else other than your pain. A nursery rhyme like row, row, row your boat can even turn the trick. Just focus on the rhyme instead of your pain. The brain always follows the direction of its more current dominant thought. You make any thought dominant by thinking it over and over repetitively. So stop thinking your pain repetitively. Think, row,row, row your boat repetitively. Any nonsense or objective thought can be your "mantra" to brainswitch and wake you out of your habitual depressive hypnosis. Why not try it? Costs no money and there are no bad side effects to better thinking. A. B. Curtiss

We Thus lose the Possibilities of What Might be at Hand

Anonymous left this comment on the post "My husband is being mean to me again."

Men seem to act like children and it seems we have to treat them like a child when they throw temper tantrums. No wonder Women are more dominantly the smarter sex. We do not act immature and childish and pitch fits when we don't get our way. I am getting so sick of my husband's negativity and put downs and being rude and demeaning. It creates such contempt that is hard for me to push aside. My husband needs mental help and counseling but of course he does not think so... He was raised by a very abusive mother who was also drug addicted and very verbally abusive as well. His father had mental issues too. Jeez, anyone raised in that type of environment would need counseling.

A. B. Curtiss response:

Men who have traumatic childhoods are dealing with a great deal of repressed fear. But they don't know they are afraid, they think the other person is wrong, or an asshole or stupid. This is the way they protect themselves in ambiguous, or uncomfortable situations. They are trying to control the other person so that they don't get blindsided again. Fear is very painful to feel and unless you make a conscious effort to get in touch with your repressed fear you project it onto others in the form of your criticism of them.

These men don't trust that they are really and truly loved. It makes a guy kind of mean at times. A person who feels truly loved and cherished is comfortable with things as they come up, even uncomfortable things because they have this solid base of feeling they are worthy.

So what can you do. You can love them anyway and learn how to protect yourself when the rampages start. If you can keep from getting angry at them for their fear, you may even be able to help them a little. I have been married to one of these men for more than 60 years. I dearly love my husband, although there were many years when I couldn't get past all this and was not so loving in my general attitude toward him. I have tried to encourage his good traits and since I am no longer afraid of his rampages, he has softened a great deal. It is a vicious cycle. As he softens, I am more loving and as I can be more loving, he softens more.

The big problem is getting rid of preconceived notions of how things "should be" and being able to be comfortable with the unexpected.When we spend so much effort wanting "something else" that we can fail to appreciate what might be at hand. If we are both stubborn we end up playing the loser's game of "you be reasonable first." We can always decide to be reasonable. There is just no downside to being reasonable first.

Depression is not real life--get back into real life

Dear A. B. Curtiss

I once contacted you and you kindly responded to my email inquiry. (I don’t remember how long ago.) But, since that time I have been off of all antidepressant/antianxiety drugs for a couple of years.  During this past year my mom was in and out of the hospital for a month at a time and my dad passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.  I took care of my mom 24/7 for a couple of months until we were able to find a place that was able to provide for her needs.

During this stressful time I felt slightly manic but managed to keep myself “together.”  Then during Daylight  Savings time and the start of winter I “crashed”…since then I have been using Light Therapy, vitamin D3 and rereading your book, Brainswitch.  I have several questions.

1) My mom is unable to leave the assisted living facility due to her the nature of her physical disabilities.  She is quite depressed.  I find that I feel anxious/depressed as soon as I enter the facility.  So I am struggling with using brainswitching techniques while talking/spending time with mom. (she has always had a negative outlook on life’s events—but more so now) I have tried to talk to her about training the brain—she just isn’t open to the ideas.  In the meantime I find that I am affected by her mood.  How does one carry on a conversation with a depressed/anxious loved one and keep from triggering those pesky neuronal associations?  Do I simply practice the techniques before and after visits?

2) Same question re: news.  I avoid watching/listening to most news for the same reason.  I have, however, read about environmental issues for over 30 years.  I keep up with these issues online too—to give support to environmental movements and sign the petitions. But, I have to admit that even from a neocortex point of view the news is not encouraging for the fate of life on our planet.  So is my only choice to ignore all news?  Obviously there are a lot of neuronal associations with the destruction of life forms on our planet.  It seems like it should be possible to be informed without panic attacks but not so sure anymore.

3) I am not religious—and so I don’t have the comfort of believing in an afterlife.  The more losses I have experienced in life the more I find that it’s harder to distract myself from fear of loss/dying.  

I think what I am trying to figure out is how to balance my thinking more—I find it almost impossible not to ponder the big picture but I also don’t want to feel crippled from anxiety/depression—and the pathways in my brain.

Hope this made sense!

S

Dear S,

Perhaps what might work for you with your mom is to reframe in your own mind what she is really trying to communicate instead of getting sucked into her negativity. People who are depressed all the time are very self-focused. They have positioned themselves in such a way that they deal with the world only through their struggle with depression and, more than that, they force everybody around them to deal with them only through their struggle with depression. It is a very safe cocoon where the depressed person never really experiences the reality of the world or the reality of the people around them. It makes for limited relationships with both.

But, no matter, the depressed person still wants what we all want. We all want to feel loved and respected and made to feel that we matter, that we are special to somebody, that we are a worthwhile person. In a way, deep down we all want the impossible—to be loved unconditionally. And of course, that’s never going to happen. So all of us are forever slightly disappointed with life.

The best possibility for you is to accept your mom in her cocoon without getting drawn into her cocoon. With love. Concentrate on what small ways you can show love for her without expecting any overt positive feedback for your efforts. Remember that if you require someone to have a particular response to your loving outreach to them, then the outreach is not a pure gift without strings. The string is that you require something in particular back from them for your outreach.

I am an author and do booksignings frequently. I offer people bookmarks as they walk by my table. “Would you like a bookmark?” If I feel offended that they turn away and don’t take my offered book mark or don’t even bother to say “no thanks” and just walk away then my offering them a bookmark is not a pure offer. It comes with strings.

So concentrate on the love you are generating for your mom rather than knocking on her closed and locked door and expecting her to open it. Your relationship is, of course, limited. I had a very limited relationship with my mom and I finally just kept her company by being a kind handmaiden to her, finding small ways to make her comfortable, reminding her of something she had accomplished over the years, or some kind thing I remembered that she did for me when I was young and how much I appreciated it.

After all, I was a helpless baby and little girl and I wouldn’t have survived without my mother. And my mom did not have the benefit of my education (she never even finished high school). She was very bitter towards my father and always felt like a victim in some way. I finally got her to write her autobiography and got her to admit that it was much more interesting because my father had done so many stupid things that she could now write about. I published her book for her on iUniverse. It’s called “The Early Days” by Bert Beman. She was so proud of that book. My mom was very beautiful as a young woman and I kept reminding her of that.

It’s hard to be a human being. How do you get out of your own depression? You have to keep reminding yourself that depression is not real life and you have to leave that room whenever you realize you have wandered into it, determinedly close the door and get outside your depression to real life by re-engaging with real life. Do some chores. Reach out to some friend. If you don’t have a good friend, or any friends then go out in the world and start to look for one. Join some book club (most libraries and small town Barnes and Nobel’s have them), some charity, some class, any kind of local activity. Read Dale Carnegies’ How to Win Friends and Influence People for some ideas of how to make a good impression on people. It really does help.

Stop yourself when you get into downer thinking about anything. The economy, the environment, the street protesters, the fate of planet Earth. The problem with downer thinking is that nothing good comes from a negative thought. So a negative thought should never be an option. Be brave. Be a noble person. Tell yourself that some good might come of the day ahead. Could happen. There are millions of people dumping their depressed thoughts into the world. Don’t be one of them. Maybe your positive thought might even help the world somehow. Could happen. You can’t solve the problems of the world all you can do is some small positive thing in your own sphere of influence. When you get bogged down by thoughts about the destruction of the planet or the futility of life or fears of your own mortality, read the “Desideratea.” I find it comforting and have committed it to memory Get a biography of somebody like Mark Twain or Benjamin Franklin and read it. All human just like you and me. You reached out by writing to me. I feel good being able to answer you. Win—win. You are never really alone and alienated. We’re all in this together, hooked together by own humanity.   A. B. Curtiss

Help, I'm Sliding into Depression Again

Hi, A.B.

I hope you don't mind but I wanted to reach out to you for a little help again.  I was feeling so great and confident about using the BrainSwitching techniques and as I told you in a previous e-mail, I was starting to wean off my anti-depressants (regarding which you cautioned me about weaning problems).  I took it slow and was very careful but just recently realized that depression was popping back up.  I tried to use the book techniques and they may be keeping me from slipping lower than I could be at, but I do feel somewhat disillusioned because I thought I could work with my mind without the drugs and yet, can't seem to. 

Any thoughts or advice?

Right now, I'm bumping the anti-depressant dosage up again because I just want to feel better and despite my efforts can't bump myself out of this "on my own".

I have been listening to hypnosis CDs for Anxiety and am about to do a hypnosis for depression, but feel that I keep trying and trying and getting so discouraged with life.

Thanks for listening.

M

Dear M,

Sometimes I slip into that old habit again myself. I have found that the techniques always work. However they will not make me happy. The techniques keep me from succumbing to depression.  They are used as a stop-gap, a kind of brake on where I go in that direction. I acknowledge that the old stuff has been somehow triggered. However, once I put the techniques into action, and stop the slide, then I turn myself immediately to some task or project and carry the heaviness along with me, accepted and basically ignored, into that opposite direction. Into the direction of new and more productive action.

Remember, the brain ALWAYS follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. You have to keep rethinking and concentrating on what you are doing, turning away from the darker reflections and getting fully immersed into some more positive action thus making those thoughts dominant over the anxious thought. If you give too much credence to some negative feelings like "Oh, no, here I go again, I can't bear it..." the brain takes it more seriously.

No, you must accept the darker feelings   (Oh, yes, I remember this crap and it always goes away when I get busy and concentrate on other things..." ).  I felt a little dark this morning. I've had a stomach flu and haven't been able to do much. But here comes your question and I feel well enough to reach out to you. And in that reaching out to you, I am already out of my own murkish world and heading back into the land of the living and okayness. I will invite you to go along with me this morning. Find something worthwhile to do, no matter how humble.

You could look up the Desiderata on my depression website and commit it to memory. I did that a while ago. It dawned on me then what it meant by "go placidly amid the noise and haste." Sometimes it's basically the noise and haste of our own upsetness and moving in the wrong direction. We can always turn around.

Hypnosis is good as well. Get Emil Coue's book. And remember that depression is a kind of self-hypnisis as well, although accidental. We can always trade accidental, passive thinking for on-purpose, directed thinking.  If you haven’t had a check-up with a homeopathic practitioner or nutritionist, that might be a good idea. When the cells get what they need, we feel good. A. B. Curtiss

 A.B. Curtiss writes for EZArticles. Her latest article: "How Nobody's Park Became Mine" is now online.

How Nobody's Park Became Mine

By A.B. Curtiss

There is a little tri-corner piece of property, probably less than a quarter acre, nestled among my house and three others. I walk by it every morning and watch it fill up with weeds. The owner hasn't lived in his house for maybe 15 years. Once or twice a year he sends a yard man to clean up the little park. But the weed cycle soon takes over again.

Click Continue to read the full article.

Why Your Psychotherapy May not be Working

        There is a huge unrecognized problem with psychotherapy today. Neither the therapist nor the patient grasp the fact that most of what occurs during their sessions is that the patient is trying to go back and "fix" their history or at least be paid for it.

        The patient is still angry and hurt about being shortchanged by earlier abandonment or abuse, and they want to be reimbursed. Wants justice. Wants recognition for the pain. Wants the therapist to blame the abuser, or the terrible circumstances of the past, and take any blame away from the patient for failing in their own present life.

        Why does this happen? We all avoid dealing with our own repressed fear and pain, which is extremely painful by blaming. Which is why therapy takes so many years.

        The patient is still using the process of blame to avoid seeing their fear, and being able to address their fear, so they can make more positive behavior choices. So the "other causes" and "life history" start to seem more important and powerful than "the patient" and his effort at making something out of his regular day. When the past becomes more important than the present, you can't live in the NOW.

        In most psychotherapy, therapist and the patient both believe the patient is trying to fix her daily life. But if that were true, they would not need to go over and over and over the patient's past background. Child abuse or bullying of any kind has nothing to do with adult choices except that it is easier to fall into habitual use of old negative habit patterns than to form new positive patterns of behavior.
        One of the worst things for a therapist to do is have their patient constantly "pillow-bashing" their former abuser. In order words, having the patient express their anger in acting out in symbolic aggression against the abuser. This is a waste of time. This old fear and anger (fear focused outside oneself) should be brought up, fully acknowledged and accepted rather than bypassed by acting it out. By acceptance, I mean allowed to finish by being recognized and felt deeply by the patient.

        The scientific fact is that old poor behavior patterns have no power to limit one's use of good behavior patterns. This includes former crazy behavior as well, which is not often thought of as a choice. Once we realize this fact, then we can simply put all our energy into practicing new thinking and behavior patterns, until the new patterns become dominant over the old poor thinking and behavior patterns.

        The old thinking and behavior patterns will still exist in the memory banks but as new ones take precedence, the old ones cease to be used as often. This is due to the brain's plasticity. The brain creates new neural patterns as a result of new behavior and new thinking. These new neural patterns can be used instead of the old ones. It is the patient's choice which patterns to use.

        But this seems too simple. Most people prefer the "therapy" for fixing their life to be complicated so that there is more excuse for lack of success. Why would we want lack of success? It is human nature to settle for the old ways, the known, even if it's miserable, than to risk the new. As the old phrase goes "better the Devil we know than the Devil we don't know."

        The new positive behavior choices generally involve dealing with your fear. Repressed fears are extremely painful. The more you are willing to risk addressing your fear, the less need you have for excuses, and the more you will use your energy to take the simple road of applying new and better behavior and thinking patterns, and therefore making yourself a better brain to insure yourself a better life.

        The funny thing is that you could write yourself any kind of life-story history, and substitute it for your real background, and take it to a therapist, and the change would have no effect on your therapy. The only difference is that your real history EXPLAINS your fear. But you don't need your fear explained. You just need to address your fear so that it can finish, and you can move on to make something of your day.

http://www.abcurtiss.com http://www.depressionisachoice.com http://mobyjane.blogspot.com/ A. B. Curtiss is a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist, diplomat of the board--psychology, certified hypnotist, author of 12 books, and the creator of brainswitching, a system of mind exercises to get out of depression. Her books have been translated in 5 languages including Japanese and Russian.