Don't Just Collapse into your Depression

QUESTION:

I read Depression is a Choice and gained some hope from it. The simple fact that you don't suffer long periods of depression anymore after suffering so terribly for so many years is enough to lend hope to those of us suffering. For the last 5 years, since I was about 25, I suffered on and off from anxiety/depression. I am thinking about getting yout book Brainswitch now. I hope it helps me. I am several months into a particularly nasty mood spell that just keeps me down. 

I have read countless books! I thought the system of Radical Acceptence was going to be the answer for me, but it turns out I'm not that great at accepting this. If I can’t manage to do Radical Acceptance do you think I can be successful with Brainswitching?

ANSWER:

I will relate an experience to you that should be of some comfort. The other night I woke in the middle of the night with a particularly horrible feeling of depression. I suffered with depression for so many years that those neural patterns in my brain are still very strong and can be triggered off by anything.

This night, the feeling was so agonizing that my first thought was, no wonder people are so afraid of this. Then I thought, this is unbearable. I felt like my whole body was filled up with pain. I could barely breathe. Then I thought, how easy it is to suffer this but why am I suffering when I know I can get out of it? Because it seems so natural to suffer the pain in your own body, I thought. It seems so inevitable, so necessary. And yet, I thought, I know that I can thoughtjam it and why don't I?

Then I did start to thoughtjam it with the dumb little song "Yes, we have no bananas today".  It’s an old 1940s song my father used to sing. The depression seemed so insistent that I shortened the phrase to Yes, we have no, Yes, we have no and just concentrated on thinking it over and over. Over and over. I went back to sleep in less than a half hour (I know because my clock chimes every half hour and I didn't hear the chime). When I woke in the morning, that feeling of dread was not there.

It is easy and it seems absolutely necessary to suffer our depression when it comes upon is. But we do not have to continue to suffer it. Depression is extremely hard to turn away from, but with great effort, we can turn away, and we do not have to suffer more than a few minutes until the brain turns away from the direction of concentrating on depression (which puts us in touch with everything that is negative in our memory banks, and concentrates, instead, on the nonsense rhyme which tends to connect with other objective and non-emotional patterns in our memory banks to give the depression/anxiety time to take a back seat in our awareness because we are no longer concentrating on the depression.

Depression needs our concentation. Depression can't think itself if we are concentrating on a thought other than the depressive thought.