Brainswitch Out of Depression
Chapter 1: What You 've Always Needed to Know About Depression
When you know its working parts, depression will no longer suck you in like a sinking star.
Depression once brought me to my knees. It was the fight of my life. I won that fight and so can you! Most people who seek help for depression want to know two things: Is there something that can stop the torture? And can I do it without drugs? The answer is yes, and yes. All suffering, depression included, can be and should be understood in the larger terms of utilizing healthy brain functions, not just brain pathology.
You have probably opened this book because you or someone you love is struggling with depression. You have come to the right place. I am a licensed cognitive behavioral therapist and a certified hypnotist. I worked in a woman 's counseling center for seven years before I opened my own private practice. One of the most important things in my background is that as a young woman in my thirties I was diagnosed with manic-depression, as was my father and brother. It 's now called bipolar disorder but I prefer the original term for its more graphic description.
Although I am a happy person now, for almost 30 years I was an unhappy one. Chronic depression devastated my life, and almost ruined my marriage. In the last fifteen years I have been so little troubled by depression that I no longer think of it as the enemy of the spirit so much as the teacher of the soul.
Not that depression doesn't still come down upon me. I spent so many years being depressed that those neural patterns are practically hardwired in my brain. However, when they are triggered for whatever reason, I am out of them in minutes instead of the days, weeks, or months it used to take. Depression no longer has the power to interrupt my life because I know what to do when it attacks.
Depression can happen to anyone
Perfectly normal people can have depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. They may come on suddenly and unexpectedly; or they can be your constant companion for weeks, months, or even years. The pain can be so unbearable that some people even consider ending it all just to escape it.
Sometimes depression occurs when things are going well and there 's no clear reason for our sudden unhappiness. At other times depression and problems become so inter-mixed that we think we are suffering from our problems when, in fact, we are suffering from our depression.
The symptoms are not going away by themselves anytime soon. Even though depression is certainly cyclical, you can 't count on its cyclical nature to enable depression to cure itself. But a new cognitive behavior technique called "Brainswitching" uses the principles underlying its cyclic nature to rescue you quickly from the agony of depression. Depression is like living in a room of pain; you can learn how to leave the room.
You cannot will yourself out of a deep depression because the pain is caused by a chemical imbalance. But this targeted system of mind techniques can short-circuit the agony by disconnecting the message that you are depressed from one part of the brain to the other until the chemical balance is restored. Brainswitching deals instantly with the physical pain of depression. Cognitive behavior therapy and psychotherapy do not. Drugs may take weeks or months to work.
However, it will not take you long to learn Brainswitching. Those who get depressed know how rapidly we can be laid low by it. Now here is a process that can get us out of it just as fast. It 's about time! Until now depression has been an unsolvable problem for millions of people.
Two different schools of thinking about depression
To add to our confusion, two entirely different schools of thought about depression have been polarizing in the last few years providing little security in the middle for those looking for a safe and sure treatment that really works. Chronic depression has become like the old proverb: Who shall decide when doctors disagree? Meanwhile people 's very lives are hanging in the balance.
One thinking insists depression is a character flaw or psychological problem that 's "all in your head." The solutions that come along with this theory tend to be low-key, sporadic, and non-specific. It suggests that you do such things as count your blessings and be grateful for what you have, exercise more emotional self-control, think positive, take the bad along with the good like everybody else, plan a weekly pleasant activity, take up jogging, volunteer to help others less fortunate, accept your pain and it will disappear.
The other school of thought claims just the opposite, that depression definitely is not "all in your head. This theory holds depression to be an incurable, genetically-based mental illness, over which you have no control whatsoever. The treatment advocated here is therapy and medication for the rest of your life.
This dichotomy has not only been a problem for those who are depressed, but for the professional community dedicated to helping them. Our common sense need not be trapped any longer in this therapeutic tug of war. There is a better answer!
The FRS factor of depression
We need to understand that depression is more than an incomplete gestalt of self-reported symptoms. We need to treat depression more than palliatively. We need to understand and treat depression neuroscientifically for the biochemical event that it is. This is not incompatible with either school of thought, and it successfully addresses the legitimate concerns of both.
This was the subject of my workshops for the California Council on Family Relations. The conference was mostly attended by students, counselors, and psychologists whose careers involve helping people through their emotional setbacks.
My lectures included an explanation of the physiological components of our feelings--how do we feel what we feel? I discussed the process whereby signals from the emotional part of the brain (the subcortex) must travel upwards and be acknowledged in the thinking part of the brain (the neocortex) before a human being is able to feel any pain or emotion.
It is inconceivable to me that anyone would be successful in understanding, much less treating depression, without some knowledge of the small area in the neocortex called the "feelings receptor station." I call it the FRS factor of depression. But when I asked the mainly professional audience if they had ever heard of this neuronal process of pain perception before, not a single hand went up!
Of course it is such a tiny event, brain-wise, that it happens beneath our level of awareness. But this small instantaneous process underlies the reason depression is cyclical. The fact that depression is cyclical is extremely important. All depression ends at some point, sooner or later, anyway. Why not move it faster along its natural continuum and get it to end sooner, rather than later? This is the whole point of Brainswitching.
Once aware of the pain perception process in the neocortex, we can take advantage of it to move ourselves out of depression rapidly. Much faster than would be the normal course of any depressive event. You can get so good at Brainswitching that depression will cease to be a major issue in your life. You can opt out of it quickly whenever it strikes.
First, you need to know a little bit about how your brain works
Brainswitching is not a magic bullet. You have to do a little work before you get the hang of it. Nevertheless, the same way that many diabetics can stem the tide of their disease with slight changes in their diet and exercise, those with depression can turn their whole life around by making small, precise, and particular interruptions in certain habitual thinking processes. If you don 't understand this last sentence, don 't worry. The first few chapters will make it crystal clear.
In order to make these changes, you will need a bare-bones education in how your brain functions which you will get in the beginning chapters of this book. Don 't be alarmed. All you really need to know about your brain can be understood by any serious-minded eighth-grader. And you will be a wiser, more tranquil person for your effort.
With this information you can make use of the latest research which shows that depression, anxiety, and even obsessive-compulsive disorders can be eliminated by altering one or two thinking patterns. You can sidetrack automatic depressive patterns by building new and more helpful get-out-of-depression patterns which you soon learn to use as automatically as the old destructive ones. Again, how to do this will become clear as you read the book.
As a psychotherapist I endured lengthy bouts of life-dulling depression for decades. Not anymore! I discovered the mechanism behind Brainswitching in cutting-edge neuroscience research and brain-mapping as I strove to help those who came into my counseling office looking for relief from their pain. As a result I found the answer to my own chronic depression, mania, anxiety, and panic attacks that I had struggled with for so long.
You can side-step depression
I have successfully presented my research findings to the National Board of Cognitive Behavioral Therapists and subsequently have provided workshops for professional organizations and holistic health schools. Thousands of people are now learning the technique.
Brainswitching is immediate. It lets you quickly side-step the depression which is generated in the emotional part of your brain (the subcortex) by taking temporary refuge in the thinking part of your brain (the neocortex), which never contains depression. Brainswitching handles stress, anxiety, and depression from the feelings receptor station in the neocortex.
The process allows you to consciously shift the neuronal activity of your brain from the subcortex, where depression is always located, to the neocortex which does not have the capacity for depression. You can learn to do this.
Brainswitching is for you if you have any kind of recurring depression or anxiety; if you have felt vaguely disconnected and too stressed to have the normal life that you see other people enjoying; or if you have asked yourself the question: "Will I ever be really happy again?"
Brainswitching short-circuits the short circuit
There 's no doubt that depression, or indeed any serious emotional upset, has the capacity to temporarily short-circuit the thinking brain. Suddenly we are under stress. We are anxious, or depressed, and we can 't think straight. Our mind seems to go blank, and our normal thinking goes "off line."
There is good reason for this. The emotional brain, being the ancient core system around which all the rest of the brain subsequently evolved, is our primal instinct. We are genetically scripted to get automatically hooked by it. However, once you have a "bird 's eye view" of how the whole system operates, you will become more wary of getting snagged in it. You will be able to by-pass this emotional short-circuit, and access your thinking brain again. That is the subject of this book.
Depression is real. We can feel it. Hook us up to a brain scan and we can see it. We can measure it in the lost hours and lost opportunities of our lives. We can quantify it chemically, bioelectrically, and neuroscientifically. We can verify it physically and psychologically. And now, thankfully, we can stop it with Brainswitching.
Chapter 2
You Can Get Out of the Torture Chamber
The most difficult problem often has the simplest solution.
Deep in my brain there still exists this neural torture chamber into which my mind periodically throws me. Down, down I sink into the blackness. I hear the sickening click of the lock behind me. I am paralyzed with fear. There are no windows to see out of this pain. I am trapped, lost! Who will help me? I am beyond help, beyond hope. The agony! The agony! I cannot stand the pain.
But then I remember! I have the key out of this terrible place right here in my pocket. It’s called Brainswitching. I don’t have to stay here. I can immediately begin to free myself. Of course I could not do this in the beginning, just as you or your loved one cannot do it now. But be assured. Anyone can learn to do it.
I sought help for depression
As a young woman I was successful in many other aspects of my life. So I couldn’t understand why I was often filled with such debilitating hopelessness that I couldn’t get out of bed for days; that I would cry for hours; that in the midst of my loving family I would feel nothing but the pain of isolated loneliness.
People who have never suffered from depression and want us to “snap out of it” have no idea of that unbearable agony. I went from doctor to doctor hoping for a better solution. Finally I stopped going to psychotherapists and became one.
I went back to graduate school. It was here that I finally found out what was the matter with me. I was completely ignorant of how my own brain functioned and how my nervous system worked. The dirty little secret is that if our brain feels bad, it is because we have unknowingly given it instructions to feel bad.
We simply don’t know how the darn thing works. And, like any extremely complex machinery, if we don’t know how the brain works we can bumble around pushing all the wrong buttons, causing malfunctions like chemical imbalance.
What you don’t know can’t help you
With some knowledge, we can push the right buttons. But without some tools of understanding, when you are deep into depression, you cannot reach far enough into yourself to rescue your heart from its own dark cave. I have already spent too much time in such a dark cave myself.
Although I still may be instantly hurled there on occasion, I now make my visits extremely short. I no longer take up residence in that painful chaos of mind. How do I manage that? I have learned exactly how my mind produces depression, and precisely, how I can put a stop to it.
Depression is the only pain that remembers. It not only remembers it recreates itself over, and over, and over. In a way it is the ultimate post-traumatic stress syndrome. The physical pain, the psychological fear, the feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, and despair, are all bound up and entangled in a neural pattern that takes on a life of its own, seemingly independent of our will. I say seemingly because we usually are not aware that we focus our attention away from our will at this time. We focus only on the depressive pattern. We can learn not to do this.
A new way of thinking is the answer
Since the pain of depression is recurring and virtually unchanging, second-guessing can become your best strategy. As you are able to anticipate the repetitive nature of what happens, you can now practice and correct your responses ahead of time. This way you can continually sharpen your wits against what depression throws at you. As powerful as it is, you will begin to see that it is a lifeless old syndrome that can’t create new possibilities for itself. But you can; with Brainswitching!
Brainswitching can disconnect you from the depressive neural pattern and build another neural pattern as a bridge to your rational faculties. You can almost immediately connect to your regular world again. It may be a new idea to you that you can build a neural pattern in your brain as an act of will; but this is what we do anytime that we acquire a new skill or habit.
I realize now that I was never depressed because I was sick. I was depressed because I was wrong. Depression easily misleads us, by the overwhelming fear and physical agony of it, into believing that we have nothing within us to fall back on. We are trapped in a death-like emptiness. We can’t concentrate. The things we used to take pleasure in suddenly have no meaning. We believe we have lost the capacity to think, feel, and enjoy the way we used to.
This is never true. Not a single bit of our extremely complex mind ever disappears or “goes blank” because of our moods. Just the opposite. It is our moods that flare up and then go blank. With all its creativity, reason, and intelligence, with all its capacity for ongoingness, our whole mind remains completely intact and immediately available to us even in the depths of depression. We simply must learn how to properly access it at this difficult time.
Getting stuck in depression is a learned response
Getting out of depression is a learned skill that millions of people have accomplished. They’ve probably picked up coping mechanisms and mind techniques as children that they are completely unaware of. The only thing they know is that they don’t get depressed “like other people.”
The millions of people who do suffer from depression don’t know these simple but important skills. To acquire them as adults involves some restructuring of thinking habits. More conscious and intellectual effort is needed. Again, don’t worry. The exercises are simple.
The exercises help us learn the difference between being responsible to our mind and being responsible for our mind. When we are responsible to our mind it’s like being responsible to our parents or our teacher, or our boss. We have to do what they want no matter how foolish we think it is.
It’s the same way with our minds. When we are responsible to our mind we think we must go along with whatever raging emotional upset, despair, or anxiety might be triggering up in the neurons of our brain. Instead, we can learn to be responsible for our mind. We can direct the neurons to do the kind of thinking that will be helpful to us instead of harmful.
We can’t use hope and a sense of fulfillment to get rid of depression. Our brains do not work that way. Depression is a biochemical event. It needs a biochemical solution. But this does not necessarily mean pharmaceutical drugs.
Depression loses its power
Thanks to Brainswitching, the hopeless anguish that was once the most real thing in my life no longer holds power over me. I can see depression for what it is--a temporary mind construction caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. And I know how to dismantle it quickly, using the same building blocks by which it arose.
It took me several years to develop this small, precise expertise. It is replicable. I can teach it to you. It can be used to supplement any other methods you are now using for depression. It has no negative side effects. Brainswitching can absolutely pull you out of any depressive episode. It takes immediate action to thwart the biochemical imbalance that causes all the pain.
You don’t have to be a psychotherapist, or some kind of heroic person to do Brainswitching. You can be just an ordinary human being, frantic and frightened like I once was, and thinking you will never be a normal happy person again. I assure you, you can be!
Anybody can do this
Sometimes I have been criticized by people who say, “Well sure, you can get out of depression because you are a therapist.” My answer is that maybe special training is necessary to research and synthesize psychological information into a working process. But once the process is created, anyone can use it. In this respect, Brainswitching is like the game of Checkers. Perhaps it takes special knowledge to invent it, but once it’s invented, even a child can learn to play it.
I relate my early journey out of depression in a book called Depression is a Choice: Winning the Battle Without Drugs. It is a more philosophical book than this one, a memoir of how I got out of manic-depression without the customary orthodox drug treatment. By the way, the title was my publisher’s idea. My choice of title was The Woman Who Traded Her Mind for a Green Frog.” Green Frog” is the name of the first Brainswitching exercise I ever used.
Brainswitching and Directed Thinking have worked for thousands of people who have read my first book and visited my web site, www.depressionisachoice.com. Brainswitching is a specific kind of Directed Thinking. One man emailed me, “Before Directed Thinking I never fully understood mindfulness, meditation, or what it was like to really live in the NOW.” Another wrote, “The best thing I learned from your book is the awareness of my awareness.
Professor of Psychology Dr. Al Infande wrote me that Depression is a Choice “has to be one the best books I have ever read on the topic of depression. And I mean it! Your book made more sense about the concept of depression than any other book I ever read.”
Why did I write a second book?
So many readers of my earlier work suggested that a how-to book with more mind exercises would be a helpful addition to the memoir. Also, I get letters all the time from people desperate for some step-by-step, practical way out of depression, either for themselves or for someone they love. Letters like this:
Our 23-year old daughter has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The doctors tell her that her condition is incurable, and that she will need to be on a combination of medication and therapy for the rest of her life. We are desperate. We finally came across your web site and everything you suggest on your depression web site is just the opposite from what our daughter is doing.
She is on sick leave, so she is not working. She is not involved in anything constructive. She is not exercising at all, and has nothing but time on her hands to dwell on her depression, which I can see is only making her worse. She is very self-absorbed and her therapy keeps her dwelling on her past and what she may have experienced, instead of on today and what she can do. Can you recommend a therapist in our area that uses your techniques of Directed Thinking? We think it makes so much sense, and it has given us our first ray of hope.
Free from depression
When I was first diagnosed with depression I was convinced that I did nothing to cause the hopeless despair that periodically laid me low. I didn’t think I could do anything to fix it either. Now I know better. When depression strikes, I take over. I am the one in charge, not my rampaging emotions. Of course, in order to do this, it helps to know something about how your brain works!
All depressed people think we have a problem with our feelings, with our chemical neurotransmitters such as serotonin. True. But more importantly we have a problem with our thinking about our feelings. Most of our pain is caused by what we are thinking and doing and we can think and do something else.
One of our major problems is that we have been sensitized by stress to over-react to our feelings. Depression is more of a geometric than an arithmetic progression. It’s a reaction to the stress of the reaction to the stress of the reaction to the stress of the reaction ad infinitum, each progression producing more chemical imbalance and thus more pain.
Depression dissolves when self-debilitating mindsets are changed
Depression is a place in the brain we get to. We don’t have to stay there. We get there by thinking a certain way, which causes a chemical imbalance. And we can get out by thinking a different way, which will correct the chemical imbalance.
When I say depression is a thinking problem I do not mean this terrible feeling is imaginary. Far from it! It is basic body chemistry. It is physically excruciating to the point where some people have even thought of ending it all, or actually tried to. But it is a needless tragedy because there is a solution.
If only I had known in my younger years what I know now, my life would have been so much better. But then I wouldn’t have become a therapist either, and perhaps my life would have lacked some depth as well. It is probably better to have borne adversity and conquered, rather than never to have suffered at all. Certainly without the adversity of my own depression, I couldn’t have written this book.
Brainswitching works for any kind of depression. Depression is not quantitative; it is a qualitative state of being. It is a state of alarm. Most people think of depression as a mood, but neuroscientifically speaking it is caused by a neural thinking mode. Therefore, even those who are deep into depression can recover the same as someone with a milder case. When you change the manner of thinking that caused it, the chemical imbalance fades, and the despair goes away. No matter what was the gradation of despair, gone is gone!
First you have to learn some basic biology
The next few chapters will discuss all the information you will need about how your brain works: the two main parts of the brain; how you get, neuroscientifically speaking, from one thought to another; the two different kinds of thinking that human beings all do (one of which leads to depression); the role of the psychological defense system; and the chemical consequences of the triggering of the fight-or-flight response. This is necessary so you can understand the mind exercises that follow.
The mind exercises are all very simple; anybody can do them. They require no preparatory techniques or previous knowledge other than what you read here. They promote a sense of well-being and calm. For one thing, at least while you’re doing them you are not punishing yourself with guilt about your depression. The decision to do some small good thing for yourself can be the starting point of a complete turnabout in your feelings.
These exercises are not only for beginners but for those familiar with the new human potential training, neural-linguistic programming, and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). They will find much here that is new. They are wonderful for children too. Just as we give them toys that teach color, distance, and balance, these exercises teach the thinking part of the brain to calm the over emotional part.
Exercises teach you how to do calm in order to be calm
You cannot cause a brain state (a phenomenal state) to appear by simply knowing something, or wanting something, or setting up the outside circumstances of your life although that is the first step. Many people think that happiness is somehow caused by circumstances other than their own thinking. This is not true. Lottery winners, plucked from otherwise disastrous fates by Lady Luck, seldom maintain their sense of well-being. And normal people, overwhelmed with sudden tragedy, can regain their inner happiness despite grievous losses.
Our moods are not dictated by our changing fortunes. They are established by our long-standing thinking habits. There is an old saying, “The wages of sin is death.” The wages of habit is more habit. Whatever life we practice, that’s the person we become. To produce calmer thinking instead of our habitual depressive thinking, we have to retrain our brain with exercises the same way we would exercise weak arms and legs to regain proper strength.
If you exercise a muscle, it will become strong. If you exercise a thought, it will become dominant. The brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. Unfortunately, in exercising depression for years, many of us allow negative neural thought patterns to build into a destructive dominance. Then we wonder why we get “hooked” into depression. We wonder why we’re not happy.
To turn around from that, we must exercise “calm” the same way we exercised “depressed.” You can easily begin to do it. The exercises are short and simple. Some take less than 30 seconds.
Knowing is not doing
Mental exercises are important. We don’t achieve strong muscles knowing how to lift weights. We have to actually lift them. We can’t play the guitar or piano, or learn how to type with just the idea that this finger goes here and that finger goes there. We have to practice, practice, practice, until the neuronal patterns form physically in our brain. This is as true for getting out of depression as it is for learning how to play the piano.
Getting the idea intellectually is not enough. You must experience the idea through mental or physical action, which imprints it in a usable mind pattern. If your depression patterns are already well-imprinted because you have been practicing them for a long time, don’t worry. By practicing new kinds of thinking, you can form new brain patterns which do not contain the old depression.
Brainswitching exercises
Brainswitching exercises are an efficient first-aid for depression or stress. You can do them when you are jumping out of your skin with anxiety, fear, and guilt; or sunk deep into despair, unable to work or sleep. There are other Directed Thinking exercises that prepare your mind for thinking changes, leading to a more stress-free and anxiety-free existence.
The mind has to help us do all this human thinking and being every day of our lives. Like any other part of us our mind needs to be nourished, soothed, stretched, and strengthened so that it will not be too weak, too frightened, or unresponsive when we call upon it.
Spiritually speaking, some suffering may be necessary for our humanity. But too much suffering can also separate us from our humanity. Turning from the negative to the positive, from your pain to your life, is not easy to do. You know it’s not easy to do. You’ve probably already tried to do it. Don’t give up on yourself. This book will show you how to do it.
Depression once brought me to my knees. It was the fight of my life. I won that fight and so can you! Most people who seek help for depression want to know two things: Is there something that can stop the torture? And can I do it without drugs? The answer is yes, and yes. All suffering, depression included, can be and should be understood in the larger terms of utilizing healthy brain functions, not just brain pathology.
You have probably opened this book because you or someone you love is struggling with depression. You have come to the right place. I am a licensed cognitive behavioral therapist and a certified hypnotist. I worked in a woman 's counseling center for seven years before I opened my own private practice. One of the most important things in my background is that as a young woman in my thirties I was diagnosed with manic-depression, as was my father and brother. It 's now called bipolar disorder but I prefer the original term for its more graphic description.
Although I am a happy person now, for almost 30 years I was an unhappy one. Chronic depression devastated my life, and almost ruined my marriage. In the last fifteen years I have been so little troubled by depression that I no longer think of it as the enemy of the spirit so much as the teacher of the soul.
Not that depression doesn't still come down upon me. I spent so many years being depressed that those neural patterns are practically hardwired in my brain. However, when they are triggered for whatever reason, I am out of them in minutes instead of the days, weeks, or months it used to take. Depression no longer has the power to interrupt my life because I know what to do when it attacks.
Depression can happen to anyone
Perfectly normal people can have depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. They may come on suddenly and unexpectedly; or they can be your constant companion for weeks, months, or even years. The pain can be so unbearable that some people even consider ending it all just to escape it.
Sometimes depression occurs when things are going well and there 's no clear reason for our sudden unhappiness. At other times depression and problems become so inter-mixed that we think we are suffering from our problems when, in fact, we are suffering from our depression.
The symptoms are not going away by themselves anytime soon. Even though depression is certainly cyclical, you can 't count on its cyclical nature to enable depression to cure itself. But a new cognitive behavior technique called "Brainswitching" uses the principles underlying its cyclic nature to rescue you quickly from the agony of depression. Depression is like living in a room of pain; you can learn how to leave the room.
You cannot will yourself out of a deep depression because the pain is caused by a chemical imbalance. But this targeted system of mind techniques can short-circuit the agony by disconnecting the message that you are depressed from one part of the brain to the other until the chemical balance is restored. Brainswitching deals instantly with the physical pain of depression. Cognitive behavior therapy and psychotherapy do not. Drugs may take weeks or months to work.
However, it will not take you long to learn Brainswitching. Those who get depressed know how rapidly we can be laid low by it. Now here is a process that can get us out of it just as fast. It 's about time! Until now depression has been an unsolvable problem for millions of people.
Two different schools of thinking about depression
To add to our confusion, two entirely different schools of thought about depression have been polarizing in the last few years providing little security in the middle for those looking for a safe and sure treatment that really works. Chronic depression has become like the old proverb: Who shall decide when doctors disagree? Meanwhile people 's very lives are hanging in the balance.
One thinking insists depression is a character flaw or psychological problem that 's "all in your head." The solutions that come along with this theory tend to be low-key, sporadic, and non-specific. It suggests that you do such things as count your blessings and be grateful for what you have, exercise more emotional self-control, think positive, take the bad along with the good like everybody else, plan a weekly pleasant activity, take up jogging, volunteer to help others less fortunate, accept your pain and it will disappear.
The other school of thought claims just the opposite, that depression definitely is not "all in your head. This theory holds depression to be an incurable, genetically-based mental illness, over which you have no control whatsoever. The treatment advocated here is therapy and medication for the rest of your life.
This dichotomy has not only been a problem for those who are depressed, but for the professional community dedicated to helping them. Our common sense need not be trapped any longer in this therapeutic tug of war. There is a better answer!
The FRS factor of depression
We need to understand that depression is more than an incomplete gestalt of self-reported symptoms. We need to treat depression more than palliatively. We need to understand and treat depression neuroscientifically for the biochemical event that it is. This is not incompatible with either school of thought, and it successfully addresses the legitimate concerns of both.
This was the subject of my workshops for the California Council on Family Relations. The conference was mostly attended by students, counselors, and psychologists whose careers involve helping people through their emotional setbacks.
My lectures included an explanation of the physiological components of our feelings--how do we feel what we feel? I discussed the process whereby signals from the emotional part of the brain (the subcortex) must travel upwards and be acknowledged in the thinking part of the brain (the neocortex) before a human being is able to feel any pain or emotion.
It is inconceivable to me that anyone would be successful in understanding, much less treating depression, without some knowledge of the small area in the neocortex called the "feelings receptor station." I call it the FRS factor of depression. But when I asked the mainly professional audience if they had ever heard of this neuronal process of pain perception before, not a single hand went up!
Of course it is such a tiny event, brain-wise, that it happens beneath our level of awareness. But this small instantaneous process underlies the reason depression is cyclical. The fact that depression is cyclical is extremely important. All depression ends at some point, sooner or later, anyway. Why not move it faster along its natural continuum and get it to end sooner, rather than later? This is the whole point of Brainswitching.
Once aware of the pain perception process in the neocortex, we can take advantage of it to move ourselves out of depression rapidly. Much faster than would be the normal course of any depressive event. You can get so good at Brainswitching that depression will cease to be a major issue in your life. You can opt out of it quickly whenever it strikes.
First, you need to know a little bit about how your brain works
Brainswitching is not a magic bullet. You have to do a little work before you get the hang of it. Nevertheless, the same way that many diabetics can stem the tide of their disease with slight changes in their diet and exercise, those with depression can turn their whole life around by making small, precise, and particular interruptions in certain habitual thinking processes. If you don 't understand this last sentence, don 't worry. The first few chapters will make it crystal clear.
In order to make these changes, you will need a bare-bones education in how your brain functions which you will get in the beginning chapters of this book. Don 't be alarmed. All you really need to know about your brain can be understood by any serious-minded eighth-grader. And you will be a wiser, more tranquil person for your effort.
With this information you can make use of the latest research which shows that depression, anxiety, and even obsessive-compulsive disorders can be eliminated by altering one or two thinking patterns. You can sidetrack automatic depressive patterns by building new and more helpful get-out-of-depression patterns which you soon learn to use as automatically as the old destructive ones. Again, how to do this will become clear as you read the book.
As a psychotherapist I endured lengthy bouts of life-dulling depression for decades. Not anymore! I discovered the mechanism behind Brainswitching in cutting-edge neuroscience research and brain-mapping as I strove to help those who came into my counseling office looking for relief from their pain. As a result I found the answer to my own chronic depression, mania, anxiety, and panic attacks that I had struggled with for so long.
You can side-step depression
I have successfully presented my research findings to the National Board of Cognitive Behavioral Therapists and subsequently have provided workshops for professional organizations and holistic health schools. Thousands of people are now learning the technique.
Brainswitching is immediate. It lets you quickly side-step the depression which is generated in the emotional part of your brain (the subcortex) by taking temporary refuge in the thinking part of your brain (the neocortex), which never contains depression. Brainswitching handles stress, anxiety, and depression from the feelings receptor station in the neocortex.
The process allows you to consciously shift the neuronal activity of your brain from the subcortex, where depression is always located, to the neocortex which does not have the capacity for depression. You can learn to do this.
Brainswitching is for you if you have any kind of recurring depression or anxiety; if you have felt vaguely disconnected and too stressed to have the normal life that you see other people enjoying; or if you have asked yourself the question: "Will I ever be really happy again?"
Brainswitching short-circuits the short circuit
There 's no doubt that depression, or indeed any serious emotional upset, has the capacity to temporarily short-circuit the thinking brain. Suddenly we are under stress. We are anxious, or depressed, and we can 't think straight. Our mind seems to go blank, and our normal thinking goes "off line."
There is good reason for this. The emotional brain, being the ancient core system around which all the rest of the brain subsequently evolved, is our primal instinct. We are genetically scripted to get automatically hooked by it. However, once you have a "bird 's eye view" of how the whole system operates, you will become more wary of getting snagged in it. You will be able to by-pass this emotional short-circuit, and access your thinking brain again. That is the subject of this book.
Depression is real. We can feel it. Hook us up to a brain scan and we can see it. We can measure it in the lost hours and lost opportunities of our lives. We can quantify it chemically, bioelectrically, and neuroscientifically. We can verify it physically and psychologically. And now, thankfully, we can stop it with Brainswitching.
Chapter 2
You Can Get Out of the Torture Chamber
The most difficult problem often has the simplest solution.
Deep in my brain there still exists this neural torture chamber into which my mind periodically throws me. Down, down I sink into the blackness. I hear the sickening click of the lock behind me. I am paralyzed with fear. There are no windows to see out of this pain. I am trapped, lost! Who will help me? I am beyond help, beyond hope. The agony! The agony! I cannot stand the pain.
But then I remember! I have the key out of this terrible place right here in my pocket. It’s called Brainswitching. I don’t have to stay here. I can immediately begin to free myself. Of course I could not do this in the beginning, just as you or your loved one cannot do it now. But be assured. Anyone can learn to do it.
I sought help for depression
As a young woman I was successful in many other aspects of my life. So I couldn’t understand why I was often filled with such debilitating hopelessness that I couldn’t get out of bed for days; that I would cry for hours; that in the midst of my loving family I would feel nothing but the pain of isolated loneliness.
People who have never suffered from depression and want us to “snap out of it” have no idea of that unbearable agony. I went from doctor to doctor hoping for a better solution. Finally I stopped going to psychotherapists and became one.
I went back to graduate school. It was here that I finally found out what was the matter with me. I was completely ignorant of how my own brain functioned and how my nervous system worked. The dirty little secret is that if our brain feels bad, it is because we have unknowingly given it instructions to feel bad.
We simply don’t know how the darn thing works. And, like any extremely complex machinery, if we don’t know how the brain works we can bumble around pushing all the wrong buttons, causing malfunctions like chemical imbalance.
What you don’t know can’t help you
With some knowledge, we can push the right buttons. But without some tools of understanding, when you are deep into depression, you cannot reach far enough into yourself to rescue your heart from its own dark cave. I have already spent too much time in such a dark cave myself.
Although I still may be instantly hurled there on occasion, I now make my visits extremely short. I no longer take up residence in that painful chaos of mind. How do I manage that? I have learned exactly how my mind produces depression, and precisely, how I can put a stop to it.
Depression is the only pain that remembers. It not only remembers it recreates itself over, and over, and over. In a way it is the ultimate post-traumatic stress syndrome. The physical pain, the psychological fear, the feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, and despair, are all bound up and entangled in a neural pattern that takes on a life of its own, seemingly independent of our will. I say seemingly because we usually are not aware that we focus our attention away from our will at this time. We focus only on the depressive pattern. We can learn not to do this.
A new way of thinking is the answer
Since the pain of depression is recurring and virtually unchanging, second-guessing can become your best strategy. As you are able to anticipate the repetitive nature of what happens, you can now practice and correct your responses ahead of time. This way you can continually sharpen your wits against what depression throws at you. As powerful as it is, you will begin to see that it is a lifeless old syndrome that can’t create new possibilities for itself. But you can; with Brainswitching!
Brainswitching can disconnect you from the depressive neural pattern and build another neural pattern as a bridge to your rational faculties. You can almost immediately connect to your regular world again. It may be a new idea to you that you can build a neural pattern in your brain as an act of will; but this is what we do anytime that we acquire a new skill or habit.
I realize now that I was never depressed because I was sick. I was depressed because I was wrong. Depression easily misleads us, by the overwhelming fear and physical agony of it, into believing that we have nothing within us to fall back on. We are trapped in a death-like emptiness. We can’t concentrate. The things we used to take pleasure in suddenly have no meaning. We believe we have lost the capacity to think, feel, and enjoy the way we used to.
This is never true. Not a single bit of our extremely complex mind ever disappears or “goes blank” because of our moods. Just the opposite. It is our moods that flare up and then go blank. With all its creativity, reason, and intelligence, with all its capacity for ongoingness, our whole mind remains completely intact and immediately available to us even in the depths of depression. We simply must learn how to properly access it at this difficult time.
Getting stuck in depression is a learned response
Getting out of depression is a learned skill that millions of people have accomplished. They’ve probably picked up coping mechanisms and mind techniques as children that they are completely unaware of. The only thing they know is that they don’t get depressed “like other people.”
The millions of people who do suffer from depression don’t know these simple but important skills. To acquire them as adults involves some restructuring of thinking habits. More conscious and intellectual effort is needed. Again, don’t worry. The exercises are simple.
The exercises help us learn the difference between being responsible to our mind and being responsible for our mind. When we are responsible to our mind it’s like being responsible to our parents or our teacher, or our boss. We have to do what they want no matter how foolish we think it is.
It’s the same way with our minds. When we are responsible to our mind we think we must go along with whatever raging emotional upset, despair, or anxiety might be triggering up in the neurons of our brain. Instead, we can learn to be responsible for our mind. We can direct the neurons to do the kind of thinking that will be helpful to us instead of harmful.
We can’t use hope and a sense of fulfillment to get rid of depression. Our brains do not work that way. Depression is a biochemical event. It needs a biochemical solution. But this does not necessarily mean pharmaceutical drugs.
Depression loses its power
Thanks to Brainswitching, the hopeless anguish that was once the most real thing in my life no longer holds power over me. I can see depression for what it is--a temporary mind construction caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. And I know how to dismantle it quickly, using the same building blocks by which it arose.
It took me several years to develop this small, precise expertise. It is replicable. I can teach it to you. It can be used to supplement any other methods you are now using for depression. It has no negative side effects. Brainswitching can absolutely pull you out of any depressive episode. It takes immediate action to thwart the biochemical imbalance that causes all the pain.
You don’t have to be a psychotherapist, or some kind of heroic person to do Brainswitching. You can be just an ordinary human being, frantic and frightened like I once was, and thinking you will never be a normal happy person again. I assure you, you can be!
Anybody can do this
Sometimes I have been criticized by people who say, “Well sure, you can get out of depression because you are a therapist.” My answer is that maybe special training is necessary to research and synthesize psychological information into a working process. But once the process is created, anyone can use it. In this respect, Brainswitching is like the game of Checkers. Perhaps it takes special knowledge to invent it, but once it’s invented, even a child can learn to play it.
I relate my early journey out of depression in a book called Depression is a Choice: Winning the Battle Without Drugs. It is a more philosophical book than this one, a memoir of how I got out of manic-depression without the customary orthodox drug treatment. By the way, the title was my publisher’s idea. My choice of title was The Woman Who Traded Her Mind for a Green Frog.” Green Frog” is the name of the first Brainswitching exercise I ever used.
Brainswitching and Directed Thinking have worked for thousands of people who have read my first book and visited my web site, www.depressionisachoice.com. Brainswitching is a specific kind of Directed Thinking. One man emailed me, “Before Directed Thinking I never fully understood mindfulness, meditation, or what it was like to really live in the NOW.” Another wrote, “The best thing I learned from your book is the awareness of my awareness.
Professor of Psychology Dr. Al Infande wrote me that Depression is a Choice “has to be one the best books I have ever read on the topic of depression. And I mean it! Your book made more sense about the concept of depression than any other book I ever read.”
Why did I write a second book?
So many readers of my earlier work suggested that a how-to book with more mind exercises would be a helpful addition to the memoir. Also, I get letters all the time from people desperate for some step-by-step, practical way out of depression, either for themselves or for someone they love. Letters like this:
Our 23-year old daughter has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The doctors tell her that her condition is incurable, and that she will need to be on a combination of medication and therapy for the rest of her life. We are desperate. We finally came across your web site and everything you suggest on your depression web site is just the opposite from what our daughter is doing.
She is on sick leave, so she is not working. She is not involved in anything constructive. She is not exercising at all, and has nothing but time on her hands to dwell on her depression, which I can see is only making her worse. She is very self-absorbed and her therapy keeps her dwelling on her past and what she may have experienced, instead of on today and what she can do. Can you recommend a therapist in our area that uses your techniques of Directed Thinking? We think it makes so much sense, and it has given us our first ray of hope.
Free from depression
When I was first diagnosed with depression I was convinced that I did nothing to cause the hopeless despair that periodically laid me low. I didn’t think I could do anything to fix it either. Now I know better. When depression strikes, I take over. I am the one in charge, not my rampaging emotions. Of course, in order to do this, it helps to know something about how your brain works!
All depressed people think we have a problem with our feelings, with our chemical neurotransmitters such as serotonin. True. But more importantly we have a problem with our thinking about our feelings. Most of our pain is caused by what we are thinking and doing and we can think and do something else.
One of our major problems is that we have been sensitized by stress to over-react to our feelings. Depression is more of a geometric than an arithmetic progression. It’s a reaction to the stress of the reaction to the stress of the reaction to the stress of the reaction ad infinitum, each progression producing more chemical imbalance and thus more pain.
Depression dissolves when self-debilitating mindsets are changed
Depression is a place in the brain we get to. We don’t have to stay there. We get there by thinking a certain way, which causes a chemical imbalance. And we can get out by thinking a different way, which will correct the chemical imbalance.
When I say depression is a thinking problem I do not mean this terrible feeling is imaginary. Far from it! It is basic body chemistry. It is physically excruciating to the point where some people have even thought of ending it all, or actually tried to. But it is a needless tragedy because there is a solution.
If only I had known in my younger years what I know now, my life would have been so much better. But then I wouldn’t have become a therapist either, and perhaps my life would have lacked some depth as well. It is probably better to have borne adversity and conquered, rather than never to have suffered at all. Certainly without the adversity of my own depression, I couldn’t have written this book.
Brainswitching works for any kind of depression. Depression is not quantitative; it is a qualitative state of being. It is a state of alarm. Most people think of depression as a mood, but neuroscientifically speaking it is caused by a neural thinking mode. Therefore, even those who are deep into depression can recover the same as someone with a milder case. When you change the manner of thinking that caused it, the chemical imbalance fades, and the despair goes away. No matter what was the gradation of despair, gone is gone!
First you have to learn some basic biology
The next few chapters will discuss all the information you will need about how your brain works: the two main parts of the brain; how you get, neuroscientifically speaking, from one thought to another; the two different kinds of thinking that human beings all do (one of which leads to depression); the role of the psychological defense system; and the chemical consequences of the triggering of the fight-or-flight response. This is necessary so you can understand the mind exercises that follow.
The mind exercises are all very simple; anybody can do them. They require no preparatory techniques or previous knowledge other than what you read here. They promote a sense of well-being and calm. For one thing, at least while you’re doing them you are not punishing yourself with guilt about your depression. The decision to do some small good thing for yourself can be the starting point of a complete turnabout in your feelings.
These exercises are not only for beginners but for those familiar with the new human potential training, neural-linguistic programming, and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). They will find much here that is new. They are wonderful for children too. Just as we give them toys that teach color, distance, and balance, these exercises teach the thinking part of the brain to calm the over emotional part.
Exercises teach you how to do calm in order to be calm
You cannot cause a brain state (a phenomenal state) to appear by simply knowing something, or wanting something, or setting up the outside circumstances of your life although that is the first step. Many people think that happiness is somehow caused by circumstances other than their own thinking. This is not true. Lottery winners, plucked from otherwise disastrous fates by Lady Luck, seldom maintain their sense of well-being. And normal people, overwhelmed with sudden tragedy, can regain their inner happiness despite grievous losses.
Our moods are not dictated by our changing fortunes. They are established by our long-standing thinking habits. There is an old saying, “The wages of sin is death.” The wages of habit is more habit. Whatever life we practice, that’s the person we become. To produce calmer thinking instead of our habitual depressive thinking, we have to retrain our brain with exercises the same way we would exercise weak arms and legs to regain proper strength.
If you exercise a muscle, it will become strong. If you exercise a thought, it will become dominant. The brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. Unfortunately, in exercising depression for years, many of us allow negative neural thought patterns to build into a destructive dominance. Then we wonder why we get “hooked” into depression. We wonder why we’re not happy.
To turn around from that, we must exercise “calm” the same way we exercised “depressed.” You can easily begin to do it. The exercises are short and simple. Some take less than 30 seconds.
Knowing is not doing
Mental exercises are important. We don’t achieve strong muscles knowing how to lift weights. We have to actually lift them. We can’t play the guitar or piano, or learn how to type with just the idea that this finger goes here and that finger goes there. We have to practice, practice, practice, until the neuronal patterns form physically in our brain. This is as true for getting out of depression as it is for learning how to play the piano.
Getting the idea intellectually is not enough. You must experience the idea through mental or physical action, which imprints it in a usable mind pattern. If your depression patterns are already well-imprinted because you have been practicing them for a long time, don’t worry. By practicing new kinds of thinking, you can form new brain patterns which do not contain the old depression.
Brainswitching exercises
Brainswitching exercises are an efficient first-aid for depression or stress. You can do them when you are jumping out of your skin with anxiety, fear, and guilt; or sunk deep into despair, unable to work or sleep. There are other Directed Thinking exercises that prepare your mind for thinking changes, leading to a more stress-free and anxiety-free existence.
The mind has to help us do all this human thinking and being every day of our lives. Like any other part of us our mind needs to be nourished, soothed, stretched, and strengthened so that it will not be too weak, too frightened, or unresponsive when we call upon it.
Spiritually speaking, some suffering may be necessary for our humanity. But too much suffering can also separate us from our humanity. Turning from the negative to the positive, from your pain to your life, is not easy to do. You know it’s not easy to do. You’ve probably already tried to do it. Don’t give up on yourself. This book will show you how to do it.