“The mind is not as smart as you think.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Willpower works better than won’t power.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“An excuse is not a ticket to anything.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Practice makes neurons! Mind exercises will form new get-out-depression neural patterns that can be used in place of the old depression neural patterns.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Biology is not destiny; will is destiny.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Life is the story you tell yourself. Make it a good one!”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Courage is the total commitment to some moral imperative at the risk of your very life.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The most difficult problem often has the simplest solution.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is nothing simpler, more elegant or more self-empowering than common sense.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"The reason that understanding principles does not guarantee right action is because we do not live our lives by our opinions but by our habits."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Concepts like meaning and happiness vanish in the actual living of one's life because they have no basis in present reality. They exist in the future. Present reality consists entirely of giving a pure act of attention to what is at hand."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Self-focus is the very opposite of self-understanding.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"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."
~ A. B. Curtiss
”Any time we want, we can call ourselves a beginner and begin.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“A thought is so powerful that if you think it, you will feel it, and believe it, and ultimately; you will behave it.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Your thinking, feeling, and behavior are not something you are, they are something you do.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Our mind already knows how to direct us. We have to learn how to direct our mind.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“It is we who have a mind. The mind does not have an us.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We have to learn how to use our mind instead of thinking we are our mind."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression becomes less of a problem if we do not mistaken believe that we need to obey our brain but, instead, can learn to direct our brain, and to insist that our brain to do specifically what thinking we want, instead of allowing the brain to do its habitual and automatic depressive thinking.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We do not have to change our brain to get it to behave. We can behave our brain to get it to change."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is no psychological truth that is stronger than its opposing moral principle earnestly employed.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“When you know its working parts, depression will no longer suck you in like a sinking star.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The tenet of science upon which my work is based is this: as human beings we are not forced to function from instinct; we may choose to function from reason freedom of the will.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"What if the mind gave a depression and we didn't go."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is not something you ARE, it’s something you DO. You can learn not to do it.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"There is nothing more patient than potentiality."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"People are successful in jobs because they have skills, not because they have needs."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Why is it so hard to accept present reality? Because reality only comes with the absence of conditions."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It isn't our great strength that enables us to exercise, it is our exercise that makes us strong. And it isn't discipline that makes us organized. It is the humble stumble and bumble of working on getting organized that makes us disciplined."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Human beings are probably supposed to suffer since we have been created with the capacity for willpower without any requirement that we use it."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Unhappiness, a feeling, is a product of the subcortex, our emotional brain. Cheerfulness, a principle of attitude, is a product of the neocortex, our thinking brain.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The weak link in depression is that we can choose to think something else other than it. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
“I found I can suffer depression by becoming unaware of my thinking, and not properly managing my thinking. I also found I can manage depression effectively by becoming aware of my depressive thoughts and choosing to think different ones.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is like living in a room of pain. We can learn how to leave the room.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
One thing we never notice about feelings is that we make use of them; we believe, instead, that feelings make use of us. We make use of depression when it comes along instead of refusing to make use of it.
~ A. B. Curtiss
.”With depression, we can forget we have a choice. So it is necessary to have some pre-arranged signal or neural trigger in the brain to remind ourselves, when we go into depression, that it is not the pain of some reality, it is only a painful feeling. It is a place in our brain that we are now visiting; but we don’t have to stay there if we don’t want to, we can go to another place in our brain.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We do not do feelings directly. The only thing we can do with feelings directly is to pay attention to them, or to detach our attention from them.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression always wins by default. Depression didn’t defeat us, we surrendered.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“In general, by reaching for excellence and precision in small things you improve the entire character of your larger life.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It is not what we do right, but in pulling back from wrong directions that most solidly defines us. When out of our own experience we can say with authority for ourselves, THIS and NOT THAT."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We can’t choose what kinds of emotions and feelings impel us. We can choose what kind of principles we grab for when we are impelled.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We cannot stop unwanted feelings directly, but we can refuse to be moved by them if the feelings do not accord with our chosen principles; and we can refuse to act upon them, knowing they are not necessarily objective reality.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Feelings come and go; it is principles that abide. Wherever it is that we came from, we brought feelings with us; but principles were already here when we arrived. Principles can save us from falling into depression, not by believing in them, but by applying them to our lives.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We should not feel bad about "settling" for a less than perfect relationship because we are never going to get ourselves perfect."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Belief, the very thing that is called upon to prevent someone from doing something, becomes the proof that it can't be done."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We need the subcortex-driven primal mind fully functioning, not straight-jacketed with anti-depressants where we have the use of our talents, but we have lost our pilgrimage; where we are free from anxiety, but we have paid for our leaves with our roots."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Since Freud, psychiatrists tend to treat the real human will as imaginary, and the imaginary symptoms of self-delusion as real."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"In depression we are causing, due to ignorance of how our brain works, what seems to be happening to us."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Fear is a feeling. It hurts! Blame is a thought, not a feeling. Blame does not hurt. Blame is the way we avoid and deny the pain of our fear.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
”We can easily forget, once we are into the process of blaming, that we are also into the process of making ourselves a victim. It is not possible to do the one without becoming the other. ”
~ A. B. Curtiss
”This is how blame works. Instead of moving to take care of ourselves when someone mistreats us (a simple situation in which we could take immediate action), we complicate things by withdrawing our attention away from taking care of ourselves, and we focus instead upon blaming the other person. The upshot of all this is that in most difficult confrontations we are not afraid, the other person is an asshole. Psychology calls this projection. Practically speaking, in the world at large, it’s called WAR. ”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Certainly the past can explain the present, but the past can never take responsibility for the present. That belongs only to us.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The mind instinctually knows fear and war. That is our defense mechanism. We have to teach our mind acceptance and peace. That is our responsibility.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Real love has nothing to do with some specific other person. That is the reason it can only be given, not received."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Psychiatrists spend half their time extinguishing the symptoms of depression with drugs, and the other half firing up the cause with their incessant focus on us as the helpless victim of feelings rather than the active and responsible source and guardian of them.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“To learn to get out of depression, we just need to change from the easy casual, accidental thinking, that got us into trouble, to the harder causal, on-purpose thinking that can get us out of it.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The most amazing thing I discovered about depression was that I could not make it worse as an act of will. That is because at that moment of attempt, I would have to switch from accidental to on-purpose thinking.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"I didn't realize, at first, that futility was just a feeling. I took it for reality."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"One thought that often pulled me out of a looming depression was this: "Wait, there is no requirement that I be happy." Sometimes I add, "There's no requirement that life has meaning either." I no longer think of myself as an existential vacuum which needs to be filled up before I can "work."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is often caused by becoming unaware of our negative thinking, and letting our thinking go off on its own without any direction on our part. We can collapse completely into it in no time, out of laziness or out of ignorance. The good news is that we don’t have to overcome depression, we just have to overcome laziness and ignorance.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Our life doesn’t work unless we do. We and life are absolutely simultaneous creations. We can’t sit around and wait for our life to get fixed up, as if our life were some kind of a run-down house. Life is not some place we live in, it is whatsoever we are doing RIGHT NOW!”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It is not possible to question the reality of depression without some actual experiences that cause one to question it."
~ A. B. Curtiss
Depression, anxiety and panic attacks are tricks of the subcortical primal mind wherein we think there is something wrong when, in reality, we are perfectly all right. We have to teach our mind to employ counter tricks to these instinctual downer tricks. As we use the counter tricks, these new neural patterns will become hooked, by learned association, to the problem and, with practice, soon the solution to the problem will be automatically triggered by the mind whenever the problem neural pattern triggers.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“It puts us at a terrible disadvantage in life if we are the only ones who do not question our thinking.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is just no easy way to see ourselves objectively. It is more painful to see ourselves than whatever trouble we make to avoid seeing ourselves. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Depression and manic depression (bipolar disorder) are not so much an insanity as they are a chronic, strategic and habitual abandonment of sanity."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We don't usually contemplate that tomorrow subsists entirely upon the shimmering present moment from which today was supposed to have been made."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We know what we know about depression. We do not have the slightest idea what we do NOT know about depression. There is nothing in our natural brain structures to alert us that depression is a feeling, and not necessarily our objective reality. We have to program that information into the neocortex-driven higher mind before it is available to us to think and therefore act upon it."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is not present reality but a state of body alarm. You can check this out for yourself. When you are depressed, notice how tight your chest is, how tense your shoulders are, how shallow your breathing is, all symptoms of anxiety and fear turned inward as depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"A distinct and abject failure is still honorable. And, as I have learned from experience, has its own subtle glory. We have not abandoned the path of self-understanding simply because we do not tromp upon it with triumphant heels. It is not ignoble to trod the path of self-understanding with a loser's gait."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Knowledge of life is not the same thing as the life of knowledge, which we can discover only by actually applying it to our lives."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Concerning depression, who among us will be so anxious for the doctors to rid us of our black holes if we understand that our stars may disappear as well?"
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Today's psychological paradigm of compassionate acceptance leads us to call ourselves shy and sensitive when it would be far more helpful and accurate to say that we are fearful and resentful. How is this a problem? It is a problem because the cure for shy and sensitive is outgoingness and self-esteem. But outgoingness and self-esteem are not the cures for fearful and resentful. The cures for fearful and resentful are courage and self-responsibility.
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We get up not because we feel like it but because morning has come. That we have no chores is unacceptable. That the day ahead holds no joy for us does not mean we shouldn't whittle something out of it anyway. Why? Because to learn to do so is the only real sanity we will ever be able to count on.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Fear is a kind of intelligence. The only thing that is incapable of fear is stupidity."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Our nature is not our enemy, it is our path.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It may be that depression alone is responsible for our most trenchant connection with existence by interrupting our heedless and arrogant rush through it."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Belief itself is all process, the content is just secondary. That's why the stronger someone believes in A, the easier it is to get them to switch to believing in B."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It is a shocking thing to say but it may be that the first step to human excellence is: first, you ruin your life. I don't think there is any other way."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Sometimes it is a great source of strength that we do not dare to show weakness in front of our fellows."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Our mental stability will ultimately come to rest upon either our emotional self-responsibility or our emotional dependence, because these opposite positionings are constantly evolving away from each toward the accomplishment of themselves, according to the principle of inertia. Pharmacology is not a viable third way.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"There is nothing more stubborn and imperious than abject helplessness."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Knowing we are powerless is light years ahead of fearing we are powerless. If we want real freedom in this life, this is the place where we will find it. Knowing we are powerless is our most solid ground, the real human condition that we all try to avoid seeing at all costs. (You may argue with me here, but how powerful is a creature who can neither help being born nor dying?)."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We cannot escape the stamp of our habitual thinking or behavior upon our lives; but we can resist it. Principles are the only way to control our over-response to anxious or depressive feelings. Our desire cannot do it, not even the desire to control feelings, because desire is itself a feeling which ebbs and flows. Principles do not ebb and flow. Principles are the solid posts set in cement that we can hold onto to stay the chosen course that feelings would push us from."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We hate and despise the agony, and the mess and the utter waste of the path of negative emotions, but it’s easier to fall into it than to choose the hard road of living by principles and duty.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The brain works all the time, with or without our awareness of its workings. There are two basic kinds of thinking all human beings do: directed, on-purpose thinking or accidental, passive thinking.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We can teach our brain to do the kind of thinking we want; or we can allow our brain to “think us” in the form of depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“If you don’t know how you think, how you get from one thought to another, you won’t understand how you get depressed.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“In general, magical thinking should not be used instead of good old-fashioned elbow grease to accomplish the everyday tasks of your life. But magical thinking does have its uses. You are bound to feel better by just repeating to yourself “I feel better.” And you are bound to feel worse if you keep repeating to yourself “I feel terrible.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“When we know exactly what depression is and where it is in our body, we don’t feel so overwhelmed when it makes its appearance.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The simplest one-second exercise can reduce stress. Wadding up a piece of paper and pitching it into the wastebasket in a mock basketball throw can take the edge off tension; or simply relaxing your shoulders and letting them drop down.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The trouble with self-focused thinking is that it disconnects us from present reality.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Most people don’t realize that they have trouble getting to sleep because instead of thinking about going to sleep, they think about NOT going to sleep. The fear of not going to sleep triggers your fight-or-flight response, and the stress chemicals prevent you from relaxing. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
‘”I was encouraged to an understanding about "happiness" by the ancient mystics who warn us to beware of "all desire," of wanting something else other than reality; of wanting something else other than "what is." I found I was now willing to commit myself to that old Victorian adage "Be good, my child, and let who will be clever" by changing it ever so slightly: "Be good, my child, and let who will be happy." When we are able to question our frantic search for our skewed idea of happiness, we turn away from the complications of wanting something other than what we have now got; and then, there is only the one and simple path ahead.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is a cautionary but barely perceptible interruption of our flow of ongoingness which comes to us at pivotal times. It is called CHOICE. We can make our claim upon this timeless instant and convert it to our use by expanding our awareness of it, or we can lose it in the surrender to what bent of habitual behavior we are already headed for.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We just need to recognize that depression is never the case, objectively speaking (as everyone else around us can plainly see but us). So we should not make it the case subjectively speaking. In other words, we think we have to be depressed. We should think something else.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is just a feeling of helplessness. The reality is that we are not really helpless. Depression is a just feeling that nothing matters. The reality is that things and people do matter. Depression is just a feeling that we can’t go on. The reality is that we can go on.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We will always have terrible flaws and limitations. When we accept them instead of trying to assess blame for them, they provide the moral struggle which forges our path through life. We will always have conflict between our behavior and our values. This is how we figure out what our values are. This is how we judge our behavior. We continually adjust our values and our behavior. We are always a “work in progress.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“If we are unclear about our values, we can look at our behavior choices for clues as to what our values might be. For instance: if we put our baby in day care so that we can afford to live in a house instead of an apartment, which do we value more highly, the house or the child? If we refuse to take unfair advantage of our customers, which do we value more highly, being a successful salesman or being a good person? If we take something that doesn’t belong to us, which do we value more highly, possessions or honor?”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We can’t heal fear and depression just like we can’t heal addictions because they are not illnesses, they are impulses. We don’t heal impulses, nor can we stop them from occurring to us; we just learn to choose to do something else other than doing them.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Our mind is not a why mind or a no mind; it is a how mind and a yes mind. “Just Say No” doesn’t work. There is a huge difference in saying “I will abstain” rather than “No more booze.” The mind can’t do anything with a why or a no; it can only do something with a how and a yes. That is the reason that saying no to a chocolate sundae or our depression doesn’t work.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“People talk about depression being paralyzing. It seems that we are paralyzed because our focus is not on the present but on the past or the future where no action can, this instant, take place. This is true even if our desire is as simple and seemingly innocent as, “I don’t want to feel this way.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
We can always choose to turn away from the feelings of helplessness and futility to the reality and the sanity that lies in a sense of duty, and some small task that we can do. Then we can feel differently. But not because we want to. We will feel differently because we did something different.
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Decisions are difficult for everybody. Sometimes the best we can do is simply perform the next small task and trust that sooner or later we will take on a direction that makes sense to us. Existence never abandons us without the next thing to do. This would be as unthinkable as looking out in the yard and finding a blank space of nothingness in the middle of the lawn. Or looking up at the sky and seeing a piece missing. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression often wins by belief. Rote mind-sets and unwilled self-hypnosis can keep us stuck in all kinds of ignominious status quo so that it can appear to us that we do not have control over our lives.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“It is only when we are thrust into utter darkness that we start looking for some light; only when we feel utterly abandoned that we know we must risk doing something for ourselves. Then we learn that the only life we ever really have, the only life that we can really claim as our own, be sure of, is the life that we have had the courage to risk, win or lose. In taking this risk, whether we win or lose, we win ourselves.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We say things in such a way that we obscure to ourselves the fact that we have a choice. And then we sell this obfuscation to each other in the form of “self-sayings” that we accept as “givens.” We say “I’m not very disciplined,” and plunk ourselves down comfortably by the side of what we believe is some natural God-given road of weakness upon which it was our fate to be sidetracked. But we aren’t being sidetracked by God or fate. We are being sidetracked by our own language. What we are really saying when we say we aren’t disciplined is, “I don’t have a high regard for duty.” If we are more precise about what we are saying about ourselves, we can more easily see what we are doing. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Here is the good news and the bad news about choice. If we are in the habit of doing evil, and decide to change, we may choose at any moment to do some small good thing. However, if we are in the habit of doing good, it is possible to fall from grace in any small moment of weakness.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“One of the problems with psychology is that it seeks for ways to excuse and understand deviant behavior rather than to bring about compliance with common-ground established norms.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“It is my experience that the wide mood swings of bi-polar disorder can be controlled by controlling our thoughts. The belief that we can’t control ourselves when these mood swings occur may be the only reason we don’t do it, not because we can’t do it. It is a matter of practice. We just need to practice controlling ourselves instead of practicing not controlling ourselves.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Sometimes we don’t realize that our mind is choosing to think fearful thoughts over and over again until we realize that we are terribly depressed. When we understand the concept of thought choice, we can refuse the autonomic thought choices of our mind by choosing a new thought pattern of our own, on-purpose choice whenever we realize that depression or mania is going on. It is simply a choice between two things for our one attention, like a choice between two cars for one driver. If we choose to drive downtown in the Ford, the Chevy will have to sit, unused, in the driveway. Its motor may be idling noisily, but if we do not get in and engage the gears, it is just running itself, it is not running us.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“ The clue to manic depression is not what happens, but what doesn’t happen. It is the same ignominious clue that remains after the mathematicians sift through all the hurry and scurry of million-dollar quantum physics experiments with quarks and other siftings of the very small, and find only one sure thing about the nature of reality: “Things that don’t happen critically influence things that do.”7 What is not happening in the realm of depression and manic depression is that we are not accessing our neocortex as an act of will, which critically influences the dependence, by default, upon our subcortex, the seat of our emotions. What we don’t do is the cause of our autonomic over-identification and enmeshment with our feelings that we call depression and manic depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“But we seem so afraid these days of the words “moral” or “sin,” as if these relational words belong solely to the discipline of religion. When the last brick of the last church has crumbled into dust on this planet, as long as two human beings still remain (or maybe even two monkeys according to anthropologists), they will still be able to sin against each other, or relate to one another based upon some mutually acceptable common-ground imperative.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Somehow I always felt ‘prevented.’ Of course, in reality, I was the perpetrator of my life, not the victim of it.
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The reason it is so hard to get out of Poor Me is that we don't think we are being defensive; we think people have short-changed us. We don't think we are demanding; we think people don’t give us our fair share. When we are really lost in hopelessness we don't think we are slothful and resistant; we think life is futile.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“As far as I know I am the first therapist to make the important connection between the process of pain perception and a method for getting out of depression quickly. If you are presently seeing a medical professional for your depression I suggest you ask him about the process of pain perception.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“To refuse to choose is a choice in itself, albeit a negative one. And the continual refusal to choose the thoughts we think causes us to believe that we have no choice.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We can learn to distinguish between impulse and volition; between feelings and principles, so that our fear remains a necessary wake-up call that ends in some chosen action instead of ending in itself, the condition of self-terror we call depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The great power of our mind can work for us or against us. This great power can mire us in terrible, painful depression, or we can learn to direct the same power of mind that is now agonizing us to help us avoid depression. We can do it even though psychologists and psychiatrists tell us that we cannot.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The continual refusal to see the unreal (we are helpless) is the necessary condition for seeing the real (we are self-responsible).
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression may indeed be a slippery slope, but I found I could install handrails and footholds, even automatic step-in elevators that could save me.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“I did not choose depression. Depression occurred because of my lack of choosing to go the way of being cheerful.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is nothing more politically correct today than the idea that we are the victims of our behavior; that our behavior is not our choice.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“What the American doctors are observing is not depression itself but depression exposed to their particularizing questions. Instead of the nature of depression determining the measurements they are taking, the measurements they are taking are determining, for the researchers, the nature of depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We don’t have to “peel ourselves” like an onion in psychoanalysis to uncover childhood neural response patterns that disturb us; we can simply forge new ones that nourish us, and the old patterns will fade with disuse.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“As powerful a phenomenon as it is, we can learn very quickly that depression is totally dependent upon our rapt attention to it. If we are depressed, there is one sure thing we know about ourselves; no one is sawing off one of our arms.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Since depression is dependent on our rapt attention to it, how is it that we can become its prisoner against our will? We can’t, if we learn how to assert our will.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is a kind of accidental self-hypnosis.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“People who are more intelligent usually have the worst time with depression since their whole intelligence has been co-opted by their emotions and thus is in league against them. When people tell us depressed people to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps,” it is really no more of an order of difficulty than what we are already doing to ourselves in reverse--pulling ourselves down by our own bootstraps.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Willpower works better than won’t power.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“An excuse is not a ticket to anything.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Practice makes neurons! Mind exercises will form new get-out-depression neural patterns that can be used in place of the old depression neural patterns.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Biology is not destiny; will is destiny.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Life is the story you tell yourself. Make it a good one!”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Courage is the total commitment to some moral imperative at the risk of your very life.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The most difficult problem often has the simplest solution.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is nothing simpler, more elegant or more self-empowering than common sense.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"The reason that understanding principles does not guarantee right action is because we do not live our lives by our opinions but by our habits."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Concepts like meaning and happiness vanish in the actual living of one's life because they have no basis in present reality. They exist in the future. Present reality consists entirely of giving a pure act of attention to what is at hand."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Self-focus is the very opposite of self-understanding.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"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."
~ A. B. Curtiss
”Any time we want, we can call ourselves a beginner and begin.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“A thought is so powerful that if you think it, you will feel it, and believe it, and ultimately; you will behave it.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Your thinking, feeling, and behavior are not something you are, they are something you do.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Our mind already knows how to direct us. We have to learn how to direct our mind.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“It is we who have a mind. The mind does not have an us.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We have to learn how to use our mind instead of thinking we are our mind."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression becomes less of a problem if we do not mistaken believe that we need to obey our brain but, instead, can learn to direct our brain, and to insist that our brain to do specifically what thinking we want, instead of allowing the brain to do its habitual and automatic depressive thinking.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We do not have to change our brain to get it to behave. We can behave our brain to get it to change."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is no psychological truth that is stronger than its opposing moral principle earnestly employed.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“When you know its working parts, depression will no longer suck you in like a sinking star.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The tenet of science upon which my work is based is this: as human beings we are not forced to function from instinct; we may choose to function from reason freedom of the will.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"What if the mind gave a depression and we didn't go."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is not something you ARE, it’s something you DO. You can learn not to do it.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"There is nothing more patient than potentiality."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"People are successful in jobs because they have skills, not because they have needs."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Why is it so hard to accept present reality? Because reality only comes with the absence of conditions."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It isn't our great strength that enables us to exercise, it is our exercise that makes us strong. And it isn't discipline that makes us organized. It is the humble stumble and bumble of working on getting organized that makes us disciplined."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Human beings are probably supposed to suffer since we have been created with the capacity for willpower without any requirement that we use it."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Unhappiness, a feeling, is a product of the subcortex, our emotional brain. Cheerfulness, a principle of attitude, is a product of the neocortex, our thinking brain.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The weak link in depression is that we can choose to think something else other than it. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
“I found I can suffer depression by becoming unaware of my thinking, and not properly managing my thinking. I also found I can manage depression effectively by becoming aware of my depressive thoughts and choosing to think different ones.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is like living in a room of pain. We can learn how to leave the room.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
One thing we never notice about feelings is that we make use of them; we believe, instead, that feelings make use of us. We make use of depression when it comes along instead of refusing to make use of it.
~ A. B. Curtiss
.”With depression, we can forget we have a choice. So it is necessary to have some pre-arranged signal or neural trigger in the brain to remind ourselves, when we go into depression, that it is not the pain of some reality, it is only a painful feeling. It is a place in our brain that we are now visiting; but we don’t have to stay there if we don’t want to, we can go to another place in our brain.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We do not do feelings directly. The only thing we can do with feelings directly is to pay attention to them, or to detach our attention from them.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression always wins by default. Depression didn’t defeat us, we surrendered.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“In general, by reaching for excellence and precision in small things you improve the entire character of your larger life.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It is not what we do right, but in pulling back from wrong directions that most solidly defines us. When out of our own experience we can say with authority for ourselves, THIS and NOT THAT."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We can’t choose what kinds of emotions and feelings impel us. We can choose what kind of principles we grab for when we are impelled.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We cannot stop unwanted feelings directly, but we can refuse to be moved by them if the feelings do not accord with our chosen principles; and we can refuse to act upon them, knowing they are not necessarily objective reality.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Feelings come and go; it is principles that abide. Wherever it is that we came from, we brought feelings with us; but principles were already here when we arrived. Principles can save us from falling into depression, not by believing in them, but by applying them to our lives.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We should not feel bad about "settling" for a less than perfect relationship because we are never going to get ourselves perfect."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Belief, the very thing that is called upon to prevent someone from doing something, becomes the proof that it can't be done."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We need the subcortex-driven primal mind fully functioning, not straight-jacketed with anti-depressants where we have the use of our talents, but we have lost our pilgrimage; where we are free from anxiety, but we have paid for our leaves with our roots."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Since Freud, psychiatrists tend to treat the real human will as imaginary, and the imaginary symptoms of self-delusion as real."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"In depression we are causing, due to ignorance of how our brain works, what seems to be happening to us."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Fear is a feeling. It hurts! Blame is a thought, not a feeling. Blame does not hurt. Blame is the way we avoid and deny the pain of our fear.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
”We can easily forget, once we are into the process of blaming, that we are also into the process of making ourselves a victim. It is not possible to do the one without becoming the other. ”
~ A. B. Curtiss
”This is how blame works. Instead of moving to take care of ourselves when someone mistreats us (a simple situation in which we could take immediate action), we complicate things by withdrawing our attention away from taking care of ourselves, and we focus instead upon blaming the other person. The upshot of all this is that in most difficult confrontations we are not afraid, the other person is an asshole. Psychology calls this projection. Practically speaking, in the world at large, it’s called WAR. ”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Certainly the past can explain the present, but the past can never take responsibility for the present. That belongs only to us.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The mind instinctually knows fear and war. That is our defense mechanism. We have to teach our mind acceptance and peace. That is our responsibility.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Real love has nothing to do with some specific other person. That is the reason it can only be given, not received."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Psychiatrists spend half their time extinguishing the symptoms of depression with drugs, and the other half firing up the cause with their incessant focus on us as the helpless victim of feelings rather than the active and responsible source and guardian of them.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“To learn to get out of depression, we just need to change from the easy casual, accidental thinking, that got us into trouble, to the harder causal, on-purpose thinking that can get us out of it.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The most amazing thing I discovered about depression was that I could not make it worse as an act of will. That is because at that moment of attempt, I would have to switch from accidental to on-purpose thinking.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"I didn't realize, at first, that futility was just a feeling. I took it for reality."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"One thought that often pulled me out of a looming depression was this: "Wait, there is no requirement that I be happy." Sometimes I add, "There's no requirement that life has meaning either." I no longer think of myself as an existential vacuum which needs to be filled up before I can "work."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is often caused by becoming unaware of our negative thinking, and letting our thinking go off on its own without any direction on our part. We can collapse completely into it in no time, out of laziness or out of ignorance. The good news is that we don’t have to overcome depression, we just have to overcome laziness and ignorance.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Our life doesn’t work unless we do. We and life are absolutely simultaneous creations. We can’t sit around and wait for our life to get fixed up, as if our life were some kind of a run-down house. Life is not some place we live in, it is whatsoever we are doing RIGHT NOW!”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It is not possible to question the reality of depression without some actual experiences that cause one to question it."
~ A. B. Curtiss
Depression, anxiety and panic attacks are tricks of the subcortical primal mind wherein we think there is something wrong when, in reality, we are perfectly all right. We have to teach our mind to employ counter tricks to these instinctual downer tricks. As we use the counter tricks, these new neural patterns will become hooked, by learned association, to the problem and, with practice, soon the solution to the problem will be automatically triggered by the mind whenever the problem neural pattern triggers.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“It puts us at a terrible disadvantage in life if we are the only ones who do not question our thinking.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is just no easy way to see ourselves objectively. It is more painful to see ourselves than whatever trouble we make to avoid seeing ourselves. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Depression and manic depression (bipolar disorder) are not so much an insanity as they are a chronic, strategic and habitual abandonment of sanity."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We don't usually contemplate that tomorrow subsists entirely upon the shimmering present moment from which today was supposed to have been made."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We know what we know about depression. We do not have the slightest idea what we do NOT know about depression. There is nothing in our natural brain structures to alert us that depression is a feeling, and not necessarily our objective reality. We have to program that information into the neocortex-driven higher mind before it is available to us to think and therefore act upon it."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is not present reality but a state of body alarm. You can check this out for yourself. When you are depressed, notice how tight your chest is, how tense your shoulders are, how shallow your breathing is, all symptoms of anxiety and fear turned inward as depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"A distinct and abject failure is still honorable. And, as I have learned from experience, has its own subtle glory. We have not abandoned the path of self-understanding simply because we do not tromp upon it with triumphant heels. It is not ignoble to trod the path of self-understanding with a loser's gait."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Knowledge of life is not the same thing as the life of knowledge, which we can discover only by actually applying it to our lives."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Concerning depression, who among us will be so anxious for the doctors to rid us of our black holes if we understand that our stars may disappear as well?"
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Today's psychological paradigm of compassionate acceptance leads us to call ourselves shy and sensitive when it would be far more helpful and accurate to say that we are fearful and resentful. How is this a problem? It is a problem because the cure for shy and sensitive is outgoingness and self-esteem. But outgoingness and self-esteem are not the cures for fearful and resentful. The cures for fearful and resentful are courage and self-responsibility.
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We get up not because we feel like it but because morning has come. That we have no chores is unacceptable. That the day ahead holds no joy for us does not mean we shouldn't whittle something out of it anyway. Why? Because to learn to do so is the only real sanity we will ever be able to count on.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Fear is a kind of intelligence. The only thing that is incapable of fear is stupidity."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Our nature is not our enemy, it is our path.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It may be that depression alone is responsible for our most trenchant connection with existence by interrupting our heedless and arrogant rush through it."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Belief itself is all process, the content is just secondary. That's why the stronger someone believes in A, the easier it is to get them to switch to believing in B."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"It is a shocking thing to say but it may be that the first step to human excellence is: first, you ruin your life. I don't think there is any other way."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Sometimes it is a great source of strength that we do not dare to show weakness in front of our fellows."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Our mental stability will ultimately come to rest upon either our emotional self-responsibility or our emotional dependence, because these opposite positionings are constantly evolving away from each toward the accomplishment of themselves, according to the principle of inertia. Pharmacology is not a viable third way.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
"There is nothing more stubborn and imperious than abject helplessness."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"Knowing we are powerless is light years ahead of fearing we are powerless. If we want real freedom in this life, this is the place where we will find it. Knowing we are powerless is our most solid ground, the real human condition that we all try to avoid seeing at all costs. (You may argue with me here, but how powerful is a creature who can neither help being born nor dying?)."
~ A. B. Curtiss
"We cannot escape the stamp of our habitual thinking or behavior upon our lives; but we can resist it. Principles are the only way to control our over-response to anxious or depressive feelings. Our desire cannot do it, not even the desire to control feelings, because desire is itself a feeling which ebbs and flows. Principles do not ebb and flow. Principles are the solid posts set in cement that we can hold onto to stay the chosen course that feelings would push us from."
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We hate and despise the agony, and the mess and the utter waste of the path of negative emotions, but it’s easier to fall into it than to choose the hard road of living by principles and duty.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The brain works all the time, with or without our awareness of its workings. There are two basic kinds of thinking all human beings do: directed, on-purpose thinking or accidental, passive thinking.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We can teach our brain to do the kind of thinking we want; or we can allow our brain to “think us” in the form of depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“If you don’t know how you think, how you get from one thought to another, you won’t understand how you get depressed.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“In general, magical thinking should not be used instead of good old-fashioned elbow grease to accomplish the everyday tasks of your life. But magical thinking does have its uses. You are bound to feel better by just repeating to yourself “I feel better.” And you are bound to feel worse if you keep repeating to yourself “I feel terrible.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“When we know exactly what depression is and where it is in our body, we don’t feel so overwhelmed when it makes its appearance.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The simplest one-second exercise can reduce stress. Wadding up a piece of paper and pitching it into the wastebasket in a mock basketball throw can take the edge off tension; or simply relaxing your shoulders and letting them drop down.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The trouble with self-focused thinking is that it disconnects us from present reality.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Most people don’t realize that they have trouble getting to sleep because instead of thinking about going to sleep, they think about NOT going to sleep. The fear of not going to sleep triggers your fight-or-flight response, and the stress chemicals prevent you from relaxing. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
‘”I was encouraged to an understanding about "happiness" by the ancient mystics who warn us to beware of "all desire," of wanting something else other than reality; of wanting something else other than "what is." I found I was now willing to commit myself to that old Victorian adage "Be good, my child, and let who will be clever" by changing it ever so slightly: "Be good, my child, and let who will be happy." When we are able to question our frantic search for our skewed idea of happiness, we turn away from the complications of wanting something other than what we have now got; and then, there is only the one and simple path ahead.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is a cautionary but barely perceptible interruption of our flow of ongoingness which comes to us at pivotal times. It is called CHOICE. We can make our claim upon this timeless instant and convert it to our use by expanding our awareness of it, or we can lose it in the surrender to what bent of habitual behavior we are already headed for.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We just need to recognize that depression is never the case, objectively speaking (as everyone else around us can plainly see but us). So we should not make it the case subjectively speaking. In other words, we think we have to be depressed. We should think something else.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is just a feeling of helplessness. The reality is that we are not really helpless. Depression is a just feeling that nothing matters. The reality is that things and people do matter. Depression is just a feeling that we can’t go on. The reality is that we can go on.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We will always have terrible flaws and limitations. When we accept them instead of trying to assess blame for them, they provide the moral struggle which forges our path through life. We will always have conflict between our behavior and our values. This is how we figure out what our values are. This is how we judge our behavior. We continually adjust our values and our behavior. We are always a “work in progress.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“If we are unclear about our values, we can look at our behavior choices for clues as to what our values might be. For instance: if we put our baby in day care so that we can afford to live in a house instead of an apartment, which do we value more highly, the house or the child? If we refuse to take unfair advantage of our customers, which do we value more highly, being a successful salesman or being a good person? If we take something that doesn’t belong to us, which do we value more highly, possessions or honor?”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We can’t heal fear and depression just like we can’t heal addictions because they are not illnesses, they are impulses. We don’t heal impulses, nor can we stop them from occurring to us; we just learn to choose to do something else other than doing them.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Our mind is not a why mind or a no mind; it is a how mind and a yes mind. “Just Say No” doesn’t work. There is a huge difference in saying “I will abstain” rather than “No more booze.” The mind can’t do anything with a why or a no; it can only do something with a how and a yes. That is the reason that saying no to a chocolate sundae or our depression doesn’t work.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“People talk about depression being paralyzing. It seems that we are paralyzed because our focus is not on the present but on the past or the future where no action can, this instant, take place. This is true even if our desire is as simple and seemingly innocent as, “I don’t want to feel this way.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
We can always choose to turn away from the feelings of helplessness and futility to the reality and the sanity that lies in a sense of duty, and some small task that we can do. Then we can feel differently. But not because we want to. We will feel differently because we did something different.
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Decisions are difficult for everybody. Sometimes the best we can do is simply perform the next small task and trust that sooner or later we will take on a direction that makes sense to us. Existence never abandons us without the next thing to do. This would be as unthinkable as looking out in the yard and finding a blank space of nothingness in the middle of the lawn. Or looking up at the sky and seeing a piece missing. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression often wins by belief. Rote mind-sets and unwilled self-hypnosis can keep us stuck in all kinds of ignominious status quo so that it can appear to us that we do not have control over our lives.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“It is only when we are thrust into utter darkness that we start looking for some light; only when we feel utterly abandoned that we know we must risk doing something for ourselves. Then we learn that the only life we ever really have, the only life that we can really claim as our own, be sure of, is the life that we have had the courage to risk, win or lose. In taking this risk, whether we win or lose, we win ourselves.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We say things in such a way that we obscure to ourselves the fact that we have a choice. And then we sell this obfuscation to each other in the form of “self-sayings” that we accept as “givens.” We say “I’m not very disciplined,” and plunk ourselves down comfortably by the side of what we believe is some natural God-given road of weakness upon which it was our fate to be sidetracked. But we aren’t being sidetracked by God or fate. We are being sidetracked by our own language. What we are really saying when we say we aren’t disciplined is, “I don’t have a high regard for duty.” If we are more precise about what we are saying about ourselves, we can more easily see what we are doing. “
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Here is the good news and the bad news about choice. If we are in the habit of doing evil, and decide to change, we may choose at any moment to do some small good thing. However, if we are in the habit of doing good, it is possible to fall from grace in any small moment of weakness.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“One of the problems with psychology is that it seeks for ways to excuse and understand deviant behavior rather than to bring about compliance with common-ground established norms.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“It is my experience that the wide mood swings of bi-polar disorder can be controlled by controlling our thoughts. The belief that we can’t control ourselves when these mood swings occur may be the only reason we don’t do it, not because we can’t do it. It is a matter of practice. We just need to practice controlling ourselves instead of practicing not controlling ourselves.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Sometimes we don’t realize that our mind is choosing to think fearful thoughts over and over again until we realize that we are terribly depressed. When we understand the concept of thought choice, we can refuse the autonomic thought choices of our mind by choosing a new thought pattern of our own, on-purpose choice whenever we realize that depression or mania is going on. It is simply a choice between two things for our one attention, like a choice between two cars for one driver. If we choose to drive downtown in the Ford, the Chevy will have to sit, unused, in the driveway. Its motor may be idling noisily, but if we do not get in and engage the gears, it is just running itself, it is not running us.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“ The clue to manic depression is not what happens, but what doesn’t happen. It is the same ignominious clue that remains after the mathematicians sift through all the hurry and scurry of million-dollar quantum physics experiments with quarks and other siftings of the very small, and find only one sure thing about the nature of reality: “Things that don’t happen critically influence things that do.”7 What is not happening in the realm of depression and manic depression is that we are not accessing our neocortex as an act of will, which critically influences the dependence, by default, upon our subcortex, the seat of our emotions. What we don’t do is the cause of our autonomic over-identification and enmeshment with our feelings that we call depression and manic depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“But we seem so afraid these days of the words “moral” or “sin,” as if these relational words belong solely to the discipline of religion. When the last brick of the last church has crumbled into dust on this planet, as long as two human beings still remain (or maybe even two monkeys according to anthropologists), they will still be able to sin against each other, or relate to one another based upon some mutually acceptable common-ground imperative.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Somehow I always felt ‘prevented.’ Of course, in reality, I was the perpetrator of my life, not the victim of it.
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The reason it is so hard to get out of Poor Me is that we don't think we are being defensive; we think people have short-changed us. We don't think we are demanding; we think people don’t give us our fair share. When we are really lost in hopelessness we don't think we are slothful and resistant; we think life is futile.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“As far as I know I am the first therapist to make the important connection between the process of pain perception and a method for getting out of depression quickly. If you are presently seeing a medical professional for your depression I suggest you ask him about the process of pain perception.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“To refuse to choose is a choice in itself, albeit a negative one. And the continual refusal to choose the thoughts we think causes us to believe that we have no choice.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We can learn to distinguish between impulse and volition; between feelings and principles, so that our fear remains a necessary wake-up call that ends in some chosen action instead of ending in itself, the condition of self-terror we call depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The great power of our mind can work for us or against us. This great power can mire us in terrible, painful depression, or we can learn to direct the same power of mind that is now agonizing us to help us avoid depression. We can do it even though psychologists and psychiatrists tell us that we cannot.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“The continual refusal to see the unreal (we are helpless) is the necessary condition for seeing the real (we are self-responsible).
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression may indeed be a slippery slope, but I found I could install handrails and footholds, even automatic step-in elevators that could save me.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“I did not choose depression. Depression occurred because of my lack of choosing to go the way of being cheerful.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“There is nothing more politically correct today than the idea that we are the victims of our behavior; that our behavior is not our choice.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“What the American doctors are observing is not depression itself but depression exposed to their particularizing questions. Instead of the nature of depression determining the measurements they are taking, the measurements they are taking are determining, for the researchers, the nature of depression.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“We don’t have to “peel ourselves” like an onion in psychoanalysis to uncover childhood neural response patterns that disturb us; we can simply forge new ones that nourish us, and the old patterns will fade with disuse.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“As powerful a phenomenon as it is, we can learn very quickly that depression is totally dependent upon our rapt attention to it. If we are depressed, there is one sure thing we know about ourselves; no one is sawing off one of our arms.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Since depression is dependent on our rapt attention to it, how is it that we can become its prisoner against our will? We can’t, if we learn how to assert our will.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“Depression is a kind of accidental self-hypnosis.”
~ A. B. Curtiss
“People who are more intelligent usually have the worst time with depression since their whole intelligence has been co-opted by their emotions and thus is in league against them. When people tell us depressed people to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps,” it is really no more of an order of difficulty than what we are already doing to ourselves in reverse--pulling ourselves down by our own bootstraps.”
~ A. B. Curtiss