Depression, Anxiety & other issues
Understanding depression
Depression is a particular emotional state where a person feels horrid inside themselves. It is not the same as sadness. You can feel sad and even bereaved with out being depressed. When a person is depressed their internal state does not agree with anything on the outside. For instance, a depressed person may be surrounded by people who genuinely love them yet they cannot see, feel or experience that love in any shape or form. They feel isolated and unloved. In fact they may be so convinced that they are an absolute stinker that they believe that everyone around them would be better off without them. The paranoid type imagines that everyone is out to do them harm and this gives them further proof that they are truly and unimaginably bad. The depressed person may feel such deep self loathing that they wish to completely destroy themselves.
Imagine for a moment how you would feel if someone hated you and directed this hatred towards you all the time. It would feel horrible wouldn’t it? Well that’s what it is like for a person who is depressed, only it is they who are being hated by themelves.
It is important to understand that the depressed person has become stuck in a negative groove, but there are some very simple steps they can take to bring about a change. These are usually the very things that they least want to do, such as only sleeping a maximum of 4 hours for a night or two. Or they may need to take 30 minutes of vigorous exercise (preferably outdoors) every day. Or change dietary patterns to eliminate starches and sugars. There are many other things that can help - do ask me about them.
But the best thing you can do for yourself is change the wrongful internal impression of who you believe you are. What if you are wrong and all the people around you who claim to care, actually do? Or what if you could just see yourself through other people’s eyes and find that they really did like or even love you? What then….?
For now I just want you to think of the last time you felt happy. Go on, do it… now place yourself in the actual picture. See what you saw with your own eyes; hear the sounds with your ears and feel your body’s sensations. Really fantasise that you are there. Feel it, taste it, be in it for real. Bring back all those lovely feelings, I bet you’re smiling a little even as you read this. Now just check with yourself - do you feel any degree of improvement? The likelihood is that you do. It may not last long but it proves the point that it is possible to change your internal state simply by what you are thinking.
Fear, the Magnifying Glass and NLP
One of the main issues that I deal with in my work on a daily, if not hourly basis, is fear. However, many people would not recognise fear as such because it is a cunning emotion.
Mostly, fear manifests itself in reluctance, rationalisation or denial. It is like a magnifying glass that distorts as well as amplifies whatever you are looking at. Whilst you are looking through the magnifier you forget what you are looking through because you are so focused on whatever you are seeing. Or when you wear glasses for reading they magnify the print so that you can see clearly but in the process you forget that you are wearing glasses. Fear makes you see things in an enlarged and distorted way. So much so that a tiny, harmless creature looks like an enormous monster that is most definitely going to harm you in some way. Even a fly magnified many times is really quite a terrifying sight.
This same thing happens to us psychologically. This is because we view the world through the lens of our subjectivity. The event or item we are viewing appears inside our minds with all our past experiences, emotions and notions attached to it. By the time our brains have finished processing all of this, a tiny midge flying around the room becomes a monster to be feared to the point of causing severe disruption in every part of us. For example, we may have an anxiety attack (especially if we are phobic of flying insects) or stop what we are doing and start trying to kill it in case it bites us. In the mean time we spill our drinks, break a glass and our partner starts telling us not to be so stupid. We have an argument and go to bed upset. All because we feared a bite half the size of a pin prick.
Other examples may be the teenager who seems unmotivated to go out and get a job, who perhaps is really quite frightened of facing the ‘big bad world’ out there, or the social phobic who has no friends but constantly complains that s/he’s lonely. They would benefit from examining the magnifying glass they are using, perhaps with the help of a life coach.
After many years of studying human behaviour in one form or another I am fully convinced that what is most important for each of us is how we see things on the inside. I also know that few of us are self aware enough to recognise how we make distorted representations of the world around us
This is the most important contribution of NLP technology. Through its exercises NLP enables you to radically alter your internal viewpoint. By looking at the way you represent things to yourself, an NLP coach can truly help you to change at a fundamental level.
By Lena Fenton
