What is definition of depression?

Depression has been described as a kind of emotional numbness.

A person may feel he or she has no laughter or joy inside because these positive emotions have been blocked by unhappy memories. Old emotional hurts inevitably lurk inside and when the new feelings try to bubble up they are filtered through these hurts. Even the most beautiful experience cannot survive if it is being filtered through a preexisting feeling of hopelessness, fear or anxiety.

How Do We Become Depressed?

Basically we are aroused by only two sensations, pain and pleasure. We all want to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. The emotional cycle which leads to depression begins in the present with our initial experience of pain or pleasure, and ends with complex feelings which are “remembered”exclusively in the past. This cycle of emotions has been found by psychiatrists to follow this pattern:

1. Pain in the present is experienced as hurt.
2. Pain in the past is remembered as anger.
3. Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety or fear.
4. Unexpressed anger, redirected against yourself and held within, is experienced as guilt.
5. The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression.

Hurt is stored because the body retains a primitive subconscious ability to remember every incident that it experiences. This is called conditioning and is part of the way we learn.

Although many people are treated with anti depressant drugs, these medications do not cure the underlying hurt or sadness that is the true cause of the depression. When the medication is taken away the depression usually reappears.

Even though it can take longer and requires greater insight and courage, a depressed person can either release the inner hurt or reprogram it. He/She can learn new, more useful and effective responses to painful experiences. When this is accomplished a permanent cure usually results.

In the Life Skills Seminar you learn to overcome depression by understanding and practising:

1. The conscious ability to relax and release stress any time, anywhere.
2. The ability to focus the mind.
3. The ability to neutralise or reprogram subconscious “hurt memories”.
4. The ability to develop mind/body exercises to overcome depression.
5. The ability to develop new responses to current experiences.