Depression is a NATURAL response to UNNATURAL stress.
There is a cure. It is within you. We know how to help you find it.
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Depression is thought of as a disease much like diabetes or MS and as with these diseases it is thought to be controllable but not curable. Medical science has established that symptom management includes diet, exercise and the right medication, which does indeed reduce symptoms and make the condition manageable, but; what if you could do better than just manage a debilitating condition? You see it is not your doctors’ job to explore the underling emotional cause of depression; in their defense, it is time consuming and each person will have a different set of circumstances that contribute to the condition, so minimizing symptoms is of course a great place to start.
What many people don’t realize is that the rest of the equation is completely within their own hands. The truth is, depression is the act of denying, ignoring or otherwise unknowingly inhibiting one’s self from feeling the full range of human feeling and emotion. The nature of human beings is to feel. When we deny our full range of feeling, knowingly or unknowingly, we depress. The familiar message in society is to bury your feelings and distract yourself with something else; the problem is that feelings pile up. You’ve heard the saying: you get good at what you practice. If you practice ignoring your feelings you will soon become numb, disassociated and unhappy because feeling is the substance of life. If you suffer with depression, begin to sincerely open up to your feelings, the one’s you don’t talk about, the ones you don’t show anyone; and if you need help ask, no one is an island.
What is Unnatural Stress?
Stress is a natural part of life and must exist. One term used to describe stress is “the physiological response to change”. Fight or Flight is a common example of your body releasing adrenaline in preparation to fight off a tiger or run away from one. This sort of stress is primal and happens all the time in the natural world. But unless you live bare footed in the great Canadian tundra, you live in a modified, less natural world. Modern stress is different and sometimes hard to identify. It is easy to identify an oncoming tiger, less easy to identify social segregation. The tiger is presenting a life or death threat that demands your attention right now. In this case you need extra hormones like adrenaline for strength and speed. When the incident is over, the excess hormones are used up and your body returns to normal. Conversely, a person living under the constant stress of social pain also produces extra hormones but, because the stress is constant this person never returns to normal and thus suffers the long term effects of the stress response.
If stress is the physiological response to change, realize that life on earth has changed more in the last 60 years than in all of history. We are no longer confronting tigers; we are facing uncertainty, social decay and economic crisis like never before. And yet as unnatural as our way of life has become, we as humans still impose the expectation that we roll with the punches and somehow find the motivation to put a smile on our face and keep going, when in fact the natural response to unnatural stress is to depress. Depression is the loss of one’s capacity to fully feel the full range of human emotion due to overwhelm of chronic, unidentifiable stress. Regaining your capacity to feel is challenging but not impossible and it is a choice that only you can make from that place inside of you that screams out to be acknowledged and cries desperately to be heard.
How Did We Forget How to Feel?
You see we get it, humans are intelligent. So intelligent, that we have found a way to systematically change the natural evolution of human emotion, to align with our intellectual and materialistic pursuits. The intellectual, materialistic world has no use for feeling. To feel is to slow life down. A fast paced, power based world is hindered by cumbersome feelings and emotion.
So, how did we change the human? Much the same way that some water animals developed legs and learned to live on land – adaptation. Adaptation occurs when it would be more advantageous to the survival of a species if it were to change to accommodate its’ environment. A physical adaptation of a species takes a long time, say a million years. An intellectual or emotional adaptation, such as suburbanized raccoons, can take no time at all. Similarly, children learn very early to adapt to their environment by modifying behavior to ensure their safety or “survival”, while others learn that certain behaviors favor reward or avoid punishment.
The basis of everything we are is feeling and it is how we navigate through life. For example if we feel rejected it may be an indication that we have done something socially unacceptable. The problem is that many of the things we feel rejected for are merely feelings. When I begin to notice that exposing certain feelings tends to elicit negative reactions, I may choose to suppress those feelings and expose different ones that elicit a more pleasant response. This is how we form the habit of suppressing feelings. Sounds simple enough, just feel your feelings, but; you weren’t conscious of suppressing them and forgot that you forgot. When we are removed from our authentic feelings, it will always seem as though something is missing. There will be an inexplicable emptiness because feeling is the very substance of being and the result of this missing part of us is the basis of what we call depression.
Our informational seminars are designed to provide you with information so that you can make an informed choice regarding your health and well being. Society has been conditioned to believe in sickness, limitation and disease. If you are tired of self-hindering beliefs and socially imposed limitations, call to request a free information hour for you and your family, group, or workplace.