In the case of [...]]]> I started doing a little research in the area of ‘emotional detachment’ and distancing. It appears that NLP has a great way of reducing the emotional impact of emotions and does help an individual to be more resourceful in handling matters – provided that the dissociation is followed by another resource state.

In the case of some people, this is what seems to happen in depression:

When women are depressed, 99 out of 100 times you’re dealing with people who have lost their voice. With depressed men the issue isn’t that so much, it’s disconnection, and that goes right to the way we raise boys, the way we turn boys into men is through disconnection. We pull them away from their mothers, we now think far too early. We teach them to disconnect from their feelings, disconnect from their vulnerabilities, and to be honest, disconnect from caring all that much about others. And when I deal with a depressed man, I am always dealing with a guy who is cut off.

In other words, a man who gets depressed may show it by being emotionally wirhdrawn – almost similar in nature to the standard dissociative techniques in NLP such as fast phobia cure.

One of NLP’s tenets is the use of well-formed outcomes. To be able to manage our future direction more effectively, it is often recommended we set goals, but I think NLP has gone one step further to infuse cybernetic outcome clarification into human behavior.

By considering the outcome clearly, we can be a little more certain that the direction we are moving toward is more effective. It also struck me, this quote:

When men are distressed, we tend to externalize. They reach out. They get into action, and for years that was one of the favorite explanations about why men are quote unquote, protected from depression. Well, many of the things that men move toward, like drink, or compulsive behavior or rage are not good. I don’t think that they protect men from being depressed. I just think they protect men from feeling depressed. And they don’t work all that well. And even when they do work, they come at a very high cost to their lives.

So in the event where emotional expression is deemed by society to be only a “woman” thing, it causes suppression, and habitual suppression turns into habit and often gets subsumed into unconsciousness. So now, you have someone who may be highly attuned to emotions but completely hides it without knowing why.

In planning the outcome, one ought to be more focused in the state that creates a solution. Depression cannot engulf someone who is acting on the feelings of playfulness, compassion and intimacy. A lot of the time, these states will also drive different kinds of actions than depression and supression.

Emotional detachment, however, does not always mean it’s a guy thing. I also know women who claim that “crying” is for babies.A healthy expression of emotions allows others to see what you are feeling because in the case of people who are unable to experience it, there’s hardly any empathy for someone who does feel sad. The experiencer may feel a Level 10 emotion but the observer may only calibrate to a 1.

Scaling Empathy For Depression

We know that people who are around depressed people need some kind of skill for empathy – that is for us to recognize the feelings before it is too late – relationships could be lost, and lives destroyed, simply because such experiencers don’t know how to really understand the emotions in others.

In NLP, we can do a variety of things to assist in handling our depression.

• Learn to experience the full-blown emotion and process it externally, rather than just internally.
• develop a belief pattern that it is okay to be emotional about certain feelings, simply to process and experience the emotion; to stick it out may not be the best thing.
• generate a sequence of reframing to the process of the emotional experience. When you feel bad, it’s not just about stopping the bad feelings completely. Sometimes, bad feelings are signals (like pain) for something that’s going wrong. We need to experience the bad once in a while, and understand what we need to learn and do after this experience. It could be a breakup, a business issue, a loss of a loved one, a betrayal from someone you care about, etc. What did you learn from this experience?
• generate a timeline sequence that helps you to sustain a corrective action. How do you carry out your change process? What are you doing that leads you closer toward your desired relationship/career/social outcomes once you have learnt what to do?
• Build a propulsion mechanism that enables you to link pleasure toward moving in the direction of your desired goals no matter how distant it may appear to be, while creating an away-from to that which caused your depression in the first place

Finally, learn to create positive feelings everywhere you go and make people around you feel good. I think that’s a great full-dress rehearsal for making things better in your life.

Sources:

http://www.ahealthyme.com/topic/mendepressionscript

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/152/3/358

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Whatever the case, the perspective I’d put on this is that depression is normal. Yes, can be debilitating, but it’s normal. Millions [...]]]> I’ll bet you encounter depression once in a while. Or, you might actually be someone who has been battling depression for some time. Maybe you have someone you’d like to help.

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Whatever the case, the perspective I’d put on this is that depression is normal. Yes, can be debilitating, but it’s normal. Millions of people go through it. Some people get out of it faster than others.

In recent days, especially after the announcement of major job losses in America, I’ve seen a surge in people seeking depression treatment or depression help. Somehow, many people are in a bad spot and just don’t know how to go about helping themselves.

To get out of a spot of depression, you’ll have to acknowledge that:

• what you are going through is not your regular self;
• it’s good to get out of the feeling of depression;
• if you’re not doing something, you have too much time to think about things that are going wrong in your life.

Most of the time, depression comes about from inner thoughts and connections. You might not know where those thoughts came from. It’s often due to a response from observing (although unconsciously) the world around you, and then the propogation of lots and lots of thoughts associated with that.

If you have trouble expressing yourself, it might cause you to think “wait, let me sort out my thinking first, then speak”. But that might simply aggravate the sensation of depression, anxiety or anger. Or worse, all of them.

NLP has a model known as submodalities. By learning to shift our mental images, we get to change the experience we have in our head. For instance, making an image brighter or darker in our minds can help to reduce or increase the intensity of a feeling.

Test it out.

If you look at an image of yourself depressed, how about making that image brighter or darker? Which direction works for you? Then keep doing it!

Of course, it’s not easy for someone to do this who has never done it before (I know some children who do this very well, though). It’s about mental flexibility and the ability to see different perspectives. If you are able to shift your perspective, coming out with alternative, healing mental images is going to be easy.

This process, in NLP, is known as reframing. Putting on different lenses and seeing from someone else’s perspective can help you to put things in context.

If you need to process your thinking, though, drop me a message and I’ll see if I can help.