A New Approach to Depression

If you are willing to let go of the past
We can help you change the future
To progress, quantify the present

From the 4Sight perspective, the label itself is a problem. It is stigmatized and gives you no helpful information other than having a term to communicate how you feel. That's why we refer to depression as a feeling that results from self-esteem issues. Those issues occur because your memories do not accurately reflect the world in which you live. However, since you constantly reference them to give meaning to the present, your perception is skewed negatively. As a result of that skew, you fail to take action, thereby reinforcing the negative. The trick is to be willing to let go of the past just enough so that you begin to challenge the undesirable thought patterns.

By age three we have in place our first "Model" of the world. That Model is the sum total of memories in our brain that enable us to perceive the environment around us. That Model supports two processes, the SE mentioned above and Self-Confidence (SC), how we plan the future. For the purposes of depression, SC is not a factor, and we will explain that shortly.

Getting back to the Model and SE there are two things you need to know. First, whatever is in place by age 3 remains forever malleable, especially so during youth. That means that the Model can be modified during your entire life. That is really important because it means that you can change your behavior, although, that change will become more challenging the more entrenched the thought pattern becomes. In other words, for every year that you spend thinking a certain way, the more it will take new and corrected momentum to move you into a desirable pattern. We call this negative force your "emotional fatigue".

The other thing you need to know is what SE actually is and why it goes awry. What we have found is that an accurate SE is based upon your ability to answer two key questions internally. Do I like myself and do I value myself? If you can answer both of those questions with a resounding "yes", you will not have any SE issues. If, however, you either equivocate or, worse, say "no" then you are going to experience a destructive emotion. That is the problem.

When you "feel" something, it can skew how you perceive the present. The way that happens is actually really straightforward. Feelings happen quickly, before we are aware of them. They also have a strong influence because they literally push chemicals through our body. At that point we become aware of the feeling, our higher-level reasoning is left to make sense of the "emotion", the labels we assign to the physical experience. The problem occurs when we are not answering those two questions accurately. The result is that we skew the meaning of something. And if that feeling is left unchallenged, we will use a cognitive distortion - effectively, we will lie to ourselves - to justify that feeling. In effect, we are enabling an incorrect conclusion with the logic part of our brain.

In order to regularly engage in desirable behavior - the constructive action we all need to survive - we need two elements: the desire to act and the ability to act (in that order). When you have SE issues that desire becomes muted if not halted. The result is inaction. We do not even get to the SC process which gives us the ability to act. The catch-22 is that our failure to act reinforces our lack of desire. That is because action reinforces more action. After all, if you engage in constructive action you will see and/or derive some benefit, in effect, confirming that desirable behavior supports our basic desire to survive. Inaction only serves to thwart that conclusion.

So what to do? The answer to that is also simple, not that it won't tie you up in knots thinking about it (those nasty negative internal conclusions!). Since you are unable to help yourself, you need to allow others to do that. After all, if you were able to help yourself, you would not be depressed, right? Unfortunately, the reaching out for that help drives more internal dialog that makes it hard to reach out.

In the end, though, you need to start with this statement: not reaching out is a choice. So, like it or not - and you may hate me for saying this - Depression is a choice. The best thing I can say is that the reason for writing that is not to blame you. That is a negative emotion you are associating with this process. However, you are responsible for being in that state and you can change it, not that the world in general or the mental health field specifically are helping that dynamic. But have no fear, 4Sight is here ;)

Anyway, I think we have rambled on enough. Our only hope is that if you have not stumbled upon this page on your own, that someone else has coaxed you into reading it. If that is the case, know that they are saying you "matter", the conclusion you *should* be obtaining on your own via your SE but are not. That is because when you ask yourself if you like or value yourself, one or both of those answers is "no" often enough as to skew your mood into being destructive. That may sound simplistic and even insurmountable. However, that is only because - before today - we never really understood how our brain works. We certainly did not know how to raise our children so that they are emotionally sound. We definitely do not know how to help adults who have such challenges. Thanks to the 4Sight Model, we can now start to change that.

Have the Courage to change. Help someone else. Help yourself. Alter the momentum. Make the future you want. After all, you deserve it. You matter.