Many people think that they are depressed, even suicidal at times and don’t actually realise that they are in brownout (warning phase) heading into severe burnout (crisis phase).  If it takes you years to get into it then you could be up for a year or two to get out.  Time to STOP and asses your load.

The Only Way to Maintain Love & Mutual Respect. A relationship can never become better than the balance of power that it is born out of, so the ingredients of such a balance of power must be teased out, before negotiation skills can be factored in. Good agreement skills will always produce a balance of power, rather than a ‘bully-victim’ type relationship or a constant power struggle. The way to a win-win agreement often involves balancing expectations, compromise and patience.

A woman’s responsiveness to a man can be a liability, as well as an asset to her femininity. Consequently, her level of libido often reflects what her husband thinks of her and how he treats her, (or else what a man once did to her in earlier years -see notes on ‘Echoes’). However, her frigidity is never simply ‘her’ problem, it heals much faster when it becomes ‘our’ problem. Is she indulging her husband’s adolescent attitudes / demands through learned or ‘Christian’ passivity / submission? ………..

Depression, the ‘common cold’ of Western mental illness, is also known as melancholia and unipolar affective (mood) disorder. It includes a variety of flat emotional conditions, but is usually characterised by profound and terrible feelings of powerlessness, emptiness, deadness, fear, lethargy, greyness a carelessness about everything an absence of en theos for life.  Left to become more severe, such emotional pain is engendered that suicide may be seen as the only way to ‘cope’ with its unceasing pain. Everything is an effort; one delays going to bed, then awakens early, or hides in sleep, and there is a loss of interest or energy for anyone or anything. The weather is permanently bleak, and one runs on willpower, if at all. While medication and electroconvulsive therapy will often bring temporary relief in cases where eating has stopped and life is at risk, it is usually not with the organics that the cause lies, nor therefore the solution.

“Children cope with rejection by rejecting in turn, those who rejected them.”  It is not wanting, yet still needing, parental supervision. When the door of trust is locked from the inside of the child’s mind, and the lock is stuck. Analogy; when a new battery disengages itself from the charger before it’s fully charged. This early event results in a dangerous premature individuation, with a hostile or defensive attitude involved on the part of the child. The child withdraws from closeness to a parent, either to “get their own back” (express revenge) or protect themselves from a sense of rejection, (whether real or imagined) or betrayal. Many teenagers are in partial detachment as part of a vendetta, which permanently damages the natural process of differentiation.

Gaining the courage to call your attitude a ‘leftover’. The default mood may be thought of as the mind’s favourite recipe when it doesn’t know what other mood to make. (It is your ‘screensaver’ mood). This habitulised feeling is a long out of date mood, feeling or emotion that the brain has learnt to readily produce over many years, whether or not it is still appropriate to the situation. For example, some people have learnt in childhood to feel a sense of despair or hopelessness, and now as adults, repeatedly slip into a ‘what’s the use’ mood – no matter what their circumstances or how much cause for hope there really is.

Emotional Energy Summoned For Self Preservation. Question 1 Which is worse too much anger, or too little? Question 2 – Which is the more effective way to stop a pot from boiling over – to lift off the lid or screw it on tighter, or take the pot off the stove? Question 3 – Is anger in itself bad, good or merely neutral energy? Question 4 – Why does the proud heart manifest more from anger than the humble?

Breaking free from an addiction is all about increasing one’s motivation, and learning how to overcome a deep and abiding ambivalence (doublemindedness). It’s about repersuasion of the deep ‘idiot-mind’ to the point of becoming completely and utterly convinced that life is better without, than with, and almost everybody is in need of some ‘repersuasion’ somewhere in their lives. (Client centered, nondirective counselling has little to offer the addict, who is already trapped within their ‘inner wisdom’.)