Are you tired of being anxious, depressed, miserable? Of trying to keep it all together? Of having difficult relationships and living in crisis? You are not alone.
Despite our vast financial, scientific, and personal resources, Americans are in the midst of a growing epidemic of emotional distress: Anxiety disorders are the number one mental health problem in America, affecting 19 million of all American adults and 13 million children between the ages of 9 and 17. In addition, according to the National Association for Mental Illness, more than 20 million of us will experience major depression during our lifetime, and almost 30% of Americans will suffer from a mental or substance abuse problem in any one year.
It's not that we aren't trying. We make hundreds of thousands of visits to mental health professionals and fill more than 40 million prescriptions for mood altering medication annually but with few results.
Something is seriously wrong: for far too long, mental health treatment has followed the old Albert Einstein's description of insanity: doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. Why? Because most therapy is based on a number of fictions so embedded in industrial age culture and so commonly accepted, that even most therapists believe them.
Myth 1: Your Symptoms are Your Disease
Fact: Your symptoms - panic, anxiety, insomnia, racing thoughts, abusive relationships, life crises - they are all indications that your body is trying to get your attention so that you can cure the basic cause of your emotional distress. Treating your symptoms as if they were the disease leads to "cures" that suppress symptoms, but not address the cause. In most cases, the result in the long run will be more relationship problems, more life crises that occur when you have let down your guard, as the body attempts with increasing frequency and urgency to get your attention.
Myth 2: Our Thoughts Cause Our Feelings
Fact: Although it is possible to conjure up feelings by thinking about things that are emotionally evocative, our brain circuitry is such that thoughts are shaped more by emotions than vice-versa. Feelings are not only faster than thoughts, they are stored in a different part of the brain. Recent research indicates that we generally have feelings first, then our rational brain makes up stories - which may or may not be true - to explain our feelings.
Myth 3: We Can Cure Our Emotions By Thinking About and Understanding Them
Fact: Expecting thoughts to cure emotions is like expecting to recover from food poisoning by studying how food becomes tainted. Thoughts - especially those pesky obsessive thoughts - stinkin' thinkin' - that keep us from getting on with our lives or getting to sleep, are more often a way we try keep our feelings in check than curing them.
If thinking about feelings could change them, psychiatrists would be the healthiest people in the world. But there is no evidence that professional counselors do better, feel better, or overcome problems better than anyone else. One survey of medical professionals found that psychiatrists had more marital and sexual problems than any other group. Their suicide rate is one of the highest of any medical professional; drug and alcohol abuse is rampant.
Myth 4: Mood-Altering Medications Correct a "Chemical Imbalance"
Fact: Clinical Psychiatric News says "despite decades of progress in developing psychiatric medications, there has been little change in the rate of suicide in the last quarter century." Even psychotropic drug manufacturers admit that medications only depress symptoms of emotional turmoil, they do not cure it.
Suppressing symptoms whether with legal or illegal substances retains harmful emotions rather than erasing them, and can increase the incidence of severe emotional distress.
Myth 5: Real Recovery Requires Professional Therapeutic Intervention
Fact: No one therapy seems to be more effective than any other; small rather than large changes in behavior and feelings are the rule; most changes are short-lived; and clients are no more likely to improve with highly-trained professional therapists than they are with untrained non-professionals.
Unfortunately, most of the advice we receive, whether from friends, family, or the mental health industry is counterproductive. Though emotional illness can be described as poisonous feelings that want to come out, the vast majority of our "cures" are about empowering us to keep them in.
Myth 6: Emotional Distress Is Always a Symptom that Something is Wrong
Fact: In the same way that soreness and swelling signals that white blood cells are attacking an infection at its source, emotional discomfort is often a signal that the body is attempting to heal itself. Severe distress is most often a symptom of a struggle between what nature wants - get rid of the emotional poison - and what we want - keep it from coming up.
Myth 7: The Alleviation of Emotional Distress Is Complex
Fact: Each of us was born with the innate capacity to recover completely from most emotional illness in much the same way the body recovers from most physical disease. Referred to by scientists as homeostasis, it is the instinctive tendency of all living things to self-correct and return to an optimal state of well-being. Eradicating emotional distress is analogous to recovering from food poisoning. The body will usually cure itself. If we let it.
Most people have an inkling that there is "something in there" that wants to come out, but are so alienated from their innate emotional healing system that they don't trust what their body is telling them. They can't distinguish feelings from thoughts. They don't know how to reach down far enough to get the original emotional poison out. They are afraid that if they stop trying to control their feelings with their thoughts they will go crazy.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Teaching people how emotions work and when the body is getting ready to expel emotional poison is not difficult. Relief can be almost instantaneous. The urge to be whole and healthy is instinctive. It operates outside our intellect and will. The only thing we need to do is learn how to let it.
Cindy Cooke, author, From Turmoil to Tranquility, specializes in converting the latest research on the emotional brain into practical, advice to help the soaring number of Americans who suffer from anxiety and panic attacks get at the root cause of their problem and eliminate it. She taught psychology at a number of Colleges including the Maricopa Community College District, Everest College and Bryman. She has taught multiple workshops in Arizona and California - From Turmoil to Tranquility, How to Kick the Bad Boy (or Girl) Habit, and others. She has a BA in psychology and an MEd in Adult Education. She has worked for major universities and colleges and for the last 5 years, was the Executive Director of Boomerz, a Scottsdale based non-profit. For more information, go to http://www.TheTherapistWithin.com.
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