The Blues Clues!

I thought today I would share a problem that is very personal to me, as I have a form of this particular dis-order. Being a hypnotists and a practitioner of NLP does give us a “golden ticket” that makes us immune to all of the problems that many people suffer from. I’ll start with a bit of history to foreshadow my writing about this terrible potentially debilitating problem:

When I was a child, Fall and Winter were the most magical time of year for me, I can still recall how I would wait mark off the days on the calendar counting down the days till it would be Christmas. The closer it got the more my home filled with the most wondrous aromas, ham, pies, cakes, brownies, cookies etc… My mom would wait every day for the mail to get the Christmas cards that came in to show us all which of our relatives remembered us and how pretty the cards were, then she would take the cards and tape them to the wall in our living room one at a time, and at the time I would memorize who sent each one so that if any one asked I could tell you who sent them. We had elaborate decorations that took weeks to put up; literally our house looked like Christmas was its entire reason for existing.

Christmas morning would arrive and I would find myself wide awake at 6am and lie in my bed for at least 30 minutes waiting to get up so that it would not be too extremely early to wake everyone in my family up because I knew Santa had been by and filled the space under our tree and I could not wait to see what I had gotten for being so good all year long! Then when the time was right I would spring out of my bed like a bat out of hell and run to my parent’s room, my mother would spring up and tell me to wake my brothers and my sister, they would be most annoyingly sluggish about waking up, but I was relentless in my determination and there would be no going back to sleep, for I had already waited long enough and there was no escaping my enthusiasm! After I made sure they were awake I would sprint to the end of the hallway and stop just short of my living room and peek around the corner barely able to contain myself looking slowly at the huge pile of presents stacked carefully under our Christmas tree.

I would then walk through the living room and join my mother in the kitchen, who would just be turning the coffee pot on, and she would ask me about the status of my siblings, and I would report to her how hard they were to wake up and then she would tell me it was time to wake my dad, and I would sprint like the flash down the hall again and wake my dad. He would always ask me “Did Santa come last night son?” I would then speak in what must have been an incoherent blurb about how huge the piles of gifts were and how hard everyone was to wake, in what I know had to be a single breath. He would chuckle to himself and then get up and grab his robe and head towards the living room camera in hand. The rest of the morning was a blur of ripping paper and adrenalin. My parents would sit and watch us play with a smile that I truly believe comes from a form of self satisfaction only a parent can truly know.  

That was 18 years ago, and now I am an adult and a parent. My home is sparsely decorated but decorated enough. Both of my parents have passed away, and my brothers and sister live in different places both physically, emotionally and mentally. Until I met my wife this was the most unpleasant time of year for me, since my parents passed away I have suffered from something called “Seasonal Affective Disorder” otherwise known as the Holiday Blues/depression. Previously to meeting my wife and kids, I all but shut down during this time of year, I would not listen to any Christmas songs, watch any of the Christmas specials I used to enjoy most of my life from when I was a child, shows like the Santa Clause specials, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Charlie Brown, etc… My Favorite Christmas movie has always been ironically enough “A Christmas Carol” But I also avoided this like the plague as well. When it comes to how I treat others I have hardly ever been a Scrooge despite how I felt. Simply I just didn’t celebrate the holiday much. I felt a sense of disconnection, like the holiday was for everyone else but not for me. I still bought presents for others, went to parties, and even made cappuccino for my family every Christmas morning with breakfast, and would be very thankful for any presents that I received. But when no one was around, I would spend quite a bit of time crying, aching to see my parents again and practically dying to just hear them say my name, reliving those moment of Christmas from so long ago and mourning the fact that I would never see another moment as fine as those shared with my family in the past.

This type problem is a very common experience for many people, statistics on seasonal affective disorder in the United States include that this disorder occurs in about 5% of adults, with up to 20% of people having some symptoms of the condition but not sufficient enough to meet diagnostic criteria for this disorder (AMA). Seasonal affective disorder is less common where there is snow on the ground. Seasonal affective disorder is about four times more common in women than men, and the average age of people when they first develop this illness is 23 years of age. People of all ages can develop seasonal affective disorder. (AMA)

I would describe the symptoms commonly used to diagnose this type of depression but frankly, most times general descriptions of any dis-order is used by most people as a sort of checklist to create one, and personally I believe in curing problems more so that creating them. But often this type of dis-order is attributed to the Cycle of the seasons, the shorter days of the year when we see less and less sunlight which disrupts the body’s internal clock, it is thought that the disruption of our body’s natural rhythm could possibly cause depression like symptoms. It is also diagnosed that the disruption in the body natural cycle’s can also an acute decrease in Melatonin and Serotonin two chemicals produced in the body that maintains our sleep and awake cycles. Often for this light therapy is prescribed as a solution. The thought is that exposure to very bright light for the same periods of time you would have normally experienced sunlight will assist the body in restoring its internal rhythm. Also supplements of Melatonin are available over the counter, and additionally other prescriptions are available of many well know anti-depressant medications.

Recent studies relating to the change of the season as being the cause SAD lead us to believe that the changing season have little or nothing to do with SAD, when we consider things like; Norway, every year Norway spends 2 months in complete darkness, as well as certain parts of Alaska and significant areas of Russia such as Siberia and none of these regions of the world report any significant increases in the amount of the population suffering from this potentially debilitating form of depression. (Institute of Clinical Medicine, Dr. V Hansen 2008, Norway). More and more SAD is being treated as a form of clinical depression for which increasingly medications and cognitive and other forms of conventional therapy are being prescribed.

*Note: It is commonly believed that suicide rates increase during the Christmas season, this myth has been proven by many studies to be completely false. Studies have shown that suicide rates actually increase in spring conversely. The thought that suicide is more common in the winter is perpetuated and fabricated by the press and media, the American foundation for Suicide Prevention has also released articles that show a direct link between articles released within the last 10 years about this and many suicides that shortly followed their release. (Psychology Today and Annenberg Public Policy Center University of Pennsylvania, 2008)

With all of these fact figures and conjecture it can definitely leave one feeling overwhelmed! Which in truth can compound the problem of SAD even more, after all how many people have had the experience of going to the doctor and being prescribed any medication let alone anti-depressants that is only for a short period of time? Most doctors do not like to discontinue a medication regiment once it has been established. Additionally, even if it is a short lived, with a problem that is seasonal, who wants to be diagnosed as being depressed, especially with how closely our personal health information is monitored by certain organizations? This can make it almost impossible to get insurance or at least make it very costly. Anti-depressant medication can also take quite a toll on the body and be quite costly, how many people have adequate health coverage for both the multiple visits to the Psychologist / Psychiatrist and such medications for such an intermittent problem?

The true problem lies in the unconscious mind, if you remember a principle of the unconscious mind is that it hides memories from us in order to protect us from things we may not be able to handle at the time they happened in order to maintain our well being. The Christmas season is a season filled with memories and associations, as we grew up when experienced November as the beginning of the biggest holiday season of our year, our parents would prepare and cook for Thanksgiving, our relatives we hadn’t seen through most of the year would come and we would get a chance to have a few special moments to share with our families that were at best rare in our day to day lives. Then Christmas would be right around the corner with the excitement of our parents and our families we all as children would fill with their excitement for the entire month and our own for that all important visit from Santa Claus, and the gifts he would leave us for being so good through out the rest of the year. We would practice this cycle every year, like a habit.

Then the inevitable happened, we grew up. Santa Claus for a time lost his relevance to us (until we had children of our own), and unfortunately our parents and dear family members got older as well and some of them passed way before their time. But our minds remain; they have kept their associations to this wondrous season, for some that have very large families it was easier as they may have had plenty of relatives that shared their lives and still to this day they can visit and find that sense of family and connection. While others who have smaller families losing family members can leave very large empty spaces that with no one to fill can take root in their psyche, that they are unable fill. And of course vice versa, folks with large families can lose important members and no one can take their place, and smaller families can lose member and knit tighter together to support one another. Either way the result is that we have very strong associations to the holidays, and every year we repeat the rituals and habits that as we have been through most of our lives, we repeat them because of our associations and then painful memories or unresolved issues we may have are then brought back to the surface from our unconscious. Because the unconscious is unable to both repress and share these memories simultaneously the strong associations we have are highly emotionally charged, and in many cases our feelings of grief or pain are repressed for our own well being the rest of the year, the automatic unpacking and being almost forced into dealing with it causes a sort of short circuit in our emotional balance to which the end result is holiday depression.  

I would also like to take a moment to address the medical diagnosis of the lower levels of Serotonin and Melatonin. Depression has been proven to cause our bodies to drastically change the levels of many chemicals in our bodies. Additionally our unconscious controls these levels and is also responsible for the function of keeping them balanced. Why someone’s unconscious would allow these levels to change drastically enough to cause such problems can indicate many things, such things are easy to solve permanently with hypnosis. This explanation I feel is very simplified and I would like to take a moment to give you an idea of why these kinds of imbalances happen, even if someone isn’t aware their unconscious is in conflict our bodies will still show the evidence of this type of conflict, and this is displayed through many types of dis-ease that many people suffer from today.

The phenomenon know commonly as dis-ease is, I believe the result of conflicting programs that confuse our unconscious minds. To explain best how dis-ease can be created by the unconscious I will start by saying that dis-ease is cause by one thing; improper functioning of the cells of the body. The causes of this breakdown or malfunction are various, but at a basic level it can be described as it relates to the pathways that conduct the energy that flows through our bodies.

Eastern Medicine describes the flow of the life force energy through out our bodies as “chi” and this is the term I will use to describe this energy. Chi is described as entering body when we inhale and is the forwarded to the body’s energy accumulators and transformers commonly know as chakras. Each of these energy centers focuses on one of the 7 glands of our endocrine system. These chakras modify the chi energy to be specific for the particular endocrine gland that uses it. The now modified energy flows through our body’s energy pathways or meridians if you like, to the cells via the endocrine gland and stimulates the cells to regenerate; not only do the cells regenerate but also they purge the body of toxins. If this chi energy is blocked and can not reach the cell community or is diminished, the cell community is deprived of its life force and begins to degrade. Blockages in the body’s main energy pathways (meridians) or its main energy centers (chakras) cause this type of phenomenon to occur. The causes for this could be from bad experiences in this life, previous lives, unresolved internal conflicts and biological memories carried over from our genetic ancestors, we shall call these energy blocking programs of the unconscious mind Negative Force Functions (NFF’s).  These NFF’s function in 3 ways:

1. They distort the body’s energy field thus disrupting the energy pathways.
2. They create negative habits that our unconscious dutifully follows.
3. They continuously support these negative habits which only embeds them further into our unconscious, which only makes them stronger.

These habits cause the distortions of our bodies energy field or blockages that affect our behaviors, the way we feel, how we relate to others, and the way we respond to life. Unless these distortions are cleared or removed, over time they can have serious consequences that affect every aspect of our lives, and ultimately can be potentially fatal in some cases.

Changing our habits and releasing the negative attachments that cause these NFF’s to exist, is ultimately the best and surest cure for most problems. Once the blockages and distortions are removed the life force energy is restored to the cell communities that have been deprived, these cells contain, in the base makeup of the cell, the blueprint for perfectly functioning new cells, and they will begin to regenerate and replace any damaged cells until the entire community of cells are restored.

The symptoms of any form of depression are mostly physical, and once the root of the cause of our woes is gone, then we are free to feel better, and true healing begins. When it comes to the "Holiday Blues" or depression in its many guises, the problem starts form with us, and the cure does also, because no matter what if you only cure a symptom, the problem remains free and unchecked to cause more problems in the future.

Now I'll sit down in my thinking chair, instead of my shrinking chair. Free to think after 18 years. Happy Holidays!