It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self - Hardcover

Jacobs Hendel, Hilary

 
9780399588143: It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0399588140 ISBN 13: 9780399588143
Verlag: Random House, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Fascinating patient stories and dynamic exercises help you connect to healing emotions, ease anxiety and depression, and discover your authentic self.
 
Sara suffered a debilitating fear of asserting herself. Spencer experienced crippling social anxiety. Bonnie was shut down, disconnected from her feelings. These patients all came to psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel seeking treatment for depression, but in fact none of them were chemically depressed. Rather, Jacobs Hendel found that they’d all experienced traumas in their youth that caused them to put up emotional defenses that masqueraded as symptoms of depression. Jacobs Hendel led these patients and others toward lives newly capable of joy and fulfillment through an empathic and effective therapeutic approach that draws on the latest science about the healing power of our emotions.
 
Whereas conventional therapy encourages patients to talk through past events that may trigger anxiety and depression, accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), the method practiced by Jacobs Hendel and pioneered by Diana Fosha, PhD, teaches us to identify the defenses and inhibitory emotions (shame, guilt, and anxiety) that block core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement). Fully experiencing core emotions allows us to enter an openhearted state where we are calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear.
 
In It’s Not Always Depression, Jacobs Hendel shares a unique and pragmatic tool called the Change Triangle—a guide to carry you from a place of disconnection back to your true self. In these pages, she teaches lay readers and helping professionals alike
 
• why all emotions—even the most painful—have value.
• how to identify emotions and the defenses we put up against them.
• how to get to the root of anxiety—the most common mental illness of our time.
• how to have compassion for the child you were and the adult you are.
 
Jacobs Hendel provides navigational tools, body and thought exercises, candid personal anecdotes, and profound insights gleaned from her patients’ remarkable breakthroughs. She shows us how to work the Change Triangle in our everyday lives and chart a deeply personal, powerful, and hopeful course to psychological well-being and emotional engagement.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW, received her BA in biochemistry from Wesleyan University and an MSW from Fordham University. She is a certified psychoanalyst and AEDP psychotherapist and supervisor. She has published articles in The New York Times and professional journals. Jacobs Hendel also consulted on the psychological development of characters on AMC’s Mad Men. She lives in New York City.

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1

Getting to Know the Change Triangle

What This Book Will Do for You

i first encountered the Change Triangle in 2004 at an academic conference on the science of emotions and attachment in New York City. There I was staring at a giant upside-down triangle projected on the auditorium screen. It was a representation of how emotions work and can lead, if mismanaged, to psychological symptoms like depression. Defenses, anxiety, and these very important things called core emotions were mapped out in such a way that something suddenly clicked. The elements of psychological experience, which had seemed random and chaotic, fell into place, like the final turn of a Rubik’s Cube. I felt understood. I felt relief. I was excited. With all of my science and psychological education—Bronx High School of Science, a biochemistry degree from Wesleyan University, a doctor of dental surgery (DDS) from Columbia University, a master’s degree in social work, and since then a certification in psychoanalysis—why had I not seen this simple map before? I had the thought then, This should be basic education. Every one of us can benefit from understanding how our emotions work and how to work with them to feel better.

When I saw videotapes of emotion-informed psychotherapy, I saw radical transformations that occurred in one session. For these patients, work that would have taken a traditional psychotherapist years to accomplish was achieved in an hour. I couldn’t help wondering if it was too good to be true. Was this a method with scientific basis that could be taught and duplicated? My last decade of practice has proved that the answer is yes.

Having meticulously studied the last hundred years of psychological thought and the science and anatomy of the brain, and having practiced psychotherapy for more than a decade, I believe that the Change Triangle can help anyone, not just those in psychotherapy. My mission is to translate the theory behind the Change Triangle into a tool that everyone has access to, not just people training to practice psychotherapy. I’ve adapted the clinical literature and science to make the Change Triangle easy to understand and nimble enough to be used anytime, anywhere. I will explain how to use this important tool to help you feel better.

Life is tough. We all suffer. Modern humans experience more stress, burden, emptiness, anxiety, self-judgment, and depression than ever. Most of us don’t know how to deal with emotions effectively. Instead we work hard to manage them through avoidance. That coping strategy is the very thing that leads to symptoms of mental distress such as depression and anxiety. Avoiding emotions just does not work in the long run. The Change Triangle is a map to moving past our distress so we can spend more of our time in calmer, more vital states of being. The Change Triangle is grounded in the latest scientific research on emotions and the brain. Despite its complicated scientific roots, it feels intuitively right and is a resource for managing emotions that none of us should be without.

Emotions are powerful forces that in an instant overtake us and make us feel things, do things, and react in ways that are often hurtful. In response, we use other parts of our mind to bury emotions, believing that won’t affect us. But emotions are biological forces that move in accordance with physics. They cannot be ignored without consequences—hence the rising rates of anxiety and depression in the world. Our cultural and educational systems fail to equip us with the education, resources, and skills to understand and work with emotions, and our society lacks a basic understanding of how they function biologically. What our culture does teach us, quite well, is how to dismiss and avoid emotions. The Change Triangle is a challenge to this cultural norm.

Avoiding emotions has a multitude of costs. Emotions tell us what we want and need and what is bad for us. When we don’t use our emotions it’s like navigating a boat across tumultuous ocean waters without sonar or even a compass. Emotions also connect us to our authentic Self and allow us to feel intimately connected to other people. When we are out of touch with emotions, we suffer loneliness, because the connections to both ourselves and the people we care about are enriched through empathy, the emotional connector. A deeper connection to our most authentic Self comes through experiencing the seven universal, inborn, prewired core emotions: sadness, joy, anger, fear, disgust, excitement, and sexual excitement. These core emotions help us to navigate life effectively, starting the day we are born and continuing until the day we die.

Emotions are survival programs deeply embedded in the brain and not subject to conscious control. In the face of a physical threat, fear is triggered. Let’s say a wild dog was chasing you; fear makes you instantly move. Anger protects us by compelling us to fight in self-defense. Sadness is the core emotion we feel when we suffer losses, like losing one’s hair, losing a cherished possession, and losing loved ones. When we succeed and connect with others in enriching ways, emotions such as joy and excitement propel us to engage further, so humans grow, expand, and evolve. Emotions are immediate responses to the present environment. Emotions stand in stark contrast to intellect. Our thinking brain allows us time to consider how we want to respond. Our emotional brain just responds.

Despite the fact that we truly need emotions to live effectively, they also cause us problems. What a fundamental conflict! From a biological perspective, we need emotions, but they also hurt us. The human mind has evolved in such a way that we have an incredible ability to ignore emotions to push through life. In fact, this ability helps us get things done. We need to work, feed our families, secure shelter, and take care of other basic needs. We use defenses so that we can carry on. But researchers now know that blocking emotions is detrimental to mental and physical health. Blocked emotions lead to depression, anxiety, and a wide variety of other psychological symptoms caused by chronic stress. Additionally, chronic emotional stress causes changes to our physical health by increasing the amount of stress hormones, called corticosteroids, coursing through our body. Emotional stress has been linked to heart disease, stomach pain, headaches, insomnia, autoimmune disorders, and more.

Furthermore, the challenges of modern life—such as the pressure to succeed, the pressure to fit in, the desire to “keep up,” the “fear of missing out” (FOMO), and the desire for good relationships and work satisfaction—evoke combinations of emotions that are often in conflict with one another. For example, Frank could not afford the kind of car he really wanted. Something as simple as Frank’s thwarted car desire could cause a mixture of sadness, anger, humiliation, and anxiety. Needless to say, all those feelings together are hard to manage or bear without defenses. Life’s challenges and conflicts create complex emotional cocktails.

Based on our genetics, natural disposition, and childhood experiences, we each navigate emotions differently. The type and amount of adversity we faced in youth directly affects how we feel today even if we cannot consciously perceive the connection. Furthermore, how our parents and caregivers responded to our individual emotions directly affects how we feel about and deal with our own emotions and the emotions of others in the present, now.

Some of us disconnect from our emotions to cope with the challenges we face. That has ramifications. We turn off. We shut down. We become numb. Eventually, we live in our heads with only our thoughts and intellect to guide us....

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Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399588140
ISBN 13 
9780399588143
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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