The Palace Or The Rats' Den?

So, you're feeling depressed, or at least not as good as you'd like to feel.

There are all the reasons that we know or can think of, or sometimes even for no apparent reason, why we're in this miserable space yet there seems no real answer. It's like we're living in a Dark Den full of Rats and Big Spiders and can't get out. We just know we feel bad and stuck.

We yearn to have the relief of feeling good, feeling able to participate in life fully, feeling confident and motivated, able to live well, embrace joy and feel it for real, deep within, don't we?

This is the exciting journey I guide people through when they come on my courses and that I'm going to share with you in this book. You need never know depression again! Instead you can learn to live well and `come home to yourself' so you feel good just because you're alive.

If it seems a little overwhelming, take heart. Once you understand the straightforward process and concepts laid out here and follow the simple exercises, the small Cut-Out section towards the back of this book is all you'll need to work with to assimilate everything here and create a life of lasting happiness.

How Your Mind Works

To begin our journey out of depression for good and into the dynamic place where we want to be, (and stay!) let's first understand what's going on in our brain, our own mind, which of course is where the depression is living. We can then understand how it is created and what we can do to rectify it.

The brain is an incredibly complex organ, in fact the most complex thing in the known universe, with immense power! The images of the brain shown below are purely for illustrative purposes and do not represent the scientific positioning of the parts of the brain mentioned; we don't need to get that technical to understand or overcome our problem. For our purposes simplicity is sufficient and, no doubt, preferable.

Figure 1 shows an oval representing your brain. You can see the grey oval inside it representing your prefrontal cortex. This is your consciousness, the part that you know as `you', your perceptions, interactions, awareness and so on. This conscious part can be positive, in the left prefrontal cortex, or negative, in the right prefrontal cortex. It makes up only about 10% of your brain. About 90% is subconscious!

The subconscious part of the brain on the left side has evolved since our caveman days, some 1.7 million years ago. This part of our mind is phenomenal! It has the incredible ability to think for itself and is called our intellectual mind; see Figure 2. It is very positive and, instead of freaking out or throwing our hands up in despair, we can make sensible assessments of things and be rational. It has a vast resource with all our answers and solutions and we naturally perform well and achieve meaningful results. We live well. It's like living in a splendid Palace, feeling good about our selves and our world, even if sometimes our world isn't quite how we'd prefer. We can cope with life's challenges and unexpected `lemons' without slipping into depression.

It's never `what happens' that is the problem, it's what we think about the problem that makes the difference between finding ways forward or being overwhelmed with misery. In the Palace part of our brain we can always make positive choices for ourselves.

The problem is that we also have the original caveman part of our brain, called our primitive mind, which is a very different story; see Figure 3. Imagine a caveman coming out of his cave in the morning. He has to be immediately on the alert for the potential danger out there, which is hardly a calm and relaxed feeling to start his day! If he sees a woolly mammoth he can't possibly relax his guard and think "I'll be ok - that woolly mammoth has probably already had his breakfast"; he must immediately anticipate the worst and run back in his cave for safety. His primitive mind then continuously needs to remind him the woolly mammoth is out there so he keeps guard and doesn't wander out ten minutes later to get snaffled up.

Essentially this part is all about our survival so is always very negative, looking for the worst possible scenario in everything and then constantly reminding us of any perceived threat, lest our survival be put at risk.

The worst thing, from our depression perspective, is that this primitive mind is not an intellect so it can't find ways forward; it can only use the negative data it's stored over the years (in your hippocampus) to remember how you've `survived' before and encourage you to do the same again. It can't work out that you have beliefs and patterns and behaviours that don't serve you; it just records what you've done before and encourages you to repeat these patterns and behaviours, because as you've `survived' before they must be good! This primitive part would be our Rats' Den.

Let's take the example of smoking. Everyone now knows that smoking can kill you and it says so on all the packets. The Palace intellectual part of your mind knows the sensible thing to do is to give up smoking because of all the reasons, including health, that would benefit you, yet your Rats' Den primitive part knows you smoked 20 cigarettes yesterday and survived, so encourages you to smoke another 20 cigarettes today - even though it's killing you! It doesn't have the intellect to realise that this is to your detriment, even though it wants you to survive.

This applies to all the negative programming and beliefs that we took on board right from birth. We are each made up of our mother's DNA and our father's DNA, thus we can look like them and have certain similar traits. Fundamentally however, we learn about our selves and our world from our environment and the people surrounding us. By the time we're just five years old we have developed a firmly ensconced `blueprint' from which we live. If we've had a difficult background it's easy to see where our negative data has come from. Yet even when we've had a very happy childhood it is likely we still received messages such as "When you're good you're approved of and when you're naughty you're disapproved of" or "You must always put other people first" or "Look at that terrible thing those other people did" or "You're only good enough if you get good grades in school" and so on. These lead us to believe our worth is dependent on...