Getting Unstuck; Unravelling the Knot of Depression Attention and Trauma

In these dialogues with your parents, you will need to see your parents as they might have been under the best of circumstances. The crux of the exercise is for you to assert and make known the perceptions that you had at the time, and to insist that your parents act upon them in order to become the parents you required but did not get.

There is no question that mind-altering substances, although perhaps helpful and pleasurable at first, can eventually lead to both Type I and Type III depressions when chronically used.

This part of ourselves is usually provided by our experiences with our parents. It’s called the parental introject, the image of our parents that we hold inside when they are not present.

Everyone loses some contact with their inner selves, and great wide swaths of religion and culture from all over the world can be seen as part of the never-ending human struggle to reclaim that contact,

Inner-child exercises are about nurturance. Whatever the situation that caused the personality fragment to form, and whatever the emotion trapped in that childlike fragment, the underlying task is to mobilize the part of the person that loves or has ever loved a child and to bring that part into contact with the part that is needlessly suffering.

Type III depressions can be subtle. They can sneak up slowly and seem logical, and they can include some smattering of either Type I or Type II symptoms. Type III depressions also account for some of the symptoms in people who are diagnosed as dysthymic. In addition, when drug withdrawal, especially of marijuana or nicotine, is involved, even if Ty

The intense trauma creates a situation in which the child needs to keep various powerfully negative feelings and thoughts out of consciousness in order to continue developing in a normal manner.

Few things contribute to the sense of impotence and frustration in people with ADD more than the gap that can exist between their understanding of things and their ability to consistently act upon that understanding.

Often, your parents will have issues and difficulties of their own that prevented them from giving you what you needed. In the second phase of this exercise, using the same force and perseverance, you need to confront your parents with their own problems — for example, drinking, rage, shyness, coldness, distance, or an unfulfilling marriage or care