Sublime

David Barlow. He was (and still is) one of the premiere anxiety researchers on the planet.

Some women never go home, and instead live their lives a la zona zombi, in the zombie zone. The most cruel part of this lifeless state is that the woman functions, walks, speaks, acts, even accomplishes many things, but she no longer feels the effects of what has gone wrong—if she did, her pain would make her immediately turn to the fixing of it.

“It must be me. I’m flawed,” you decide. You blame yourself

An illness can either strengthen or weaken the ego. If

By listening to our pain instead, and moving toward that yearning to feel, we can identify the discrepancies between the way in which we’re living and the way we want to live.

type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called “unemployment neurosis.” And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life.

Most likely, the first thing you’ll notice will be a general sense of anxiety and fear.

Anxiety and depression are not abnormal. They are not pathologies or aberrations. They are just one end of a spectrum of normal experience playing out on the same mechanisms that allow us to survive.

this approach the phobic patient is invited to intend, even if only for a moment, precisely that