A Psychotherapy Group

Valuable Insights in Overcoming Negative Impulses Resulting from Anxiety and Depression

Over the years at A Psychotherapy Group in New York City, we’ve found the following insights very useful, often inspiring, in helping people to manage the surges of anger, frustration and fear that result from on-going depression and anxiety by consciously suppressing immediate worries, i.e., deliberately putting them aside – not to be avoided but dealt with at a later time – and striving to live more fully in the moment, to be more deeply in themselves and act more slowly, grounded in their true feelings. Here are some of the best insights from Joseph Campbell and Dan Millman and the poet/folksinger Georges Moustaki:

• The following story from Joseph Campbell is a wonderful example of being true to one’s self. A samurai is on a mission to avenge the murder of his master by an assassin. He finds the assassin, draws his sword and is about to execute him when the murderer curses him in a flood of obscenities and spits in his face. The samurai stops, puts his sword back in its scabbard and tells the assassin: “I cannot execute you now in the heat of anger. I must wait for a peaceful moment in which to dispense your just punishment for murdering my master.”

• Don’t be like the preacher who thought about praying while making love and thought about making love while praying.

• If you desire to dig a well to reach water, your efforts are more fruitful if you stick with one 100-foot-deep hole than if you start ten holes, each 10 feet deep.

• The seasons don’t push one another; neither do clouds race the wind across the sky. All things happen in their own good time.

• There is no path to happiness; happiness is the path. There is no path to love; love is the path. There is no path to peace; peace is the path.

• The peaceful warrior’s way is not about invulnerability but absolute vulnerability – to the world, to life and to deeper presence you feel. The peaceful warrior’s way is not about imagined perfection or victory. It’s about love. Love is is the warrior’s sword. Whenever it cuts, it gives life, not death.

• Money is neither my god nor my devil. It is a form of energy that just makes us more of who we really are, whether it’s greedy or loving.

• Each time to ascent to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must undergo a period of discomfort and initiation. There are no exceptions.

• Here is a beautiful description of an authentic woman by the French folksinger, George Mustaki: She doesn’t make love, she loves. She doesn’t loan herself, she offers. She doesn’t cry, she suffers. She doesn’t ask, she takes.

For some moving stories on the struggle for authenticity in the face of overpowering depression and anxiety, see:

Michelle, implacable advocate of self-care.

Susan who had to have Tom and didn’t know what she got, or did she?

Valuable Insights in Battling Depression and Anxiety

Here are a number of valuable insights that have helped us at Psychotherapy in the Village in New York in our work with people struggling with depression, anxiety and despair.

• The first and most important step in alleviating depression is to let yourself feel the full depth of the sadness. Blocking it out may work for a while but it always comes back, usually when you least expect it, and you always feel worse. When you let yourself feel it, face it head on, it becomes less frightening and eventually less painful.
• Mourning or grieving a painful loss is like living through the seasons. It can’t be rushed.
• If you knew for certain you had a terminal illness and had little time left to live, how would you decide to live in the time remaining to you?
• There are never any ordinary moments, if we just slow down and take time to feel them.
• It takes practice to live in the moment. Here’s a good example: There I was in an intermediate Yoga class in the middle of a warrior II right-side stretch and the teacher tells us “Let the thoughts that do not serve you fade away into insignificance.” Then she smiles and says “I know what you’re all thinking. How much longer is she going to torture me by keeping me in this position?” Well, that’s exactly what I was thinking! But for about a second and a half I let the thought go and just got into the full physical feeling of the stretch and it actually felt good. But then when we switched to a left-side stretch and the same old tortured thoughts grabbed hold of me again.
• Suffering is really psychological resistance. Events can cause physical pain but when you fight the pain, your resistance to it, creates suffering. Suffering is just another word for stress or a resistance to what is or the unfolding of life as it is.
• If you don’t ever feel afraid, how can you say that you’re truly alive.

For other useful insights in battling depression and anxiety see:Inspirational Thoughts that Help in the Struggle with Anxiety, Panic and Depression Symptoms.

Useful Insights our Therapists, Counselors and Psychologists have found to help Relieve depression symptoms.

Inspirational Thoughts that Help in the Struggle with Anxiety, Panic and Depression Symptoms.

• Nobody sees a flower – really- it is so small it takes time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. Georgia O’keeffe
• Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it. Robbie Gass
• The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with objects it loves. C. G. Jung
• Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand. Spinoza
• Human beings are both good and bad and that’s not the real issue, it’s that they are more or less ignorant. And when ignorant people believe they know everything, they are really blind and get into trouble. Albert Camus
• Creative power makes people generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Brenda Ueland
• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• A mind too active is no mind at all. Theodore Roethke
• Inspiration, I am sure, is the antithesis of self-consciousness. Aaron Copland
• It always goes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard. May Sarton
• During periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight. Fritjof Capra, Physicist
• To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. Joseph Chilton Pearce
• Affirmations are like prescriptions for certain aspects of yourself you want to change. Jerry Frankhauser
• An affirmation is a strong, positive statement that something is already so. And every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness. Shakti Gawain
• Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

For particular stories of the struggle to overcome anxiety, panic and depression see:
Vinny who Crawled Out on a Limb with the Best Girl he Ever Met.

Michelle, Implacable Advocate of Self-Care

A Useful Tool our Therapists, Counselors and Psychologists have found to help Relieve Anxiety Symptoms

At A Psychotherapy Group in New York City, we’ve heard many stories from good people caught up in anxious, painful feelings sometimes verging on panic that grab hold of them during the day or at night and just seem to come out of nowhere. It could happen when you just wake up in the wake of a bad dream you can’t remember, on the subway or in the middle of your work day. Most of the time these feelings are triggered by very real stresses experienced in everyday life, either at work or in your relationships with your your friends or your relationship with your lover.

At A Psychotherapy Group in New York City, in our work with people struggling with recurring, free floating anxiety and panic attacks, we’ve found a very fine book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, filled with useful insights and tools on how to understand and cope with anxiety and panic. Here is one tool that’s proven useful to the people we’ve worked with:

The concept of Crazymakers. These are people we get involved with in everyday life. They are often charming, possess impressive amounts of knowledge and even charismatic. But they also create pockets of fear inside of us, encourage self-doubt and often push us to the point where we’re afraid to be our true selves. Here are some examples of crazymakers:

1. A work colleague who always misses deadlines and makes excuses.
2. A boss who always makes you feel you’re lacking but never tells you how you might improve or do better.
3. A lover who’s good at blaming others, including you, but nothing is ever their fault.
4. A friend who turns normal stresses into high melodrama and always expects to be rescued.
5. A lover who turns your apartment into a chaotic mess without once thinking about how deeply this violates your sense of order.

These crazymakers always trigger deeper feelings that come from the past, from experiences with others usually from childhood or later and long forgotten; earlier hurts, deprivations and abuses that got lodged in us as we grew up. This is what Freud meant when he described repeating without remembering. We always block out the earlier events but the pain attached to them lies in hiding, waiting to be triggered by painful experiences with a crazymaker in the here and now.

If you find yourself caught up in a tortured relationship with a crazymaker, it’s important to ask who is really driving you crazy, the one in the present or that person long ago who used to make you feel this way? If you can get in touch with what’s really making you anxious or panicky, you can better control it, like hitting the stop button on a DVD nightmare that you don’t have to go through again because you really have the power to stop it in the present. Once you can begin to view your current crazymakers as simple triggers, then you can succeed in relegating them to the obscurity and irrelevance that they so richly deserve in the present and then go on to experience the feeling of being your true, authentic self.

For particular stories of people struggling with crazymakers and the anxiety and panic they cause, see:
Bill Who Pitches other People’s Stories but can’t Find Words for His Own.

Ellen, a Bad, Bad Girl, Anorexic and Bulimic with Delicate Men.

Pragmatic Insights our Therapists, Counselors and Psychologists have found to help Relieve Depression Symptoms.

The psychotherapy literature is filled with stories about people caught up in deep sadness they’re never able shake in everyday life, debilitating sadness that keeps them from feeling fully alive and in the moment. Instead they live with unbearable thoughts and feelings they barely understand and horrible images of themselves. Much of this is often felt as real physical pain such as headaches, neuralgia, allergies and shingles. One thing we know for certain is that depression and despair always result from a serious loss or painful set back; for example, the loss of a lover, a job we love, a betrayal by someone we love, a treasured dream that will never come true, the loss of anything that’s truly important to us. These setbacks in the present always trigger deeper feelings that come from the past, from experiences long forgotten; much earlier hurts, deprivations and abuses that got lodged in us as we grew up. This is what Freud meant when he described repeating without remembering. We always block out the earlier events but the pain attached to them lies in hiding, waiting to be triggered by painful experiences and losses in the here and now.

So how can anyone deal with painful dormant feelings from the past waiting to be triggered by painful setbacks in the present? At A Psychotherapy Group in New York City, in our work with people struggling with depression symptoms, grief and despair, we stumbled on a wonderful book, The Little Book of Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen, filled with moving insights that help in encouraging ourselves to fully experience and work through painful setbacks and losses. Here are a few of them that have proven useful to the people we’ve worked with:

• When you’re suffering from a great loss, if you pick something strong in yourself you might by accident discover your real power.
• Whenever something ends, something else, something different, will always begin, if you let it.
• Keeping a tight grip on the things we own, the only things we feel we know, from fear of losing them always leads to our being owned by them.
• Sealing yourself off from the pain of loss is really cutting yourself off from life.
• Times of serious, painful loss are always times of discovery. We can always count on them to make for a steep learning curve!
• A satire line from Robert Frost helps a little in dealing with loss: “Dear God please forgive my little jokes on thee and I’ll forgive thy great big one on me!”
• Here’s a better line from Naomi Remen: Grieving after a loss, letting yourself feel the pain and  living through the five stages of grief – Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Despair and, ultimately, Acceptance, is always necessary if you’re ever to love again.

For particular stories of grieving and loss, see:

Ellen, a Bad, Bad Girl with Delicate Men.

Vinny who Just Crawled Out on a Limb with the Best Girl he Ever Met.