Overcoming Anxiety & Depression

A newly referred client came into my office some months ago and shared with me that she had struggled with anxiety her entire adult life. She had been in therapy with the same person for well over six years and had made little progress. I inquired as to what she had learned from their work together. If I actually had hair on the back of my neck, it no doubt would have stood straight up upon hearing her response. "He told me the best that we could do we be to try and manage my anxiety," she offered. So many mental health professionals are literally trained to believe that matters of anxiety and depression can at best be managed, and often with the associated medication to achieve the lessening of symptoms. This speaks to their mindset of pathology and the absence of a deeper understanding of the relationship between thought and anxiety or depression. The limitations of such a worldview are limiting and produce a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure...

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Defining Moments

From time to time, most people tend to experience an occasional insight. An insight is simply the ability to change our filter and look at things differently. In moments of insight, there's a sudden burst of clarity where there had previously been static; there is an epiphany of movement. It's the AHA moment. When we are firmly entrenched in our beliefs and rooted in our certainty, we're not typically open to insights. To have an insight we need to at least temporarily suspend our beliefs and open to new possibilities...

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Why We Struggle in Our Relationships

From my experience, a relationship that goes unscathed and unchallenged is the notable exception. Conflict and struggle become ordinary facets of our partnering. What often begins as a loving and intimately connected partnering tends over time to wither and fall from grace. It is rather a common denominator that relationships are a challenge for almost all of us. We might well consider why that is the case...

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More Articles by Mel Schwartz

• An Epidemic of Depression

• Are you Dependent, Independent or Autonomous?

• Beyond the Mind Body Connection

• Collapsing the Wave: Creating New Realities

• Coming into the Edge

• Commitment

• Discovery or Emergence?

• Does Familiarity Breed Contempt?

• Falling In- and Out- and Back In- Love

• From Being to Becoming

• He Had Potential

• How Much Should We Share with Our Children?

• I Just Beamed Down

• I'm Just a Kid

• Intellectual Intuition

• Keeping Marriages Energized

• Learning from Our Dramas

• Living Mindfully

• Marriage: Work or Play?

• Mid-Life Crisis or Opportunity?

• Not "Just Semantics"

• Order Out of Chaos

• Our Forgotten Sixth Sense

• Perfect or Perfectionist?

• Quantum Relationship

• Reconsidering Depression

• Selecting Your Past

• Self-Esteem or Other-Esteem?

• When Coping Mechanisms Grow Old

• Talking Back to Depression

• The Art of Relationship

• The Coming Revolution

• The Measure of a Man

• The Pathologizing of a Culture

• The Power of Thought

• The Problem with Perfection

• The Problem with Silence

• The Questions Not Asked

• The Wrong Reasons for Staying Married

• Turning Crisis into Opportunity

• What Informs Your Belief?

• What is a Mistake?

• When Coping Mechanisms Grow Old

• When the Lights Went Out

• Why Don't We Ask Why?

• Why Psychotherapists Should Not Be Shrinks

• Wisdom: A Lost Art

 

 

© 2008 by Mel Schwartz. All rights reserved.