Lifestyle Choices

Like good breathing, yoga can also make you beautiful. And I don’t mean by simply trimming a flabby thigh or flattening a neglected stomach. Of course, it will do these things too. But what I mean is more fundamental. The meaning of the word yoga is “union,” or in modern terms, “integration.” Practicing yoga regularly can bring a sense of calmness, poise, and detachment that eliminates the negative effects of stress and clears away tensions that stifle the full expression of your individuality— intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It can also help bring together these four parts of a woman so she functions as a whole. (more…)

The second obvious change which happens to dieters is that they become preoccupied and obsessed with their weight. The original motivation to lose weight is complex and yet the main focus is to feel and look more attractive and to feel in control.

Yet dieting shifts the focus from feeling and looking better to what the scales say. Weight/height charts do not say that your ideal weight is when you feel good about yourself. They say you should weigh 8 stone 31/2 pounds or 9 stone 2 pounds. They precisely select and advise a weight for you. Every women has a different bone structure, a different facial structure and is a different age. What may suit a 30-year-old would make a 45-year-old look scrawny, and yet the dieting industry sells us a specific weight as if we are all the same. (more…)

Dieting changes your mood and mood changes can cause overeating. Dieters often report feeling positive and motivated at the beginning of a diet. It provides a structure and a goal, and a way to confront life’s problems. However, dieting can also cause misery and feelings of inadequacy.

Women set themselves targets. They aim for a specific rate of weight loss and decide that all they have to do is eat less! However, it is not as simple as this and not losing weight or diet-breaking is depressing. Not being able to achieve these goals can make you feel a failure. Diet-breaking is understood in terms of being weak-willed, and this idea is promoted by the dieting industry which suggests that weight loss is a sign of control, thinness is a sign of control, and not sticking to its diet sheets is due to weakness and not the fault of its diet. (more…)

Stress during labour

Childbirth can be a time of intimacy, excitement, wonder and openness. It can also be a time of fear and pain, sometimes in a place that is forbidding and lacking in warmth. There may be all kinds of left-over feelings, which are usually repressed. First of all, the birth hurts you — it is quite natural for some women to be angry about this. Secondly, you may resent the way your delivery was handled. Unfortunately, the case history above is not an isolated example. I have heard of so many similar and worse cases that it sometimes makes me feel ashamed of my profession as a doctor. The resentment is usually related to lack of consultation on decisions. Medical interventions are sometimes carried out (for instance, routine episiotomies, injections to speed up the birth of the placenta) without any explanation of side-effects. If the side-effects occur, the natural reaction is anger, but this is often repressed, with the explanation that the doctor knows what is best. It is this attitude of the patient handing over authority to the doctor and the doctor taking assumed authority over another’s life that may lead to later feelings of resentment. Some women have told me they felt like a nonentity, going through a process that was designed by the hospital to maximize speed and efficiency. Others have told me that it felt like being taken over by machines and fingers. The residue of resentment may go very deep and is usually repressed, with a resultant depression of spirits in general. (more…)

When you experience the death of someone close to you, or when you have lost somebody who has gone away or whom you have left, it is natural to grieve. In fact, a process of mourning is necessary in order for you to come to terms with the loss and adjust yourself to a life without the dead person.

GRIEF

Grieving openly is an acutely painful process which is not usually encouraged in western cultures. Even when people believe that grieving and openly demonstrating your feelings are good for you, their fear of the sheer power of the feeling of grief often makes them try to stop you or calm you down. The commonest alternative to grief is the prolonged numbness of depression which, unfortunately, can last years. Although the expression of grief differs in different individuals, there is a pattern to grief that is fairly common, consisting of three basic stages: numbness, despair and detachment. (more…)

Since most people spend a large portion of their lives at work, and since it usually provides a sense of meaning in life, problems related to work are a common cause of depression. The problems mentioned below may also pertain to voluntarywork or work on committees.

When you start a new job, or if you are given more responsibility at work, you may relish the new challenge. As you go on up the ladder, however, there may come a point where the extra responsibility puts too much pressure on you. This ismore likely if you are exceptionally conscientious, finding it hard to delegate to anyone, in which case you are faced with an increasing work-load. You may find that this eventually becomes insurmountable.

If you are over-conscientious, you probably tend to overvalue others‘ opinions of yourself. Your strong ideals to be worthy, superior, good, strong and, most of all, to make no mistakes, are quite impossible to attain. But at the same time there is often an irrational feeling that these impossible goals have to be reached for fear of disapproval by peers or superiors. (more…)

Moving is invariably a time of stress. Whatever the reasons for the move, such as a marital problem or a change of job, which may cause depression in themselves, the upheaval involved may cause physical tiredness and emotional strain. Selling a house may take months, during which you have to put up with strangers traipsing through your private life, and there may be weeks of uncertainty while financial transactions succeed or fail.

A house is almost always a home, invested with feelings and memories. Part of you will always be there. You may even have built it or part of it yourself. However_ much bigger and better or more exciting the new house may be, there is inevitably a feeling of loss about what you are leaving behind. Unless you are moving locally, you will be leaving familiar faces and places, probably good friends, and you will be facing the unknown where you may initially feel isolated and lonely.

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There are particular periods in your life, when changes are faster, more far-reaching and often more stressful than at other times. It is difficult to put exact ages on these times of change because people vary greatly in their timing of the stages of life, as well as in how much difficulty they have with each stage. Any stage that is only partly negotiated,or avoided, can lead to a period of depression.

Children start life as almost totally dependent on their parents and must, for their own personal fulfilment, break away to form their own lives in their own way. But the period ofbreaking away, usually in adolescence, though it can be at any time between the ages of 12 and 40, is often fraught with conflict. You want to be independent, but you still may want your parents‘ love, and perhaps their house, food and financial support for your education too. (more…)

Lack of stimulation in life, with day following day in endless repetition, eventually leads towards apathy, a feeling of pointlessness and, ultimately, a desire to give up. A boring job or a boring home environment often lead to a feeling of hopelessness. On top of this, loneliness may create despair. Although it can be tempting to stick to the security of a well-known path, endlessly retreading that path creates a rut; the rut can sometimes become so deep you can no longer see over the edges or believe you can get out of it.

Loneliness

For those who live with others but with little real contact, life can also become very meaningless. You may not be aware of being lonely and yet somehow you do not feel emotionally fed by those around you, so that you feel a sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness which may be with you most of the time. Others seem distant, or else they do not seem to really understand, or perhaps you feel they do not like you. The causes of this problem can lie either with you or with them. You may be a person who has difficulty making warm human contact, in which case you feel somewhat alone in any situation. Perhaps the person or people you live with are different from you and, through no fault of their own, relate to you on a level that simply does not satisfy you. (more…)

Unemployment

As higher social beings, we need to feel useful to society. I don’t mean in any grand way necessarily, but we want to feel that what we do has a use at least to somebody, we want to feel needed. When you are unemployed it is difficult to avoid a feeling of uselessness that may creep over you as the weeks and months drag on. To live for a long time without a feeling of a function in life eats at the soul and can create bitterness, hopelessness and depression. This may then create a vicious circle, for when you are depressed you do not have much energy for looking for work. Even if you do, your depressed energy is going to fail you should you get an interview, since the one thing that almost any employer wants is enthusiasm. (more…)

The balance of achieving your potential is delicately perched between the depression of feeling unfulfilled and the stress and anxiety of trying to do too much. The problem is that there are no rules to tell you just what your potential is. It is easy to assume that your potential is similar to your mother’s if you are a woman, or your father’s if you are a man. You may assume that your potential is similar to that of your peers, or you may believe what your teachers at school told you.

Cultural expressions

Barry Sheene, world champion motor-cyclist, was told at school that he would never get anywhere so long as he wasted his time fiddling with motor cycles, and Winston Churchill`* failed most of his exams. Sometimes very intelligent children cannot tolerate the tedium of rote-learning. Others have an intelligence that is not suited to the style of learning of most schools, but may be highly successful, if they can ever get over feeling inadequate because the school learning-systemdid not suit them. Many are pushed by a cultural expectation to do well in a certain manner, to learn by rote, pass exams and think with a particular kind of restricted logic. (more…)

When pain is unavoidable, animals, children and adults learn to switch off. If a child is constantly hit, intimidated or punished with coldness, he makes the inner decision to repress the feeling of hurt. This decision is eminently sensible at the time because the child has no means of changing his environment. The problem is that the decision tends to become more or less permanent so that the adult too represses feelings of hurt, sometimes so successfully that he does not realize the need to change the hurtful environment. Instead, as a result of the repression of feelings, he tolerates a relatively depressed life, more depressed at times of greater threat or morehurt. The case history, below, illustrates the potentially damaging effect of learning to vanquish feeling. (more…)

“GOOD BEHAVIOUR” PERSONALITY

The “good behaviour” type has put a tremendous amount of energy into conforming. He relies on others’ opinions and likes to obey the rules. He looks down on those who do not follow the rules or do not act in the proper fashion. He is obedient and authority bound — he is always worried about whether the authority will approve of his actions, and he willtry very hard to please. On the positive side, he may be an extremely conscientious worker.

Childhood background

The childhood history is often one of an over-emphasis on the control of behaviour. Being a good boy or a good girl is more important to the parents than natural expressions of spontaneity. Thus, eating up all your food, or going to the lavatoryonce a day, or being nice, or not being aggressive, becom_emajor issues in which the parents eventually win a battle for control. The child thinks that if he conforms, then at last hewill receive the warmth and security he wants, but howeverhard he tries, he can never be good enough because he will never really be loved for who he is. (more…)

If there was a significant life event, or even one that seemed insignificant, that occurred before, at or around the same time as the beginning of your depression, it may be helpful to look at the following questions and suggestions.

• How do you really feel about it? After diagnosing the life event as a possible cause of your depression, go back to the event and ask yourself how you really feel about it. If the answer is “depressed”, do not accept that, but find the feeling before the depression — even if that feeling was only transient. If you can’t find the feeling after reading what you have read in this book so far, make a guess as to what the feeling could be.

Then ask yourself what it is that does not allow you to feel that kind of feeling. For instance, as a mother, you may have felt moments of anger with the children which you quickly shut off and tried to ignore. You may find that you have a belief, even though you may never have thought about it in these terms, that a “good mother” should always think well of her children and should always feel love and gratitude. Or perhaps you find a general injunction that anger is wrong. (more…)

When you have dealt with some of the doubts that stoppedyour feeling, you may find that you can allow the feeling to “live” within you without repression. Often, however, it is helpful to find a way of expressing the feeling. You do not necessarily need to know what the feeling is in advance. If you are mindful of the possibility of the feeling arising and free to let it arise if it will, you will find that some of the following activities can create an opening for the rediscovery of the feeling you stopped. If you don’t feel anything, don’t worry,the exercise itself is helpful. Try one of the following suggestions, depending on the nature of the feeling.

1 Difficulty in expressing anger:

• Take part in an aggressive sport like squash or football.
• Hit a punch-ball, imagining each blow is directed at the person or the situation (if that is easier) that makes you angry. Use all your force and with each blow, grunt. After some practice, try hitting and grunting with your mouth wide open and then increase the volume of sound till you are yelling at the top of your voice. All this can be done equally well hitting a cushion, a pillow or a bed. As you get more into it, tryputting words to each blow, for example, “I’m sick of dirty nappies!” or “I’ll smash your face in!”.

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The most debilitating effect of unemployment and retirementcan be the feeling of uselessness. Such a feeling may prevent you getting another job and render you of less use than you need to be. If you feel like this, consider the following:

Do something useful. It does not matter how small it is. Choose a small, though useful task, such as putting the children to bed, cleaning something or repairing something in the house or garden. Any completed task will give you a better feeling about yourself (see Reasons for living, overleaf).

If you are unemployed, remember that an attitude of despondency will stop you getting another job. If you feel despondent when you go to a job interview, act. Muster all the enthusiasm you can, practise it on friends and act eager and interested at the interview. It quite often happens that the initial pretence breaks through a barrier to your genuine enthusiasm. Do as much research as possible on the job you are applying for and gather every bit of available information on potential jobs. Consider doing jobs that you would not normally consider, just to get yourself started and to regain some self-respect. (more…)

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), a pupil of Freud, extended analytical ideas on repression of thought and feeling to include the physical level. He showed that people literally tense against an uncomfortable or socially unacceptable thought,by tensing muscles and thereby creating an “armouring”, rendering the body physically less vulnerable. When the body is harder, the person feels less vulnerable emotionally. Many people are aware of their bodies tensing in a tense situation, for instance, their necks stiffening in a moment of anxiety. Lowen and Pierrakos, both patients and pupils of Reich, took the best ideas of Reich and developed what they called “bioenergetics“. In this form of psychotherapy they made use of physical movement to help release old tension patterns, which Reich had recognized to be related to old patterns of thought and feeling. (more…)

Bridging distance

When you feel negative about, distant from, or angry with somebody, do not start by assuming that you do not like him, thereby giving yourself a reason to sever contact or keep your distance. Begin by asking yourself about your own intent and your part in the distance or the bad feeling. Answer yourself as honestly as you can. Here are some possibilities:

* Your friend has done something that you are annoyed about and you have failed to tell him. As soon as you do say something about it the barrier between you usually goes, and you realize that there has been no intentional wrong.

* You are jealous of your friend who has a quality, a possession or a relationship which you do not have. Because you judge your own jealousy as bad, you do not say anything and the distance grows. Many friendships get broken in this way. The problem is not the jealousy, but the judgement that jealousy is bad. Jealousy (like practically everything else) can be used positively or negatively. The negative side is to plot to destroy the success of another, to say in effect: “If I don’t have it, you won’t either.” The positive side is to achieve your own success in your own way, to say in effect: “Well, if you have that, I am going to make sure I have something good for myself too.” Jealousy spoken positively is nothing more than a compliment: “I really envy your family (friends, success etc.).” The honesty to admit you are jealous can give a relationship a little more depth and trust. (more…)

For most people, however, repression is less necessary than is often taught. It is nearly always possible to find ways of expressing feelings which can create more contact and understanding, or which at least are not destructive. Some of these ways are mentioned in the self-help section (see Express the feeling, page 122). The following section explores the area between holding back entirely which is likely to make you depressed, and letting go indiscriminately which is likely to have repercussions beyond your desired result.

Containing feelings

Expression or repression are not the only two alternatives. It is also possible to contain feeling so that it is not expressed, yet not avoided, but remains simmering below the surface. Repression involves making the feeling unconscious by a process of diminishing body energy and feeling, whereas containment involves no deadening of feeling but a “movement” of feeling within. Containment is not related to depression. (more…)

One of the fears that people have of expressing feelings is that the brutish animal within will be released with damaging results. Animal feelings are not, in fact, essentially destructive. If you look at a bird flying at a cat to protect its babies or a hungry lion stalking its prey, you see raw aggression. Such aggression is nearly always used to protect the young, or search for food. More limited or ritualized aggression is usually used to fight for a mate or for supremacy in the social hierarchy. The socially evolved mammals, such as the apes, have highly developed caring instincts. We human beings are the most destructive species and also the species that most represses animal instincts. (more…)