“I don’t feel as sick as I did last time.”
I was so taken aback by my client’s words that for a moment I was speechless.
“Sick?! It never occurred to me that you were sick!” I responded with surprise.
When I first met this client in my trauma clinic, some time ago, she was recently discharged from a mental hospital with a diagnosis of severe depression. She had responded rapidly to the Havening Techniques® we used to delete the emotional trauma underlying her depression. She found joy and meaning in her life again and started a new job.
Now she presented in acute distress, struggling with an event that had left her feeling devastated, depressed and self-blaming.
In my practice, I regard anxiety or depression as a symptom, not a diagnosis. Indeed, I never give a client a mental health diagnosis other than having emotional trauma. Emotional trauma is ‘hard-wired’ (encoded) in the brain to cause the painful emotional reactions and stress responses, which lead to the life problems experienced by my clients.
On this occasion, my client was devastated by the sudden break-up of an intense love affair. In the middle of a conversation about their future plans, her partner had suddenly stated, “I can’t do this any more!” and had abruptly broken off the relationship.
My client was heart-broken, depressed and full of self-blame. The break-up must be her fault, she had concluded, because she believed she was worthless and not good enough. The painful rejection had pushed her into a big dark hole and she felt trapped and hopeless, an understandable reaction to a major life loss.
In endeavouring to give her some encouragement, I reminded her of the profoundly depressed state she presented to me when we first met, and how quickly she had responded to Havening. That’s when she said, “I’m not as sick as I was last time.“
When I asked her to elaborate on her thoughts, she confessed to me that she believed that she was ‘brain damaged‘ as a result of repeated cycles of mania and depression. Her said her brain wasn’t functioning properly, she had trouble remembering things, and as a result her life seemed doomed.
I hastened to reassure her that her temporary mental incapacity was the result of severe stress, a reaction that I see often. Science tells us that acute stress causes parts of the brain cortex to go ‘off-line’ as we fall back into primitive survival mode. I also knew that my client was, in fact, a highly qualified professional, easily able to do complex work.
When I asked about the basis of her belief that she was ‘sick‘ and ‘brain damaged‘ she then told me about the most devastating event in her life: a psychiatric consultation twenty years ago. The doctor told her that she had ‘manic-depression’ (now usually know as bipolar disorder).
My client was absolutely devastated by this diagnosis. She had previously met several people with manic-depression and they all had chaotic and out-of-control lives. This was the future she now saw for herself.
To add to her devastation, she was advised that her condition would make her incapable of looking after children and being a mother. As a young woman, she had dreamed of having a family and now her hopes and desires were dashed on the rocks of a medical diagnosis.
I listened to this story with horror. My client’s life had been blighted by a medical diagnosis, which was laid on her like a curse. Yet I knew her as a highly functioning and deeply caring individual with advanced professional qualifications and many gifts to offer the world.
Ironically, of many the traumas that had affected her life and made her prone to depression and anxiety, one of the worst traumas was her experience of the psychiatrist. My client’s belief in her ‘sickness‘ and ‘brain damage‘ all stemmed from this diagnosis.
Fortunately, with Havening we were able to quickly erase the traumatic memory of her psychiatric consultation. When that process was complete, she was able to think back to that event with no distress, almost as if it had happened to someone else.
The change in my client was striking. We ended the session with an affirmation, “I am ready to offer my gifts to the world,” which she stated with conviction and positive energy. After twenty years, the curse of a diagnosis was lifted.
When she returned for the next session, she was still struggling with negative thoughts and feelings but a whole new door had opened up to reveal the earlier life causes of both her depression and ‘mania’. Until we lifted the curse of the diagnosis, we had never been able to identify the fundamental causes of her mental health problems.
Now she gained an important new insight: how the recent break-up with her partner was actually re-triggering the trauma of early life events and her dysfunctional relationship with her father.
As we talked more, it became apparent that her ‘mania’ represented a rebellious part of her breaking free of a controlling relationship. Her depression was understandable in terms of never feeling she was good enough and her chronic habit of self-blame.
I’ve seen these kinds of patterns before. Another client, diagnosed with manic-depression, responded really well to Havening when we separately addressed the trauma that drove both his mania and his depression. We examined carefully what was happening in his thoughts and emotions at the beginning of each cycle and used those clues to identify and then delete the relevant trauma.
His extreme energy and obsessive commitment to a new project – that became mania – were driven by a personal mantra: “I’ll show you!” In response to his severe childhood violence and trauma he had created an incredibly powerful motivation to prove his worth, which was encapsulated in these words.
As we healed the trauma and built his self-worth, the excessive need to prove himself softened. He became more self-aware, he could throttle back his energy and stop himself becoming manic.
In the same way, we worked on the root causes of his depression and negative thinking. Now when he feels discouraged or down, the feeling lasts only a few hours or days and he can pull himself out of the trap of negative thoughts and feelings.
Both these clients are complex. In addition to serious childhood trauma, their adult lives have been blighted by chronic mental health issues. The gentle unpicking and healing of the trauma is a prolonged process but, week by week, I get to celebrate the emergence of new resilience and wellbeing in my clients. The ultimate goal is cure and I have deep faith that my clients can leave their troubled past behind.
Doubting the worth of psychiatric diagnosis
I am not the only one to question the validity of psychiatric diagnoses. A recent study, published in Psychiatry Research, has concluded that ‘psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless as tools to identify discrete mental health disorders.’
The authors report:
- Psychiatric diagnoses all use different decision-making rules
- There is a huge amount of overlap in symptoms between diagnoses
- Almost all diagnoses mask the role of trauma and adverse events
- Diagnoses tell us little about the individual patient and what treatment they need
The authors conclude that diagnostic labelling represents ‘a disingenuous categorical system‘.
Little will change in mental health care until we abandon the current diagnostic criteria. However, in many countries including the USA, clinicians can’t claim a fee for their patient care unless they attach a diagnostic code from the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).
Yet these labels can do immense harm to patients and so often lead to harmful treatments and life-long stigma. Using drugs to treat anxiety or depression is at best treating symptoms, not causes. It’s time we adopted a trauma-informed approach to mental health, which is infinitely more promising.
All human beings have amazing self-healing power and our brains are designed to rapidly heal trauma. Shouldn’t this be the basis of our approach to mental illness?
If you are curious to learn more about the amazing science of self-healing and the power of Havening Techniques, read my new book ‘TIME TO HEAL‘. It’s available on Amazon and for instant download from my website.
