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May/June 2006 Alternative Health
A New Cure for the Blues

by Judith M. Davis, M.D.

Who among us has not been blue at some time? Sadness comes in many forms and for many reasons. It may be short-lived, but many people experience ongoing sadness. Sometimes we are all too aware of the cause, but often its origin is obscure.

Depression is a reaction to a loss. Some losses are major, such as the death or departure of a loved one, a move, being demoted or laid off, or the loss of good health. Others are small but incremental. Frequent criticisms or failure to live up to your expectations can deprive you of your self-esteem. Failure to find a partner or disappointment in one may make every day feel dreary.

Whenever we feel distress we strive to end it as best we can with a true solution: one that completely ends the discomfort. If no true solution is available, we choose a partial solution: one that diminishes the disturbance. A feeling is one kind of partial solution and one of the earliest that we use. When an infant is in distress, it discharges some of its tension by crying. As we develop, we feel sad when we don’t get what we want.

Unresolved needs from the past create ongoing depression. Often we don’t know the cause and therefore don’t know how to end it. And sometimes we may feel depressed in response to a trigger that we don’t recognize because it is related to past events that we don’t remember or don’t realize the significance of.

There is a new self-hypnotic technique to overcome depression that creates a special mental pathway, which functions as an Inner Guide with a sense of its own identity, and a wish to help. This guide can end our discomfort and solve our problems.

Our minds work very rapidly out of awareness. Whenever a problem occurs, the mind accesses the best solution available at that moment. This solution gets locked in so that when the problem occurs again, the same solution is automatically chosen. This is how habits are formed.

Depression is a partial solution for a loss. It doesn’t end our distress but, though it is uncomfortable itself, it lessens our tension. The first time that we respond to a loss with sadness it gets locked in and becomes a habit, an automatic response to that loss. A habit can be changed only in the presence of a complex stimulus: a stimulus with two contradictory meanings, allowing a pause to occur during which the mind can replace a locked-in habit with a better solution. 

An Inner Guide first determines the source of distress by searching the memory. It then accesses a true solution for the problem. Next it creates a complex stimulus so that the new solution can replace the previous habit. Lastly, an Inner Guide repeats the new solution until it can enter our awareness.

A chronically depressed woman was raised by a mother who viewed her as bad and who blamed her for everything that went wrong. The woman was so accustomed to this that she didn’t realize it was abnormal. She felt continually sad because she was deprived of her mother’s love and, thinking that she was faulty, criticized herself constantly and suffered from low self-esteem. She began self-hypnosis and developed an Inner Guide who solved her discomfort. First it searched her memory and learned the source of her distress. Then it found the true solution: she was not at fault and shouldn’t feel badly about herself. And she no longer needed her mother’s love because, as an adult, she could find love in her current relationships. Her Inner Guide then created a complex stimulus. As the woman was trying to write a letter of apology for a misunderstanding that she thought was her fault, her Inner Guide caused her to repeatedly rephrase it. Each time she began to write and then stopped she experienced a complex stimulus: she was writing/she was not writing. This allowed the new solution to replace the partial solution of feeling sad. Because the implications of not having to feel sad were so overwhelming, her Inner Guide repeated the new solution many times until its novelty waned enough so that it could enter awareness. She stopped blaming herself, her self-esteem rose, and her depression disappeared.

We don’t remember everything that has happened in our past; we are especially liable to have blocked out the most painful events. But an Inner Guide can locate any information in our memory because, as it is so comfortable itself, it has no “mental static” to interfere.

Some forms of depression require prompt medical intervention. A “major” or “clinical” depression is a serious illness in which an affected person has trouble eating and sleeping, loses weight, becomes preoccupied exclusively with the loss, develops slowed speech and movement, has trouble functioning, and develops suicidal thoughts. It is important for a person in this situation to seek help immediately.

Another type of depression, called dysthymia, is characterized by a lesser but longstanding feeling of sadness with a lack of energy and initiative. People with this disorder often eat and sleep excessively.

Both major depression and dysthymia can be successfully treated with medication and psychotherapy. People with these disorders can also do self-hypnosis and develop an Inner Guide that will augment treatment during the acute illness and subsequently work to end other problems and discomforts. And all of us can benefit from a technique that will bring us emotional comfort and enhanced creativity.

Judith M. Davis, M.D., author of Emotional Comfort: the Gift of Your Inner Guide, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who practices in Chicago. She has created The Davis Foundation for Providing Emotional Comfort (www.davis-foundation.org) to assist those who use the Davis™ Technique to change their lives.