Depression Solutions Without Medication
Depression is a debilitating condition that affects millions of Americans. If you’re feeling the burden of depression, today’s Best Day Blog article will provide you with depression solutions without medication. Make sure to check out the in-depth video linked at the bottom.
In it, we’ll discuss tips and tricks to help those dealing with depression or living with anxiety cope in their day-to-day life. These strategies for coping will work whether you have depression, anxiety, PTSD, or another mental or emotional illness. Unfortunately, in almost all cases, depression medication doesn’t solve depression. In many, it makes the depression worse, and in almost all cases, when coming off it, this is undoubtedly so.
Medication only medicates the symptoms, but it doesn’t deal with the root cause – and this goes for all depression medications, of which many work only on a psychosomatic basis. There can also be significant negative side effects from depression medication, so you’re in the right place to look for real solutions and answers.
There are several contributing factors to the issues with depression treatment: problems in the medical community and problems with the way we look at treating mental and emotional health.
What are some of the myths and facts about depression?
Modern research into how the brain works shows us that the way we feel and think creates our biology, which means the old adage that faulty brain chemistry creates depression is mostly wrong. You might be genetically predisposed, but that does not mean it is predetermined. It takes faulty feeling and thinking to trigger that gene of depression to activate. One of the medical issues is that it only looks at biology – take this anecdote as a way of explaining this:
A car has many different components that make it run smoothly – an engine, tires, windows, batteries, oil, gas, clutches, etc. – but using the anecdote of the car in medicine, they only look at the engine. If the car has a flat tire, prescribing a pill would be akin to ‘Put more gas in the tank!’ rather than looking at the actual issue causing the car to run dysfunctionally. The car will still run, but the root cause of the issue has not been addressed. Pills are not always the most effective treatment for depression. They might be an initial starting point so a person can begin addressing unhealed emotional pain’s root cause.
Why won’t your doctor tell you this? Medical research and medical schools are funded by huge pharmaceutical companies, meaning that most doctors are trained to become simply a ‘pill mill.’
How does illness happen?
Illness happens when cells break down and cells have receptors. Think of it like the texture of an orange, all the little bumps. Those bumps are the receptors. If there are 1 million receptors on the cell, depression might only 500 of those receptors. Sadly, medication doesn’t just attach to the “depressed” receptors. It attaches to ALL of the receptors This is what causes significant side effects and leads to an activation of the ‘healthy’ cells unnecessarily. So now, all of the latent conditions that may be sitting in the cell receptors that weren’t activated become activated and cause other issues on top of the one you were initially trying to deal with. This leads to further prescribed medication and the start of a long journey of living in a medicated state – this isn’t helpful for a happy and healthy life.
Health needs to be bio-psycho-social, a holistic approach that understands that our health isn’t predetermined. We must start bringing in the psychological and emotional factors that create our medical conditions because stored emotional energy creates illness. This is what Candace Pert talks about in her book ‘Molecules of Emotion’, stating ‘If you look underneath your depression, you’ll find anger, If you look underneath your anger, you’ll find sadness, and under sadness is the root of it all – what’s really masquerading all the while – fear.’
Where did we learn to be afraid?
Childhood. We’ve all been through perfectly imperfect parenting, and while many believe their childhoods were perfect, it’s not true. Every single one of us has been through levels of shame and trauma, even when a parent was trying their hardest with our upbringing. We are all human. We all make many daily mistakes, even loving parents. Parents are not perfect, and those imperfections leave lasting wounds. Depression results from attempting to minimize, justify and ignore this fact and truth.
But what happens to a child experiencing that? Alice Miller has several books that provide a deeper understanding that at the heart of this depression is the inability to express emotions. In ‘The Body Never Lies,’ she says. “The point is that the fatigue characteristic of such depression reasserts itself every time we repress strong emotions when we play down the memories stored in the body and refuse them the attention they clamor for.”
We are depressed because we have suppressed, repressed, minimized, and ignored the anger, sadness, and pain of our childhood. Almost everyone is told growing up that it is not okay for you to be a child, to be imperfect, to feel – most often, children are told to shut down their feelings.
The Solutions For Depression
If you’re here reading this, you know medication has not solved this for you. Because you’ve lived it and know the truth, let’s get to the solutions.
Depression Solution Number One:
Pick up Beverly Engel’s book ‘The Emotionally Abusive Relationship.’ This will help those who are finding it difficult to stomach the truth that you learned this in childhood. Most likely, you may not be aware of what creates perfectly imperfect and dysfunctional parenting. This book will help you understand the different parenting styles and learn more about how they impact you today.
Depression Solution Number Two:
Purchase Alice Miller’s books ‘Free From Lies: Discovering Your True Needs.’ ‘The Drama of the Gifted Child, and ‘The Body Never Lies. These three books will help you to discover how the trauma from your childhood is the cause of your depression.
It has been proven that genes do not predetermine our life. The emotional environment the gene is placed into that triggers and activates a gene to ‘switch on and create illness. Therefore, healing depression requires developing new tools, skills, and knowledge to create a new emotional environment to change the cell’s genetic makeup.
Depression Solution Number Three:
Go to this link to access my free resources on my website. Look at the Feelings Wheel and the ‘10 Simple Steps to Heal Emotional Pain’. These will help you become an expert in Emotional Authenticity. Understanding how these emotions create biology, realizing that you cannot change depression with THOUGHT! You can only change it with emotion.
So use the feelings wheel to track your feelings for the next few days. Start with tracking how you feel and where in your body you’re feeling it 3-5 times a day. We store emotional trauma within our body physically, which leads to illness. Becoming aware of where it is in your body will really help.
Ask yourself when the first time you had this feeling was. Can you remember and trace it back to childhood – that moment you experienced the sentinel feeling? These emotional expressions have been diminished, and part of the healing journey is learning to express these emotions healthily.
My ‘10 Simple Steps to Heal Emotional Pain download walks you through the complete healing journey. It gets to the core solution rather than attempting to medicate the symptoms.
My video ‘How to Release Emotional Pain’ works together with the above printout.
These three free resources will help you to get off the medication and deal with the source of the problem.
