You Are Not Depressed, You Are Unfinished, Ardeshir Mehran

This book caused me to revisit my overall paradigm on treating mental/emotional conditions, and made me realize that I was missing one important piece: the subconscious mind (which, in retrospect, should have been quite obvious.) The author would argue that his paradigm addresses the body as the seat of emotion, and not the subconscious mind, though I suspect the subconscious mind isn’t housed exclusively in the brain anyway. He puts forth an alternative approach to mental health, combining somatic therapy and his own unique concept of Emotional Rights, the violation of one or several of which leads to depression (or anxiety, or both). He uses somatic therapy to access the subconscious mind (or the knowledge of the body, or however you want to think of it–at any rate, something not available to the conscious mind), allowing it to focus therapy to the relevant issues, rather than trying to get at it through the conscious mind via talk therapy. In this way, only what the person is ready to deal with is likely to come up, sidestepping the possible issue of re-traumatizing someone in the context of talk therapy by digging up more than they are yet ready to address.

I suspect that the Holy Spirit can speed up this process considerably, but only if the therapist knows and believes this, or the person involved knows and believes this. Nevertheless, the idea that the true source of anxiety or depression can be only one of so many possible unmet needs, and if you can categorize them, you can address them systematically, is both obvious and revolutionary. If only we could get the rest of the mental health profession to approach it in similar terms.

My rating: *****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: none

Political content: none

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