your emotional life: our mission
About the SAD Syndrome
And its Mental-Emotional Partners in Your Life
Social philosophers, demographers and those of us who stop to take a wider look at our current culture note that the human race - or at least the so-called developed 'First World' - has become the saddest in history. Why is this so?
The advent of Western medicine and its offshoots, Western psychology and psychiatry, have secured their place in the way that we see ourselves in our society. The mad rush to 'labeling every human trait' and pathologizing it in the interests of so-called 'health care' has resulted in a persuasive mass mind-programming that leads us to believe that we need medical or psychiatric correction and, yes, medicine to manage our states of being.
In the interests of responsibility, we do not claim that the many and growing diagnoses are false. Nor do we claim that there are those who truly suffer from deeply seated mood imbalances, but believing in the myth of ubiquitous sets of mental diseases and illness, can make us sicker and more unsettled than we have cause to be.
We claim on the home page of this site that "The SAD Syndrome" is ECR's main enemy in the mental-emotional arena. To see why we make that claim, let us have a brief look at the components of SAD, and (in further reading) a few of its 'partners.'
STRESS
the "S" in SAD
Interestingly, the word “stress” is a misnomer. Stress relates to physics rather than psychology. We live a life that is continually being influenced by external stressors, or events and situations that are not to our liking, but it’s only your emotional (affect) reactions and responses to those stressors that can be changed and improved, not the external situations.
"Man is not affected by events, but by the view he takes of them." Epictetus
This quote from the Greek Stoic Philosopher may not at first seem to relate exactly to our experiences of stress. But from the perspective of 'emotional core' studies, it is a perfect expression of how easily we can take everyday events that may not be exactly 'comfortable' and expand and pathologize them based on our view of what our environment is handing us.
From an evolutionary standpoint, stress exists to help us, not make us ill beyond what its purpose might be. We cannot live without a reasonable balance of stress in our lives. The operative words here being 'reasonable' and 'balance.'
Stress is a biological positive. But the structure of modern society and day-to-day living tends to upset the primal nature that allows for 'balance'. Affectology and neuroscience research defines the development of our 'way of viewing' as being a deep-seated preverbal learning - influencing the way we place meaning on everyday stressors.
And that's where ECR comes in - to reframe the meaning of responses at core subconscious level, and balance their expression in a positive and helpful way.
"Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems”
Epictetus
Our Greek philosopher friend holding forth once again! This quote may seem identical to the one above about stress, but it is not the same. In much the same way as we magnify life's stressors into what the medical profession often diagnoses as stress disorder, we have a tendency to do the same with our anxiety states.
We cannot survive without some degree of anxiety. We need the feelings of some level of discord and a projected doubt about our safety to simply cross the road or abide by some of our society's rules and regulations (anxious about the outcomes of stupid behavior on our part or the part of others around us, friends and strangers alike).
And, of course, gone unchecked, anxiety can easily become what we might call 'panic attacks' where the mid-level anxiety accelerates and exacerbates into bouts of terror and the accompanying heightened physical hazards. High-level anxiety can be dangerous!
On the other hand, anxiety, remaining at a lower level, can result in pervasive shyness and an inability to perform well at work, school or even on the stage.
We may say that this deeply rooted emotional core anxiety is the result of early life fear responses - the sort of habitual response patterns that ECR is perfectly equipped to reframe and resolve.
ANXIETY
the "A" in SAD
DEPRESSION
the "D" in SAD
The spectre of depression as a valid 'disease' has seemed to overtake our cultural thinking. Most people tend to accept the mythology surrounding depression in its medical and psychiatric terms without question. That is not to say that depression is not real - of course it is - but to give ourselves over to the notion that it cannot be combatted without drugs sentences us to a life of being medicated - and exposes you to the risks that antidepressants and other psychoactive drugs pose. The songster/poet Leonard Cohen astutely noted,
"The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape."
We ECR practitioners do not aim to go to war against the medical profession, but more than twenty years of practice in affectology has shown evidence of depression sufferers beating their problem with ECR. In fact, it may be said that ECR is the therapy of choice for those who accept that there may be some degree of self-responsibility in the 'stuckness' that is a part of clinical depression.
Major depressive order aside - and perhaps not aside at all - ECR has been shown to be a perfect approach to reframe the core emotional driver-components that allow depression to keep its hold over people.
If you suffer depression, you can do well to purchase a copy of Beat Depression the Drug Free Way, and discover the truth about the 'depression industry,' and how getting wise to the facts can break the grasp on your life.
To read about the extensive range of conditions and life issues that ECR can help with, go