Too often people want to hang onto the life they are living and "fix" their children's problems, or the person with the diagnosis, without having their own lives derailed. However, the life you are living led to, or is feeding, this problem in some complicit way. So change is the answer.
If you live with an addict: The first step to really helping an addict is an acceptance that the job ahead is huge and requires an absolute nonjudgmental commitment from everyone in the support network. Step two is to approach healing from the concerns of the addict, not the wishes of those around the addict. Addicts don't stop using because we want them to. They stop using because they want to stop more than they want to use. This 'thinking with the mind of an addict' requires some very challenging re-balancing of motivators but once it's done you can speak the same language and head for the same goals, you are on the same team.
So, where depression and addiction are concerned, change, the right change, motivated by a desire for health, is the answer. Always.
However, if you step in and change the environment, if you attack all the pleasures and don't replace them with greater ones, you will fail so big the problems become stronger, even more resistant to change.
So yes, restructure the roles everyone in the family is playing. Make less screen time and movement that is fun for the mover a rule, examine the beliefs of your home and your culture with a willingness to shift, adjust, rewrite, and then, if you allow for a life that isn't perfect in appearances but is mostly a joy to experience, you will likely avoid addiction and depression altogether.
True these issues often originate (as in adolescence and menopause) from genuine physiological imbalances. However, one's psychology becomes their physiology and vice versa. Thus you can still use psychological change to re-balance physiological shifts. That was always a good idea. It just needs to be done with the right mindset and supportive environment.
For example, the person who fears the world often does so to balance feelings of depression. Depression is a mentally slowed down, body-heavy experience. Fear is a quick-thinking, anxiously vibrating, heart-fluttering one. The two can actually balance each other out. This technique, however, has a deleterious effect on health and emotional well being.
The depression-driven fearful person is often advised to take self-defense classes in order to remit their feelings of fear. This action does help them feel stronger but the need for self-defense also vindicates their feelings of fear and causes them to believe more fully that the world is dangerous. Sometimes people in this scenario then unconsciously seek to prove themselves right and invite danger through unfocused action. Thus, they discover that they were right, the danger is real. They discover this without seeing their own complicit behavior in the circumstance. Generally, this commonly used approach simply causes the fear to shift position.
However, having a purpose and being active may have remedied the originating cause: depression. Thus some people will actually heal this way.
But with an eye on cultivating an answer-oriented frame of mind, we can find a better way.
A better approach might be to have that same person take Tai Chi with a focus on health and longevity. This would also improve strength and preparedness. However, without an increase in the focus on danger. Fear distracted, used, and dissolved. In the course of making these changes, the previously fearful person would also alleviate any symptoms of depression but this time without behavioral side effects.
I do not mean to make this sound easy peasy.
To be honest, before I started using neurofeedback sometimes these changes required herculean efforts and were just not enough to maintain the improvements they instilled. Neurofeedback became my tool for reaching deeper into the brain and creating behavioral change from within. The combination was so powerful, so easy peasy, I changed my life trajectory and became a medical professional sharing what I had learned for the benefits of others.
So add a little (okay, maybe a lot) of neurofeedback and you can say goodbye to depression altogether. Particularly in younger brains. As for addiction, in my experience addiction is usually caused by a desire to feel better. When you feel better it dissolves quite easily.
So help yourself and your people feel better, and let joy do the rest.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am no longer accepting new clients but I am still consulting, speaking, writing, and creating my international docu-series FIX IT IN FIVE with THE BRAIN BROAD (it airs on The Autism Channel and can be purchased/rented via Vimeo On Demand) all ways I am still reaching out to offer help and continue learning. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about depression, addiction, or any other mental health challenge. My websites: www.brainbody.net / www.lynettelouise.com
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