We all experience depression and anxiety in our lives from time to time and this is certainly normal. It is when a combination of events or extremely negative events occur that we sometime find ourselves spiraling out of control and into the dangerous “A-D” Spiral. The A-D Spiral is when anxiety produces depression which, in turn, produces an anxiety disorder – assuring that depression will expand and not contract. The end result of this spiral is often a panic attack or a severely depressed condition – or both.
Medical science has a number of cures for this combined ailment mostly through medication. While drugs have their place – especially in extreme cases – a better and less organic solution lies in the brain of the sufferer. What’s more important is that this opportunity is faster, more effective, totally under the control of the patient – and it’s totally free!
What we are talking about here is the technique of Causal-Replacement or turning the cause of the condition into its cure. This is sometimes confused with self-talk or positive affirmations and the like but it is totally different.
Self-talk attempts to change our outlook – and especially our feelings – by piling up affirmations against the volume of negative affirmations stored in your subconscious mind. Causal Replacement does not seek to change how you feel about yourself but rather to change your mind. These are two radically different approaches. With CR you’re not lying to yourself and hoping it sticks, you’re changing the way you feel about a subject and allowing your mind to alter the downstream affect on both how you feel and what you think.
To begin with you must identify conclusively what it was that caused you to spiral into a combined condition of both anxiety and depression. Without a clear and blunt definable statement of cause there can be no progress at replacing it with an altered state of mind. Indeed, this is the first place to look should your first attempts at this technique fail – i.e. have you properly identified the root cause of the initial spiral of depression and anxiety. Once you have arrived at a clear understanding – then write out in long hand both the error in thinking that produced the depression and the anxiety attack and the new, accurate and correct understanding that must take its place. Take the revised statement with you for a couple weeks and re-read it constantly. You should start to see a drop in both your level of anxiety and the severity of your depression. Certainly your panic attack should be a thing of the past.
