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There are good reasons why a person might react to a stressful situation with anger, anxiety or depression. These were all strategies used by early humans to protect themselves. Let’s imagine that when you go out tomorrow you run into a polar bear. What would
happen? Your anxiety would go up. You would lose intellectual control and move from your intellectual mind to your primitive mind. Your heart would start pounding; you might start shaking and your stomach churn. You would be off like a shot. In the circumstances you would be pleased.
Unfortunately, it is the same in life. If we perceive that we or someone close to us is in danger our anxiety goes up. This can be as a result of a crisis or gradually if we are faced with a longer term threat. When this happens we can lose intellectual control and find ourselves in our primitive brain. This part of the mind always operates within the primitive parameters of anxiety, anger or depression; or a combination of all three.
If our primitive mind thinks for any reason that our life is in some kind of crisis or emergency, it will generally step in to help. Depression, anxiety and anger are all primitive opt out clauses.
When primitive humans looked out of their caves and saw there was bad weather or other danger and they could not go out to hunt, they stayed put until the danger had passed. We have adapted this to all the modern symptoms of depression. You might feel it is safer not to go out and interact with the world.
If we were living in the wild in those days, we would have been on high alert most of the time- looking for dangers from every angle. Anxiety is often about anticipating danger, real or imagined.
Anger was a useful tool for increasing strength in the face of threats e.g. wild animals or hostile tribes.
As we can see, anger anxiety and depression were useful for primitive humans. However, they are not so useful now. Solution focused hypnotherapy is a very useful tool for helping you to stay in your intellectual mind where you can access your vast intellectual resources to help you face challenges in your life rather than reverting to those primitive behaviour patterns.
The key tools I use are reducing stress and trance as well as talking therapy to change patterns of behaviour that are not useful to you. Give me a call at Sandbox Hypnotherapy to find out how I can help you to be in control and find creative solutions.