[unicorn]

Working with NLP and acupuncture combined, I have observed a pattern that seems to be very common with depression. Depressed people very often have a liver-meridian that is very low on energy flow. In chinese medicine the liver energy is in charge of control and mastery. Low liver energy translates on the psychological level to lack of control and self-assertiveness in opposisiton to overly high liver energy that gives symptoms of aggression, over-control and bad temper generally.

Exploring this syndorm with NLP, I have found that most of the depressed people I have worked with have internal subconscious conflicts that they have no strategy for solving. The most common conflict pattern is being socially conditioned to do one thing while passionately wanting to to another thing. Below the treshold of consciousness there is an argument going on between two subconsious parts that nobody wins, and stalemate reigns. That produces a stagnant situation and generates the feeling of depression. The feeling then clouds the thinking process, and the external world and ones life gets tainted with negative labels. The depressed person is rarely consciously aware of the subconscious conflict, and rationalises the emotion of depression with probable causes the conscious mind can see, which is normally external factors. This attribution of cause to factors that has nothing to do with the real cause is what makes it so hard to get out of it.

I believe that just telling a depressed person to change their focus is counter productive. The depression actually have a message for the conscious mind from the subconscious mind that is "Hey, I've got a problem and I don't know how to solve it". The subconscious mind is the part of you that will do learned stuff automatically for you so you can consciously focus on new stuff. If there are two subconsious programs running that gets in each others way you get a deadlock situation, and negative emotion is the subconscious' way of letting you know about it. For those that know anything about computers, it's like when two processes are competing for the same interrupt, you will get a "Not resopnding" situation from one or both processes. This slows the system down. Depression is actually that - the system slowing down with one or more processes not responding. Changing focus woud be like minimizing the error message and using another program for the time being, the problem is not really solved.

The way to solve it is to look inside and ask yourself what you would like to do that you are not allowing yourself to do or believing you cannot/should not do. Bring the inner conflict to the surface and negotiate a solution. If there seems to be no solution possible, get the intention of all involved sides in the conflict and see if there is a third or fourth road that will take care of all the intentions. Also pay attention to the values implicated by the sides of the conflict - are they yours, or are they just something that someone else put there when you were to young to protest... In my experience when you solve the underlying conflict, depression lifts immediately. You are back in charge, and the liverenergy starts flowing too, it's palpable on you pulse.

So the connection to self-esteem becomes obvious, when you have unresolved inner conflicts you don't get moving where you want to go, and when you don't get moving it's hard to feel good about yourself.