S2 EP243 – Beyond the Darkness: Healing Anxiety and Depression

Transcription:

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. It’s so sad to me that so many people are suffering from anxiety and depression, and this is what I want to address today.

In our current society, there are many external factors that can cause or contribute to situational anxiety and depression. Money issues, work problems, relationship and family issues, illness and loss of loved ones, and traumatic situations such as unhealed childhood abuse, present narcissistic abuse, accidents, as well as various forms of violence such as rape and wars, are major contributors to situational anxiety and depression. In life, there are always going to be external factors that deeply affect us, and it’s vitally important that we learn to be very compassionate loving adults with ourselves as we face life’s challenges. With self-compassion and a spiritual connection, we can hopefully develop resilience and learn to weather the hard times and heal from trauma.  

Today, I’m focusing on two internal factors that are the major causes of clinical, not situational, anxiety and depression: physical causes coming from food, and emotional/spiritual causes coming from various forms of self-abandonment. 

I’ll talk about the physical causes first, and then I want to share with you my own recent process of moving out of depression. Depression is very unusual for me, so I knew when I felt depressed that there was another layer of exploration I needed to do, so I did my deep Inner Bonding work. This turned out to a very core issue for me and once I became aware of it and did the deep work I needed to do to come into reality about the issue, my depression completely lifted and I’m back in joy, with new insights that are also helping my clients. As a therapist, I can only take my clients where I’ve gone, so my inner work is never done. My feelings of anxiety or depression always let me know that there is inner work to do. 

As many of you know, keeping my body healthy has been very important to me since my early 20’s, and I feel very fortunate that I learned about the problems with our foods 63 years ago, and that I’ve been exercising daily for most of my life. 

Keeping your body healthy is actually fundamental to avoiding anxiety and depression. This means finding a form of exercise that you love to do and doing it consistently. It also means educating yourself about good nutrition and learning about what your body needs to be strong and healthy. 

The first thing you need to eliminate is sugar. 

Years ago, I would stay away from sugar for weeks, and then, thinking that one treat wouldn’t hurt, I’d be right back in my addiction. Even after I knew the damage it could do, I couldn’t stay away from it – not until I started to practice Inner Bonding and learned to truly love the body my soul lives in. Once I learned to stop abandoning myself by learning from my feelings rather than cover them up with sugar, I no longer needed will power to completely eliminate sugar from my life. 

Refined sugar is a poison for the body. One of the main ways it causes anxiety and depression is that sugar, and processed foods that turn into sugar, such as processed carbs, are food for the harmful, opportunistic bacteria in our gut. As many of you now know, the gut is about 80% of our immune system, so when it’s out of balance with too many harmful bacteria, it causes many health problems. One of the problems is what’s generally called leaky gut, which means that the harmful bacteria create holes in the lining of the intestine, allowing food particles and toxins from the harmful bacteria to enter the blood stream and organs, causing illness. The other thing that happens, is that the toxins from the harmful bacteria go up the vagus nerve into the brain, and this can cause anxiety and depression.  

Also, eating sugar raises the blood sugar level too rapidly and causes the pancreas to pour excess insulin into the system, thus lowering the blood sugar level too much. When this occurs, the brain doesn’t get enough glucose and depression can occur.

But sugar isn’t the only culprit. Both anxiety and depression can be exacerbated by eating foods with pesticides and preservatives, because of the demand these put upon the body. Anything that is not natural to the body causes an energy drain as the body attempts to digest and utilize foreign substances. A simple rule of thumb in eating well is to eat only what people ate a few hundred years ago. This would eliminate packaged, processed, and pesticide-laden products.

In addition, each person needs to discover what his or her particular body needs to be healthy. You need to learn to tune into your feelings and level of energy and notice what supports you and what drains you or causes anxiety or depression.

The other big issue for me regarding eating well and keeping my gut healthy is that it’s vitally important to me to stay connected with my higher guidance, and sugar and most processed foods lower our frequency. Because of this, I’m highly motivated to keep my body clean and healthy, and because this is so important to me, it takes no will power at all for me to only put clean, natural organic food in my body.

And, of course, I don’t want to be sick. I hate being sick. I’m so grateful that I learned about all this early in my life and at 85 I’m still very healthy with no loss of cognition. 

Marianne consulted with me because of anxiety and depression. She had tried various forms of medication but was not reacting well to any of the drugs. She was exhausted from lack of sleep, and from the intense anxiety that kept waking her up. While there were challenges in her life, like in everyone’s life, none were extreme enough to have this effect on her. She spent her days depressed and her nights awake and anxious.

Marianne had done years of inner work and fully understood that her thoughts create many of her feelings. She was vigilant about thinking thoughts that were positive, so she could not understand why she was having such a hard time. When she awoke at night in a panic, she could not seem to gain control of her thoughts. She would ruminate over and over about the various challenges in her life. She was very discouraged that she had had so much therapy and had done so much inner healing work, and still felt so awful. Sometimes she felt like she was going crazy because she felt so out of control over her thoughts and feelings.

Marianne had a deep spiritual connection. She did not feel alone in her life, knowing that her spiritual guidance was always with her and always guiding her – which made her anxiety and depression all the more perplexing and upsetting to her

“I just don’t get what is happening to me,” she told me. “I take really great care of myself. I attend to my own feelings, I eat well and exercise, and I have great friends and a wonderful relationship. My kids are doing well, and I love my work. Why am I having such a hard time?”

Fortunately for Marianne, I had gone through the same experience. I discovered the source of my problem through research on the Internet, which proved much more accurate than what my doctor was telling me. It appeared that Marianne was suffering from low blood sugar – Hypoglycemia.

Marianne would fall asleep just fine but would awake in a panic four to six hours after falling asleep, and then not be able to go back to sleep. When a person’s blood sugar goes too low, the adrenal glands take over and shoot epinephrine, also called adrenaline, into the system to raise the blood sugar, which causes anxiety or even panic.

I suggested that Marianne ask her doctor to give her a glucose tolerance test, and it turned out that she did have hypoglycemia. Her doctor, a functional medicine doctor, put her on a new diet plan with some natural supplements.

Within days of going on this food plan, Marianne started sleeping through the night.

When she did wake up, she was not anxious and was able to go back to sleep. She no longer felt depressed. Then one night she went back to not sleeping and having the anxiety.

“Marianne, what did you do the day that you couldn’t sleep?” I asked her.

“I joined a gym and did a hard workout. I read that exercise is good for hypoglycemia.”

I asked Marianne to do a little more research on this and she discovered that intense exercise greatly lowers the blood sugar – that she needs to eat during exercising. After doing this, she had no more sleepless nights.

Most people don’t really notice that what they put into their bodies affects how they feel. They might know that if they “sugar out” they may crash emotionally, or if they drink too much they will feel hung over, but they are often unaware of how other foods may be creating anxiety and depression, as well as many forms of illness.

In the many years that I’ve been a psychotherapist, I have frequently encountered individuals whose anxiety and depression completely cleared up by tuning into how food was affecting them.

For example, Marnie discovered that dairy, wheat, vegetable oils such as safflower, sunflower, soy, corn or canola oil, and sugar kept her up at night. She would wake up at around 3:00 in the morning with intense anxiety and would be tired and depressed the next day. By experimenting around and cutting out different foods, she discovered that she slept fine when she stopped eating dairy, wheat, and processed foods containing the vegetable oils and sugar. All her nighttime anxiety vanished, and she was no longer tired and depressed.

Joel discovered that his sleeplessness and resulting depression was a direct result of caffeine from coffee, tea, chocolate and soft drinks. He had not realized how much caffeine he was actually consuming until I suggested that he cut out all caffeine and see what happened to his sleep. After a week of headaches from caffeine withdrawal, he was sleeping soundly for the first time in years and no longer felt depressed.

Adrienne discovered that her feelings of anxiety and depression, that had been with her most of her life, disappeared after she started eating only organic foods. Her system was so sensitive to the pesticides and food additives in non-organic food that she could not eat them without feeling anxious and depressed.

Alex, who periodically struggled with depression, inadvertently discovered that drinking raw milk from an organic dairy had a completely different effect on him than pasteurized milk. He was visiting Los Angeles and went into a health food store where he discovered that he could buy raw dairy products (which are outlawed in most other states). He found that the raw milk gave him more energy and elevated his mood. He also found that, while he was lactose intolerant with pasteurized milk, he had no problems with raw milk. Now he owns a cow share and has access to raw milk, cheese and butter, with none of the depression he felt with pasteurized dairy.

Over and over again my clients, who have chosen to tune into how food was affecting them, have discovered how much their feelings were being affected by food. Many of my clients have learned that even a little sugar or processed foods with vegetable oils brings them down. Sugar and vegetable oils consume so many vital nutrients as the body attempts to process them, and has such a disastrous effect on cells, that they can actually be considered poisons. 

Two hundred years ago, when people naturally ate non-processed and organically grown food, they were getting all the nutrients they needed. 

Now, most fruits, vegetables and grains are being grown on devitalized soil and over-processed on top of it. Cows and sheep that were once grass fed are being fed pesticide-sprayed grains and given hormones to fatten them up. As a result, much of our food not only contains little nutrients, but has many toxins as well. Without the vitamins, minerals, and many other factors that natural, organic and grass-fed food contains, many people suffer deficiencies that can cause anxiety and depression, as well as many other illnesses.

When I discovered that the fat of raw organic dairy products, especially butter, contains natural anti-inflammatory nutrients, I wondered if the huge rise in arthritis, asthma, and other inflammatory conditions is related to the pasteurizing of milk. Any inflammatory condition can also contribute to anxiety and depression.

Food is certainly a major factor in the rise of anxiety, depression and illness. Only you can do something about this by learning how you are being affected by the foods you eat. Bringing a devoted Inner Bonding practice into your life will help you access the desire and the inner discipline necessary to consistently eat well.

Now on to the emotional causes of anxiety and depression.

Many of our painful feelings, such as anxiety, depression, anger, hurt and fear are caused by our thoughts that come from our false beliefs. The major way that our inner guidance system communicates with us instantly is through our feelings. When we think a thought that causes us to feel depressed, anxious or fearful, these painful feelings are our inner guidance’s way of letting us know that the thought is not true – it is a false belief. Thoughts that create feelings of peace, love and joy are coming from truth, and thoughts that create depression and anxiety are coming from the lies we tell ourselves. The problem is that our ego wounded self thinks it’s thoughts, which it makes up or comes from programmed false beliefs, are the truth, so we keep thinking thoughts that cause us to feel anxious and depressed.

Truth does not come from our own minds. Truth comes from spirit. When you are operating from truth, and taking loving action based on truth – rather than thinking and behaving from false beliefs – you will be well on the way to healing your anxiety and depression.

The Inner Bonding process is a powerful process for learning what you are thinking and doing that is creating your anxiety and depression, and for discovering the truth. So I’m going to go through my Inner Bonding process that I did that took about a week when I was feeling depressed, which, as I said, is rare for me. 

In step 1, I tuned into my depression. I felt a heaviness in my body, a sense of apathy, tiredness, and lack of motivation – all very unusual for me. I acknowledged, welcomed, and embraced the depression, knowing that it had important information for me. I held my depressed inner child who needed my caring. I knew that I wanted to learn what this depression was telling me about how I was abandoning myself and that I wanted responsibility for causing this feeling.

In step 2, I breathed in to my heart, consciously choosing a compassionate intent to learn about what I was thinking or doing that was creating the depression. I let go of thinking that it was anything external. I visualized my higher guidance, inviting in love, compassion, strength, wisdom, courage and truth into my heart, breathing that in so that I could be a strong loving adult to do the inner work I needed to do.

Then I moved on to step 3. I asked my inner child to talk to me about what I was telling her, how I was treating her, what I was doing or not doing, that was causing her depression. Then I focused inside, giving voice to the depression, and this is what she said to me. I’ve spoken about this issue in a previous podcast, but I thought it might be helpful to you to hear my process.

She said, “My feelings don’t matter to you.” 

I was stunned, because I’ve been practicing Inner Bonding for almost 40 years and, as far as I knew, I was taking responsibility for my feelings. So I had no understanding of what my inner child was saying to me.

“Tell me more,” I said. “Tell me more about what you mean by that.”

My inner child showed me how often, in my relationships with others, and even with my animals, I feel their feelings, and I put their feelings and needs first. This is automatic for me – I’ve been doing it since I was a young toddler.

With all my inner work, I didn’t see that I was doing this, so of course my inner child didn’t feel that my feelings are important to me – that my feelings matter to me when I’m around others.

As I went deeper into my wounded self in Step 3 of Inner Bonding, I discover a very old and very deep belief: “My feelings don’t matter.” The belief is very specific. It’s not that I don’t matter, because I know that I do – that everyone matters. It’s not that I feel inadequate, because I don’t. I deeply value who I am and the gifts I’ve been given. It’s just about my feelings. And as I took this in, it was like I was watching a movie of all my experiences of my feelings not mattering, from infancy through all my growing up years, through the years of my marriage and with my kids. I saw that I always made everyone else’s feelings matter more than mine.

Then I felt intense anger at my feelings never mattering to my parents and my ex-husband. I lay on my bed and allowed my inner child to cry and rage and pound my fists at all the memories that were coming up, and then her rage at me for making others’ feelings matter more than mine. It took a while, but finally I was angered out, and I felt a huge relief. The darkness of the depression lifted, and I felt light and peaceful.

I then opened to learning with my higher guidance in Step 4 of Inner Bonding. While I knew the answer, it felt good to hear from my guidance that my feelings matter as much as everyone else’s. I then asked her what the loving action is and she told me that my responsibility was to be aware of when I was making others’ feelings more important than mine, that there were times when others’ feelings were more important than mine – and I was fine with that – and that I would know when I was abandoning myself when I got that sinking feeling of depression. I saw that my inner child had been letting me know instantly when I was not making my feelings matter, but that it was only recently that I understood what the depression was.

Since then I feel much joy in taking the loving action by noticing when I’m about to make someone’s feelings matter more than mind. I’ve become very tuned into the feeling of depression that is my inner child – my inner guidance system – if I forget to notice. I’m learning balance – to care both about others’ feelings and my feelings. I laughed out loud when I realized one morning, when my cat let me know she wanted to go out, and I started rushing what I was doing so I could let her out quickly. I stopped and took my time, making my feelings matter, and she was fine, continuing to rub against my leg.

I’m so grateful for my depression for letting me in on this very old deep core false belief. I feel a lightness of being that I always feel when I discover a false belief, and I take the loving actions guided by my spiritual guidance. 

I’m so grateful for the six steps of Inner Bonding. They always serve me well. And I’m so grateful that my spiritual guidance is always here for me, as it is for everyone.

Learning to access your higher guidance is vital for healing anxiety and depression. How do you think you would feel if you knew that there was always someone watching over you, someone who had your highest good at heart? How would you feel if you could turn to this being for guidance, comfort, love, wisdom, truth, and strength? Of course, you would feel much less alone and anxious.

Many people believe in God but do not have a direct and personal relationship with a source of spiritual guidance. And others are atheists and have no spiritual beliefs at all. My parents were atheists and so is my ex-husband. To me, this is a sad way to live. Knowing that I’m never alone and that my soul is immortal has taken away so much of the anxiety I used to have before learning how to connect with my spiritual guidance through my Inner Bonding process.  \

In my 54 years of working with people as a psychotherapist, I’ve found that we cannot heal anxiety and depression without a strong spiritual connection. Life on this planet is often too scary and challenging without the love, guidance, and support of spirit. We have constant decisions to make, and we need the wisdom of our guidance to know what to do. 

While on the planet, we live in the duality of the earthly and the spiritual

The earthly journey is about control. It’s about accumulation, status, and physical safety. The spiritual journey is about evolving as a loving human being, starting with ourselves. While we do need to pay attention to the earthly because we have to provide food and shelter for ourselves and do all we can to keep ourselves healthy and safe in the physical world, if our focus is on control and accumulation, we may often feel anxious and depressed. The earthly journey is not fulfilling for our heart and soul. 

If your primary focus is on the soul’s journey of becoming a loving human being, and you stay connected with your guidance regarding how best to do this with yourself and others, you will feel anxious and depressed far less often. You have control over who you choose to be – loving or unloving, open or closed, controlling of others or in surrender to spirit. As I hope you now know, you do not have control over others and the outcome of events. If your focus is on controlling others and the outcome of events, you will likely feel anxious and depressed whenever you fail to get what you want.

Focusing on the spiritual journey can often make our earthly journey far easier. Focusing on the earthly journey can create much fear, anxiety, and depression, while focusing on the spiritual journey is often inspirational and fulfilling.

We don’t have control over the painful situations of life that can cause situational anxiety and depression, but we do have control over how we treat ourselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually. When you accept that most clinical anxiety and depression is being caused by the false beliefs of your wounded self and your resulting self-abandonment, then you will do your Inner Bonding work whenever your inner guidance system is letting you know, with anxiety, depression, and other wounded feelings, that there is something new to learn about and heal. You can heal if you are willing to learn and practice Inner Bonding as part of your healing journey. 

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day home study Course that teaches Inner Bonding: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself, creating loving relationships, and healing from my newest book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.