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There are different kinds of depression, and I can only speak for my own experience of it. But I think there are four things you do need for the trick to work.
First, you need what the professionals, bless them, call 'low self-esteem'. I don't need to elaborate on that one: it's the main hallmark of depression. But it's not the same thing as the depression itself.
The second thing you need is a steaming pile of negative thoughts about yourself that keep coming back to haunt you, either triggered by something or seemingly out of the blue. Not all depressives get recurring negative thoughts about themselves, but most do. The sort of thing I mean is: I'll never get the hang of being a decent human being; I'm not a nice person; I never do anything right; and so on. Any hint of criticism, or something that goes wrong, brings one of them to mind, and very quickly the others follow, along with memories which reinforce them, and before you know it you're mired in a ghastly grey goop. You use up a tremendous amount of energy wrestling with them, and it's no wonder your sleep is disrupted and you spend most of your life exhausted.
Depression is referred to by the pundits as 'irrational'. From my present vantage point as a confirmed ex-depressive, I find that I disagree quite strongly with that. Depression is, for many of us at any rate, an intensely rational process. All the thoughts and the evidence are marshalled into a perfectly coherent way of looking at yourself and the world. There's nothing wrong with the logic - it would have Mr Spock gasping with admiration. It's what it's based on that's the problem.
If you're not haunted by bad thoughts about yourself, then I have to say that I have no idea whether the BROH trick will be any use to you. You've got nothing to lose by trying it with the symptoms you do have. The way it worked for me depended on having the negative thoughts, but it doesn't matter a hoot what their content is.
Thirdly, you need to understand clearly that the low self-esteem and the 'orrible thoughts are not the same thing. That's where the thinking comes in. The low self-esteem is a judgement about yourself; the bad thoughts come unbidden, like an annoying tune you've got on the brain. In my garden there's a bird whose song includes the four notes 'Drunken Sailor' in the sea shanty. So, when I'm doing the weeding, I'll hear the bird and soon enough I've got 'Ooray and up she rises' belting out in my brain with the thickest Cornish accent I can muster. It's got to the point now where I don't need to hear the bird: the weeding itself brings it on. Imagine the blind alley you could follow with a psychoanalyst who wants to get to the bottom of your association between drunken sailors and weeding! I tried to grow an edelweiss once: thankfully it died.
The bad thoughts and the self-image look like the same thing when you're in the grey goop, because the unbidden thoughts seem so objective. There is evidence all around you to back them up. The best analogy I can think of is the difference between true love and infatuation. When you're in the throes of it, you can't tell which it is, but the chances are that you've had enough experience of infatuation in the past to know the difference with hindsight. For instance for me, the difference between my husband and all the other men I'd been in love with was that with him I never felt I had to pretend to be something I wasn't. The quality of it was totally different.
Another analogy that might help is this: think about how you see your worst enemy. Never mind the content - the point is that the quality of the judgement is different. You can't see yourself in the same way as you see others, because you don't see what's going on in their heads; you can only see what they do with it. Holding someone else in low esteem is like holding yourself in low esteem without the 'orrible thoughts. It's a judgement.
Trendy counselspeak is fond of telling us that we shouldn't be judgemental, and it's a load of cobblers. No-one can function without judgement, and the most judgemental bunch of people I ever encountered were the local Quakers. So for Heaven's sake don't start feeling guilty about making judgements about people. You can work on making your judgements wiser, after you've sorted out your depression. Meanwhile you are fully entitled to the ones you've got.
The point is that the judgements you make of yourself, and of others, are not the same kind of thing as the unbidden thoughts that haunt you.
Finally, you need a strong enough desire to break free. Please don't get me wrong, but strange to say, this might be the tricky one. It might even be one of the bad thoughts - that 'there's something within you that wants to stay miserable'. Certainly in my case, depression was so much a part of my life for so long that the idea of not being depressed - of living without even the spectre of depression - was so alien that there was a lot to be said for staying the way I was. If you have got a problem here, let me give some reassurance. The release from depression using the BROH trick is a very subtle and gentle process. Nothing happens too fast for you to cope. The improvement in your life creeps up on you, and you will cope effortlessly with things that, at the moment, you couldn't imagine you could handle.
You'll be in a much better state to deal with the other problems in your life when you've got rid of the depression. Many of them - a surprising number - will simply disappear with the depression, and the remaining problems will look so different you'll hardly recognise them.
© 2001
All Rights Reserved
Vivien
J. H. Mitchell PhD
