Me and my BROH

Other short articles:
The spiritual element
Choosing a therapist
Tai Chi & depression
Asperger's syndrome

Links and feedback

The first glimmering of liberation for me was the dawning realisation that my depression was not a matter of my moral character. Now that doctors have effective antidepressants at their disposal, it's much easier for them to acknowledge the problem in the first place - I wasn't just a spoilt brat feeling sorry for myself after all. When the Prozac actually worked, that was the second step. I could see my depression as a chemical problem in my brain. For two years I saw it that way, and resigned myself to possibly taking Prozac for the rest of my life.

Then it dawned on me that the 'orrible thoughts - which I was still getting, though not so badly - were a brain thing too. I came up with the tune analogy to explain it, and realised that 'it's not me, it's just my brain's old habits'. It was like an old wound playing up, and had no bearing on my self-esteem at all. The BROH trick was born!

I came to understand that I wasn't thinking the bad thoughts, I was thinking about them. The way the vicious circle works is like this: the negative thoughts were all conscious once but now they've become automatic, like changing gear when you're driving. The self, on the other hand, is conscious here and now. So when something depressing happens - perhaps an embarrassment, a disappointment, a clumsy accident, or something you didn't handle very well, you look at yourself and what you get is the BROH. So the BROH pulls your conscious self-image down, and the low self-image in turn puts more poisonous thoughts into the BROH. The spiral can go on for days at a time until, exhausted, you let go of it. Next time something happens, the BROH spews back all the accumulated stuff from last time. As the process repeats itself, the BROH gets more and more elaborate in its condemnation. Eventually, you don't need to be aware of a trigger - it just seems to happen spontaneously, or as the expression goes, 'out of the blue', and then everything goes pear-shaped.

It's obvious now why the old approaches didn't work. Any technique that pays close attention to the BROH, even to challenge it, is totally unproductive. There's no need to try to persuade the unconscious to change. You can challenge someone's choice of wallpaper, but there's no sense in challenging the wallpaper itself. It's neither true nor untrue, it's just a pattern. Once you see that, you can leave it in the background and let it fade, organically, so to speak. I do still find myself looking at it, and some of it does provide clues to my nature, but now that the depression, the vicious circle, is gone, it's totally different. I can choose what to make of it. I could even choose to analyse it, Jungian style perhaps, if I wanted to - but there doesn't seem to be any point any more. My conscious self, unshackled, can go to work on a whole new set of choices.

Just in passing: I discovered recently, when I started thinking about publishing the BROH trick on the Web, that the vicious circle (the feedback model) is actually a central part of the theory behind cognitive therapy. It would seem from anecdotal evidence, though, that the theory also assumes that the client isn't up to seeing what's going on. If the BROH trick does anything, it might be only to tell the cognitive therapists that to point out the feedback mechanism can do the trick much faster than challenging the BROH thoughts one by one and encouraging the client to replace them with new ones.

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Copyright © 2001
Vivien J. H. Mitchell PhD