Depression makes it hard to get up in the morning and subtracts the joy out of life. While depression may not be a cause for divorce, it can put major strains on relationships, and definitely can be contagious.
In an earlier PT post I described a new treatment for depression that my colleague Dale Petterson and I have been exploring. The treatment involves shifting energy from the right to the left prefrontal lobes. The video below illustrates this brief and potentially highly effective experimental technique.
While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a video is worth even more. The video hopefully will make the explanations in my earlier post about these depression-alleviation techniques more comprehensible.
Actually, this prefrontal lobe energy-shifting treatment is surprisingly simple.
To do the treatment, however, a therapist needs to know how to use muscle kinesiology to get yes and no answers from the subconscious. Muscle kinesiology is explained in the video. At the same time, if you should want to learn to do it yourself, YouTube has multiple videos of the various ways in which differents therapists accomplish this technique, also often referred to as "muscle testing."
Here's the video.
Our data on outcomes with the dozen or so depressed folks with whom we have begun to explore the potential of this technique so far is observational. When we do the procedure, most folks feel significantly better, at least temporarily. The effect is evident usually within a few minutes to hours, and occasionally taking a day or two. A few seem to feel no difference, but these have been a small minority of cases. One person has reported feeling worse for the next day, and then fully relieved of depressed feelings and thoughts by the following day or so. No one has reported any other negative side effects, nor have we observed more thus far.
A word of warning: Some people who watch the muscle kinesiology insist that the therapist, Dale, is pushing harder when he wants a certain answer. That is a mistaken conclusion. The goal of using kinesiology is for the therapist to obtain data from the client's subconscious. Making the arm move any particular way would be the opposite of letting the subconscious speak.
My goal in writing here and showing this video is to interest researchers in designing and running scientific studies that might establish the merits and/or limitations of this potential treatment technique. My ideal would be to find a physician or neuropsychologist who could test use brain imaging to determine if and to what extent the brain makes changes with these interventions. Any researcher volunteers?
One last thought: If it really is getting the results we are hoping for, this treatment could replace drug treatments. At the same time, it would definitely not replace your therapist. The technique seems to work best in association with individual and/or couples psychotherapy. Folks who are depression-prone definitely benefit from working with a therapist to learn what will enable them to stay depression-free. Folks whose depression stems from dominant-submissive interactions in their marriage or other couple relationship need to learn to interact without put-downs and instead with only collaborative patterns of talking together.
While prefrontal lobe energy shifting is not meant to replace conventional talk therapy treatment, the technique hopefully may someday augment and accelerate the good effects of work with a therapy professional.
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Denver psychologist Susan Heitler, PhD specializes in treatment of depression, anxiety, narcissism, bpd and marriage difficulties. Her online program PowerOfTwoMarriage.com teaches couples the skills for marriage success.