I do have some misgivings about the way the core message elides material and structural considerations (classism, racism, sexism, etc. With curiosity and compassion for your feeling, stay with the sensations, breathing deeply until you feel them calm down.

In a way, shame wants us to be small, because when we make ourselves small, it’s like putting on armor and we are less likely to be hurt, or in other words, rejected. He could barely bring himself to speak, and his voice, when I managed to get anything out of him, was meek. This isn't a book about depression, nor is it a book about illuminating the reader about what is and what isn't depression. Hendel teaches us that core emotions like joy, anger, sadness, fear, and excitement, are automatic and universal physical experiences; this is firmly grounded in neuroscience.It shows how often we allow others to push us into uncomfortable places from which we feel we cannot escape. patient to attend not only to his thoughts and emotions but also to the physical experience of those thoughts and emotions. This book, “It’s not always depression” by Hilary Jacobs explores the use of the “Change Triangle”, and the method “accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy” (AEDP) that is used by Jacobs when treating her patients.

I took a screen shot of the change triangle page as a useful reference, but I not much else out of this. Can I access compassion now, even though I may also be having other emotions like fear, sadness, or anger? A lot of repetition, and doesn't take into account that many people are able to identify which core emotion is causing their anxiety or depression but that doesn't make it go away for them.Those were really helpful in seeing how the triangle plays out, but I really could have used a bit more time dedicated to understanding the parts of the triangle better. I don't want to explain further because I'll have to talk about my experience, and it just feels very personal to me. I strongly believe it is essential reading for everyone and anyone who wants to live an emotionally healthy and fulfilling life.

She distills this knowledge into a multitude of useful tools and skills to better understand, acknowledge and use our emotions to enhance our lives. It can also release some of the expectations we have around emotions, and feeling like we need to “fix” them or change them.To add to this, the author did mention something about trauma, but it's not the FULL ON/REAL DEAL trauma that some people expected when reading this book.

Whether you’re a therapist, in therapy, simply curious, or all of the above, this book is sure to be refreshing, interesting, helpful and useful. I thought the title was quite interesting because depression or saying you're depressed have become such buzzwords nowadays and I always feel uncomfortable when people say them unless they've actually got a diagnosis.When fully experiencing core emotions, without judgment, fear, shame, guilt, or anxiety, we can enter a state of openheartedness, which can be best described using the 7 C’s: calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear. In the Lower Point 🔻are Core Emotions: (you’re going to have to imagine an arrow pointing at the bottom point of the triangle here). Distancing ourselves from the emotion, and not attaching or identifying ourselves with it, can have a really big change in our day-to-day lives. With some trepidation due to the "woo-woo" nature of what I thought it was I delayed reading it for several months before cracking it open. But knowing he had been treated for depression for years without good results, I wondered about the diagnosis.