[_ywdj]

Out of necessity (after existing conventional treatments offered little help) I've been conducting a 10+ year self-experiment related to this topic.

Like others have described, when I started experiencing symptoms of conditions resembling anxiety, depression, ADHD, mild bipolar, paranoia and CFS/ME, I initially sought mainstream medical psychiatric treatment and undertook talk therapy and was prescribed anti-anxiety (benzos) and antidepressant (SSRI) medications. There was some relief but there were also unpleasant side-effects, and I just had a strong feeling these treatments were not really addressing the core problems, and indeed I even felt like the symptoms were fairly normal reactions to the life experiences I'd endured.

Later I tried to heal myself with nutritional and exercise-based approaches, and relatively conventional emotional approaches like meditation. Again, some mild/temporary improvements were noticeable, but they were inadequate, and it still felt like there was something deeper I needed to connect with.

About 8 years ago, I found an approach that involves identifying and releasing traumas, attitudes, behavioural patterns, self-perceptions and defense mechanisms that are held in the subconscious mind, particularly ones that have been attained in early life and have snowballed through repetition compulsion [1] (a concept that Freud first articulated).

I've been undertaking these approaches continually since I discovered them, and bit by bit all the symptoms have resolved.

My experience has confirmed, at least to me, that these conditions are "adaptive responses to adversity" (or something else related to that concept), and that in order to heal the symptoms, I needed to understand their basis at a very deep level; as Jung said, "making the unconscious conscious" [2].

Once that had been done, adopting new, healthy attitudes and behaviours and living free of those symptoms has been fairly easy; i.e., healthier behaviours just emerged naturally once the causes of the unhealthy behaviours were identified and understood.

If any researchers or laypeople are interested to know more about the techniques I've used and the results I've experienced, I'm happy to be contacted (email address in profile). None of the approaches I've used or their underlying hypotheses are novel; it's been written/spoken about extensively by veteran experts on mind+body health including Maté and Bruce Lipton. But there doesn't seem to be much in the way formal studies into these concepts, so I'd be happy to connect with anyone working in the field or anyone else interested to explore further.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/44379-until-you-make-the-un...

[phkahler]

I completely agree. In my experience, most therapists have been given very powerful tools but are not really equipped to handle them. It has led me to understanding these concepts much like you. As for this:

as Jung said, "making the unconscious conscious"

I may be misquoting but "until you make the unconcious concious, it will control you life and you will call it fate." Or something close to that. I agree, we often do things for reasons we dont fully understand. We can offer an explanation that sounds plausible, but there may well be more to it that even we haven't really explored.

[iamdbtoo]

This has been my experience as well, but I found it through talk therapy, medication and some philosophy.

Almost all of my negative emotions on a day to day basis are generated by defenses I developed as a child to make being a kid with undiagnosed ADHD workable. It worked while I was a kid, but became untenable as I got older.

Once I discovered the ADHD as a basis for this thinking, everything started falling into place and as I started exposing these thought patterns to myself, they started going away.

[astrocat]

The Trauma of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller is probably a good read to throw in here if this is the direction you're looking to explore - especially if you can get an early edition that hasn't been watered down. Some of her perspectives into experiences as a child that are commonly accepted as "normal" but are often experienced by the child as trauma and grow into dysfunction as adults were interesting.

[Ancapistani]

Is it "Trauma" or "Drama"? The version I'm seeing on Amazon is "The Drama of the Gifted Child".

ETA: I found this interesting, too - the author's own child wrote a book about his negative childhood experiences: https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium-mother-dearest-1...

[thebean11]

It's "Drama"

[Ancapistani]

Thanks :)

[Valakas]

I attest to this. This book should be required reading in school. There's so much suffering in the world being done to children in the privacy of homes. That suffering goes without punishment and the victims grow up to be perpetrators or victims again (in abusive relationships). And most don't even know how that happened.

[kej]

>an approach that involves identifying and releasing traumas, attitudes, behavioural patterns, self-perceptions and defense mechanisms that are held in the subconscious mind

Could you elaborate on this part? What does "identifying and releasing" look like, in practice?

[_ywdj]

This is where discussions about this stuff can go off the rails, as the main modality I've used has links to the chiropractic profession (even though I think that profession is highly dysfunctional and many or even most of its practitioners are quacks at best and frauds at worst).

Anyway, the modality I've most used is a technique called NET (neuro-emotional technique), which (I believe) is similar to a practice called Psych-K (I've never done this one but I'm told they're similar). Both of them use muscle-testing to identify incongruences between different aspects of the mind and body (e.g., conflicting/incompatible desires, beliefs or values).

I've also done plenty of Holotropic Breathwork and Ericksonian Hypnosis, some EMDR, some EFT/Tapping, and some use of basic affirmations. Someone else I know well has done a lot of a practice called Family Constellations, as well as another practice that focuses on healing the trauma of birth - though I've not done either of those practices.

[sizzle]

These sound like awesome techniques to have in your toolkit. Any idea if they've been studied in double blinded evidence based trials on patients for efficacy? We need more tools like this at our disposal for cracking the code on the last frontier that is mental health, in addition to the current shotgun approach of flooding our synapses with neurochemicals via SSRIs.

Also wish I could try psychoactives like Psilocybin which many have had life changing positive responses to.

[_ywdj]

Of NET, some small trials by fringe researchers have been conducted [1] (or just planned [2]), but none has had much impact.

This 2017 study [3] seemed to find promising results:

Changes in cerebellar functional connectivity and autonomic regulation in cancer patients treated with the Neuro Emotional Technique for traumatic stress symptoms

...

Results: The results demonstrated significant changes in the NET group, as compared to the control group, in the functional connectivity between the cerebellum (including the vermis) and the amygdala, parahippocampus, and brain stem. Likewise, participants receiving the NET intervention had significant reductions in autonomic reactivity based on heart rate response to the traumatic stimulus compared to the control group.

That result seems to warrant further research, but I can't see it happening at any significant scale.

I've thought/read at length about the state of research into these kinds of modalities, and have concluded that it doesn't and won't happen at scale, due to a combination of these reasons:

- The cost/effort to run a large, controlled trial, including longitudinal research (you'd really need to monitor people over at least 5, but ideally 10+ years to get the best results) would be huge.

- No body with the resources to conduct such a trial is sufficiently motivated to do so, as there's no drug discovery or other outcome that can yield billions of dollars in revenues.

- The chiropractic profession exists at the fringes of medical practice (for generally valid reasons) and is too "hot" for any government or major research institution to want to touch.

The same goes for the work of the researchers I mentioned in other comments; Gabor Maté, Stan/Christina Grof, Peter Levine, Bruce Lipton and others. They've done plenty of qualitative research through their careers, and have written many papers and built solid careers as writers and seminar speakers for sizeable-but-still-niche audiences (of mostly very privileged people with plenty of spare time and money to devote to this kind of healing work). But parlaying that into large-scale studies just never seems feasible, no matter how compelling their findings.

But I think it's profoundly important work, as I'm sure it has the potential to transform the existing psychology/psychiatry fields, so, who knows, maybe something will click one day to make something happen.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site:nih.gov+neuro-emotional...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2646715/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29052102/

[sizzle]

Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough response

[RankingMember]

Hey if worked for you, it worked for you. Thanks for laying it out there regardless of what I think of some of these techniques.

[novok]

This is known as psychodynamic therapy for others who want a name for it. There are therapists that specialize in it. I must warn you its a very long type of therapy with a lot of sessions, so it will cost you $$$. Also some people use it as a weekly whining session for years and never get anywhere with it, so please go into it trying to get results.

[mettamage]

> Also some people use it as a weekly whining session for years and never get anywhere with it, so please go into it trying to get results.

A bit harshly formulated, but I agree. I've seen people being quite aimless in their therapy. I'd recommend becoming an expert on your own condition.

[RankingMember]

Can you give us an example of one of the techniques you used?

[_ywdj]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24365937

[vanderZwan]

While I'm very happy that this worked out for you, and I'm also sure that your scenario will apply to others, maybe even many people, even then I have to add a word of caution: generalizing from the experiences of one person to all psychological conditions would be a scientifically unsound position to take (I know that this not what you are saying, but it is possible to walk away with that conclusion).

For example, many of the issues that you mentioned (anxiety, depression, etc) are symptoms that can have wildly varying causes. It's similar to, say, a fever: if you have a fever it can be completely different reason than what causes it for someone else: one can develop a fever from an infection, or from stress alone - so a psychosomatic cause. It's even possible to have chronic fever due to brain damage! It has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis

[_ywdj]

Sure, thanks, but remember we're adults here, and pretty well educated ones at that, so, the need for caution and discernment can be presumed to be understood by readers on this site :)

For what it's worth, plenty of books have been written about these concepts over several decades; some authors include Gabor Maté, Bruce Lipton, Stanislav and Christina Grof, Peter Levine and Iain McGilchrist, all of whom have advanced academic credentials in psychiatry or biomedical science.

So, yeah, there's no "generalizing from the experiences of one person to all psychological conditions"; there's sharing one anecdote as an example of what many experts have known for years (even if those experts' research findings aren't used much in formulating the DSM or applied by your average neighborhood psychiatrist, for reasons that are a whole other discussion!).