It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self

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You can speak to your GP about talking therapies or get in touch with the talking therapies service directly without going to your GP. With curiosity and compassion for your feeling, stay with the sensations, breathing deeply until you feel them calm down. Like, did you ever just find yourself in a situation that triggered you, to that point that you found yourself in the throes of anger, or whatever kind of emotion that experience elicited?

focuses on fostering awareness of the emotional life of the patient as it unfolds in real time in front of the therapist. However, to be fair to the author, she does not argue that the change triangle is the only viable therapeutic framework; instead, it's the one she prefers. She introduces us to The Change Triangle, a conceptual tool, a map, to understand our emotions and discover what we are doing with them that limit our awareness and growth. I would have liked to see more exercises, preferably more profound than "take deep breaths and think about how you feel. I'm writing some of my favorite parts here, but I'd still definitely re-read it to see the up close and personal applications of the triangle with different people.For me, well, I found some of it helpful, and I can use those parts, which is what - in my opinion - self-help books are good for. Additionally, if we own the damage we did with our actions, whether we did it on purpose or by accident, can be healing. When using this tool, Jacobs is able to help her patients heal past wounds, depression, anxiety, stress, or trauma; by accessing the memories of the deeply buried core emotions from the past, patients can release and experience their emotion, feel it in their bodies and release it. This isn't a book about depression, nor is it a book about illuminating the reader about what is and what isn't depression.

Whatever it is, the emotion was manifesting in their body - and by naming this, the patients were able to experience their core emotion and enter a state of openheartedness. This 2018 Best Book and Nautilus award winner, It's Not Always Depression, gives us the emotion education we need (and should have ideally received in high school!It’s Not Always Depression is author and therpaist Hilary Jacobs Hendel’s popularization of AEDP and a tool used in AEDP known as the Change Tangle.

Focus on sensations of anxiety: Tune in to the physical sensations of your anxiety, like a quickly beating heart or butterflies in your stomach. In this model Emotional Defenses include any emotion that you allow yourself to feel, so you don’t have to feel other uncomfortable emotions. In an openhearted state, we are calm; curious about our mind, the minds of others, and the world at large; connected to our body and to the hearts and minds of others; compassionate to ourselves and to others; confident in who we are; courageous in our actions; and clear in thought.Jacobs Hendel provides navigational tools, body and thought exercises, candid personal anecdotes, and profound insights gleaned from her patients’ remarkable breakthroughs. There's a wealth of exercises to try included in the book and I feel like the author is very generous with how much she shares. I am VERY aware that I'm scared and angry about how my flatmates decided to invite a friend over tonight without giving me much warning.

But “The Change Triangle” is also super helpful for clinicians to be aware of when working with clients.I was incredibly eyeopening into core emotions and the effect that childhood trauma causes on adult brains. Working the Change Triangle is the step-by-step process at the heart of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), a therapeutic method that teaches patients to identify the defenses and inhibitory emotions (shame, anxiety, and guilt) that prevent them from being in touch with their core emotions (joy, anger, sadness, fear, and excitement). The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In these states, thinking, problem solving, and rationality are compromised, if not shut off entirely.