You must tell on yourself…

(by Dr David Burns on the anxiety podcast)

“NO ONE can help you unless…..you tell on yourself.” — Shannon Goertz

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking that makes it so.“ — William Shakespeare.

I have a powerful story that answers the question: Why am I depressed and anxious? What causes depression and anxiety? And more importantly, what is the cure? How can I defeat this thing?

One of my toughest patients ever commuted from New York to Philadelphia to see me, I believe because he had read my first book. He told me that he had never found happiness in his life. He had felt like a worthless human being, pretty much every day of his life.

As a young man, he had escaped Nazi Germany and arrived on the streets of New York City penniless. He survived by shining shoes on the sidewalks of New York. He told me that no one had ever been able to help him.

This was around the time people first started talking about endorphins in the brain.

You have probably heard the theory that endorphins are the body's natural opiates and that they are responsible for feelings of happiness. The idea was that you could boost your happiness through strenuous exercise, flooding your brain with endorphins and improving your mood.

A lot of people believed this, although I was suspicious. I had done quite a bit of brain research myself before going into private practice, and I knew there was not much evidence to support some of these claims.

Still, I decided to test the idea.

I told this man, whom we will call Harold, that one of the problems with depression might be that he did not have enough endorphins in his brain and that perhaps he could build them up through strenuous exercise. I had been running quite a bit myself in those days, so

I asked him to start running farther and farther every day….eventually he was up to 12 miles a day.

I asked, “Harold, how did you feel at the beginning of your twelve mile run?”

He said, “I felt like a totally worthless human being.”

Then I asked, “How did you feel at the end of your twelve mile run?”

He replied, “I felt like a totally exhausted, worthless human being.”

I began to realize that the endorphin explanation was not going to solve Harold's problem.

There was another important part of Harold's story.

He was an extremely intelligent man. Despite his depression and the poverty he experienced when he first arrived in America, he had worked his way up in the world and become incredibly successful. By the time he came to see me, I believe he owned several blocks of downtown Manhattan and had become a successful industrialist.

Yet despite all his success and wealth, he remained miserable.

His story demonstrated something important. Neither the absence nor the presence of money automatically determines whether someone will have self-esteem.

Finally, I asked him a simple question.

“Harold, tell me why you think you are worthless. What is it about you that you believe is so worthless?”

There was a long silence.

He became emotional and said, “Dr. Burns, I have never told this to anyone…

(No one can help you unless you tell on yourself)

I have not told my wife. I have not told any of my psychiatrists. It is intensely personal.”

I told him that he did not have to tell me anything he was not comfortable sharing. But I also suggested that if he could tell me why he felt so worthless, perhaps we could address the actual problem more directly.

He began to cry.

“Ever since I was a little boy, I have had claustrophobia and a fear of the dark. I do not know how to get over them. I feel like that makes me less of a man. I am so ashamed. I have been hiding this from everyone my entire life.”

My heart went out to him. People struggling with anxiety can experience tremendous shame about their fears. But fortunately, there are ways to treat those fears.

One of the techniques I use for anxiety is exposure. It is one of many approaches, but it can be incredibly powerful.

“Do the thing you fear most….and the death of fear is certain…..”

                                                                                                                            –Ralph Waldo Emerson

I told Harold that I wanted him to go home and, on a night when there was no moon, set his alarm for two o'clock in the morning. I wanted him to go into the basement of his large Manhattan home, turn off all the lights, and roll himself tightly inside a carpet with his arms pinned at his sides so that he would feel trapped in complete darkness.

I told him he could have a tape recorder with him. Every minute, I wanted him to record how anxious he felt on a scale from zero to one hundred, with one hundred representing the worst possible anxiety. I also wanted him to describe exactly what he was afraid might happen.

Then he was simply supposed to stay there.

He would remain in the darkness and continue recording his anxiety minute by minute until the fear eventually subsided.

Harold seemed extremely unsure about this assignment.

He took the train back to New York and later called my office to cancel the rest of his sessions.

He left a message, and essentially, I had been fired. He thought I was crazy. He believed what I had asked him to do was incredibly dangerous.

So he went to yet another psychiatrist and told this doctor about the crazy psychiatrist in Philadelphia named Dr. Burns who had instructed him to do this horrible and dangerous thing.  The other psychiatrist told him, “Dr. Burns is exactly correct. This is what you need to do, and I want you to go back and do it under Dr. Burns's supervision.”

So Harold came back.

He told me he had decided to do it, but he was terrified. He wanted to know if he really had to go through with it. Eventually, I got him to agree that he would complete the exercise and come back the following week to tell me what happened.

When he returned, he was stunned by the experience.

In the middle of the night, Harold went downstairs into his basement. His anxiety was already at one hundred on a scale of zero to one hundred. He turned off the lights, rolled himself tightly inside the carpet, and became completely trapped in the darkness.

After one minute, his fear was still at 100.

After two minutes, it was still at 100.

He was panicking. Every instinct in his body was SCREAMING at him to get out of the carpet, turn on the lights, and run upstairs to safety.

But he had made a promise. So he stayed.

As instructed, Harold had brought the tape recorder with him. Eventually, on the recording, he asked himself a crucial question: “What am I actually afraid of?”

Then he said it out loud.

“I am afraid that a ghost is going to come out of the darkness, sit on my chest, and suffocate me.”—He believed with absolute certainty that this was going to happen.

Eight minutes passed.

No ghost.

Ten minutes passed.

Still no ghost.

Yet his anxiety remained at 100 because he was still convinced the ghost was coming.

Then, after about fifteen minutes, something changed……..

Harold finally shouted into the darkness,

“I am sick of waiting! If you are going to come sit on my chest, then do it now. Otherwise, get lost!!!”

And amazingly enough, no ghost appeared.

Suddenly, Harold realized that the entire fear was a sham.

He started laughing.

His anxiety dropped from immediately from 100 down to 0.

When he came back to see me, he said, “God bless you, Dr. Burns. After seventy years of failed therapy, I finally found my answer.”

I was incredibly happy for him. I never saw Harold again after that day.

So what can we take away from his story?

The first lesson is that your thoughts create your moods. According to this approach, depression and anxiety are driven by what you are telling yourself about your circumstances rather than simply by the circumstances themselves.

Think about Harold's life. He escaped Nazi Germany, arrived in New York penniless, and survived by shining shoes on the streets. He eventually rose from extreme poverty to extraordinary financial success.

Yet none of those external changes made him feel worthy.   Why???

Because the voice inside his head never changed.

That voice kept telling him:

“You are not good enough.”

“You are worthless.”

“You should be better than you are.”

“You are not a real man because you are afraid of the dark.”

“You are not a real man because you have claustrophobia.”

“A real man is courageous and strong. A real man does not have fears.”

But those thoughts were not facts.

Men experience fear.

Women experience fear.

Human beings experience fear. We ALL have emotions.

I have personally experienced several different anxiety disorders, which is one of the reasons I love treating anxiety. Whatever fear someone brings to me, I can often say, “I have experienced something like that too, and I can show you what helped me defeat it.”

1.       The first principle, then, is that what you tell yourself has enormous power over whether you feel depressed, anxious, afraid, or worthless.

2.       The second principle is that when you are suffering emotionally, many of the thoughts you are telling yourself may simply not be true.

Depression and anxiety can be extraordinarily convincing.

Harold believed he should not experience fear. He believed he should be better than he was. He believed that having anxiety meant there was something fundamentally wrong with him.

That was perfectionism.  (note from Shannon, possible addiction)

3.       The third principle is that when you finally expose the distortions in those thoughts and discover that they are not true, your emotional experience can change dramatically.

Harold spent approximately 70 years building toward a realization that happened in a matter of seconds.

For seventy years, he believed the story his mind had been telling him.

Then one night, alone in a dark basement and rolled inside a carpet, he finally discovered that the story was not true. And in that moment, something changed. He found his freedom.

The technique that worked for Harold, however, will not necessarily be the technique that works for everyone. Over the years, I have developed or learned more than one hundred different techniques for challenging the thoughts that rob people of self esteem and contribute to panic, fear, depression, and feelings of worthlessness.

There is no single method that works for every person.

We each have to find the tools that work for us and our own path toward freedom.

Fortunately, there are more tools available than most people will ever need.

(from Dr. David Burns, feeling good on YouTube)

T❤️