Why a hormonal imbalance is not the end of
your answers to postnatal depression
‘A chemical imbalance in the brain’ or ‘hormonal imbalance’ is what is largely publicised as being the cause of depression.
But how did this ‘imbalance’ become present? Why, all of a sudden, has your brain become unbalanced? Is it the events in your life? Is it because your brain is broken or is malfunctioning?
The answer is neither.
Consider this. What would your reaction be if a spider was to land on your shoulder? If you were like the majority of people I know, you would freak out, run a mile, or at least scream and whack your shoulder over and over again to get it off, feeling a very real and momentary feeling of fear rushing through your body.
Most of us know that with that feeling comes a hormonal reaction in the well-known form of Adrenaline.
What caused the adrenaline though? Was it the spider? Or was it how you perceived that spider? (eg ‘spiders are dangerous’, ‘spiders can kill me’)
If it were the spider than that would mean that everyone who experiences a spider on their shoulder would produce adrenaline, but we know that that isn’t true.
This is because we all have different perceptions of what spiders mean to us and hence, different reactions to them when we see them (or in this case, have one land on our shoulder).
Now apply this to depression.
What is it that causes the chemical imbalance/hormone imbalance in our brains? Is it the events in our lives, or is it how we have perceived these events?
Just like there are beliefs that cause the reaction of fear when a spider is present, there are also specific beliefs that lie behind depression.
The primary belief that is present in all cases of depression is ‘I am a failure or my life has failed’.
Your perception of your life is that in your experience every time you have tried in a specific area of your life (or perhaps you have just tried once) that you have failed, or your life has failed. This is due to beliefs about what defines your self-worth.
Common examples of that can be:
· I have to be the organised one (or the smart one, pretty one, happy one, the one that gets it right etc)
· My job made me feel good (worth-more)
· I need to breastfeed/have a natural birth to be a good mother (worthy in the area of motherhood)
This may also be why depression can be periodical. Sometime we feel that we are living up to these definitions of self-worth, however whenever we can’t we spiral down into feeling like a failure again.
What happens then if you are perceiving your life (and your self-worth) in this way, is that it can send you to a very dark place, particularly if you keep experiencing more and more in life that you perceive as being further evidence of your ‘failings’.
Furthermore, when we are feeling like a failure, this causes us pain. It is one of our most basic human instincts to avoid pain, so in order to stop feeling this pain, what do we do? We stop setting goals in that area of our lives.
We stop trying to get up in the morning and be that mum that you want to be, you stop trying to ‘get back on track’ or try to overcome your struggles. It all seems too hard because you are perceiving yourself or life to be one big failure, so you think “Why bother! Why bother setting any goals in this area of my life, because all it does is show further evidence of me being a failure?”
So this is where we give up and shut down.
Now it’s true that different people experience depression in different ways and with different levels of severity and this is only due to the beliefs that they hold about what defines their self-worth to begin with and how badly they feel their self-worth has been damaged because of the events that have occurred in life.
The majority of times we perceive life in accordance with the beliefs that were set up in childhood and often we carry these same perceptions throughout our adult lives, unless we deliberately look at them and change them, or have experiences that upgrade these perceptions.
This is why the ‘chemical imbalance’ answer is just not enough.
The bottom line is that somewhere along the line, someone or past experiences taught you that you were worth-less when life plays out a certain way. And this is the lie that you need to be corrected.
What you need is a new education on how to think differently. Learn how to perceive life in a way where you are able to accept the realities of life’s ups and downs. Learn how to find value in the ups and downs you experience. Learn how to understand the behaviour of yourself in the past, as well as the behaviours of others, and finally, learn how you are always 100% worthy every minute of every day, just by being alive.
You see, when you change your perception of what you experience (especially when your life is not going to plan) then you change how you FEEL. Consequently the depression lifts too.
Tara, a previous client of mine told me this after completing my free webinar:
“I've been to 3 psychologists and I've never felt this level of clarity before. Thank you so much Jackie!”
Now let me be clear, I’m not saying that psychologists don’t work, nor am I saying that medication doesn’t either, because both traditional avenues of help have their value (everything has value). However there are many people who I come across on a daily basis who have gone down these roads and nothing has changed.
Often this is because they are still going through life with the exact same mindset that has caused the depression in the first place. Also, because often therapies concentrate on rehashing past experiences and what this often does is simply reinforces the very beliefs that have led you to depression in the first place!
A new understanding of life is what is needed, not a reinforcement of the old understanding of life. This is paramount for change. So if you have a psychologist or counsellor, make sure they are giving you new ways to think about life that are in alignment with reality, not allowing you to roll around in how bad everything is, how wrong life is, how much you are missing out, how life should have been better, how you could have done something different, or how someone else could have. And most of all, not rolling around in how worth-less you are (stupid, failure, not good enough etc).
Because this is the specific thinking that is causing the depression. The imbalance in the brain is the consequence of this thinking, not the cause.
