21 Oct Depressing Debrief or Happy New Life?
So I recently got to do a debrief with a young lady, her mum rang me up because this young lady had had a history of challenges. At the age of 12 she was diagnosed as being clinically depressed. She has been on every anti-depressant medication at high doses and none of them have worked. She is now 18 and she is on trial anti-depressants as a result of the run of the mill ones so to speak have made no difference whatsoever.
In that time in those 6 years of being clinically depressed she’s had eating disorders, she’s self-harmed, she’s been pretty miserable to be honest. She came to me because her mum was really concerned, she wants to go to university this year and needs strategies to help her be able to leave home, go to university and be ok living on her own.
Unfortunately, the counsellors and the therapists that she’d been seeing before she came to me had been trying to teach her how to cook pasta! Of all things! I think it’s recipes for life she needs, not recipes in the kitchen! So before I see any of my clients I ask them to do a little test to prove that they want to work with me and that they are willing to participate in their own progress; and so I gave her an Ignition! profile quiz to do online. She came out as a Navigator profile.
When she came to see me for the first visit we didn’t really talk about the profile at all, I just used the opportunity to get to know her, to understand who she was, what she loved to do, what she hated to do, where she had challenges, what she thought her strengths were and she gave me lots of information.
Some of that information was definitely congruent with a profile but there was such a lot that came up in that conversation that just did not fit with a Navigator profile and I had lots of question marks as I was taking notes to remind me to come back to at the next session.
So we talked a little bit about flow and what did flow mean and when was she in flow and when she out of flow and what were the things that frustrated her and what were the things that empowered her. At the end of the session I asked her to do a little bit of homeplay, so before the next session here’s your profile report, I want you to go through it and highlight what is most like you, underline what is least like you and what insights or questions does it bring up for you.
So in our next session along she came, I said to her, ‘so did you do your homeplay?’ She smiled and she said ‘yes I did’. I said ‘how did you get on?’ And she looked at me puzzled and she said ‘well actually, I really don’t think this is me’, and I looked at her and I said ‘why do you think that?’ and she said ‘because everything that I have underlined as it says is least like me is actually what I think is really most like me and the opposite way round’ and I smiled and I said ‘so, you think you might be the opposite to that?’ She said ‘well, yeah I do’. I said to her ‘well actually in my notes last week I did have a lot of questions about whether you were actually that profile or not so that’s interesting that we have the same curiosity about it. So let’s explore’.
So together for the next 40 minutes or so we explored the geniuses to discover which was her genius. She said it was mostly Nova Exuberant, ok, so maybe she could be an Astronaut or a Pilot or a Captain profile. So we explored a little bit more in terms of the other layers of Ignition! we looked at learning preference styles, we looked at 6 human needs, we looked at the questions that you ask and by the end of the discovery she had absolutely decided beyond a shadow of a doubt she was a Captain profile.
Now that’s interesting because a Captain and a Navigator are almost opposite sides of the Ignition! compass and along that journey of discovery she’d already started to recognise ‘Oh my gosh, I need to do this differently and to be happy I need to do that differently and when I get run down I need to go and be around people so that’s why I love to sing and I want to be the star of the show!’
So it was a really lovely discovery and insight into who she really was. So I said to her ‘I’m curious though, if you’re absolutely sure that you’re a Captain profile, why did you answer the questions that made you come out as a Navigator profile?’ She said ‘because that’s where I’ve been pushed by the people around me to live my life’. And I said to her ‘well that’s very interesting, in terms of you being clinically depressed and none of the medications working for you.
So here’s a fact, you’re unconscious mind is the most powerful part of you.
When you say ‘I am’ it says ‘as you wish’. It has no choice but to be congruent with the ‘I ams’ or the identity that you give it but the challenge is, you’ve been trying to give it a false identity. So your unconscious mind has been trying to be congruent with a false identity.
It cannot do that, incongruences in the nervous system are devastating so no wonder you’ve been clinically depressed since the age of 12 and no medication is working, it’s not that you’ve been depressed it’s that you have been so out of flow trying to live a false identity.
I suspect now that you know who you really are and you start to get used to that and embrace that and live in that role then you probably won’t need to take your medication anymore. I think your depression will probably go away’. So that’s a beautiful example of the impact of trying to be who we’re not and what being out of flow is. So find who you really are, live in your flow and be congruent with your real identity.
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