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

Hilary Jacobs Hendel

Feb 2018 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Hilary Jacobs Hendel and Cassandra Campbell

About this audiobook

Fascinating patient stories and dynamic exercises help you connect to healing emotions, ease anxiety and depression, and discover your authentic self.
 
Sara suffered a debilitating fear of asserting herself. Spencer experienced crippling social anxiety. Bonnie was shut down, disconnected from her feelings. These patients all came to psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel seeking treatment for depression, but in fact none of them were chemically depressed. Rather, Jacobs Hendel found that they’d all experienced traumas in their youth that caused them to put up emotional defenses that masqueraded as symptoms of depression. Jacobs Hendel led these patients and others toward lives newly capable of joy and fulfillment through an empathic and effective therapeutic approach that draws on the latest science about the healing power of our emotions.
 
Whereas conventional therapy encourages patients to talk through past events that may trigger anxiety and depression, accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), the method practiced by Jacobs Hendel and pioneered by Diana Fosha, PhD, teaches us to identify the defenses and inhibitory emotions (shame, guilt, and anxiety) that block core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement). Fully experiencing core emotions allows us to enter an openhearted state where we are calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear.
 
In It’s Not Always Depression, Jacobs Hendel shares a unique and pragmatic tool called the Change Triangle—a guide to carry you from a place of disconnection back to your true self. In these pages, she teaches lay readers and helping professionals alike
 
• why all emotions—even the most painful—have value.
• how to identify emotions and the defenses we put up against them.
• how to get to the root of anxiety—the most common mental illness of our time.
• how to have compassion for the child you were and the adult you are.
 
Jacobs Hendel provides navigational tools, body and thought exercises, candid personal anecdotes, and profound insights gleaned from her patients’ remarkable breakthroughs. She shows us how to work the Change Triangle in our everyday lives and chart a deeply personal, powerful, and hopeful course to psychological well-being and emotional engagement.

Includes a bonus PDF of figures and exercises.

Ratings and reviews

A very informative and insightful way of looking at emotions and thoughts. Working in education myself it is rooted in neural science which is now how we understand we learn and develop. I read the whole book in 2 days to get an overview and will now go back and pick bits to revisit and put into practice. If this book speaks to you you will find it invaluable. If it doesn’t keep looking til you do. Keeping if mentally healthy and fit takes as much commitment as physical fitness. We just need to keep at it.

From what I'm reading it sounds like you're highly intelligent I think i super interested in I can't tell you how many twists and turns through misdiagnosis is like this and it turns out I have narcolepsy with cataplexy and I didn't find out till it's 35. I've been in and out of the hospital accused of anorexia but in reality I have no control over my sleep wake or ability of appetite I feel like I guess Amaze U surgery never forg giving chemo/w-out dr know what 9 dr help not depr. Bc sleep.

About the author

Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW, received her BA in biochemistry from Wesleyan University and an MSW from Fordham University. She is a certified psychoanalyst and AEDP psychotherapist and supervisor. She has published articles in The New York Times and professional journals. Jacobs Hendel also consulted on the psychological development of characters on AMC’s Mad Men. She lives in New York City.