In 2004, I was absent from work for six months with anxiety and depression.
Anti-depressants and talk therapy were prescribed as treatment. When I returned to work, my mental health had not improved.
This scenario is becoming all too familiar to employers and employees. It is estimated that mental health costs the UK economy £300 billion.
I lived with anxiety and depression for another 10 years, occasionally reaching out for help through conventional channels. Nothing worked. My condition deteriorated to the point where panic attacks kept me awake all night.
Eventually, I began researching mental health and studying depth psychology. What I discovered was life-changing: my life lacked purpose and meaning, I had low self-esteem and I had no sense of belonging.
Even in the company of close friends, I felt lonely and isolated. I felt unheard, disrespected, and lost.
These feelings stemmed from self-rejection and a failure to listen to my emotional needs and desires. In essence, I had lost the connection with my SELF.
Moreover, I learned that anxiety and depression were physiological responses to the external world. My body was telling me something was wrong.
This insight was a turning point.
My story could be retold in numerous ways by countless people across the UK. What’s even more saddening is that most will not find effective solutions to overcome their condition.
Why?
Conventional strategies for treating mental health often fall short. Medication masks pain, yet pain holds the answers.
The reason for pain being there in the first place is to signal something in your life needs attention. Physical pain is often a symptom of stress and stress is a psychological response to the environment, an external stressor you do not feel emotionally equipped to handle.
Talk therapists, while helpful to an extent, often lack the tools to provide consistent, day-to-day guidance for recovery. Therapists may be good at diagnosing problems but not as good at providing effective treatments that enable you to overcome psychological issues.
Poor mental health conditions are typically caused by common themes. Shared traits include low self-esteem, lack of confidence, fear of rejection, shame, guilt, alienation, sadness, limiting beliefs, a critical inner voice, and feelings of inadequacy.
These roots often flower in a craving for comfort, connection, recognition, and acceptance. Above all, there is a deep desire to be loved.
These symptoms are easy to diagnose and trace back to a lack of emotional support during childhood. But there is another way to interpret “emotional trauma”.
I call it “repressed consciousness”.
During my healing journey, I recognised certain character traits, feelings and behaviours were locked away in my subconscious. They were repressed parts of my personality that had once been deemed unacceptable or unworthy.
These disowned parts would resurface as immature behaviours, maladaptive coping strategies, and ultimately, anxiety and depression.
We may be consciously aware of how we behave, but we’re often unaware of why we act the way we do or why we develop unwanted mental and physical health conditions.
And here’s the kicker few people are talking about: repression is the underlying cause of mental illness and a host of debilitating autoimmune diseases.
Mental health conditions arise from a combination of biological, psychological, and environmental factors.
Biologically, illnesses are often linked to imbalances in neurotransmitters like serotonin, oxytocin, and norepinephrine.
Psychologically, unresolved trauma and repression create fertile ground for maladaptive coping mechanisms, negative thought patterns, and poor self-perception.
Environmental stressors then trigger these psychological responses, which in turn trigger biological reactions.
Preventing mental illness requires identifying the psychological and emotional responses triggered by environmental stressors.
With this in mind, I believe we need to reassess how we recognise stress and tweak the script slightly. There is a silent stress that few people are talking about.
Stress is commonly associated with chaotic, pressurising, and overwhelming events. And here’s where the script needs changing:
Stress is promoted because of an inability to cope with certain situations that our subconscious — memories — perceive to be distressing.
These psychological stressors are much more subtle than external stress we feel amid chaotic environments and challenges that are pressuring and overwhelming.
These emotional stresses often go unnoticed because they are masked by habitual behaviours that serve as coping mechanisms.
Silent stress is arguably the most deadly because we rarely recognise we need a change in lifestyle or attitude until it’s too late.
Stress is deeply personal. How we experience life’s stressors is determined by the information stored as memory in the central nervous system and communicated via neural networks in the brain.
Take note of the word "information": in-formation. The word implies that we are in a continuous state of being formed, of becoming.
The respected neuroscience Joseph LeDoux points out that we are. The synapses in the brain which form neural networks shape our personality and determine our behaviour. In his 2003 book, The Synaptic Self, LeDoux writes:
Thought-Provoking Quote
“Learning, and its synaptic result, memory, play major roles in gluing a coherent personality together as one goes through life. Without learning and memory processes, personality would be merely an empty, impoverished expression of our genetic constitution. Learning allows us to transcend our genes…our genes may bias the way we act, but the system responsible for much of what we do and how we do it are shaped by learning.”
~ Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self
When we don’t know how to respond to our environment, we invite stress. Chronic stress, in turn, is the root cause of numerous mental and physical health conditions.
Doctor Gabor Maté, M.D., a leading expert on the connection between repression and disease, writes in his book When The Body Says No:
Thought-Provoking Quote
“Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when human beings are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs—or fails to occur—during childhood.”
~ Gabor Maté, M.D, When The Body Says No
As we mature, we should develop psychological maturity and emotional intelligence. This includes learning to regulate emotions and consciously express aspects of the personality.
Unfortunately, this process often does not happen seamlessly.
There are two reasons why:
Repression: We have experiences that make us feel unloved, unworthy and unacceptable. These experiences prompt us to disown the parts of our personality that are not deemed good enough.
A lack of expression: We don’t express our emotions or parts of our personality when we don’t know how or because we have not had an experience that calls for a quality to be expressed.
Mental illness, therefore, is caused by ignoring parts of our personality, forgetting we can do something or because we never learned how.
Thought-Provoking Quote
“Many aspects of this inner, deeper nature are either (a) actively repressed, as Freud described, because they are feared or disapproved of or are ego-alien, or (b) "forgotten" (neglected, unused, overlooked, unverbalised or suppressed), as Schachtel has described. Much of the inner, deeper nature is therefore unconscious. This can be true not only for impulses (drives, instincts, needs) as Freud has stressed, but also for capacities, emotions, judgements, attitudes, definitions, perceptions, etc. Active repression takes effort and uses up energy. There are many specific techniques for maintaining active on consciousness, such as denial, projection, reaction formation, etc. However, repression does not kill what is repressed. The repressed remains as one active determinant of thoughts and behaviour.”
~ Abraham Maslow, Toward A Psychology Of Being
Repressed consciousness emerges in an infantile state, or what the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung termed a “complex.”
A complex is an identifiable pattern of traits and behaviours that began life as a coping mechanism. Jung showed that a complex is an underdeveloped, or “split-off” archetype.
The goal of healing mental health is to develop each archetype to fullness. When you develop all 12 archetypes to fullness, you become whole.
Whole and Health have the same root word in Sanskrit, English, German and Dutch.
The path to health and well-being lies in self-awareness: recognising survival-based coping mechanisms and subconscious programs that shape our personality traits, attitudes, and behaviours.
Subconscious programs, often rooted in childhood memories, massively influence how much silent stress we experience.
Countless studies demonstrate the connection between childhood experiences and adult stress.
As the respected neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky writes in his 2017 book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst:
Thought-Provoking Quote
“Childhood adversity increases the odds of an adult having (a) depression, anxiety, and/or substance abuse; (b) impaired cognitive capabilities, particularly related to frontocortical function; (c) impaired impulse control and emotion regulation; (d) antisocial behavior, including violence; and (e) relationships that replicate the adversities of childhood.”
~ Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Chronic anxiety and depression are often physiological symptoms of long-term stress that remain unnoticed in the absence of overt chaos or pressure-cooker deadlines.
Research identifies three key factors universally promoting stress:
— uncertainty
— a lack of information
— and a loss of control.
These factors often reflect the psychological inability to cope with our environment which subsequently invites stress.
This silent stress is a fundamental factor to mental illness and adverse physical health outcomes.
To improve mental health and ward off common conditions such as anxiety and depression, it’s necessary to recognise maladaptive behaviours born from repressed consciousness.
Maladaptive behaviours point towards an archetype that is revealing itself in an underdeveloped state of consciousness. Dark thoughts are also another indicator that enables you to identify which archetype is causing problems and requires development.
The archetypes model available at Master Mind Content is designed to help you identify which archetype you need to develop to better manage your day-to-day activities.
Not only that, but the tools we offer enable continuous growth so you can get from where you are to where you want to be at every stage of your journey.
Rather than looking outward for others to meet your emotional needs, it is necessary to learn how to meet those needs internally. You do this by developing archetypal qualities that lie dormant in the unconscious — qualities that have not been committed to memory.
This involves cultivating self-awareness, addressing repressed parts of our personality, and fostering resilience. When you feel safe, valued, and respected, you can develop the tools you need to effectively cope with external stressors.
Recognising stress as a signal for growth, rather than a burden, allows you to transform your life.
Master Mind Content has developed a personality assessment model which enables you to identify how and why you are encountering stress and identify unconscious qualities that need bringing to the surface of the conscious mind.
Contact us today to find out more and book a FREE 30-minute discovery.
