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

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Hendel explains that you can use the ‘Change Triangle’ which is made up of defensive behaviour, inhibitory emotions and core emotions to analyse our emotions and responses to situations to self-sooth this trauma. After years of using this tool in her private practice, Hendel was convinced that it could be a life-changing resource for anyone. I also don't 100% agree with the premise of the book, that just becoming aware of how you feel will make your depression or anxiety or whatever go away.

Fully experiencing core emotions allows us to enter an openhearted state where we are calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear. Moreover, Hilary Jacobs Hendel’s writing is lucid and accessible, which makes her method as clear and practical as you can get in self-help titles. The Change Triangle may prove an efficient therapeutic tool for both patients and psychotherapists to combat psychological problems by reconnecting the self to its core emotions and basic physical reactions. I learned a lot about shame and guilt, the differences between these two seemingly similar things, and how we can move past them to access our underlying emotions.

I would have liked to see more exercises, preferably more profound than "take deep breaths and think about how you feel. When fully experiencing core emotions, without judgment, fear, shame, guilt, or anxiety, we can enter a state of openheartedness, which can be best described using the 7 C’s: calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear. He looked a bit surprised but said yes, so I grabbed a small cushion off my sofa and tossed it to him. What is unique in this book is Hendel's mission to take psychotherapeutic tools and present and rework them in a way that can be used by individuals . I was incredibly eyeopening into core emotions and the effect that childhood trauma causes on adult brains.

It allows you to reacquaint yourself with your feelings, to recover a more authentic self and to be more calm, curious and connected. It is because the real reason behind it was my fear and shame that developed in me growing up with neglectful parents and constant chaos at home. This was a non-fiction book so will be a general review rather than focusing on the usual plot and pacing, characters and writing style. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It's things like how your parents brought you up and that one time they didn't let you quit the football club and you've been nursing that grudge for three thousand decades.

This shines a new light on our personal issues, and confirms what I knew intuitively for a while, that most of them come from repressed emotions that we haven't released yet.

She distills this knowledge into a multitude of useful tools and skills to better understand, acknowledge and use our emotions to enhance our lives. All you need to know is that I wasn't diagnosed with depression nor anxiety, but it doesn't mean that I didn't experience these at some point in my life. I particularly liked the experiment that made me imagine a safe space, somewhere I can go to when things get stressful.This practical and clearly written self-help book written by a gifted therapist helps the reader learn the incredible importance of understanding and accepting your core emotions and the variety of ways we use defenses and other emotions (anxiety, guilt, and shame) to protect us (even though they cause us pain as well). Hendel does well to explain that this trauma may be something as simple as our caregiver responding to us in a negative way when we’re excited, so that as an adult we learn to suppress our excitement and thus is not really the fault of our caregivers. I thought the techniques wouldn't work but tried them with an open mind and they did work, and I'll be repeating these as required. Her approach reminds us and focuses on our innate drive to health and teaches how to use that more effectively.