394: Your Past Isn't Why You're Still Depressed

When something terrible happens, most people assume the damage lingers for years, buried in the unconscious and quietly running their life. Dr. Lisle says the nervous system doesn't work that way. It is built to be present and future oriented, so if you're still suffering years later, the cause is almost always in your life right now.

A 45-year-old listener in Germany writes in after being convicted of a crime he says he didn't commit. Years later, he's sleeping less, he feels his wife has had enough of him, and he wonders whether there's an open loop he can't close. Dr. Lisle walks through how he would approach the case clinically. He explains why depression is failure feedback, why the Freudian idea of repression is a catastrophic misunderstanding, why consciousness works like a penlight in a dark library, and why most suffering comes from the esteem discrepancy: the gap between the esteem you're getting and the esteem you believe you deserve. The conversation continues in the next episode.

0:00 Why your feelings come with instructions 0:31 Listener letter: convicted of a crime he says he didn't commit 5:04 Depression is failure feedback, not a lingering wound 8:41 Why your unconscious isn't hiding anything from you 19:52 Why lifelong revenge only happens in Hollywood 29:48 The esteem discrepancy: what you get vs. what you deserve 40:30 The clinician's real job: closing the gap

Beat Your Genes is co-hosted by evolutionary psychologist Dr. Doug Lisle, PhD and Dr. Nathan Gershfeld, DC.

New episodes every other week.

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Intro and outro: City of Happy Ones. Ferenc Hegedus. Licensed for use. Copyright Beat Your Genes Podcast