You have the power of mind to liberate yourself from both depression and anxiety. In this episode Dr John Demartini shares what you can do to transform feelings of depression or anxiety using a cognitive process called the Demartini Method.

Hundreds of thousands of people have stepped out of their perceived nightmares to live meaningful and fulfilled lives once they know how to shift their perspective. You can too when you follow this simple yet powerful process.

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The pharmaceutical industry loves to sell you the drug.

And if you don't want to be accountable, then thank God that's there.

But if you want to be accountable, you can change your perception.

Today I'm going to talk about depression and anxiety.

As you probably are aware that a significant

situation that many people face in their lives at different moments in their

life. So maybe you have something to write with and write on,

you can take a note.

Some of the things I'm going to say may not be what you're used to hearing.

And if so, great,

I hope to elicit a response from you and make you think.

So, first,

with every perception that we have,

our mind births pairs of opposites.

And so if we are perceiving something that we are

drawn to infatuated with, seek,

something that our brain in our amygdala perceives it as prey that we want to go

after, we

immediately have a fear of losing that. So in other words,

we have a biological desire for prey, eat prey, like an animal,

but if we lose the prey, we have a fear of starvation.

And we also have a desire to avoid a predator and the

fear of the predator coming upon us.

So I'd like you to write this down. The fear of loss of that which we seek,

and the fear of the gain of that which we try to avoid,

are the two primary biological distresses that

we respond to in our amygdala, our survival responses.

These two responses can go in any direction of life.

What that means is, you have a spiritual quest,

an intellectual quest, a business quest, a financial quest,

a family and love and intimacy quest, a social leadership quest,

a physical health and wellbeing quest.

So anything that would like intellectually that you'd like to learn,

if you fear the loss of it, you can be distressed.

Or you fear the gain of something you don't want to hear,

don't want to learn about,

somebody trying to talk to you about something that's uninspiring to you,

get it outta here. Business,

if all of a sudden somebody comes in with new business or takes away business

that we want or gives you business, clients that you don't want,

or bills you don't want, or challenges you don't want.

It doesn't matter which of the seven areas of life, our spiritual quest,

mental quest, financial quest, business quest, social quest, family quest,

or physical body quest. Anything that we seek, we can have the fear of loss of.

Anything that we try to avoid, we can fear the gain of.

What we seek we could call a fantasy. And what we try to avoid

we could call a nightmare. Or a philia and a phobia,

something we seek, something we avoid.

It shows up in our body in physiology as an impulse and an instinct.

We have an impulse towards things. We have an instinct away from things.

A gut instinct away and a gut impulse towards.

So the fear of loss of that which we seek and the fear of gain of that which you

try to avoid are spontaneously emerging with every

contrasted perception. Now how does that relate to depression?

Depression is a comparison of your current reality to a

fantasy that you're addicted to, that you fear the loss of,

or that you're not gaining. Now

that's interesting because I've worked with people with depression,

"clinical depression",

and many times their psychiatrists got them onto psychiatric drugs.

And I found that there were 15 most common

underlying unrealistic expectations or fantasies that people were dealing with.

And they had the fear of loss of those fantasies or the fear of gain of things

that would be nightmares. The compensated opposite. In other words,

anytime you expect another human being to be one sided,

a fantasy of people always being nice, never mean, positive, never negative,

kind, never cruel, giving, never taking, you know, generous, never stingy,

cooperative, never competitive, peaceful, never wrathful.

Anytime you have an unrealistic expectation on some human

they're going to let you down,

because there's no such thing as a human being that's one sided.

I'm not a nice person. I'm not a mean person.

I'm a human being with a set of values that if you support my values,

I can be nice as a pussycat. If you challenge my values,

I can be mean as a tiger. So anytime you have an unrealistic expectation,

which is a bit of a fantasy, which is something you seek,

you're going to have the fear of loss at that and you're going to have a fantasy

that's not able to be obtained.

And depression is going to be a compensation for that

unrealistic expectation.

I say that every time you have an unrealistic expectation like that,

you have anger and aggression, blame and betrayal, criticism and challenge,

despair and depression, desire to exit and escape, futility and frustration,

grouchiness and grief, hatred and hurt, and in a sense,

insanity and irritability.

I call those the ABCDEFGHI's of negativity,

which are a feedback to us to let us know that we're pursuing something that's

unrealistic.

We have an impulse towards that which we are seeking that we fear the loss of.

And whatever the opposite of that is,

when that individual has the opposite behavior,

we're going to fear the gain of that and that fear of that gain of that,

and the fear of loss of that fantasy that we're holding onto,

can lead to our frustration and our body's response called depression.

I'm not going to call depression an illness. I know that everybody,

a lot of people call it that, I'm not going to call it.

I'm going to call it a biological response to an unrealistic expectation that's

stored in the subconscious mind, that we're not always conscious of.

The next unrealistic expectation is to expect that other individual

to live in your values, not theirs.

Or you having an unrealistic expectation for them to live outside what they

value, which isn't going to happen.

Every decision that they make is going to be based on what they believe will

give them the greatest advantage over disadvantage at any one moment in time.

So if you expect them to live in your values and live outside their own values,

you're going to have the ABCDs of negativity and depression,

because you're expecting to be some fantasy, a fantasy that they can't live.

And anytime you have a fantasy,

you fear the loss of that and you fear the gain of its opposite again.

The third one is a combination of the two.

Now you have an unrealistic expectation on them to be positive without negative,

and to live in your values.

"You're supposed to read my mind and be the way I expect you to be." And this is

common in relationships, and of course, leads to depressive states. Now,

if you put all three of those together, you get a double whammy,

an unrealistic expectation on them to be one sided,

an unrealistic expectation for them to live in your values or outside their own

values. Number four,

an unrealistic expectation on yourself to be one sided.

You live in the delusion you're supposed to be a positive thinker all the time.

Always positive, never negative, always kind, never cruel, always giving,

never taking, always, you know, cooperative, never

never wrathful. Anytime you expect yourself to be a one-sided individual,

it's a delusion. There is no one-sided individuals.

The entire positive thinking mentality has screwed people up because it's made

them think that they're supposed to be one sided. It's childish.

It's an amygdala response. Our amygdala wants to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

So we sell the fantasy to people.

It's an opium of the masses of a one-sided world. Not going to happen.

Never has. It's not going to.

So you might as well ground yourself and grow up and face the reality that

there's two sides to life. In the process of doing that,

if you have an expectation on yourself to be always kind, never cruel,

always nice, never mean, always positive, never negative, always giving,

never taking, it's not going to last.

You might try it for an hour or two or a day or two,

but it's not going to be consistent.

So you're going to beat yourself up and then be depressed about your life's not

matching the fantasy you have.

And you're going to fear the loss of that fantasy and the gain of the opposite

of that fantasy. Every time you have a fantasy,

the opposite becomes the nightmare.

And you have the fear of loss of the fantasy and fear

that's sitting there. Then you have an unrealistic expectation, number five,

an unrealistic expectation on yourself to live outside your values in somebody

else's values. Well, when you maybe infatuated with somebody,

you meet some person on the street and you go, "oh my God.

I like this person." And you're infatuated with them.

You tend to inject some of their values into your life.

Try to live by their values temporarily and try to live outside your own,

but just give it a few weeks and eventually you'll say, "Hey,

I want my life back." You're not going to live outside your own values.

So anytime you expect yourself to be living in somebody else's values,

I'm amazed at how many people say they want to be financially independent,

but their values don't show that.

Their values show that they want immediate gratification and buying consumables

that depreciate in value.

Their values don't show that they want to invest methodically and patiently and

almost boringly into some asset accumulating system to build financial

independence. So anytime you expect yourself to live outside your own values,

you're going to have a fantasy that you're trying to live by that you're not

going to live by and you're going to be impressed. The ABCDs of negativity,

all those responses, anger and aggression, blame and betrayal,

all of those are symptoms that are actually letting you know,

you have an unrealistic expectation. And that's not a bad thing.

Those responses,

depression is actually a feedback to let you know that you have a complete

delusion about how you're expecting your life to be. Wake up.

Now in the process of doing it, you have a combination of those two.

An an unrealistic expectation on yourself to be positive without negative,

nice without mean, one sided, and to live outside your values.

So that's now the first three and the second three, that's six of them.

Number seven is all the above.

Now you're unrealistic on other people and you're unrealistic on yourself.

Now you go one step further,

you have an unrealistic expectation on the world in general,

the collective consciousness, even God in some cases,

some people anthropomorphize God, and make even God live in this collective,

and now you're expecting a one-sided world from the God,

some anthropomorphic deity that you think is going to protect you or something,

or people are supposed to be one sided.

You'll see very carefully in the global peace index that peace and war is

constantly balanced. And so if you expect a one-sided world,

you're going to be depressed.

And depression is letting you know that you have unrealistic expectations.

And then you're thinking, well, if you have a fantasy,

if you want this one-sided world,

the fear of loss of that is going to be depressing and the fear of gain of its

opposite again, is going to be depressing.

So you have an unrealistic expectation leading to that outcome.

The next one is the unrealistic expectation on the world in general,

or God to live in your values.

You've anthropomorphized some masculine or feminine deity and you now

thinking it's supposed to read your mind and give you what you want.

You pray for it to take care of all your problems to support your little

childish behaviors and basically not face reality.

So now you have a situation where you're thinking that somehow the world in

general is supposed to live in your values. I was amazed,

I spoke at UNESCO at the United Nations training center,

and I was amazed at some of the people that are going for United Nation delegate

positions had this fantasy,

people are supposed to be one sided and the world's supposed to live in your

values. You're going to have another delusion.

So now you can have the unrealistic idea that, "Okay,

whatever is important to me is the way the world's supposed to be,

that will make life peaceful." Delusional, not going to happen.

You'll find out in your own family,

you've got a brother or sister that's the opposite of you.

You'll find it in society that there's complimentary opposites. And it's needed,

because evolution demands a building and destroying and remodeling,

a neuroplasticity, a psycho plasticity, a biological plasticity,

a remodeling, adapting to new environments. So if you're not,

if the whole world was just stuck in your value system, it'd be Twilight zone.

You wouldn't want that.

So you have to have realistic expectation if you don't want to be depressed.

Depression is not your enemy.

Depression is a feedback to let you know you have unrealistic expectations on

life. Now let's go one step further.

You have now an expectation that the world's supposed to be living in your

values and it's supposed to be a one-sided and that's the next one.

And then you have another one that's all the above.

You're expecting other people to be that way.

You're expecting yourself to be one sided and live outside your values and now

you're expecting the world to do it. It's crazy. You compound those.

I've sat there with clinically depressed people and I have found that there's

inside those people are these unrealistic expectations.

And the biochemical imbalance is what they're blamed on.

So a pharmaceutical company wants you to believe that, and it may be true,

there may be biochemical imbalance there, but that's not necessarily causal.

That's correlated. Cause your biochemistry changes.

If a tiger jumped in a room and all of a sudden hit you in the room and came in

the room and scared you, your chemistry changes like that.

And if you've got subconsciously stored information that's imbalanced in your

mind, your chemistry is going to show that. That doesn't mean it's causal,

it just means that it's correlative.

And now you have an unrealistic expectation on mechanical objects.

I bet you've been peed off at an ATM machine or a car

not working the way you fantasize.

And if you expect it to always be one sided and not both sided,

or you expect it to read your mind and live in your values at the time you want

it, you're going to be upset.

And if you put all those together and you put ALL the things together,

welcome to depression.

Depression is a comparison to your current reality to an unrealistic expectation

about life. Now,

sometimes people are trained from mothers and fathers and preachers and teachers

and the morays and traditions and conventions of society that have moral

hypocrisies that they throw them on you about how life's supposed to be.

And that's the opium of the masses and it sells and disempowers people,

because it gives them false understanding about how life is.

I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to basically ground you and let you know that there's two sides to

life. I'm not, I don't try to be one sided.

I gave that up when I was 30 years old, I finally woke up to that reality.

I'm not a one-sided individual. I'm both sided.

Almost every imaginable trait I've found inside myself.

So I don't put unrealistic expectations on me to get rid of half of myself and

only be one-sided. It's a waste of time, wake up and see it.

Go monitor your life and you'll see you never got rid of any of those traits you

think you've been getting rid of and you never had to gain any of the other

traits. They're there all your life and you need all of it.

You want to love yourself, you've got to take them all in.

Not here to try to get rid of half of you or half of the world or half of

somebody else. You're going to be frustrated as hell.

And you're going to be depressed as heck if all of a sudden you're expecting the

whole world to be one sided or live in your values.

So I just want to address that because that's a lot of what depressions are.

And yes, those two things,

every time you infatuate with something and you fear its loss,

the infatuation with it creates dopamine and oxytocin and vasopressin and

serotonin and encephalon's and endorphins and certain chemical compounds that we

associated with seeking.

And if all of a sudden we see things that challenge our values,

and we don't want it to come near us,

we can be depressed about things that we don't want coming near us,

and that causes osteocalcin,

cortisol and norepinephrine and epinephrine and testosterone,

and these compounds get imbalanced because of our perception.

Like I said, the pharmaceutical industry loves to sell you the drug.

And if you don't want to be accountable, then thank God that's there.

But if you want to be accountable, you can change your perception.

I've been developing a method on that for years.

I've been doing it for thousands of people.

And I'm absolutely certain you can change your perception. You know,

the greatest discovery is that you can change your life by changing your

perceptions and attitudes of mind.

So depression doesn't have to be your reality. Depression is,

it's not something to run for a pill necessarily for.

It's about taking command of your life and put realistic expectations on

yourself and let your physiology do its job.

And watch what happens the moment you have realistic expectations.

The moment you find out what's really highest on your value,

the moment you set goals that are really, truly yours,

the moment you set objectives that are balanced,

the moment you have realistic expectations, your physiology will rally.

You'll rise to the top. You won't have time for depression.

You'll be too busy doing something that's inspiring your life.

And if you go out and make a difference and trying to help other people fulfill

their highest values, you won't have time for depression.

You'll be too busy serving people, that makes a difference. Now,

let me address quickly. I've got a few more minutes here.

Let me address something on anxiety.

Anxiety is a compounded phobia. So what does that mean?

Let's say you have a child and it sees its mother and father fighting.

And it's it's not even one years old, it's crawling.

And all of a sudden it sees the fighting it's sitting on the floor and it runs

and crawls and scampers off into it's room and hides under a bed,

and puts a pillow around it. It doesn't want to,

it closes it's ears and closes its eyes and it freezes,

and they yell and scream. Okay. The child then falls asleep that way.

And it's basically associated sound and sight with something that they perceived

as threatening, right? A challenge to their values.

And so what happens is the parents stop fighting. They go to bed,

the child's in bed now or under the bed.

And the next morning mom gets up. Daddy goes to work. They're fine.

They got over the thing. Mom now comes and takes you to the grocery store.

And then all of a sudden you're in the grocery store.

Mom's got you in the little, you know,

the little pushcart and all of a sudden you see in front of you,

a man that has blue jeans on and a white shirt, just like daddy did last night.

And as he's coming down the aisle,

you automatically either get in front of mommy and look over your shoulder at

it, to protect mommy, or you get behind mommy and protect yourself.

And so what happens is, the mom goes, "What's going on?

Why are you acting out?" Because your brain associated something of danger

with blue jeans and a white shirt, maybe brown hair and a mustache,

because your dad has that.

Now what happens your brain associates that so anytime you see something that's

associated with that, you might have a trigger that can trigger a response,

angst.

Now you go down the next aisle and that 'bad' guy passes by and your anxiety

goes away. and all of a sudden you're fine.

You turn down the next aisle and you see a guy with a yellow shirt now,

blue jeans, brown hair, brown mustache, and they have a mild response.

And mom wonders why are you acting out like this?

She's not seeing the correlation between what happened the night before,

because your brain saw, blue jeans, white shirt, brown hair, brown mustache,

associated with danger to mom and your life depended on mom.

So in the result of that,

you now have a sympathetic response that creates sympathetic neurotransmitters

that create the physiological responses and the fight or flight response.

In the process of doing it, you now have on the next aisle a yellow shirt,

which is not originally associated with it,

but because it's got blue jeans and brown hair,

you now put a secondary association, a compounded association with it.

Now you have a little milder response, but you have a response,

because the blue jeans and brown hair still there. Now you go down the next one,

now you see a red shirt, blue jeans, brown hair, brown mustache.

The same thing can occur. You go down the next aisle,

(and I'm making this up as you imagine),

go down the next aisle and you see now somebody with blue jeans,

white shirt, blonde hair, blonde mustache.

But now you have the blue jeans and blue,

the white shirt so you now have enough of a mild association where there's a

little bit of trigger that stimulates that a response. Now,

as you go through there,

you can stack up a series of associations over

time, compounded associations in the brain with the original event.

If you don't go back to the original event and neutralize the original event and

find out what was the upside of that,

because people have fighting in relationship, I've never seen a,

I've never heard of a family that doesn't have fights sometimes.

And when they have a fight, they get over it and life goes on most of the time.

So if a child lives in a fantasy,

it's supposed to have peace without war then it's going to not be prepared for

the realities of there's going to be conflicts at time.

And so in the process of doing it,

the child may have associated more drawbacks than benefits,

more pains than pleasures and fear is an assumption that you're about to get

more pain than pleasure. So if you have that and it frightens you,

and now you have other things that remind you of that, which frightened you,

those can compound and create secondary and tertiary and quaternary

associations,

that eventually any of those little stimuli can make

an anxiety, a little fear, in varying degrees.

And you can have a panic attack because of the secondary associations.

If you go back to the original event and go find out the positives of it,

find out how it served mom and find out how it helped you and find out the other

side of it and neutralize it.

I do that in the Breakthrough Experience that I teach every week,

I basically go through and show people how to take whatever they thought was so

terrible in their life and find out the other side to it.

Cause there's never a challenge without an opportunity.

There's never crisis without a blessing.

There's not a negative without a positive,

because there are no such things as one side events.

Unless you morally are rigid and can't grow up and finally face the truth about

life having both sides. When you can finally face both sides,

you can see both sides, then the event doesn't have any stress.

Then the secondary associations calm down and collapse.

You can either peel the onion by going to each one of those angsts and look and

find the blessings of it and the benefits of it and peel yourself back or go

back to the original event and to neutralize it. And

The anxiety is there letting you know that anything that you haven't loved and

appreciated and seen both sides of,

it's making sure you don't escape that and make sure you go back and redo that.

So your life is not filled with subconsciously stored baggage.

It's not a bad thing. Anxiety is not your enemy, necessarily.

Anxiety is letting you know that you've got some incomplete awareness over

there.

Cause anytime you're infatuated with something and you're conscious of the

upside and unconscious of the downside, you're not seeing what's there.

You've been infatuated with people before and then you finally dated them for a

period of time and "Oh,

they're not what I originally thought." That's because you were blind initially.

Your intuition was trying to whisper to you, you ignored it,

and you let your impulse and your fantasies overrule.

And then you eventually discovered, my God, they had both sides.

And the same thing. You have this terrible event and a day, a week, a month,

a year or five years later, you look back and you go, "Well,

thank God that occurred." So why have the wisdom of the ages with the aging

process when you can have the wisdom of the ages without it,

by looking right away and finding the other side to it.

Anything you don't see both sides to is stored in your subconscious mind and is

impulsively and instinctually seeking and avoiding and causing you to react,

200 milliseconds before you can even think. But the second you balance it,

you get to act, with thought without emotional reaction.

And that's where you have self-governance. If you don't,

if you don't go back and balance it out,

it's basically going to run your life until you do.

Anything that you haven't said thank you for is baggage, anything you can say,

thank you for is fuel. So if you see a drawback without a benefit,

that's your choice. That's your imbalanced perspectives.

It had nothing to do with them, nothing to do with anything outside you,

it was a perception. You have control of your perception, decisions,

and actions. And if you balance out that perception,

it no longer has a cause for the anxiety. I've been doing that for years.

And in the Breakthrough Experience, I teach people exactly how to do that.

It's not that difficult to do. It's just being accountable.

And most people don't want to be accountable. They want to run their story,

their little therapist and go over and over and over run that little story and

dramatize that story so they can get affection and attention and listened to.

That's foolish.

What's wise is actually being accountable to see both sides of your life and

quit living in fantasies that life's supposed to be one sided.

It's not going to be. It never will be, never has been. So grow up,

face the realities of both and watch what happens in your life.

You'll liberate yourself from a lot of baggage and bondage and angst and

fears. Again,

fear is an assumption you're about to experience more drawbacks than benefits.

And the opposite of fear or phobia is philia.

Philia or fantasy or infatuation is an assumption you're about to experience

more positives than negatives. Neither one of them are real.

You're going to have both sides to it.

You're never going to find somebody you infatuate without finding out they have

downsides.

You're never going to find somebody you resent without finding out they have

upsides. If you discuss both sides and discover both of them, you mature.

If not, you're going to hold onto that stuff. It's going to store in your mind.

It's going to run your life.

It's going to make you seek and avoid before you even have time to think. So,

how about that? I covered a lot of ground there.

So I just wanted to let you know that your fear and your phobia and your

anxiety or whatever, it doesn't have to be your enemy.

You can use it as a guide to guide your life, to balance out your perception,

put realistic expectations on things and the same thing with depression.

So that's my presentation for this this week.

I hope that startled you a bit and kind of made you think for a second.

I just want to let you know about something that can also help you in this

process. The practical applications now.

I have a masterclass called Balancing Emotions.

It's an on demand masterclass you can get, and if you sign up for it now,

and this is about how to balance your emotions,

how to prevent the very thing that we just talked about,

how to take command of your life and be the master of your life instead of

letting things around you run your life. You don't want to be extrinsically run.

You want to be intrinsically driven. But this masterclass

Balancing Emotions can help you do it. The process on how to do that.

And if you sign up for it now,

you'll receive a free gift called Awaken Your Astronomical Vision,

which is about expanding your vision and giving yourself permission to do

something more extraordinary in your life.

You're only going to grow based on the size of your vision.

If you don't have an astronomical vision, don't expect a global effect.

And today with the internet we're global and someday solar,

but in the process of doing it, this program,

Awakening Your Astronomical Vision, I'm absolutely certain is a mindblower,

listen to it. You're going to listen to it five or six times. I promise you.

And go listen to that and sign up for the program, the demand, the masterclass,

Balancing Emotions., They'll help you.

They'll help you break through these anxieties, these depressions,

and make you kind of ground yourself about reality,

about human beings and help you break some fantasies about how life's supposed

to be.

Remember when you appreciate the way life is and not keep comparing it to a

fantasy of how it's supposed to be, you can appreciate your life.

It's pretty amazing life if you do. Anyway, this is Dr. Demartini,

until next week,

have a fantastic week and just know that that no matter what happens in your