FEATURED AUDIO FILE: To listen to Dr. Parker Wilson's public talk, offered in Denver, CO, on the topic of Working with Loss: the Wisdom of a Broken Heart (20 minutes), please click here. 
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"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."
- Dr. Carl Rogers
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Many psychologists in Denver promote themselves as treatment providers for depression and anger. Many clinical psychologists, although claiming expertise, are actually ill equipped to treat these particular problems. Most graduate schools in the United States do not offer specific courses in the most modern and effective treatment modalities for depression and chronic anger. Because this is true, please be very diligent when choosing which psychology in Denver is the right one for you. 

Dr. Parker Wilson has been treating depression and anger, in its various forms, for many years. Dr. Wilson uses the most effective techniques of modern cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness based cognitive therapy. Using these techniques, Dr. Wilson's clinical effectiveness (with and without medication) for minor depression is over 95%; with major depression (again with and without medication) is over 70%. For chronic anger problems (without co-morbid psychiatric problems), Dr. Wilson enjoys a clinical effectiveness of over 95%. To schedule a consultation with Dr. Parker Wilson, please click here.  

Depression and anger often walk hand in hand in the sense that they frequently co-create each other. Depression and anxiety often create each other as well, but anxiety is a dynamic worthy of its own coverage. To learn more about anxiety and impulse disorders, please click here. Many psychologists in Denver do not understand this, and so the therapies they offer are ineffective. We tend to be very uncomfortable with our emotions. Our discomfort with certain emotions, across time, can often transform into a full blown intolerance of certain emotions. When we can not tolerate our own emotional experience of life, often the habitual alternative is to seek an exit door. 

First let's turn to anger.

Let's look at how the emotional experience of helplessness and loss create anger. The feeling of loss could be triggered by anything: the death of a loved one, a serious illness, a lay off, the end of a romantic relationship or a marriage, etc. For example, let's say that someone has just been told that they have cancer. In this case, the loss is of the person's basic sense of health and perhaps the impending loss of life itself (a loss of one's future). What does someone feel after being told that they have cancer? They would certainly feel loss, fear, and grief. There would also be a strong sense of helplessness underlying these feelings, perhaps even a sense of overwhelm and panic. 

When human beings feel helpless and overwhelmed, we typically become angry. Anger feels powerful; in the moment, anger feels like the opposite of helplessness. Think about that and analyze your own experience of anger. I believe you will see it. We like this illusion of power. As seen in the picture below, we use anger and its illusion of power to exit the uncomfortable feelings of helplessness and loss.           


For anger to sustain itself for longer periods of time, however, it needs an object of blame. For anger to continue to exist in our mind, someone or something has to be at fault for our suffering. This means that we must superimpose blame onto a person, place, or thing. For some people, the object of blame is their own sense of self, but the principle is the same. To stay angry, we must tell ourselves a story about the suffering (loss, fear, helplessness, and grief), and that story must star us as the victim of some misguided, unjust, or evil person, place, or thing.

The trouble with using anger and blame as an exit door is that the exit is only temporary and always insubstantial. Anger and blame don't change anything, in fact they only make the mental situation worse. In our example of the person being told he has cancer, perhaps he will blame God for the "unfairness of life" or his parents for his "bad genes." This will make him feel bitter and resentful, and these emotions will only fuel the anger more. All the while, the person remains disconnected from his authentic experience of life; he remains disconnected from everything he is actually supposed to be feelings: loss, fear, helplessness, and grief. In this way, he is stunting his own evolution and making his suffering worse.   

Now things often accelerate. Once we have become angry and we have established our object of blame, now it becomes easy to get aggressive with our object. Now we can justify our own negative and aggressive words and behaviors with our "righteous anger." In our example of the person being told he has cancer, perhaps he will act out against God for the "unfairness of life." Perhaps he will stop praying and going to church in protest. Perhaps he will begin cursing God to his friends and family, which may encourage them to cultivate bitterness and resentment. Perhaps he will take his resentment out on some of God's children by being chronically irritable, critical, and impatient.        

But even with an object of blame, we can not stay angry and aggressive for very long. Eventually we come crashing back down into the core emotional experiences that we were trying to exit in the first place: helplessness, grief, and loss. And what does the helplessness feel like once we crash back down into it? It seems to have become more intense and entrenched somehow. This is clinical depression.

And because everything becomes easier with repetition, we are also more prone to exit the uncomfortable feelings again. This is how a more serious depression typically forms across months and years: entrenched and intense feelings of loss, fear, helplessness, and grief (fueled by the active cultivation of anger, blame, and aggression) that have never been properly acknowledged, worked with, and worked through.     

When we habitually and compulsively exit our own experience of life, we cut ourselves off from the natural properties of the mind. We prevent the mind from resolving, evolving, and healing itself. No one can escape this life without experiencing some disappointment, loss, grief, sadness, fear, and loneliness. There is nothing necessarily wrong with those emotions. There is nothing necessarily to fix just because you are experiencing these "afflictive" emotions. When we do not have the courage to accept helplessness and loss as they are - on their terms - when we just automatically become reactive and habitually exit these emotions by engaging with anger, blame, and aggression, we actually make ourselves sick. We become depressed.

So what is the alternative to habitually and compulsively cultivating depression and anger? This is the most important question to ask all psychologists in Denver that could become your treatment provider. All clinical psychologists and other psychotherapists incapable of answering this question should be eliminated as possible treatment providers for you and your family. Dr. Wilson's psychology in Denver has a definite and effective answer to this question.

The alternative is to learn to wake up. Becoming aware of how our mind is functioning, in any given present moment, is always the starting place. Waking up begins with recognizing that a mental problem (an afflictive mental habit, a compulsion, an automatic tendency to exit, etc ) exists. Waking up begins with recognizing that our perceptions and priorities might need to be re-evaluated and recreated because they are causing us pain. Waking up begins with noticing that our attitude towards our own mental discomfort (towards our own experience of suffering) is adversarial. Waking up begins with noticing how we pour fuel on the fire and how we thereby make our suffering so much worse than it ever needed to be. Waking up begins with recognizing that if we are experiencing pain, confusion, grief, stress, helplessness, powerlessness, insecurity, vulnerability, or fear - that doesn't necessarily mean that something is wrong! Nothing necessarily needs to be fixed! The lesson is found is learning to cultivate the courage and mindfulness necessary to stay with our own minds, not in continuing to compulsively exit.

Waking up begins with awareness, becoming more mindful, because we can not fix a problem until we know that the problem is. When my clients first begin mindfulness practice, it is like trying to see the bottom of a beautiful lake while a storm is raging on the surface. The furious waves constantly disturb and distort their perspective. They are tossed about, disoriented, and they feel overwhelmed. With this storm raging, it is impossible to see through the surface of this lake; in fact, all they can clearly experience is the intensity of the frenzied waves bashing them about! All these churning, intense waves represent your unhealthy priorities, your unhealthy concerns, your inauthentic exiting of your own experience, and your cultivation of deadly emotions and destructive behaviors. All these chaotic waves smashing into you are nothing more than your untrained mind (your unwise thoughts, emotions, compulsions, judgments, and beliefs).

Most of us are so used to this raging, internal storm (most of us have so few moments of mental peace, quiet, and clarity as a frame of reference) that we simply believe that this storm is just the way we are. In other words, most of us believe that we ARE that raging storm inside our heads. We believe that we ARE the mental chaos and compulsivity we experience; we are on auto-pilot; we are sleep-walking; we believe that we ARE all the disturbing things that we think, feel, say and do.

And what if you could just wake up? Would you even want to? Would you even think it possible? What if you didn't have to exit into anger and aggression; what if you didn’t have to identify with and become anger and aggression? What if you could learn to watch yourself experiencing anger? Have you ever noticed yourself thinking or feeling something? Have you ever said to yourself, “Man, I am really feeling angry right now?” One of my teachers called this “catching yourself in the act.” This is basic introspection. This is basic waking up! These are the baby-steps of both mindfulness and psychotherapy.

This is how one becomes mentally healthy: one becomes vividly aware of one’s own disturbing thoughts and emotions, one learns to abide with them (to stop getting “all caught up with,” and then exiting them), and then one learns to work with and transform those disturbing thoughts and emotions into meaning, inspiration, connection, authenticity, compassion, and purpose. This is the path and the goal of modern psychotherapy.

To become mentally healthy is to transcend living simply (and futilely) to avoid pain and maximize pleasure and mundane concerns. To become mentally healthy is to live deliberately in the present moment (the only true reality available to us). To become mentally healthy is to create meaning and authenticity in our lives; it is to stop disconnecting by indulging our destructive and unhealthy habits, thoughts, and emotions. Being mentally healthy is to move beyond your exit doors, to voluntarily close them, and to have the courage to stay with your own experience.

When we become mindful, we stop being so self-absorbed and stuck; we begin to live beyond just avoiding our own sense of fear, anger, compulsion, and sadness; we stop exiting and begin staying; we begin to live beyond life and death themselves. In such a mind, psychological flourishing, peace, stability, clarity, and balance are naturally cultivated. We can see more clearly, and thus we can make this life truly meaningful and rich.

Psychologists in Denver who do not understand these dynamics mistreat their patients. Any valid psychology in Denver must provide serious and effective tools for a client to work with their own emotions. All qualified clinical psychologists who treat depression will be able to offer such tools to their clients.   

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If you are interested in scheduling a consultation appointment, please contact Dr. Wilson today.

If this material has been stimulating, please consider purchasing Dr. Wilson's latest online mindfulness seminar.