IT'S NOT ALWAYS DEPRESSION

IT’S NOT ALWAYS DEPRESSION is a story-driven book that challenges the way “depression and anxiety” are now ubiquitously diagnosed and explores the most cutting-edge work in psychotherapy today. Hendel presents a method based on the most current neuroscience and the "Triangle of Conflict," a schematic road map to healing psychological suffering by resolving conflicts between our core emotions, inhibitory emotions, and the defensive behaviors we develop as a result. This method enhances a person’s coping skills and resilience, and augments the brain’s natural ability to adapt to life with all its challenges.

Weaving in stories from her patients as examples, Hendel organizes the book to mirror what happens in a psychotherapeutic treatment, beginning with defenses, such as changing the subject to avoid intimacy or emotion, to being judgmental, to self-harming and the like. Next, Hendel sheds light on the inhibitory emotions of shame, guilt and anxiety, elucidating how those are modified and transformed. The third section examines core emotions: sadness, anger, fear, joy, excitement, disgust, and sexual excitement, and readers will learn how to be with their own core feelings in a constructive way that feels good. At the end of the journey is Core State, an undefended calmness in which our authentic and true self is front and center, tapping into the best of humanity. Hendel illustrates the 7 C’s that characterize this state: calmness, clarity, curiosity, creativity, compassion, connection and confidence.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel is a certified psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, published in the New York Times and professional journals including the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy and The AEDP Journal: Transformance. She is also the Mental Health Consultant for the Emmy Award winning television show Mad Men on AMC. Hilary received her BA in Biochemistry from Wesleyan University, and an MSW from Fordham University. She lives in New York City with her husband, and has two daughters and two stepdaughters.