What keeps a low mood in place
"I don't even have a reason." Of everything people say to me, this is one of the most common. Behind it sits the suspicion that you should be able to talk yourself out of it. You can't. A low mood doesn't need a reason you could point to — it just needs a handful of patterns that got to run undisturbed for long enough.
The loops that keep the state going
In more than ten years of practice, I keep meeting the same ones on this issue.
The first is learned helplessness: the expectation that nothing you do will change anything. It doesn't come from one single experience, but from a string of them — and it confirms itself, because you stop trying in the first place.
The second is pessimism as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're sure it will go wrong, you go into it differently. And when it then goes wrong, well, of course it did.
The third is rumination, which starts in the evening and is still there the next morning. It feels like thinking, but it isn't, because it never arrives anywhere.
The fourth is withdrawal. You cancel because the energy isn't there, and afterward you have even less. Add exhaustion from work, and this overlaps with burnout more than it feels like it does.
And the fifth sits underneath all the others: a self-image that turns every mistake into a verdict. Not "that went wrong," but "that's who I am." Often there's an old fear attached to it too — of failing, of the future, of what other people think.
Why understanding alone changes nothing
Most of my clients can explain all of this to me themselves. They've read up on it, thought about it, some even keep lists. And they still lie awake at half past eleven, running through the day. An argument moves the unconscious about as much as a weather forecast moves the weather.
The moment it feels different
That's why the most important part of a first session is rarely what we talk about — it's what you feel while we're doing it. Often, something settles in within the first few minutes of trance: calm, warmth, a bit of lightness. Something many people haven't had in months.
That sounds small. It isn't. Because the most stubborn belief on this issue isn't "I feel bad" — it's "there's no other way." You can't argue that one away. You can only disprove it, yourself, in your own body.
Backward, present, forward
From there, we work in three directions, usually not cleanly separated.
Backward: we look at where the sentences about yourself were learned. Not to assign blame, but because a belief you look at again loses its sense of being simply obvious.
Present: we adjust the filter. Your unconscious is constantly deciding what it even shows you, and with a low mood it's set to confirm what you already believe. We open it wider.
Forward: we build a future you can picture again. Not as a goal on a list, but as something that's already felt real once, in trance.
None of this makes the hard days disappear. It makes them separate — instead of all running together.
