I'm screwed up, can you help?

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Question: I'm all screwed up. I have been diagnosed as obsessive/compulsive and bi-polar. Since my diagnosis, in spite of my medication, I feel depressed all the time. Can you help?

Answer: I am not a doctor so I cannot give you that kind of help. However, I can give you some information so you can help yourself.

The first thing I would suggest is that you work on removing those "crippling labels" (obsessive/compulsive, bi-polar) from your mind. Those labels weaken rather than strengthen you.

Once you have removed those labels, chances are, you will see that what has been labeled as a mental health problem is nothing more than a problem with understanding your own feelings and emotions. Once you understand your feelings, those problems will dissolve naturally. Of course my approach is too simple to please most people but it might work for you.

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Author Note: I speak from personal experience on this one. From the time I was a little kid, until I was in my thirties, people did their very best to label me as "this or that". I knew who I was, even as a small child, and I would have no part of the "labeling process," for I knew how crippling labels were. Once we accept a label an "authority figure" places on us, without questioning it, we are done, gone, finished, kaput.

From that point on , even if the "authority figure" who labeled us is no longer in our life, they control our destiny and we do not. Labels, acting like STOP SIGNS, stop people dead in their track from thinking more deeply about what is troubling them. As a result, they can never solve the problems that trouble them because of the "labels" placed on them earlier in life.

As an example, I worked with a man who was so crippled up by a label placed on him, earlier in his life, that he was on the verge of committing suicide when he met me.

He had a normal sounding name, Alan Samuel Smith. However, when he was young and very vulnerable (the beginning of puberty), some school bully realized the initials in his name spelled ASS. This bully began calling him ASS all the time....

Soon all the other kids started calling him ASS and worse names too. From that point on, the self-image the man developed for himself was that he was an ASS and there was nothing he could do about it.

This crippling label, that was cruelly placed upon him, in his teenager years, affected his relationships with women, his job performance and it made life hell for him as an adult. As silly as this all my sound to you, that's how much damage a label can do to someone who accepts it, without questioning it, like this man did.

Alan was very fearful of giving up that crippling label until he met me.. The reason for his fear was because, as much as he hated that label, he didn't have a clue as to who he would be without that label.

After working with me,he discovered who he truly was; a powerful, magnificent, lovable one of a kind human being. With this discovery, he let go of his ASS (the label ASS that is) and cried in my office for over an hour.. I had the opportunity to see Alan weeks later at a meeting of a local civic organization and he wasn't the same man any more. In fact, he had become one of the happiest men I had ever met...

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When the solution is simple, God is answering. - Albert Einstein