The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook For Depression: Using Acceptance & Commitment Therapy To Move Through Depression & Create A Life Worth Living (Includes Cd)

Description

There are hundreds of books on the market that try to help readers "overcome" or "put a stop to" depression. But what if depression isn't a "thing" to be gotten rid of? What if depression is a behavior that, in the context of the life of someone who is depressed, serves an important function or acts as a signal that something needs to change? Learning to understand the function and interpret the signal of depression, then, would be a much more important goal than finding out how to simply make it go away. Living well even with feelings of depression would be a more productive, and probably more attainable, goal. This workbook marks a major development in the treatment of depression. Based on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), this book offers a new approach to depression. The central idea is that feelings of depression are not problems in themselves. What is a serious problem is the avoidance of pleasurable, productive activities. At first, depression may set the sufferer up for this avoidance, but sooner or later the process becomes a cycle, and the avoidance behaviors start causing more depressed feelings. When readers use the techniques in this book to evaluate their own experiences of depression, they will find out how to make changes that may or may not decrease their depressed feelings but will most certainly enrich and improve their total life experience. Includes CD with guided imagery & mindfulness exercises.