Читать книгу The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements - Julia Ross - Страница 39

Like most psychotherapists, I have spent many long hours struggling to help people with shyness and low self-esteem. I have usually started with assertiveness training and backed it up with a deep exploration of the past and present circumstances that might be contributing to a lack of confidence. My female clients have hated their bodies. My male clients were more likely to doubt their ability to be competent on the job. All of them were much too hard on themselves, with frequent inner self-scoldings and unnecessary guilt or shame. Sound familiar? The trouble was that psychotherapy didn’t always help. Self-critical thoughts and feelings often continued to dog my clients, no matter how hard we worked. I couldn’t understand it.

But when those same clients changed their diets and began using pro-serotonin supplements, something amazing happened—as their serotonin levels rose, so did their self-confidence. One of the most dramatic transformations in self-esteem I’ve ever seen involved Fleur, a jazz musician who had been a bulimic for fifteen years. Research confirms that bulimics are low in serotonin and that they stay marginally low even in recovery, which is why their thoughts and moods tend to continue to be so negative and why they so often relapse.

Fleur was in psychotherapy and went to Overeaters Anonymous meetings regularly, but she’d been unable to stop bingeing, purging, and overexercising. Her self-esteem was completely tied to the size of her thighs. She was measuring her thighs with a tape measure several times a day and taking desperate steps, like abusing laxatives, if she found the numbers going up. We immediately designed a supplement protocol to rebuild her nutrient-stripped system.

When she came back the next week, she reported feeling much better and being free of her urges to binge and purge. Then I asked her, “What about the tape measure?” She looked blank for a minute, then a shocked expression came over her face and she answered, “I completely forgot about that. I haven’t done it all week!”

This example makes a point that is especially poignant to me—Fleur had been convinced that she was just an ugly, inadequate mess at the core. But the real Fleur was able to blossom into her true self with the correction in serotonin chemistry that a few nutrient supplements could provide. Once Fleur’s brain chemistry was corrected, she became much more active and productive in therapy, too. Until then, she’d just been going over and over the same senseless feelings of self-hate and the same empty body image issues that her low serotonin had forced on her. She was actually a very strong, positive woman, who easily learned to assert herself appropriately when her biochemical confidence was restored by certain amino acids, the basic supplements, and her good-mood foods.

Are You Overwhelmed by False Guilt? Do you feel guilty too often? Even when you’ve done nothing wrong, do you feel that you have? If your own behavior does get out of line, do you get upset out of all proportion? Because many low-serotonin sufferers condemn themselves without a trial, it’s no wonder that violent suicides are just as likely as violent crimes to be associated with low serotonin levels. Raising your serotonin levels will leave you with a healthy conscience, not a toxic one.