Читать книгу The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements - Julia Ross - Страница 41

If you have low serotonin levels, you are likely to be experiencing feelings of impatience, edginess, and unreasonable irritability. For example, violent criminals have much lower serotonin than do nonviolent criminals. And while you may not be given to violent rages, were you prone to tantrums as a child? Is anger affecting your relationships now?

Most (but not all) people with subnormal brain serotonin do feel irritable too often. Whether they’re able to control the expression of their angry feelings is another matter that may relate to how low their serotonin levels have fallen. For example, some of our female clients become much more irritable, even violent, during PMS than at any other time of the month.

One of the worst aspects of sapped serotonin is how it can harm your relationships. I’ve had many clients whose marriages improved dramatically as they became less irritable and critical. Other relationships can heal as well. My client Clara was appalled by her outbursts at her young son, because she had been badly abused by her own father. She had never forgiven her father, though he had mellowed as he’d gotten older. She had always seen him as sadistic but felt that she was in an entirely different category, because she knew that she loved her son. I asked her to consider that her father’s behavior, like hers, might have been involuntary—the impersonal expression of a malfunctioning brain. This relieved her of some of the hurt and anger that she still harbored toward her father. Although he will probably never apologize to her and fully mend their relationship, her new perspective on his past behavior has helped.

If you have been harmed by a parent’s or sibling’s irrational anger, dealing with the same kinds of feelings in yourself can be a very bitter frustration. Understanding the brain chemistry of anger can be a powerful force for healing old family wounds and putting an end to the wounding pattern.

I’ve been intimidated by my own angry clients at times. A real standout was a 16-year-old giant brought in by his mother, who adored him but cowered in the corner of my office in our first session while I tried to figure him out. Since he sulked and snarled much of the first hour, it wasn’t easy. But I finally got enough information out of the two of them to confirm that his disposition included depression, insomnia, and low self-esteem, along with chronic irritability. He’d been in an outpatient counseling program for a year, because he’d been caught with marijuana at school. As a result, he’d tried to stop using marijuana, but he hadn’t been able to resist the mood boost that it gave him. His mom thought we might be able to help get him back on track. After gleaning this information, I consulted with one of our nutritionists and gave him 2 capsules of 5-HTP. About ten minutes later, he began to smile and actually volunteer information about himself. He wasn’t aware of the extent of the change (he usually felt that his anger was everyone else’s fault), but his mother was thrilled by it. She recognized that her true son was emerging from the hell that serotonin deficiency had created for them both. Note: There are certain kinds of extremely angry behavior that seem to have more to do with imbalances in the minerals copper, zinc, manganese, or other nutrients in the body than with serotonin levels. I recommend the book Depression-Free Naturally, by Joan Mathews-Larson, if your anger does not dissolve upon using the supplements recommended in this book.