FACEBOOK.COM/WDDTYAUNZ ISSUE 01 | AUG/SEP 2019 | WDDTY 77
ALTERNATIVESBy that time, Sofia, a French academic living in
Copenhagen with three master’s degrees in cultural
anthropology and linguistics, had given up hope of
finding any answers and had accepted that she would
just have to live with depression for the rest of her life.
“I had been dealing with depression most of
my life since childhood, and I had tried just about
everything,” she says. “I had been on different kinds
of antidepressants, I had gone to psychiatrists,
psychotherapists, psychologists, art therapists.”
Despite being married with a 13-year-old son, Sofia’s
depression was very severe and debilitating; she was
suicidal much of the time and had reached a point of
giving up. “I had accepted my lot; this was how it was
going to be,” she says. She began to feel as though she
were somehow built differently from other people, and
didn’t have the same skills to survive life.
“And then I saw a TED talk by [RTT creator] Marisa
Peer that blew me away, because she had a different way
of approaching depression. She talked about how your
mind is geared to keep you alive. Its job is not to keep
you happy, but to keep you surrounded by thoughts that
are familiar. So much of it resonated with me.”
Sofia frantically read everything she could about
RTT and a week later booked a session online with a
therapist. As there were no practitioners in Denmark,
she found someone in Australia, Kerryn Bolton, who
looked kind and welcoming.
First, they held a preparation session via Skype, where
Kerryn did a short hypnosis on Sofia. Immediately, she
says, “I felt a surge of hope as if there are some things I
don’t know in my mind that are keeping me here, as if I
have been doing this to myself unknowingly.”suffered from crippling
depression and suicidal
thoughts for more than
25 years and had tried everything conventional medicine,
psychiatry and many other therapies had to offer, but to
no avail.
So when she heard about a modality called Rapid Transformational
TherapyTM (RTT)—a hybrid of hypnotherapy and psychotherapy—
that claimed to cure people of practically any issue within one to three
sessions, she was initially very skeptical.
This followed with a full session. Kerryn helped
Sofia revisit her past and the reason for her depression
emerged: “I discovered I had suffered traumatic abuse
before the age of two. There was no way I would have
ever known without regression. Once that came out,
so many puzzle pieces connected and made sense. It
validated my years of struggle, because there finally was
an ‘explanation.’”
The depression lifted
instantly. “It felt very
miraculous!” says Sofia. “I left
the session and went for a walk
in the park, and I was skipping
and feeling elated and happy.”
Not all the negative thinking
disappeared, but something
felt very different, because Sofia
could now recognize when
she was doing it, almost like
an objective observer. “I could
instantly notice my thoughts,
whereas before I felt completely
powerless over them.
“I would think, ‘I am doomed,
my life is never going to get any
better,’ and suddenly I noticed
that worry. Or I’d notice when I was thinking, ‘I am
walking in the park, I am happy, but I bet the phone is
going to ring now with some bad news and mess it up.’”
Normally, Sofia would have been overwhelmed by
these negative thoughts, but this new ability to observe
her own thinking processes enabled her to push the
thoughts away.Sofia
Megzari
Immediately
I felt a surge of hope
as if there are some things
I don’t know in
my mind that are keeping
me here,
as if I have been doing
this to myself
unknowingly