Heart Bypass Surgery and Depression

Heart bypass surgery and depression can be a traumatic event, but it can also be a door to our deepest talents and energies, if we look for it within ourselves.

Welcome to our website. If you are here because you or your loved one has gone through this , we want to offer you the encouragement you deserve. You will walk in your journey much easier if you can see and understand fully the path on which you are traveling.

Heart bypass surgery and depression oftentimes go hand in hand. We will first look at the organ itself in all its wonder, and then we will examine its relation to depression and or anxiety. To begin, we must look beyond the medical dimensions of your heart, for it is spiritual as well as biological, in nature. Meta physicians say the heart is the source of our love. We will look at the heart and how God connected it to you metaphysically, and its higher order role in your life. It is far more than the organ that pumps your blood, for it is the source of your spiritual strength as well as your physical strength.

When you were young, and you had your first crush on someone, this muscle actually felt the experience along with your brain. When you become sad, this same muscle mass itself feels the heaviness. When you love a place and wish to return, this organ is the source of that longing to return, as in, ‘I left my heart in Ireland.’ The heart, not the brain, is the source of all of our love, dreams, and desires. The yearnings of our life that motivate us come from the this wonderful muscle itself. This magical organ that pumps your blood is actually an antenna to the source of love that drives the universe. Your heart is your source of your identity and of your talents and thusly, if you follow its promptings, your destiny while here on earth.

The muscle of this organ demonstrates this ability to connect outside of itself in one medical example. One clinical experience proving this, happened when doctors removed part of a heart muscle with biopsy for testing. The removed piece, kept in life sustaining medium beat at a constant rate. At one point observed by medical personnel, the removed piece began an accelerated beating for no reason. Confused, the medical personnel recorded the time and rate of beat.

Subsequent to that, they discovered the heart patient at that moment had undergone a treadmill test in another medical facility on the far side of that town. Somehow, the removed piece was still in constant communication with its original organ, miles away.

How this works nobody knows. We may alter this connection temporarily with bypass surgery and depression results. Doctors have reported patients after transplants that somehow knew the name, age, sex and sometimes cause of death of their donors simply through intuition. This explains briefly the complexity and magic of the heart within you.

Now let us look at what happens after heart surgery. Statistics show that depression and anxiety experiences are common to patients between ten and fifty percent of the time, with a mean of about thirty percent. There are medical reasons for this and psychological reasons as well. The medical reasons have to do with chemically inducible changes for which medicines can help, such as thinning of the blood. These medicines, which include beta-blockers, them selves cause the experience of depression.

The psychological reasons for the depression are due to the organismic trauma of the surgery, as well as our subconscious responses, which are two separate areas. Heart surgery is into the deepest and most personal part of us. We have a duality, our bodies, and our minds, in which both sides of us are capable of expressing its own feelings, separate from each other. Both of our centers of conscious for body and mind is our heart.

The organism of our human body, by its very self-protective nature does not like intrusions into it. On rare and severe events such as this, our bodies express its feelings to us outside of our subconscious feelings in its own biological way. Our bodies get upset and depression and anxiety may well result from such an organismic intrusion.

On the subconscious side, heart bypass surgery and depression will result when we must embrace our own mortality. Heart surgery procedures are very safe and are routine today. It is no longer on the far frontiers of medical exploration as it was decades ago. However, the perceived experience of coming close to death, and having our selves opened up on a table by mortals is both frightening and humbling. It brings us face to face with how finite we truly are.

We are in more ways than we think, dependent on the forces around us. If we feel these forces are hostile, and we do not trust our environment, then this is terrifying indeed. If we have mistrust of our parents and unresolved pain from our childhood, then we will have mistrust of life and little faith in the circumstances around us.

This is the true source of most of our depression, and much of the reason we may feel anxiety. Unresolved emotional issues from our childhood are the cause of ninety percent of heart bypass surgery and depression. It is very important for you to know that what happened in your past directly controls your depression now.

Your sense of your role and significance in the world around you comes from your childhood. Under normal circumstances, you will have no reason to question your role or your significance, but a heart surgery changes all that. God tests our trust in the world around us for a reason.

We experience Anxiety and depression after heart surgery because we are failing the test of that trust. God ultimately sends us here to do three things only, and those three things are to grow and to learn, and by doing that, to serve, in that order.

There are positive steps we can take to correct our depression, and ease our anxiety. Counseling from a therapist is not always possible. Fortunately, another weapon works just as well, and is much more readily available. Seeking out a close friend, and talking about the major things from your childhood; the fears, the dreams you had, the traumatic events you experienced, and perhaps the lack of a parent figure when a child, will help. You do not need to justify the fears or events as being rational or not, for that does not matter.

What does matter is that whatever it was, it was important and significant to you. There is no such thing as a ‘childish fear’ or a feeling to ‘be ashamed of,’ for those fears and feelings are you. You must share those feelings and know that they are part of you, and that part exists for a reason.

Talking to significant others, while they understand our feelings of our past, is the most therapeutic thing we can do. There is nothing more healing and uplifting than to get something off your chest that you never realized was bothering you. Find that ‘thing,’ put it into words and share it, for in the sharing, lies the healing and in the healing, lies the empowering.

When God made the animals, God brought all the animals to Adam for Adam to name. What is the meaning of that parable, and why did not God name all the animals himself? God could have easily enough, but he wanted us to grow, and to overcome our own obstacles, after all, that is why he gave them to us in the first place. From our perspective, all things in life, if we can define it and name it, we can claim control over it. If we can describe what is bothering us in our own words, we have dominion over that thing. In therapy, we have a saying, ‘if we can name it we can claim it.’

If no one is around or a suitable listener, we do not have to share our feelings with others as we reflect on our past, to gain benefits. The sharing does not necessarily have to happen between other people and us, to resolve our own issues. Healing can come just in our own realizations. Keep a journal and write down those memories and thoughts in present tense, in the magnitude and words that you feel them. When you begin to write, in any structure that is meaningful to you, more things will come to mind. As things come to the surface, record them, for in the writing down of something is the gaining from which is written down.

Experiencing depression after a heart bypass surgery and depression need not be a permanent condition for you, but only a temporary classroom for lessons about yourself. That is what God intends, for he loves you and wants only your continued strength and growth. Once you have learned the lessons, the classroom will go away and a more empowered life will await.

For more on this subject please consider our first in series book Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind. In it, we take you through your spiritual journey back home to your Original Self. We talk about God's purpose behind that soul’s journey, as we follow our heart’s dreams to our ultimate destiny. We answer many questions about selfishness, prosperity, psychotherapy, and finding our dreams and happiness. We share much about boundaries. We also talk about the spiritual controls we have within to bring our good to us. Those controls are our Sincerity Switch, Spontaneity Switch, and lastly our Feelings and Dreams Switch.

Thank you for visiting us and please keep in touch, sharing your trials and your victories with us. We promise to answer personally every Email that we receive.

Shayne and Lori North in Aurora, Colorado

Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind The Book

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