POWER OR DEPRESSION is an essay that was inspired by the author's selfhelp guide 'Macht oder Ohnmacht', originally written in German language. The essay points out the historical roots of abuse and patriarchal society's systematic breeding of depression as something like a cultural disease. However, the author does not stay with the analysis what depression is and how it is systematically bred by our culture, but he shows practical ways to get free from the cultural trap so as to find a way to personal liberation and creative realization. His approach to healing the abuse pattern is mainly focused upon establishing a strong identity, built on soul values, and realizing a high level of personal autonomy. This involves working on the integration of emotions and the dissolution of patterns of co-dependence and emotional abuse in our lives and relationships. And beyond current alternative psychiatry that has recognized the devastating effects of co-dependence and emotional abuse in individual relationships, he shows these same effects to happen in the relation individual-organism, individual-group, individual-ideology, individual-sect. Fusion is even more dangerous when people seek to dissolve themselves within organizations, because what happens then is that they will indeed by eaten up by the organism and become wheels in a murderous system. One essential element in this process of identifying and healing an abuse pattern in your own life is to stay as much as possible untouched by the current media propaganda that focuses on labeling certain people as abusers, and certain people as victims, thereby occulting the real causes of abuse in our culture.

You simply have to see that the USA-driven 'abuse-centered' propaganda has made out of abuse a worldwide business that is currently flourishing and the political and economic forces behind this industry are interested to see abuse on the rise, and they will do all and everything for this to happen, and continue to happen. It is for this reason, while it is of course never voiced in the mass media, that the many solutions to healing abuse, that have been developed in the meantime by alternative psychiatry, psychology, anthropology and shamanism researchers such as Dr. Alberto Villoldo simply do not enter forensic research and law enforcement authorities, and remain marginal in their overall impact upon reforming modern society. In this context, the reason why abuse is perpetuated is occulted by forensic psychiatry, namely with the argument that the abused of today will be the abusers of tomorrow. In reality, the chain of abuse can well be broken by appropriate support and treatment. The reason why abuse is and will be perpetuated to the generations to come is because society at large does not go beyond its moralistic, reductionist and judgmental life paradigm that projects problems large-scale on certain groups of people, on so-called 'perpetrators' and 'offenders', on predators and their prey-victims, in order to avoid taking responsibility for the problems it has itself created as a society. Before a change can occur society-wide, in postmodern international consumer culture, a healing process and transformation on the individual level is essential to happen, which comes about through activating of what the author calls self-power, primary power or soul power.