In the first session I first do some light memory recall. Remembering stuff that makes her feel good. That is mainly to check that she does have positive reference experiences that we can call on when necessary. She presented her childhood as just generally terrible and depressing at first. However, on the recall she found many positive experiences in her life.
Then in the second half of the session I ask her how she gets depressed. Nobody had asked her that before. Upon eliciting her strategy for getting depressed, the following surfaced:
She is a very visually oriented person. And she is also very ambitious. She made very vivid pictures of what she wanted to accomplish in life. Very large, colorful, clear, 3D pictures, many of them. And she placed them right in front of her face. She hadn't really been aware of that before. She is in the movie industry, so it was pictures of winning an academy award and that kind of stuff.
The problem was that she made so many pictures, and she made them so overwhelming that she daily reality didn't compare favorably at all. The pictures were stuff she HAD to do, like right now. She didn't give herself space enough to work towards those goals. She got depressed immediately by noticing that her life wasn't like that today.
I taught her about the controls on her internal perceptions. Specifically I got her to move those pictures further away. We put them at a distance where she could still clearly see them, but they were a bit out in the future, and she could see that there was a bit of way to get to them. They were then no longer overwhelming and she didn't have to be depressed about them.
Basically that handled her depression. We did other actions in the following sessions to strengthen the result. But, I have seen her many times after that and the depression largely didn't come back.
In session two we worked on the ability to be associated into past incidents or dissociated out of them at will. And then we did a polarity integration on a Secure / Insecure polarity.
In the following sessions we went on to other subjects, mainly her relations to men. Her troubles there mainly related to a chronic polarization between different ways of being. That turned out to be pretty much a lifetime issue, so we worked on that for a number of sessions in many different ways. Polarity integration, re-experiencing, unfixing of ideas, reframing. Her life changed and improved greatly. However, the two different sides of her were persisting for quite a while. Attempting to integrate them would produce a claustrophobic feeling. That got eased up by clearing a number of pre-natal incidents. Various early incidents set up patterns of shutting off emotions and being split up. Most notably sexual molestation incidents by her father.