De-pressing feelings can lead to depression
Depression begins with sadness that lingers. It starts with sad moments that turn into sad hours, and before you know it, sad days and months. This is when we call it a psychological disorder. In the process, our brain chemistry changes and we begin to feel a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. By this time everything feels dark and hope is gone.
There is nothing wrong with sadness. What we do with sadness determines whether it turns into a disorder or another human experience.
Symptoms of depression:
- constant sadness
- lack of motivation
- helplessness
- lack of desire to attend social gatherings
- feeling tired most of the time
- inability to think clearly
- inability to enjoy life
What you should know: If you have been feeling the above, you are not alone. One out of seven people experiences these symptoms. But the question is what are you doing about it? If you have a headache for a few hours, you may not do anything even though it bothers you, but if it goes on for a few days you are likely to do something to get rid of the headache or at least reduce it because you know something can be done. You have been informed that a Tylenol or Advil, exercise, massage, aromatherapy, or something else might help you with the headache and therefore, you will take action.
What we don’t know can hurt us: The problem that keeps people in that depressing place until they finally feel completely helpless is that they do not know they can do something about it. They do not know they can change the quality of their lives. You were not born depressed from your mother’s womb. You were a happy child at one point in your life. Even those who do not remember ever being happy, thanks to the scientific revelations about the neuroplasticity of the brain, now we know you can do something about it.
The biggest question is do you want to say goodbye to depression? I don’t think anyone would say no, but the news I want to share with you is that it requires work. It doesn’t just disappear with a pill. Of course, you can go to your physician and ask for anti-depressants and try a few of them until you find one that works, put up with all of the side-effects and temporary change your brain chemistry and feel better for a short while; and in more severe cases, this is exactly what you need to do. But if you want to go to the roots of depression and take care of it from the root so that you move forward in life, you need to treat it differently.
Is it caused by a medical condition? Depression does not all of a sudden show up on our doorway. First, we need to rule out all medical conditions that may lead to depression and my recommendation is if you have not done so yet, see your physician and rule out all medical conditions that may be contributing to your mood in general. Many medications and substances are constantly affecting your mood.
What is depression? Depression often starts with sadness, even though you may not remember the initial sadness that led you to depression; and the truth is there is a reason we have emotions including sadness. When we do not honor sadness, when we do not pay attention to the message behind sadness, it expands and grows. In essence, it is trying to tell us something, teach us something so we can grow and become stronger and more mature as we grow older. But when we do not listen, the bag of sadness we carry around with us eventually becomes unbearably heavy. Before you know it, it gets so heavy that it tires us to walk around, talk, breath, concentrate, communicate, and in a sense live. We then have a hard time connecting with others, concentrating, sleeping, functioning at our job, and so on.
How does depression progress? The initial avoidance of feelings leads us to become the mother who just does not have the energy to plan that birthday party for her child, the employee who wants to do well at work, but just can’t, no matter how hard s/he tries, the father who is too exhausted to help his children with their homework, the twenty or thirty-year-old who cannot find the energy to emotionally attend to a healthy and sustaining relationship.
Where can you start? I call this the exercise of getting your voice back.
Step 1: Get a journal and make a note of your feelings throughout the day. At least three times a day ask yourself, how am I feeling? Even though the list of human emotions is long, the most major ones are usually sad, mad, afraid, and happy. Sometimes, you can have a combination of two or more and if so, it is important to recognize that. In front of the feeling, write a number from 1 to 10, with 10 having the highest intensity. Checking in with your feelings every day increases your emotional awareness, which eventually lead to emotional intelligence.
Step 2: Write down the incidents, relationships, or experiences that bring this feeling to the surface. Write it as if you are describing it to a friend.
Step 3: Ask yourself where in your body you feel this energy. Many of my clients struggle with this part. Unfortunately, we have not learned to pay attention to our bodies and the messages of the body. The side news is, if we do so, we can recognize physical ailments at the onset and do something about them way before our blood test tells us something we do not want to hear.
Step 4: Go back to your answer in Step 2 and write a statement about how you feel. Say it directly to the people involved in step 2. If you could have said anything you needed to say, especially, if you could have expressed your feeling at that moment, what would you have said to the people involved?
The above steps is a very powerful exercise and may bring up other feelings. Learning to process feelings is a skill. The truth is we had the skill when we were children, but social conditioning moved us away from the free expression of feelings and taught us to repress them, instead of teaching us to express them in a healthy mature way.
Faith Nouri, Ph.D.,
Licensed Professional Counselor & Supervisor
www.LifePulseCenter.com
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rather than ignore them
This is not uncommon for most people. We get attracted to people who push our buttons the way our caretakers did. But why? If you want to go really deep into this concept learn about Imago therapy introduced by Drs. Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt. But in a nutshell, we all have a comfort zone. Our comfort zone is not necessarily comfortable, instead, it is familiar. If we had a mother or father who easily lost their temper, over the years we developed familiarity toward that behavior, even though it was unpleasant and disturbing. As a result, we know how to be, how to act, and how to exist around people who lose their temper easily.