Dealing With Depression
- No More Of The Same

If you've read some other articles on this site, you already know how to get some quick relief from depression. Ah, but what about the cause of it? Do you happen to know the cause? We all have junk and debris in our personal history that may well have contributed to the way we are feeling now.

Equally, some depressions just seem to 'happen' with nothing obvious to blame. Always, the question is "why?" with the expectation that the answer may offer clues in dealing with depression. However, most modern therapies agree that "insight alone does not produce change" - you may understand where it came from but does that really help matters? The 'why' is not as important as the 'how'...

How? The clues to your learning skills in dealing with depression lie in
how you get depressed. That's right - it's not happening to you, you are actually actively creating and maintaining it, whether you know it or not.

Depression is a 'stuck' word, meaning it sounds like you're not involved in the process. Stuck words can make you feel like a helpless victim to an outside force, which makes matters worse. Don't just accept something being 'done' to you - it's your mind and body!

So let's unstick that word - if you're creating and maintaining a depressed state, what are the steps required to successfully feel really bad? What do you do, and in what order?

Here's a list of some of the 'fun' things we do to ourselves to get depressed - write down the ones that apply to you, in the order that they happen. Add your own to make it really personal.

• Imagining a voice that tells you what a bad person you are
• Imagining a voice that tells you not to bother as there's no point
• Imagining a visual prediction of the worst possible outcome
• Recalling unpleasant memories from your past
• Noticing an increasing knot in your stomach
• Feeling all the energy drain from your limbs
• Feeling increasingly heavy and weighted down


Take time to note the direction any voices come from and where images are located - left, right, up, down, etc.

Once you have identified the steps to how you get to feel depressed, clear your mind then try it out - see how well your recipe works in creating 'depression'. You might have missed an ingredient, or maybe certain things happen in a different order. Try it in a few imagined scenarios to see how well it works - maybe in a park, a hairdresser, a coffee shop, etc.

Got the formula? Great! Dealing with depression is like any skill - for depression to work properly, certain things have to happen the same way, every time. Now that you have recognized the steps to feeling depressed, you can notice when you're doing it in the future - now, imagine this:

What might happen if you noticed one of these steps was happening and you decided to change something? In order to successfully feel depressed, you need to run your unique formula in the way it's always been run.

You may choose that you don't want to do that this time.

Shift those elements around in your mind - move the voice over to the other side and change the tonality to a silly cartoon character.

Flip pictures upside-down and move them away from you into the distance. Turn the brightness down, turn the volume down and take a deep breath... aaaaaahh, that's better.

Think about someone or something that really loves you unconditionally. Make a BIG representation of them in your mind with any sights, sounds and smells that go with them. If you can't think of anyone specifically, imagine how wonderful that would feel if you could.

Allow the feeling of being unconditionally loved to flow through every part of your body, energising and fortifying you.

You know what to do if you notice a part of the old depression routine running in the future - you can choose to just stop and change what's happening. And the more you're actively dealing with depression this way, the more the old bad feelings just won't work. Now that's powerful!


You may also be interested in this article on Self Criticism


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