If you are a person who suffers from depression, stress, have panic attacks, have low self esteem, anger management problems, then you may feel the title of this article is rubbish and that I don’t know what I’m taking about.
If you do feel this way and I understand those feelings very well, please read on and see if you feel the same by the end of the article.
Firstly, let me say that I do know from first hand experience as well as professionally what depression and anxiety feels like. Yes, I have suffered from depression and quite serious depression a long time ago and know all about the terrible symptoms. This was when I was younger and less knowledgeable than I am today. Today I am much older and fortunately wiser than back then when it was very black and white and cast in stone for me until I learned better.
My beliefs were the following:
- If I am depressed I am defenseless against it.
- If I am depressed I have no control over the awful negative thoughts in my head that I believe are right anyway.
- If I am depressed I am doomed to a life of negativity because that’s how it is in depression and I have no control over it anyway.
- If I am depressed there is nothing I can do to change my situation.
- If I am depressed I can’t change the way I think, feel or behave, the depression makes me that way and I must accept this as being the way it is.
These were my negative thoughts on my own depression and in those days I believed them. I believed it was my destiny to endure the pain and isolation depression brings with it.
I was wrong!!
My depression was “Reactive Depression” rather than chemically based depression, meaning I would become depressed in reaction to certain situations. A bad thing would happen and I would plummet, time after time into wretched depression full of negative thinking, emotions and behavior. I would think doom and gloom. I would feel wretched and want to hide myself away from the world because my mood was so bad. I believed there was no escape from this, which made me feel a hundred times worse. This is what depression can do to us, right? It makes us a little crazy. I suffered many miscarriages over many years which sent me spiraling each time.
However, when I was not depressed and was fine I could see another truth. I saw others who had similar experiences to mine who were not in the same state of depression as me. I wondered why and how could this be so? Their perception of the situation must be different to mine if they are fine. My perception clearly wasn’t the same as theirs. One of the things I quickly learned was that there is more than just one way to perceive our situation. More than just one way to see life and what happens to us, and because there is more than one way that explains why different people react differently to any given situation. I knew it didn’t need to be this way, all negative if I learned how to change myself.
Of course I also knew it is also dependant on other factors, but one basic truth must be if it is not a chemical problem, that we, each of us individually choose how we ourselves perceive and react to any given situation. That little truth is surely universal?
I wasn’t always depressed, just in those times where something very negative happened and I seemed to have no control over my negative reaction to it.
As you may already know chemical depression is one thing, and reactive depression is another. Mine was definitely the second as many depressive states are. You personally would need to find out whether or not your particular depression is chemically based or not.
Having a genetic predisposition to depression may account for why some people react more negatively than others to negative situations, but undoubtedly negative situations like loss of any sort, losing a job, which in this day and age is contributing to the number of people suffering from depression. Losing your home, partner, a friend, a pet or even negative input from another can all contribute to the plummet into a depressive episode.
As I say, for me it was losing a number of babies that was the trigger for me. I don’t know why it was like this, but it was. It was all very depressing and each time I reacted to these situations by becoming depressed. I would feel I was the only person in the world who suffered this fate as well as the depression that followed it. I became a negative person, seeing the world, my life and my fate in an unhealthily negative way.
It was exhausting for me and tiresome for those around me. In fact in the end I distanced myself from people and situations, and they from me. I don’t know which one came first actually, them or me. Even though I was married and had my son, it was a lonely existence which only deepened my depression even further.
It all changed of course. It was a phase in my life, brought about by the repeated loss, but I learned a great deal, hands on so to speak. There are many reasons why people become depressed. Life can be difficult and unfair, especially in this day and age. It often leaves us understanding little about why we have to go through so much pain and misery in our life.
Over time I saw for myself that people in similar situations to me (miscarriage) did not react in the same way as I had. Their rationale was different to mine. Their perception was different to mine. I should add that all this was before I became a psychologist.
I knew deep inside me that there must be a logical reason for this difference, but in those days believed it was “my makeup’ and that I was doomed to depression. They (for whatever reason) were lucky enough not to experience the same feelings as me. It was destiny one way or the other.
One day however I started to realize that it is not what happens to me that is important in terms of my well-being within that situation. Rather, it is HOW I perceived the situation and how well or badly I responded or reacted to that situation that became the deciding factor in relation to my mood and thinking.
I suddenly came to the understanding that I and I alone chose how to be. I alone allowed myself to stay in negative mode.
I realized that I was my own worst enemy when I was depressed because instead of helping myself out of my plummeting mood and the depression that became a part of it, I allowed it in without resisting it, without fighting it, without testing, questioning or evaluating what was going on in my head. I allowed reactive NAT’s, conditioned thinking and my belief system to dictate how I felt and what I thought. In those days I didn’t tell myself that my mood, my thinking, my reactions, my emotions were up to me, I didn’t know about such things as choosing how we think. This was well before my days of CBT unfortunately.
I realized that in some mad way I chose to stay in the state of depression and negative thinking. I chose to live in it, in that state. I could choose differently, but didn’t.
I was so used to being depressed by now that it felt as though I really had no control over any of it. If a bad situation arose I would be straight there, my mood would drop like a ton of bricks leaving me in a place that by now I knew so well.
I was brought up in different times than those of today. I was brought up to believe others are responsible for making me better and that we have little say in the matter and even less control. In those days that kind of thinking was quite normal. How absolutely wrong that attitude is.
Today a far healthier view is taken, which is that we individuals can be very instrumental in our own well-being. We can choose and make things happen for ourselves and don’t have to be at the mercy of any outside person or situation as long as we choose to take matters into our own hands and do whatever we can to make changes in ourselves. This way of thinking is so wonderful, so healthy and so empowering, it is also us taking full responsibility for ourselves. We don’t have to put up with anything if we choose not to and this for many cases includes depression.
My revelation turned all my negative beliefs on their head. One day, and really one day, I suddenly realized that if I am the centre of my own misery, my own depression then surely I can also change it?
There are two things involved here. One, external situations we have no control over. For example I would lose a baby (out of my control) Internally, I would then react badly by becoming depressed, especially to repeated miscarriages. External situations or situations we have no control over are those situations where we can’t make our own internal choice whether it happens or not. These are situations beyond our control, whereas internal control comes from us choosing how we are going to manage that situation.
Grieving is natural and normal but it’s where we take it from there that matters. Whether we choose to perceive negatively or effectively is the issue. Secondly and importantly is how we react emotionally, whether negatively or not and whether we allow negative emotions or thoughts to take control. I decided I had grown so used to automatic negative feelings, even though the situation most certainly was negative and a repeated situation. I wondered what it would feel like if I stopped being the negative person I had grown so used to being and reinvented myself to take control of my thinking and emotions. The shift astounded me as became less depressed and less under the control of everything that had gone on before.
This revelation was a huge one and boiled down to the fact that I and I alone had sole control over my reactions to situations. No external person or situation. How can a situation be responsible for my mood? I and I alone am responsible whether I like that fact or not. I could either chose to do nothing to help myself and stay depressed or better still I could ensure I never get into such a state of depression ever again. Loss is difficult especially when it repeats itself but I saw plenty of women who handled their loss differently and had a healthier state of mind. They addressed their grief but differently to me. They were very courageous, I was not, I was worn down.
I did learn however that I can choose HOW I react to a situation. I CAN take control if I choose to; it is not chosen for me by some voodoo. No, I myself choose and if I choose badly, negatively, then yes I will suffer unbearably negative thoughts and scenario’s, unbearably painful emotions and will behave negatively as a result.
But all of it is actually of my choosing and the choice I make will impact on my well-being. No-one forces their will upon me if I don’t choose to allow it, neither can anyone other than myself choose and be responsible for my own mood and how I deal with it apart from me.
I can make excuses and blame external factors; people, bosses, doctors, situations but the bottom line will always be the same. I am responsible for myself and whether I choose to be positive or negative.
A situation might be a negative one, the situation itself might not be in my control because it’s external, but what is within my control undoubtedly is my internal state. I can choose that and change that, if I so choose.
If I don’t then I have to take the consequences and take the responsibility for having my own choice in the matter. If I choose negatively, so be it, I will have to live with that choice. I do have a choice whether I know it or not, whether I believe it or not, I do. I can take control which actually feels very nice, very empowering indeed and leaves me in a place where I am NOT at the mercy of another, or a situation. I have the power to stop all that, to think differently, to feel differently if I so choose.
From that day onward all those years ago, from that revelation I developed a new strategy for helping myself out of the doom and gloom of so much loss by empowering myself, by giving myself the choice, the decision, the prerogative. It felt great because for the fist time in a long time I was back in control of my internal state, my thought processes, emotional state and lastly the way I reacted to all three. As I say this was way before I knew anything about CBT.
It was amazing, is amazing.
I now know one of the fundamental secrets of life which is that I and I alone am responsible for my choices in thinking, feeling and behaving. I do have this choice and that I have the power to change myself, correct myself and give myself the best quality of life I can, if I so choose. I can also choose to give myself a poor and miserable quality of life where each day is torture or I can choose not to. Whatever is internal to me is my choice, no one can coerce me if I don’t allow it, even my own thought processes which I suddenly learned I do have great control over if I so choose.
We all have choices, we just have to know we do and then we simply need to learn how to make those choices rather than continue to make the negative choices of accepting our negative state as cast in stone and as we are oh so used to doing.
I hope this has been a revealing article for you also inspiring.
Good luck with the program
Carole