Depression Help – The Box of Depression
One of the first obvious things to discuss around depression is unpleasant feelings. Difficult emotions. And if you look, its easy to find that we all operate from a box around our emotions. A very simple, obvious box.
We all have emotions we like feeling. A normal list are things like Love
pleasure
contentment
Exuberance
Excitement
Inspiration
Enthusiasm
These types of emotions we call "good feelings." We want to feel them as much as we can. Just so, there are many emotions we don't want to have or feel at all. See if some of these negative feelings would be on your list:
Anger
Anger
anger
loneliness
Hate
hate
Hopelessness
humiliation
These feelings we call "bad emotions" and we try to avoid or stay away from them as much as we can. If we must feel them, we try to get away from them as fast as we can.
So what is this simple box we operate from around emotions? The box is that there are good emotions and bad emotions. Pretty obvious, right? We all seem to just know that when it comes to emotions there are good ones and bad ones, and the game in life is to feel good and not feel bad. This is so obvious that it goes unexamined. Of course this is the way you deal with emotions!
Therefore, all the feelings that go with the condition of depression we classify as "bad" emotions, to be gotten rid of as quickly as we possibly can. Thus the box we're stuck in around depression is that depression is "bad." And we believe we should avoid or resist all the emotions that go with depression.
But there is an underlying problem to this approach of trying to avoid or get rid of all the feelings that go with depression. It is founded in an "emotional mistake" we make every day. This mistake is about not trying to feel bad emotions.
Consider the idea that we all, each of us, have an emotional body, just like we have a physical body and a mental body. And your emotional body has a purpose and function, which is to simply feel feelings. All of them. Good emotions like joy and happiness, and "bad" ones like fear and anger. Its job is to feel feelings. You can't actually keep your emotional body from feeling feelings.
Your skin can't help feeling hod or cold, smooth or coarse sensations. You skin is an organ and it feels whatever it comes in contact with. In that same way emotional bodies are supposed to feel all emotions. Not just good ones. You can't keep from feeling negative feelings. It goes with being human. And when you try to resist or avoid feeling bad feelings, they just tend to get stuck. They stay around longer. In a way, then, trying not to feel the emotions that go with depression can cause the depression to stick around, it can keep the depression from simply passing on through you!
So for help with depression, you need to get outside the box of resisting and avoiding all difficult emotions. One approach to doing this is to learn some basic emotional intelligence so that you can process difficult feelings more efficiently and quickly so that they don't get "stuck." No room here for all the details, but just 5 minutes a day of exploring a difficult emotion rather than resisting it can provide surprising depression help.