Depression is the denial of feelings. That's my take. I've been battling depression for many, many years. I am operating on the belief that it's possible to get rid of it. I wasn't born with it, so it must be possible to die without it. What I've noticed this depression is that I shut down so I don't have to feel anything, and that's my depression.
When I choose to allow myself to feel something, I don't get depressed, I just feel bad and then it goes away. But as soon as I try to shut that bad feeling up somewhere so I don't have to feel it, I just shut down entirely and can't feel at all. Well, I feel depressed, but I don't feel.
That's the short story.
I'm still working some of this out, but I think the longer story is that I grew up in a dysfunctional hellhole (the kind where Peggy & Al would have called the authorities on my parents), and the survival method I chose was to shut down as many feelings as possible. Looking back, I can see the logic in this. The abuse was too much, and the negative feelings were overwhelming. By shutting off the feelings, I could carry any amount of abuse.
The more you do something, the more you do it automatically. Shutting down/depression at this stage is such an automatic response to any bad feelings I don't even notice when I'm slipping into a depression.
That's where Four Agreements comes in. The author talks about these fear-based agreements we created when we were younger in order to survive and how to break these agreements.
I have to tell you, it's a long process, or it has been for me. And the more you work on it, the better it gets. It does get better. I can promise you that.  |