Depression, Desperation and Acceptance
Clinical depression is more than just the “blues,” being “down,” or experiencing temporary feelings of sadness that we all have from time to time in our lives. It is a serious condition that affects a person’s mind and body.
People with depression often feel their life is out of control. It can evoke strong feelings of emptiness and that their life is pointless or by merely existing bad things can happen.
Depression may be triggered by a life event such as a relationship problem, bereavement, redundancy, illness, etc. In many cases, the causes of depression within individuals is a mixture of the two. It is a combination of a mild low mood with some life problem, such as work stress, may lead to a spiral down into depression.
Desperation is like a black hole that is overwhelming, while it can override your best intention to stay connected with the present, to be motivated to act and also recognize the difference between what’s happening now and what happened in our long past.
Below are some description of depressive symptoms.
- Things just seem very “off,” unclear or “wrong.”
- You feel hopeless and unhappy.
- You feel like you brain processing power is slow as if you are operation in slow motion.
- Your sadness and crying happened with no apparent reason. Sometimes, minor things may trigger strong reaction.
- You sleep a lot and it is difficult for you to wake up in the morning.
- Normal daily tasks seems to be a struggle.
- Communication is hard and you find difficulty to express yourself.
- You have recurring thoughts of hurting yourself or dying, while having suicidal thoughts. Hurting yourself or suicide seems like a welcome relief.
- You are concerned, worried and anxious more than usual.
- You are indecisive and challenged by making simple decisions.
- You feel alone and unloved, while not sure if you love your significant other.
- You feel agitated and lower emotional tolerance.
- You have low capacity to concentrate and low level of motivation
- You feel as though you are drowning or suffocating.
- Over thinking while focus on the negatives
To overcome your depression, you have to first see if you’re feeling the symptoms of depression. When desperation arises, the past becomes entangled with the present, and the real is entangled with the unreal. Your desperation becomes very real and provide with strong sense of emergency.
When we consciously choose not to stay with desperation, but to allow desperation to stay with us, rather than resist it, we heal. By allowing desperation to exist, we accept it without judgment, and consciously decide that it’s okay to feel desperate for as long as the desperation requires. It may be for an hour, day, but it is always transient. We know that it will pass.
Staying with desperation, as a feeling, in the body, will only happen if we calmly and quietly refuse to engage with our thoughts that constantly arise in our heads. This is why Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be very helpful in treating depression,specifically acceptance commitment therapy.
Please visit spiral2grow author, Moshe Ratson at his Google+ Profile: +Moshe Ratson
