Lurkette...depression, as I'm sure you know, is a cycle. It's a syndrome of self-loathing, shame, and guilt. It comes from within by being the world's worst self critic.
No amount of outside praise will lift it. No amount of positive reinforcement will alleviate its grip on you. It's unbearable and crushing, and unless you break its hold, it can destroy everything you value. It's taint seems to permeate even the happiest of occasions and suck the joy out of life's finer moments.
That being said...IT CAN BE BEATEN! You'll find that the introspection that you use to unwittingly devalue yourself, can offer you insight as to the why and how that it's hold grips you.
Step Number One:
Find a Spiritual center. I mean this in a Eastern sort of way. Meditation is good. Breathe deeply and fully. Relax on the exhalation. Clear the mind. Relax the soul.
Find some info on Zen-type breathing techniques and start there. It's corny, but it works for a start.
Step Two:
Expand the spiritual part of yourself. You are an avowed agnostic. Which is fine. You're also very intelligent, which makes faith based religions hard to stomach. I personally find myself as a Christian with eastern proclivities. It's not a normal thing, but it works for me. This step is important because it places a large measurement perspective in your life. Depression breeds in you. You have to separate your perspective and see just how small those things are that you unwittingly obsess about.
Step Three:
This is a culmination of one and two and is a little hard to understand. Depressives live a little too tightly in their own skin. I want to expand your awareness in a very eastern way. As you're meditating, try to hear, feel, and focus your awareness as outside of your body that you can. Try to hear every little noise. Every little change in the wind. Every little nuance in the world around you. You'll find by expanding your awareness, living in the now, that it is very hard to feel depressed. It centers your "self" and changes the perspective of "self." Making your field of awareness encompass more than just you. Kind of giving you a break.
Practice these for a week. See how you feel. Then on to the more cognitive phase.
Step Four:
Realize that the ruler in which you measure yourself has been dictated by a marketing society. Your thoughts on marriage, your self image, and the things that make you up are have all been given a value by society. But not the real society. The marketing society. We learn soo much bullshit from TV, our peers, and our parents about how we're supposed to think, feel and react, that each time we think, feel , or react differently, we make a value judgment on ourselves. This is a crux of the depressive personality. The only problem with this knowledge is that you tend to judge yourself in the nanosecond before your cognitive kicks in and lets you know that it's all bullshit anyway.
Which leads to Mr Sticky's First Rule of Depression:
Emotion comes first.
Simple. I know, but powerful when you think on it. No matter what information you come in contact with. You emote first! There is ALWAYS feeling before thought, no matter how cognitive the information is. You have already been fucked before you can pull yourself out of the bad feeling nosedive. Sucks, don't it?
You'll have to eventually realize that since you start out with the negative feeling, it's damn hard to lose it, no matter how stupid it is. When caught here, do steps one through three.
Step Five:
The brain is lazy. Emotions, just like all mental processes, are on circuits. You don't reevaluate every experience each time. You add it to the already existing database. Your love for Ratbastid is dropped into this quick little file that slams through every time you see him. Both cognitive and emotive. I mean shit, sometimes you even have to remind yourself that you are mad at him sometimes. you know?
This hardwiring is one of the toughest things that you'll have to overcome. Exactly because it's hardwired. You're emoting these circuits first, and THEN YOU"RE TRYING NOT TO FEEL BAD? I mean shit, you're already there, Right?
Well, that's where the true work lies. You have to add to this emotional circuitry by forgiving yourself whatever ingrained bullshit you've been spoon fed and allow this feeling to add to that circuitry. This is a LONG process. You think how many years you've been kicking yourself and go from there. You have to separate that feeling (the breathing helps) and assign it a new lift of feeling. This is much like sorting through the loss of a loved one. At first, all you have is the pain and grief , but eventually the remembrance of the life and the love some what alleviates this, until at some point you can remember them happily. But of course this, most like anything else, takes time.
This is the crux of it. There's more, but this will do for now. Try these, please. Some of it seems hokey, shit, some of it IS hokey, but I swear it works.
We'll be thinking about you...
