Dealing with chronic clinical depression is difficult for everyone to understand – the individual experiencing it and the loved ones, co-workers and others in the life of that individual.
Depression can affect anyone, old or young, man or woman, boy or girl. Chronic clinical depression is not just feeling down for awhile, or an emotional state due to a current external event such as a loss of job, divorce, death, or a child leaving home. However, these types of events, or several of them occurring in succession, can so trigger the chemistry of depression that chronic clinical depression sets in.
A self-empowering approach to alleviating depression is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – CBT. There is ever-growing support for CBT as an effective treatment for both anxiety and depression, two conditions which tend to go hand-in-hand. Statistics cite that 70 percent of the people who experience clinical anxiety also experience depression.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy allows the individual to better understand the causes of depression while offering ways to manage and reduce the symptoms of depression.
An unmistakably positive change in brain function is demonstrated in the brain scans of people engaged in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT works because it teaches people strategies that affect how they think, how they feel, and thus, how they live.
So what is a way you can put Cognitive Behavioral Therapy into practice yourself?
It’s important to understand that body chemistry follows an emotion. In other words, the emotion one chooses after having a though becomes a chemical reaction. Changing your emotion changes the chemistry that flows through the body in response to that emotion. Changing this chemistry disempowers depression.
The first step in self-empowered depression-busting is to learn to hear your thoughts before they become an emotion, before they trigger chemistry. You ask yourself, “does this thought make me feel positive and uplifted?” If the answer is no, you pause and refashion the thought/feeling matrix until it is positive – or at least neutral.
At first, this is may not be easy. The experience of depression over time develops many constructs of thinking/feeling that are firmly in place. It may initially seem you do not have a choice regarding your feelings. But the more determined you are to change the presence of depression, the more you’ll see the influence of your determination.
Little rays of positive thinking will start peeking through the cracks in the mortar of the wall of depression. Considering the fact that self-motivated and self-empowered approaches to banning depression have been proven to be more effective and more lasting than medications – which have negative side effects – you’ll discover you have an increased capacity to stick with it.
Working with a caring professional can be very effective. Your counselor tracks your progress, comes to know your depression triggers and is there to support, guide and help you through the narrow passages, holding the line while you banish depression and “reel in” your ever-present happiness.
A journal is a great place to note the day’s events and to record your thoughts, feelings and insights. My suggestion in journal-keeping is to jot down at least three things for which you are grateful every day. They may be the smallest of things – describing the light as it came into your room in the morning, the trill of a song bird – anything that caused you to pause and to be entirely in the moment, however briefly.
You also write down those times you stopped a thought that would have developed into a bad, sad or negative feeling and chose a thought/feeling that was depression-busting. Write about how you accomplished your mood change so that some other day when something seems overwhelming, you can return to your own self-teaching and recall how, step by step, you succeeded in moving away from depression.
I’ve worked with many people who said they couldn’t journal and who didn’t believe journaling could positively undermine their depression. But they eventually, with my dogged encouragement – and sometimes supplying them with a blank book – began writing. I’ve gone with them on their journey of self-healing as they learned the power of journaling. I’ve served as guide and witness to many people healing from chronic depression and I’ve seen first-hand that it can be done. And I know you can do it too.
