emotions

Try This Simple Trick to Free Yourself From the Shackles of Depression

/ Clay D. / Leave a comment

Would you like to feel more alive and in control of your life?

You can do so by separating yourself from your depression.

The first thing to keep in mind is that unwanted, negative emotions— depression, worry, fear, and anxiety—are not you. You don’t have to live under a cloud of these burdensome emotions. 

The key is to mentally compartmentalize your depression so that it’s not a part of you. 

Try this exercise the next time depression, anxiety, or another negative emotion tries to take over your mind. 

Picture yourself from outside your body, looking at yourself as if you were another person. You see yourself and notice that you’re visibly happy with a pleasant smile on your face. 

Then, imagine taking any negative emotions that have been plaguing you and physically pulling them out of your body. 

You then stuff them securely into a neat little box. Make sure in your mind that this box is separate from you.

You are you, and your depression and anxiety are not part of your mind or your body.

You can even personify the depression for more impact. Picture it with a face, but put a quizzical look on the face as if the depression is suddenly stunned it’s no longer part of you. 

Notice we’re not calling it “your” depression, but simply depression.

Depression has been relegated as it were to the peanut gallery of your life. All it can do is just watch—with awe and envy—as you continue happily living your life out from under its control. 

You’re happy now because you’re free from the shackles of depression, worry, anxiety, and fear.

Anytime any of those emotions start to creep their way back into your mind, stop what you’re doing and mentally divorce yourself from them again. 

Firmly place them back into that box, the one that occupies space that is completely outside of your body. 

Remember—depression and worry are not you. You are you, and you are choosing to live free, not under the control of those emotions. 

Don’t Give In to Your Thoughts and Feelings

/ Clay D. / Leave a comment

“You don’t have to think about everything you feel, but you will feel everything you choose to think about.

Levi Lusko

Counselors who specialize in cognitive therapy will tell you that your thoughts and feelings don’t determine who you are and how your life has to be. 

They are just emotions that pop into your brain. What we choose to do with them at that point makes all the difference.

For example, we can decide whether we want to linger on the fact that so-and-so never returned our phone call. 

We get to choose whether to get mad (and stay mad) that someone cut us off in traffic. 

We can decide if we’ll let everything go to crap when the thought that the day is ruined flashes into our mind.

These are all decisions that we must make every day, moment by moment. 

The decisions and reactions we make regarding what enters our brain determine how our lives will be—not the stimuli themselves. 

Don’t give your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and impressions more power than they have. You get to determine the course your life takes—not them.

But here’s the thing…

Just because you decide to go ahead and have a good day after a negative thought crosses your mind, doesn’t mean that’s the end. That thought may keep coming back, over and over. You may have to decide dozens of times a day to make your day the best it can be.

It would be nice if we could just make that decision once and that was it. It doesn’t work that way, however.

Moment by moment, we must decide what our outlook on our situation is going to be. How will we react to each interaction, event, or incident in our lives?

It can be hard when you first start taking control of your reactions to your thoughts. The task seems daunting. However, it gets easier the longer you do it. 

Begin making it a habit to think positively about your situation, no matter what you find yourself in. Find something good you can focus on, rather than something bad.

Four

/ Clay D. / Leave a comment

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary when I hugged him and told him goodbye. He probably told me to be careful on my way back home, but I don’t remember. I climbed into my car and pulled onto the highway, making a mental break from my brother and preparing for my long drive home. My mind was filled with all the events of the weekend — seeing my old classmates at the reunion, driving past the the house where I grew up and seeing the inside warmly lit, visiting with my extended family. It would take me quite some time to process the deluge of emotions swirling around inside my head from all that had happened that weekend. These emotions were so intense that my relationship with my last surviving brother was not of much importance at that moment. I didn’t know it then, but we would let years pass by without so much as a word to each other. In fact, today marks four years exactly since I last saw or spoke with my brother.

I had felt it creeping up on me. These four years have not elapsed without weekly and almost daily realizations that more and more time had passed since our last conversation. For the first year or two, each time I would think about it I’d say to myself something like, Yes, I really should call him. We are flesh and blood after all. We shouldn’t go on like this without having at least some kind of relationship. I would often picture myself several years down the road, stressing over finally calling him after such a long time. I never wanted to become one of those middle-aged adults you see on TV who reestablishes contact with a brother or sister after decades of separation.

family-of-originHowever, for the last year or two, I haven’t cared so much. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an  adult, it’s that time has a way of softening painful emotions. The importance of difficult situations and their attending emotions seems to diminish ever so slightly with each passing day, week, and month. Now when thinking about the the whole situation, I have pretty much resolved myself to the fact that I no longer have any siblings (my sister is a whole other story), a condition that I anticipate will in all likelihood remain the same for the rest of my life.

Of course I feel some guilt for this situation. I could easily have picked up the phone and called him at some point over that last 48 months. I never did, however. I’d say this is mostly because the thought that he never bothered to call me either showed exactly how much worth he had placed on the relationship. Why should I bother to go out of my way when it is quite apparent that he has no desire to maintain a relationship with me? I would very conveniently put my apathy for him out of my mind.

I regret not maintaining a relationship with him. The concept of a strong family unit was always important in my family of origin. My mother used to say, “Family is all you’ve got. Girlfriends and boyfriends will come and go, but you’ll always have your family.” Also, I remember the day she told me that biologically I’m closer to my siblings than to either of my parents. She explained that we siblings all came from the same two parents, making us biologically as close as possible.  But for that same reason (that we’re a product of both parents), we’re not as biologically close to either of our parents individually as we are to our siblings.

As for my father, his way of encouraging tight family connections was to tell us when we were going out for the evening, “Don’t do anything to disgrace the family.” There is no telling how many times I heard that appeal to my siblings when I was younger, and then to me personally when I reached my teen years and began going out regularly. My guilt over not calling my brother makes me feel like I’ve let the family down in some way, like maybe I’d still have a brother to talk to if only I’d called him at some point.

Perhaps, after all these years, the time is right to reach out to him. I can’t help but wonder about his spiritual state. If he died today, would I have any assurance that he’d experience eternity with God instead of suffering and eternal isolation from Him? No, I don’t.

I guess I know what I need to do.