by Cathy Chapman, PhD
The woman had been struggling emotionally for a long time. She had one emotional crisis after another, several traumatic events in a short time. As difficult as it had been, she was making steady progress. One day she walked into the office and admired the framed print on the wall. She talked about the colors and how vivid they were. She was incredulous when I told her the print had been there for years.
When you are struggling with depression you are unable to see anything but the dark and dreary in the world. You don't notice beautiful paintings or when the flowers begin to bloom. You might attend an event everyone enjoys and notice what went wrong. Your can never do anything right and neither can anyone else.
If you haven't been depressed you have little idea of what it's like to live with yourself day after day without any happiness. There are actions you can take to pull yourself out of the depths of depression. The problem is that action takes something a depressed person has little of—energy. It takes a supreme act of will to change your thought and behavior patterns.
Strategies to Raise Yourself Up
- Train yourself to look at the positive. This includes noticing when you've done something right rather than always focusing on what you do wrong. This applies to others, also. Notice the positives about someone. Search hard until you find at least one positive thing about yourself and someone else every day.2. Find something good that happened during the day. This is all about changing your focus from the negative to the positive. Who smiled at you today? Did someone open a door for you or give you a small courtesy?
- Do something nice for someone else. This can be large or small. Pick something up someone dropped, say "Good morning" with a smile, put your change in the "Help fight leukemia" jar, and tell someone how good s/he looks.
- Move! Exercise releases "feel good" chemicals. Walking is an excellent exercise. If you can't get out of the chair, move your arms and legs up and down. A CNN video was about a man so obese he literally couldn’t move out of his chair. He began to move his arms up and down, in and out. He built up to holding a book and then weights. He started moving and shaking his body to the beat of music. It got him going to where he lost more than 200 pounds in a year.
- Discover the possibilities open to you. Many people are stuck in grief and regret about what is no longer available. There are infinite opportunities available. Force yourself to choose one thing you can do differently, and then do it.
- Accept yourself as you are… then move on from there. If you say you can't change, prove yourself wrong by changing something small in your routine in the morning. If you always put your right shoe on first, put your left shoe on instead. If you get your mail at 2:00, pick it up at 4:00. Any little variation can have a change, err, chain reaction.
- Move your attention into your heart center located at the center of your chest. Imagine breathing from this place. Now offer a prayer for someone who has it worse than you do.
- Count your blessings. If you're finding it difficult to think of any, try this. What do you have that you would be upset if you lost? You just found a blessing. Who would you hate to not have in your life? There's another blessing.
- Get some energy work. There are multitudes of energy modalities available, most of which can be done at a distance.
- Choose one person every day and ask Spirit to fill him or her with all the love s/he needs that day.
There are many stories of people who made the choice to do whatever was necessary to move out of the morass of depression and anxiety. You can be the next one.
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Cathy Chapman, PhD, LCSW assists you in achieving health, wealth and happiness by addressing your mental, emotional, spiritual and physical selves. For monthly suggestions on personal healing as well as receiving the free report "7 Powerful Methods for a Practically Impenetrable Immune System," please go to her website.
