Instead of dealing with our problems, Freud gave us all the easy way out with this lethal invention.
Thinking that one has depression, makes one depressed. It's a paradox. It doesn't even exist and yet our clever little brains can force it into reality.
Try sadness or anger. It has to be one or the other and both are useful where depression is not. Being sad lets us educate our emotions, teaches us what to avoid in the future and how to deal with it when it does happen again. Anger will do the same but can also be used as motivation.
Sadness means that when we're done, we'll return to being content along with some added perspective. A little faith in the knowledge that the feeling won't last forever but will come back, and when it does, a little less intense next time. The same goes for happiness.
We want to avoid unhappiness and anger, that's what the purpose for them are. To identify the emotion, recognise it and discover where it came from so that in the future, such things may be preventable.
The only certainty we live with is death and we will always be sad when things come to an end but even then, the end is important in all things. When sadness ends, happiness begins and vice versa.
Emotions teach us to not waste our time. The trick would be to stay content.
Grumpy Teenagers
Puberty drips mind bending hormones into our blood to fire up an all enveloping furnace that burns the heart right out of us, replacing it with that annoying, infuriating sex drive.
The faster these ups and downs can be moderated, the less likely one is going to feel the illusion of depression.
Ecstatic joy is certainly a wonderful thing and where we would all want to stay, twenty four hours a day. It's not ideal however, as being mortifyingly sad every day is exactly the same thing.
What we're really after is serenity, a neutral balance between the two.
We know that happy times will come and go, we know sad times will come and go but until then, we need to be cool, calm and relaxed to see past the cloudy confusion of our emotions and work out what it was that made us so happy, what it was that made us so sad.
Neuro Chemicals
Shrinks play a dangerous game with patients because a patient will look up to their counsellor for help, even if that professional has the honesty to admit they really don't have a clue.
The patient still wants to believe this person must have some kind of understanding of the condition. They've been studying the damn subject for years. They must have some sort of answer.
Good can feel bad, Bad can feel good. Confusing, but quite fine because all that is happening is our emotions trying to figure out what we like and what we don't.
If a person managed to maintain a perfectly objective point of view upon experiencing their first kiss, or their first war time fire fight, they would not learn which they liked or not.
That person would find that they like everything and fear nothing. While the entire universe may turn into an ancient Greek interpretation of beauty, that person may be considered psychopathic and slightly less human, for these emotions are meant to make us what we are.
Therefore, a 'healthy' human would again balance them-self halfway between psychopathy and mania.
Hypnotised
Depression doesn't strictly exist because it cannot be defined. It's just a trick the mind plays to get around the problem because we can't see the forest for the trees.
Figuring out why we are depressed is insane, and that's the point. It simply doesn't exist because there is no such thing.
While logical, this happens only because objective reasoning has been replaced with an easy tag line that looks so damn accurate, but if you were to try and objectively reason what depression is you would only come up with a list of symptoms and nothing else.
Being depressed is nothing more than dancing around a problem one is afraid to face and the problem we need to face, simply doesn't exist; The problem of not knowing. Once we can admit that we don't know and may never know, then we can get back to the things that we do know and can work with.
People who are depressed are to be highly praised. These people look at life with an ideology that is pure and honest. These people view life in it's truest glory and understand that there is a solution to all problems so long as we work at them, for they have gone so far as to seek out a problem that doesn't even exist.
This is an innate, natural human condition that we all have to go through one way or another. It is the resolution of depression that is the trick, for depression is real and it's solution, illusory yet the illusory solution is based in logic and reality. Paradox solved.
Training
If everyone insists that something is real then you'll have a hard time believing anything contrary.
Control by training. It works best while still young. The brain stays quite plastic (changeable) up until the mid twenties so you've got a good ten years to teach yourself how to process the new slant to pubescent emotions.
If you're still depressed in your thirties, it's not too late but it is more difficult and this training has to employ slightly more advanced practices to compensate for a greater knowledge base but the method remains the same.
Training takes will power with concrete knowlegde and that is what we are having to learn. Instead of feeding off an emotion when it arrives, you take moment, breath once or twice and observe that emotion from a semi removed aspect.
Feel it, instead of allowing it to overwhelm and control.
Teaching oneself to control the effects of that emotion is the point so that there is give and take between the conscious part of you that conducts all deliberate action, and the randomly wired brain that fires off neurons which ever way it feels like, whenever it feels like doing it.
One can of course go too far and start feeling nothing at all. This is the same as feeling everything all the time so training has to also account for when, how much is too much sadness, or too much joy, or too much neutrality.
Anger versus Sadness
Depression accounts for these two emotions. They are in opposition. Anger is passionate, strong, a growling intensity that wants to do something positive, something actionable and fight out against that which we deem wrong.
Sadness is the opposite. Apathy, weakness, pointlessness and passive suffering. When these two opposites get mixed up then we become totally confused and label it depression.
It is worthwhile working backwards and do every effort to split depression back into these two constituents.
Deciding which bit is making us sad and which bit is making us angry gives something to work with and we'll be able to work through each in turn.
One might be depressed about work, a reason being that there is no satisfaction. We're angry that we are forced to endure this pointless job and that makes us sad. We are sad because we are unable to do anything about it, and that makes us angry.
Whichever emotion came first is the one to focus on and work through, without allowing it to delineate to the second. Stick with anger or stick with sadness because on their own there is resolve.
If sad, go talk to a loved one, cry your heart and let them feel that sadness. If angry, take a pillow and beat the shit out of it, scream, jump or run for as long and hard as you can.
Just make sure you don't let one emotion become the other until you've sorted out the first one first.
#psychology #emotions #depression
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