You can\u2019t summon depression or control it.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t chase it away or ignore it either.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
For me, it crept in slowly and worked its way into my life over a long period of time.<\/p>\n
My problem was that for a very long time I didn\u2019t recognise it at all<\/strong>. That occasional feeling of melancholy and listlessness somehow seemed normal to me, especially as a teenager. At that age your life, your soul and your body change from one day to the next. You are waiting to finish school, for the entrance exam for secondary school, you are struggling with heartbreak, everything is so turbulent and so much is happening that you can\u2019t notice, tell apart or name anything.<\/p>\n On top of that, being emotionally healthy and emotionally intelligent comes with age, and I couldn\u2019t even tell when I was angry just because I was hungry, let alone draw a clear line between sadness, anger, despair, disappointment, dejection, feeling rejected and so on.<\/p>\n In the next, more advanced stage of depression, most days I couldn\u2019t find any feelings in myself at all. I woke up and went to bed with an unspeakable and terrifying feeling of emptiness.<\/strong><\/p>\n To this day I have nightmares about that state. I am simply afraid of it.<\/p>\n Photo: S-Dad<\/p><\/div>\n Of course I had no idea how I could fill that emptiness, or, to put it better, how to stir my soul back to life. I had no idea where the emptiness came from or whether it would ever go away, and I knew even less about what had caused it. I started doing things on autopilot.<\/p>\n I applied the patterns of behaviour I had learned so far successfully in every situation, without any feelings for the person I was talking to or for the situation itself. My body was a mere tool for hiding how I really was.<\/p>\n Most of the time I wore a mask, and it changed depending on the situation I was in.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Sometimes the emptiness would disappear for a moment and euphoria would set in, like the cry of a dying man who believes he still has a long life ahead of him.<\/p>\n I was never really able to identify with the person who showed up in those moments. And after that state, which never lasted long, I always came back to myself and to my demons, who were patiently waiting.<\/p>\n Once again that feeling of emptiness and indifference, above all towards myself.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t stand myself.<\/strong> And slowly life starts to look worthless and pointless.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n What kind of gift from God is that, if this is what it looks like?<\/p>\n What is a life like that even for?<\/p>\n Did anyone ever ask me whether I even wanted to live that life (which felt like a prison cell)?<\/p>\n It is hard to say, really. The best thing would certainly be to look for professional help. But sometimes that is very hard.<\/p>\n As an immature person, I worried about how to open up to someone I didn\u2019t even know, someone who would surely judge me or not understand me.<\/strong> Hindsight taught me that these professionals are not there to judge us, but to listen to us and help us.<\/strong><\/p>\n Of course we can\u2019t trust them the moment we walk in for the first time, but who can we really open up to after just one conversation?<\/p>\n Going to a psychologist or psychiatrist has one priceless advantage: they don\u2019t look at us through biased eyes the way our loved ones do.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Their insights are free of the emotional baggage that actually blinds us. So they don\u2019t have an image of who and how we are supposed to be; they see us as we are.<\/p>\n Of course your friends and family don\u2019t want you to be ill, and they don\u2019t want to admit, to you or to themselves, that you have any kind of mental health problem. They do it out of love, but in those moments it hurts us more than it helps.<\/strong><\/p>\n It seems to me that the word \u201cdepression\u201d has started creeping in from all sides. Taking depression and serious mental states lightly, and throwing around sentences like \u201cI\u2019m so depressed\u201d when it is really just mild discomfort or sadness, has become almost a part of everyday life.<\/p>\n How many real depressive feelings are actually hidden behind sentences like that? Probably very few.<\/p>\n The reason is that people who really are depressed often don\u2019t have the strength to say it out loud, let alone face the looks and reactions they would probably get if they shared how they really feel.<\/p>\n Depression is a response to some kind of loss or failure.<\/strong> Long ago, Freud said that depression is the result of strong ambivalent feelings towards a lost object.<\/em><\/p>\n Anyone who is ready to question whether their personality is good enough, whether their life has meaning, and whether they even have the right to live this life can develop depression.<\/p>\n Feelings of overwhelming helplessness, emptiness, worthlessness and inadequacy are present every day.<\/p>\n There is another burden that people with depression carry, and we must never forget it: the constant questioning. \u201cWhere are these feelings coming from?\u201d, \u201cWhose fault is this?\u201d, \u201cWhat terrible thing happened to me that I react like this?\u201d. Looking for someone to blame, asking whether your parents were good enough, and most often the question comes down to what did we do wrong<\/em>. In essence, searching for the cause of your own state is one of the main features of depression.<\/p>\n However, searching for the cause without professional help usually leads us into even greater confusion.<\/strong><\/p>\n Nina Nikoli\u0107, psychologist, @umetnostduse<\/p><\/div>\n The causes are many and idiosyncratic (unique to each person). Mostly they are factors we can trace back to our personality traits, that is, our tendencies towards certain behaviour, which can also be counted as genetics.<\/p>\n Then there is our environment, which includes our family, friends, the conditions we grew up in (money, home), and which of our needs were met while we were growing up (from basic physical needs to emotional ones such as feeling safe and loved) and which were not. What is happening in our country or in the world at a given moment (crises, wars, pandemics) also has a significant influence.<\/p>\n What I don\u2019t want to leave out is that you won\u2019t necessarily recognise depression in someone\u2019s face, body or behaviour. Depression can stay hidden for a long time, sometimes, sadly, for far too long.<\/strong><\/p>\n Depression becomes a tool for rejecting yourself, for feeling indifferent towards other people, towards the world and towards everything that is happening somewhere out there (seemingly far away from you).<\/p>\n When we suffer from depression, neither the future, nor sex, nor food, not even sleep brings us excitement or pleasure.<\/p>\n There is also a healthy emotion that helps us get over loss and failure.<\/p>\n The well-known one: sadness. Unlike depression, it allows us to see both the positive and the negative sides of the situation we are in.<\/strong> With the help of sadness we manage to gather our strength and look for help, while in depression we are left all alone with ourselves. This can also be one of the goals of therapy: learning to turn depression into sadness, which is, of course, an inevitable part of life.<\/p>\n You could say that a depressed person is flooded with feelings of hatred and contempt for themselves. \u201cIn a phenomenological and symptomatic sense, depression is a manifestation of the part of the personality that suffers from self-hatred and self-contempt.\u201d (Milivojevi\u0107, Z.)<\/p>\n Depression is not a final state, and it doesn\u2019t have to be the end result.<\/p>\n This state is very hard and exhausting, and it can drain the last atom of strength and will out of a person. That is a fact.<\/p>\n It is also true that with the right support and step by step progress this state can be overcome. With education, professionals, support from the people around you and learning to trust yourself, so that your focus shifts to your strengths at least for a while, this state can be overcome.<\/p>\n After learning to live with emptiness and helplessness, the other side can seem very challenging, maybe even wrong and uncomfortable for people who have been depressed for a long time.<\/p>\n I would like you to remember that you were once on that other side too, and that the experience of depression can help you in many ways.<\/p>\n Some of them are certainly getting to know yourself better, including your dark sides (which many people never face, although it can be useful). Along with this comes a better understanding of others, the ability to hear and feel people who feel the same way.<\/p>\n With this kind of cognitive reframing, I believe that depression, despite its enormous weight, can become a little more bearable.<\/p>\n Sadly, I can\u2019t tell you exactly. It took a lot of time and a lot of lucky circumstances, but also a great deal of support from my closest family.<\/p>\n Realising that someone is there for you, whatever happens and whoever you turn out to be, may be one of the most important medicines for a wounded soul. But it is a very long process, and there is no alternative to it.<\/p>\n One of the first steps a person with depression has to take is to notice and recognise depression for what it is<\/strong>. That may seem easy and unimportant, but it isn\u2019t. Because the hardest thing is to admit to yourself that there really is a problem.<\/strong><\/p>\n And then the endless search for its causes begins.<\/p>\n Even today, when I think about that period of my life and the time before it, I always remember new details.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Human life is complex, and I will say it again: things shouldn\u2019t be trivialised or reduced to a single factor. For a very long time it ate away at me that I couldn\u2019t find that one, crucial reason for the state my soul was in. All the reasons seemed trivial and unimportant to me, until I realised that there were many of them\u2026 And that a pile of unimportant things can turn into a big problem.<\/p>\n It is very important to understand that, in the end, everything depends on you and that you alone are responsible for your actions and your life. Finding new reasons for a (normal) life is solely up to the person suffering from depression, and nobody else.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Sometimes you find those new reasons by chance, sometimes you are lucky and they fall from the sky straight onto your head without you having any say in it, but most often you have to take the initiative.<\/p>\n In my case it was a mix of everything, but that proactive attitude has stayed with me to this day as one of the key traits of my personality.<\/p>\n How the hell do you do that???<\/p>\n Easier said than done, believe me, I know!<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In my case there were two paths: reading and work. Both are medicine. And, of course, professional help!!!<\/p>\n That is a topic for one of my next posts.<\/p>\n Sometimes, when life simply gets on top of me, I get flashes of what could become depression. Over the years I have learned to deal with it.<\/p>\n What definitely changed me and made me even stronger was Sofia coming into the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n Caring for another human being, the love that grows out of that bond, and growing up emotionally have all made every hardship easier to bear.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n As I already mentioned, it is about a proactive attitude to life: training, reading, spending time with people, writing, questioning yourself, facing yourself\u2026 And the thing not all of us can afford, but which we should definitely try, is psychotherapy.<\/p>\n Finally, I would like to stress once more one of the most important defences against depression:<\/p>\n Don\u2019t, because then we never know when they will come back to the surface and overwhelm us.<\/p>\n A rug is there to play on, to roll around on with our kids and to lounge on, and whatever we have swept under it will sooner or later start to smell or to rub us the wrong way\u2026<\/p>\n Facing yourself is very hard, and every one of us automatically freezes up in front of that task, but there is something liberating about facing what is and what you used to be.<\/p>\n If you recognise yourself in this text, don\u2019t wait for it to pass on its own: talk to your doctor, a psychologist or a psychiatrist.<\/em><\/p>\n S-Dad<\/a> and Nina Nikoli\u0107<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"Blurred](\"https:\/\/smama.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/WhatsApp-Image-2022-03-24-at-19.32.55-min-1024x682.jpeg\")
<\/a>\n
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What can you do in that situation?<\/h2>\n
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What an expert says about depression: Nina Nikoli\u0107, psychologist<\/h2>\n
What is depression, really?<\/h3>\n
Who can develop depression?<\/h3>\n
![\"Psychologist](\"https:\/\/smama.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/100044050038-min-1024x679.jpg\")
<\/a>How can depression be overcome?<\/h3>\n
When does depression end? My experience<\/h2>\n
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![\"Light](\"https:\/\/smama.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/P1180327-min-683x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBut how do you find the strength to get moving again?<\/h2>\n
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Does depression come back?<\/h2>\n
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Don\u2019t sweep things under the rug!<\/h2>\n