Recovering from Depression

By - karengray
04.03.18 08:41 PM

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”    ~   Carl Jung

For me, it starts really quietly. I feel a little sad and I can’t quite seem to put my finger on why. It seems to come out of the blue. My training and experience has taught me to look a little deeper, and to spend some quiet time with myself to examine what I’m feeling. I try to identify the emotions that I am experiencing, as if I am looking in from the outside. Yes, that looks like sadness, and that looks like a little hopelessness, and that there, that looks like self-pity.

From there, I try to look at what is going on with each emotional state. What is going on in my life right now that is making me sad? What is happening that makes me feel hopeless? And what on Earth is this self-pity about? Lately, I have been a little sad. My oldest has moved out to start his adult life, I am missing my parents more the older we all get, and I want a much safer world for my youngest as she gets ready to transition into middle school. 

These are all valid reasons to be sad, and there may be others that I am not so consciously aware of. The next step is to look at proportions. Does the amount of sadness I am feeling make sense when I put it in the framework of my reasons for being sad? Does it look like I am overreacting?

Sometimes that is exactly what happens. I find that my emotions are way out of proportion to what is going on in my life, and I need to take a step back and see if I can reframe those emotions. If I can eliminate the excess so that the emotions I feel are more in proportion to the things that I am experiencing. Usually, this works well, and my emotions even out as I become more mindful of them. Just by thinking about them, I am able to reason through and dismiss the overflowing emotions, leaving me with more manageable feelings.

Sometimes though…. 
Sometimes it just all overflows, and I can’t shake the sadness that seems to have no real reason to be there. It is easy at this point to try to ignore it and “just get through the day.” But I want you to try to avoid the impulse to brush those feeling aside. It is important to take the time to acknowledge and validate the emotions we experience as they present themselves to us. Those emotions are real, and they are there for a reason. Ignoring them often leads to stronger emotions, including outbursts and full-on bouts of depression.

Imagine that you have a pressure cooker inside you that holds all of your emotions. Each time you stuff one of those emotions and bury it inside you, each time you stop yourself from experiencing an emotion, it adds a little more pressure. Not only that, but every time you try to push back another emotional state it has the same effect of someone jumping onto your back and talking in your ear. It weighs you down and makes it harder to move, harder to concentrate, and harder to get through the day.

Eventually, you will explode from the pressure, or crumble under the weight.

But when we are able to take a few moments and acknowledge those emotional states in a safe place, they stop fighting for our attention, and we can let them flow by us like water in a stream. There are healthy ways to process through those emotions, without creating an even more stressful interruption in your already busy routine. Imagery, hypnosis, Stillness, and meditation are all effective ways to create that safe place for moving through your emotional states.

There are some people who just don’t seem to feel anything. If you experience what some people describe as a numbness, a blankness, or just not feeling then you may have developed what you can think of as an emotional shell. This shell functions like a barrier between you and your emotions and is often the result of trauma or prolonged stress. Before you can start to identify and process through your emotions, you need to break through that shell.

The Role of Hypnosis
It is common to use hypnosis to navigate through difficult emotional states in a safe an effective way. Hypnosis does not treat the symptoms of depression or stress. Instead, hypnosis allows the mind to heal itself with gentle suggestion and guided imagery. 

Hypnosis helps you identify your "unfinished business".
People often have “unfinished business” with whatever has been lost, hurt, bruised, or broken. These unresolved feelings of resentment, regret, blame, anger, guilt, jealousy, hurt, and fear are stored in the mind and body. If these feelings are not processed and released, they can lead to depression, negative self-talk, self-defeating and sabotaging behaviors, and self-medication with drugs or alcohol. Clinical hypnotherapy works for depression because it allows you to safely identify the unfinished business in your life, without having to relive the traumatic events.

Once you have identified those things that are causing your problems, it helps you "finish" the "unfinished business" and release the stored emotions and experiences. With hypnotherapy, we can go down to the deepest level of these traumatic experiences, memories and stored emotions and release them from the mind and body without causing further trauma or damage.

With each healing session, we can replace the negative repetitive thoughts that often follow a traumatic experience. Positive affirmations are effective following hypnotherapy because you have released and let go of the negative emotional states that were stopping you from moving forward.

Once the self-sabotaging thoughts and behaviors have been resolved, you can begin to use self-hypnosis to continue to reinforce the changes you have already made, as well as create new positive changes in your life. Hypnotherapy can be very helpful in correcting patterns of restless sleep, low energy or libido, headaches, and chronic pain.∎

Karen Gray is a Certified Hypnotist, a Registered Nurse, and the owner of Green Mountain Hypnosis in Lebanon, New Hampshire. For more information on how you can use hypnosis to change your life, you can visit www.greenmountainhypnosis.com, contact Karen at karengray@greenmountainhypnosis.com, or call (802) 566-0464.

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