Depression Information

Depression: Bringing Yourself Down


Sometimes it's hard to see the forest from the trees. Sometimes its hard to see how much you can bring your self down. Recently, my life has been turned upside down. I lost someone close to me and the world became a dark place.

Repression is a common reaction to traumatic events. People repress all sorts of things, violence, trauma and loss. To repress is to be able to move on - quickly. The side effects are often just as bad; repression invites long term suffering and inner turmoil. Typically, the common solution to repression is to be open to dealing with the emotions as they come. By deal with your emotions as they evolve, you have no need to repress. Its seems like a simple solution - until you have to go through it.

Problems arise when you allow yourself to immerse yourself in the emotions. This is what happened to me. In order to work my way toward healing I opened myself up for the emotional ride. I decided that the long term benefit of not repressing far out weighed the social concerns of functioning 'normally.' I let my self go. Exploring painful emotional memories really can bring you down. The problem was that I had no means to pull my self back up. Gradually, I just began to stay lower and lower. My frame of reference of what normal emotional levels were.

I have to tell you that sinking lower and lower was bad. It really did nothing for my overall outlook. However, more critically, I began to accept this low in my emotional state as the norm. I reset frame of emotional reference to this lower - and miserable- point.

This is not as uncommon as I thought. It happens all the time with drug users. New users find that each subsequent high is never as good as the last. Further, each period of coming down is longer and more severe. When they return to homeostasis, it is lower then when they began. To compensate users have to take more of the drug and the process becomes a viscous downward spiral.

In my case, my body and mind adjusted its sense of normal to fit with my most consistent emotional state. Our bodies are really talented when it comes to things like this. However, this did little for my overall happiness. It was not until I got out of this cycle that I could even see what was happening. I could not see the forest from the trees.

I don't want to suggest in this article that repression was a better solution for me. No. I just want to make it clear that exploring any emotional difficulties should be done so with great care. I recommend finding someone who can act as a touchstone for you. That is someone who can show you the forest anytime you need to see it.

Novo Vitae is a site dedicated working through depression. Novo Vitae can be found at http://www.zizzoo.com/guides/depression.


MORE RESOURCES:

THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Indian Express, India - 1 hour ago
It was the largest and most acute economic depression in modern history that ended at various times in the 30s or early 40s for different countries. ...
Recession? Depression? How Deep, How Far and What Can Be Done? AlterNet
all 2 news articles


China Daily

Fed chief guided by lessons from Depression
San Francisco Chronicle,  USA - 12 hours ago
The chairman of the Federal Reserve is also one of the nation's pre-eminent scholars of the Great Depression. As the world careens through a global ...
Video: Bernanke: More Economic Pain Ahead AssociatedPress
Analysis: Fed reaches for its rarely used power Kansas City Star
In Praise of Bernanke New York Times
Reuters - Seeking Alpha
all 1,811 news articles


CTV.ca

Norbert weakens to tropical depression over Mexico
The Associated Press - 6 hours ago
PUERTO SAN CARLOS, Mexico (AP) — Norbert dissipated into a tropical depression over the northern mountains of mainland Mexico on Sunday, after ripping off ...
Video: Mexico Mops Up After Marco, Eyes Norbert AssociatedPress
Depression may form in Mexico's Bay of Campeche - NHC Reuters India
Hurricane Hunter aircraft to investigate tropical depression in ... BYM News (press release)
Central Florida News 13| - Reuters AlertNet
all 5,380 news articles


Could America be heading for another Depression?
KHOU, TX - 3 hours ago
Then, as now, for a lot Americans the realities of life seventy-nine years after The Great Depression are painful. The trouble on Wall Street, the crisis in ...


Straits Times

AP Top News at 3:32 am EDT
The Associated Press - Oct 11, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government will buy an ownership stake in a broad array of American banks for the first time since the Great Depression, ...
US govt to buy stakes in banks Straits Times
The panic of 2008 Socialist Worker Online
US to buy up stocks in struggling banks for the first time since ... Daily Mail
New York Daily News - Washington Post
all 451 news articles


Beneath the financial crisis waits a nastier beast
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 8 hours ago
Consider the Great Depression, to which some are ominously likening this crisis. Latin America, which was hit particularly savagely because of its ...


Gawker

Prostitution Still a Safe Bet in New Depression
Gawker, NY - 3 hours ago
Like the drug trade, booze, and motion pictures, prostitution can muster through any economy. Although New York City's ladies of the evening say that the ...


Gawker

Geniuses Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris Compare Depression ...
Gawker, NY - 5 hours ago
Don't be a sucker. Those complicated, long-winded explanations of the worldwide financial crisis are just a lot of big city hokum. ...


FROM THE EDITOR: Stakes as high as the Great Depression
SouthCoastToday.com, MA - 16 hours ago
The survivors of the Great Depression, at least those old enough to remember, are in their 80s and 90s now. It was a different America then, ...


The Southern Ledger

Norbert weakens to tropical depression over Mexico
KLTV, TX - 5 hours ago
AP - October 12, 2008 12:15 PM ET PUERTO SAN CARLOS, Mexico (AP) - Norbert dissipated into a tropical depression over the northern mountains of mainland ...
Video: Raw Video: Norbert Slams Into Mexico AssociatedPress
all 215 news articles

Depression - Google News

home | site map
© 2006