One of the first obvious things to discuss around depression is unpleasant feelings. Difficult emotions. And if you look, its easy to find that we all operate from a box around our emotions. A very simple, obvious box.
We all have emotions we like feeling. A normal list are things like Love
Joy
Happiness
Excitement
Enthusiasm
Inspiration
Enthusiasm
These we call good emotions. We all like having them and want them as often as possible. What are some emotions we dont like and dont want to have? See if most of these fit for you:
Fear
Anger
sadness
hate
loneliness
hate
Meaninglessness
shame
These are what we call bad emotions and we try to avoid them as much as possible. If we cant avoid them, and cant help but feel them, we try to get rid of them as quickly as we can.
What then is this paradigm or box we operate from concerning emotions? That there are “good” and “bad” emotions, of course. Each one of us just seems to “know” that there are good emotions and bad ones, and the point of life is to work to feel good ones and avoid feeling bad emotions. This assumption about emotions goes unexamined by all of us. Of course that’s how you manage your emotions!
And, of course, all the feelings that go with depression we classify as bad emotions, to be avoided or gotten rid of as quickly as possible and at all costs. The box were stuck in about depression is that it is bad. And we definitely want to get away from having all of the kinds of feelings that go with it.
But there is an underlying problem to this approach of trying to avoid or get rid of all the feelings that go with depression. It is founded in an “emotional mistake” we make every day. This mistake is about not trying to feel bad emotions.
Consider the idea that we all, each of us, have an emotional body, just like we have a physical body and a mental body. And your emotional body has a purpose and function, which is to simply feel feelings. All of them. Good emotions like joy and happiness, and “bad” ones like fear and anger. Its job is to feel feelings. You can’t actually keep your emotional body from feeling feelings.
You cant keep your skin from feeling hot or cold, soft or hard. Your skin will feel whatever surrounds it. Just so, your emotional body will feel all of your emotions. You cant just feel good feelings. When you try to suppress bad feelings, you only cause them to get stuck. They then tend to stick around much longer. Trying not to feel the difficult emotions that go with depression can be a way to keep depression around!
So for help with depression, you need to get outside the box of resisting and avoiding all difficult emotions. One approach to doing this is to learn some basic emotional intelligence so that you can process difficult feelings more efficiently and quickly so that they don’t get “stuck.” No room here for all the details, but just 5 minutes a day of exploring a difficult emotion rather than resisting it can provide surprising depression help.
