Tag: Depression

You Are Not Broken

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Often when we have experienced trauma we feel broken, we call ourselves broken and sometimes other use this word to describe us. I would like to respectfully disagree. No one is broken.

Trauma damages our sense of well-being and we can feel as if we will never feel well again, but this is not true. There is always a path back to the light of wholeness. We may need support from the people around us and the resources we have access to, like well chosen books.

It may take time, sometimes it can take years, but the things missing that took away your wholeness can be brought back into your lives and wholeness will be possible again. You are never alone and you are not broken. You are a beautifully unique human being that has a unique that only you can bring to the world. I for one am happy you are sharing this life long adventure we us.

Heal Yourself With Compassion

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

We treat anger, depression and other negative states of being as things to remove or reject, but sometimes they are valid feelings and sometimes we are in the middle of experiencing such feelings and it can be hard to know what to do.

Try treating these feelings with compassion. Think of them in the same way that you would a small child. You wouldn’t reject a child for being upset or angry, you would cuddle and care for the child and help them move through the negative feelings into happier ones.

There is always a reason we feel angry or depressed. If we approach these feelings with compassion we can discover the root cause and heal it.

The Work Of Being Happy

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

There is an impulse in us to avoid negative thoughts and feelings at all costs. Some, however, dwell within the negativity and let it take them over. Neither approach, I feel, will be effective in the long run, if you want to be happy. It is better to engage our negative thoughts and feelings and invite them in for tea, so to speak.

Once they become familiar to us as aspects of ourselves then we can understand why they are there and resolve the underlying causes. This is the work of living a happy and fulfilling life. I recommend utilising both meditation and writing a daily journal.

The Skill of Optimism

The Pathway To Fulfilment

“While you can’t control your experiences, you can control your explanations.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman

Much is often said of the optimism of youth and that such a person is optimistic and another person is pessimistic, as if they are both something we have as innate abilities, like being funny or courageous or creative. Much of what we see as personality traits are in fact based on learnable, practicable skills. It all depends on knowing the underlying behaviours and thinking patterns that bring about said optimism or pessimism.

In his book Learned Optimism, How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D lays out his evidence for the theory that optimism can be learned and that pessimism left unchecked can make us feel helpless, which is the essence of depression; depression is essentially prolonged helplessness. The root cause of both pessimism and optimism is how we explain bad experiences and good experiences to ourselves, how we explain failure and success.

I will let Martin E. P. Seligman explain this is their own words. “The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.”

So, how do you explain misfortune to yourself, do you say things like “why does this always happen to me?” The emphasis on the always will make it seem like the misfortune will happen again and again and that it all your fault. The language we use to explain misfortune to ourselves matters, because seeing misfortune as permanent, pervasive and our fault makes us feel helpless, with no way to make things better. If we begin to train our thinking to explain misfortune as temporary, specific and caused by factors outside of ourselves then we build our skill of optimism.

Optimists, according to Martin E. P. Seligman’s research, also see success as permanent, pervasive and created by themselves, and pessimists see success in the opposite way. A simple flip of how we explain misfortune and success changes everything, and we go from pessimistic to optimistic. However, the way we explain the events in our lives has been developed and somewhat hard wired into our brains from childhood. It is not a quick process to changes our thinking, but it is possible through repetition.

It helps to monitor how we explain the events in our lives and keeping a journal to document our explanatory style (pessimistic or optimistic) and to create language that develops optimistic thinking can change it over time. This is positive, it means that your success and failure are in your hands. It means that you can develop bulletproof optimism that will lead to a happier and more joyful life full of successes and, ultimately, a more fulfilling life. So, take back control over your life through your explanations of what happens in it and make it a life well lived.