How to Deal with Depression, Abandonment and Anxiety: We All Need Healthy Self-Mothering

How to Deal with Depression, Abandonment and Anxiety

We don't know how to deal with emotions because we've never been around people who do know. We don't even know that we don't know. Most of us are emotionally illiterate.

We have no power to change anyone or to make them happy. We lose power when we need someone to be different so we can feel happy. Depression is often a message that the only true answer lies within.

Overcoming depression and emotional illiteracy means learning how to change from the inside out.

One of my depressed clients said he was a miserable person and everyone in his family was miserable. And his misery attracted other miserable people into his life.

He saw his family and friends looking for happiness in all the wrong places. They tried to soothe their misery with things that can't bring happiness. They constantly sought outer things things like cars or status - but not inner things like healthy emotional resolution or relationships.

He tried to help them feel better. He gave and gave and gave but nothing he did ever made them happy. He felt like a powerless failure.

He lost his power as soon as he felt responsible for them, as soon as his job was THEM instead of himself. We all lose power when we do that. (This is a classic trap that many mothers fall into.)

Happiness (dealing with depression or abandonment) is an inside job with deep, sensitive emotions. Your feelings need a secure, safe space in which to happen. A holding space. A kind, empathetic, self-mothering space.

Change requires a nurturing, safe, secure environment. Your inner environment is the environment that allows for positive change.

So, you ask, what does Mom have to do with it?

Your first environment was inside of your mother. Then in her physical and energetic space, her energy, her feeling state. She taught you about dealing with your feeling space with the way she dealt with her space. And with how she treated your feelings.

Six supports for dealing with depression, abandonment and anxiety:

First. Are you friendly to yourself? Or do you incline toward right/wrong, good/bad type thinking? (That is a hostile, judging environment.) Were your parents into right and wrong, good and bad?

Second. Do you set standards which you see yourself as failing? Do you notice and celebrate progress?

Third. You must let go of knowing and controlling how things work out.

Fourth. Insisting that anything has to be a certain way doesn’t help and it creates tension and a hostile territory.

Fifth. How do you feel? I’m NOT asking what you think. Don't judge how you feel. Let your feelings be like the weather. Let the weather of your feelings pass.

Sixth. Believe in the power of your perseverence. ANY change is proof that change is possible and anything is possible one little change at a time. Nurture your environment (YOU) and YOU (your environment) will nurture you.

Then just relax.

http://www.beat-depression-naturally.com/how-to-deal-with-depression.html