Depression
Depression. Depression is the place in life where everything feels gray, where you’re exhausted before the day even starts, where nothing makes sense or feels real anymore. It’s a place where your brain defaults to two paths: shut down or freak out.
In a shut down state you’re on autopilot. Everything is boring, you’re tired of people, even the things you normally love to do. It feels like you can’t take it anymore and you just want it to end, but that’s not the same as taking action to make it better. You tell yourself it’s safer this way: If I just push through the pain by shutting down, then I won’t feel any of it. It’s like wearing armor to protect yourself against the enemy, but instead of putting on the big plates you just numb the feelings out until your brain is dull and your heart is silent. You’re not weak for this to happen to you, but you can become very weak if you keep living here. You have all these emotions about things you never feel in your conscious mind. They’re building up into a burden weighing down your subconscious mind, but you’ve got so thick a crust of protective numbness on the outside that you are refusing to even face it. You think you’re fine, but this armor is keeping you from life in a lot of ways. You feel trapped, but it’s a “safe” kind of trapped.
When your mind is freaking out, it’s always taking the same path. It’s a subconscious reaction and it’s like being hunted by your own thought life. It’s like fear told you the dinosaur is coming and so now you’re reacting. You hear a sound in the bush and you dive for cover in a heartbeat. You’ve got all these fears about the future or regrets about the past. Thoughts like, “I’m never going to make it, nothing is ever going to change, I’ll never be good enough…” and the list goes on and on. Your thoughts are panicked and it just repeats over and over. In these moments you’re playing that same song on repeat and all you do is react to the fears in your life again and again.
Both of these mindsets, shut down and freak out, have subconscious patterns. Your mind is trying to protect you from danger and these automatic reactions are the solutions it’s come up with. The problem is that neither of those “helps” you in a positive way. In your shutdown world, you’re not getting to actually live; you’re just going through the motions. You’re not broken, but in your subconscious mind you believe that you’re weak and that you have to be that way. It’s dangerous and limiting to the life God created you to live. In your freaked out world, your subconscious patterns are reactive. Your world is that fear tape that just keeps playing on repeat over and over. You’ve got all these beliefs about the past or future that your mind is convincing you is real, but it’s just your own thought life running in circles. You’ve never had the tools to do anything different, so you are left in your own head, running that record.
The cool thing is that you have a choice.
Think of a person wandering in a deep fog. It’s thick and all they can see are a few feet in front of them. If they panic and start running in all directions, they only get more disoriented and tired. They can also choose to sit down and give up. They figure they’ll be lost in the fog forever. But if they can sit still, they may notice even a faint wisp of breeze or a tiny bit of daylight to one side. If they can take one slow, deliberate step and then pause, this person will find their way out of the fog. They will eventually get their bearings.
God meets you in the place where you choose to be aligned. Not in the fog of shutting down or running in circles, but in that place where you have enough awareness to know that you have a choice. Please hear me on this: I believe that God is sovereign and He can do miraculous work through depression. That’s not what He designed for your life, though. He made you to live in clarity and purpose, not reaction. You have emotions. You are more than your feelings, and God has not left you in the land of the fog. You can choose to be aware. You can choose to pause and think in a different way.
The question is if you can begin to recognize misalignment when you get caught in it. Can you pause and choose to create another path in your mind? If you’re living in that two-lane road of numb vs. freak out, and you can’t find your way out of that, then you’re just living between two prisons. Shut down or overwhelm. React or retreat. Neither one of those is helpful in the long run. Neither one of those is actually the real you.
You can begin to recognize automatic thought patterns that are creating depression for you and create a whole new set of thoughts that don’t drive depression. It’s not about positive thinking. It’s about understanding that your thoughts create your reality and you have the choice to choose thoughts that are aligned with reality. You will learn how to get off that merry-go-round of automatic thought patterns, so that clarity and purpose become your default place to live, instead of, well, more of the same.
Book a session and let’s figure out exactly where you’re stuck and what to do about it.
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