How to Overcome Depression While Feeling Bad

How to Overcome Depression - Tune Into Your Feelings

I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect we don’t take care of ourselves because we haven’t developed our ability to tune in.

The ability to tune in is a conundrum because if you don’t have it, how can you give it to yourself? Tuning in is a result of good mothering and good mothering is a result of tuning in. It goes round and round - and it all starts with your mother.

If your mother didn’t know how to tune into her self, then she couldn’t teach you to - no matter how much she loved you. Before she could teach you, she had to know it for herself. The second thing she had to know was how to tune into you. She had to tune into your needs.

A mother’s ability to tune into her child’s needs doesn’t happen automatically, a lot depends on her basic nature. We all know that ideal, unconditionally loving mothers are not the typical reality. Mothers just don’t show up that way. Mothers can be stressed, emotionally immature, even wounded - and therefore unable to tune into you.

Our mothers were wounded. And so are we.

If you take a deep look at your parents and their parents, if you look at many generations before us, you’ll see they had no opportunity for healing.
Traumatic, unhealed life experiences have been passed down to us through the generations.

There is a term in psychology called “holding”. It means a safe space, an environment that supports people in talking about their feelings and challenges. So it follows that the essence of self-mothering is the art of creating a “safe space” for your feelings and fears, your dreams and insecurities. For the changes you need to go through.

A good inner holding environment provides the security we need so we can engage with life and encourages us to take risks in order to grow. A poor holding environment is reactive, unsafe, and repressive.

At her best, Mom provides a safe, secure holding environment for your drama of growing up. “Holding” - Isn't that a perfect word for mothering? She holds you in a womb, as an infant, and you - your “you-ness”- through the many changes you grow through. “Changes R Us!” (says Mom)

How to overcome depression?

With fear and with courage.

There is way to live life fully, a way that is not just another strategy to escape suffering.

The first step is to cultivate your inner holding environment. This gives you the "home base" you need in order to face life's challenges.

Accept the fact that life includes survival issues. Survival issues run the gamut, from fear of abandonment to fear of death, from fear of loneliness to fear of betrayal. It is reasonable, even wise and and responsible, to have healthy fear of lacking food or shelter, to fear poverty or illness.

There is plenty to fear and hurt about. Resisting your pain around the harsh realities of life is not how to overcome depression.

Courage is the secret to the good life

Maya Angelou, in an inaugural address to graduating seniors, said that courage is the most important virtue because without it, all your other virtues will go unused.

Since courage is the #1 virtue, the courage to feel how you feel is the most important, the #1 crucial place to develop your courage.

If you can't face or feel your feelings, you become afraid of them. Fear of your own feelings cuts your life down to small instantly and completely. Life becomes pure resistance to your experience of it. Fear of feelings is a catch 22...you become controlled by them, which is exactly what you are afraid of!

This is why your self-mothering, secure inner-space is the secret. It is the place where you "deal with it." Where you face the difficult task of letting go of the illusion of security in the outer world.

Attempting to create security in the world is where we go wrong. I'm not saying that security per se is bad, but it is where most of us go wrong.

Making outer security #1 is a big mistake

Whatever you fear, whether it is being alone or being fat, being a failure or being loved for your money... What EVER you are afraid of, if you build your life around not feeling your fear, around protecting yourself against it, you will be miserable.

Think about it.

How to overcome depression?

It is NOT about security OUT there
it IS about security IN you.