One of the things Viktor Frankl used to use in his therapy sessions was a thing called "paradoxical intentions." Here's a short wiki about it: Paradoxical intention - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . (Also check out the logotherapy section linked on that page as well.)

The idea is basically to actively practice the negative thought pattern in order to 1) overexpose yourself to it and 2) teach you the irrationality behind it.

I say that basically because all conventional advice will tell you to fight the depression and to not "give up." But depression is such a tricky animal. I compare it to the chinese finger trap. Basically, the more you resist it, the more it persists. Depression is not something you let go of. It lets go of you. And the only way that I have personally found to do that is to stop resisting it and to actively search for the beauty in it.

I'm facing a bout of seasonal affective disorder at the moment. In the past it's basically crippled me and turned me into a zombie, hating life and not wanting anything to do with people or my job at all.

This year, however, I've stopped fighting and resisting it. It doesn't make it go away. It just makes it more bearable. I'm actually off work for a couple of weeks, and I've been in my house for 2 days now. In the past I would be going nuts about that, thinking that I had no life and that I needed to get up and out and get moving. But right now I've just been enjoying the time to recharge my batteries and to watch huge amounts of Netflix. I especially have been drawn to dramas, stuff that makes me want to cry. And the reason I like that is because the crying actually brings this very cathartic feeling to me. It's a great release, and it's an even bigger release to give myself permission to do it without attaching all that negative gunky stuff about crying that men are supposed to believe.

Like it or not, your depression is a part of you. For many of us, it's not a temporary thing either. For many of us, it's something we are going to have to deal with for the rest of our lives no matter what we do. But that doesn't need to make you lose your hope or your faith! On the contrary, you learn to live your life in a new way. You find ways to make it work for you and live so that it doesn't cripple you and have major negative impacts on your life. And that, my friend, is actually very doable. It's within your reach to find ways to live with it (and to do so without medication if that's what your therapist agrees is okay).

I mentioned finding beauty in the depression. There is a beauty to our darkness. After all, you can't see the stars in the daylight, can you? I first realized this a few years ago when I was going back over my childhood and looking for root causes of my depression and anxiety. One particular time, I landed on something that was so utterly intense that I cried harder than I ever cried in my life. The interesting thing I found was that when I was crying that hard, it almost mimicked laughter. It was one of the weirdest things for me to realize that I was crying so hard that I was almost laughing. I thought maybe I was going crazy. But I felt so much better when I was done.

Later I came to realize that our darkness and our lightness is separated by a very thing thread. And we fight so hard to keep that separation within us because we fear that we will go legitimately crazy because we don't know any other way.

Nowadays, I don't fight the depression anymore. I embrace it. It's a part of me and who I am, and I am okay with that. It's okay to be sad. Depression is a bit like a storm that comes over you...it's rain for your soul (so to speak). Your job isn't to stop the storm from happening. It's to plant seeds inside yourself that will grow when the rain comes.