Hi Everyone --

re: Myzen: "This made me wonder how we can cope with triggers if we don't even know we are having them. Then I wondered how we do cope with our triggers, and so that's my question."

It sounds like you have an effective strategy for the coping in place, Myzen. Bravo!

The way I've interpreted the remark @ "don't even know we're having them" is that therapy (self, group, through books, whatever) makes us conscious that there is/was a trigger. Until that happens, we sit around feeling blue, helpless to do anything.

I don't even go back into the past most of the time to identify a root cause. I just look at the situation. Say, I feel badly because my work was rejected.

Okay, so -- that's normal. Does it have to destroy my life or me? Can I put the rejection into a narrower context in terms of consequences? Can I look at who the rejectors were and decide I don't care about their opinion so much that I need to make myself heartsick over it?

Dealing with the here and now (instead of with long-ago root causes) as pragmatically as possible helps me. There are techniques for working on one's stinkin' thinkin' in Dr David Burns Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. They only work if one writes them out -- and I have done that many times. After all, when I'm deep depression -- or even milder depression -- what the heck else am I doing that's so important.

Thanks for bringing up this excellent topic for discussion.