I feel so sad this morning and I have problems with seeing hope.

I remember when I was young. The depression "crept into me" and I ordered a session with a psychiatrist. I sat down at his office and thought he would ask some questions. He threw me out because I hadn't explained the problem.

I tried another one and that led to feeling worse. I decided to be my own therapist and set apart half an hour each night after the news. I decided that activity was the opposite of depression and put activities into a schedule. That helped enough to make me into an University. At that time I decided to try a psychologist instead of a psychiatrist. That helped much together with my activity plans. Good job followed after University and a health that was OK enough (I mean I looked out for triggers and adapted my daily life trying to do the best for my total health).

After many good years a really dirty happening became far behind my ordinary coping mechanisms. I was more depressed then ever and I had to cope with one or two days at the time of "ups" as well.

My condition became chronic. It is something about that when you already are down in energy and small "things" happens there is no energy to fight with. When one has one "small event" after the other, life becomes a daily struggle.

Before Christmas last year, I had some sessions with a CBT therapist. That direction attracts me because it is the one that seem most similar to my homemade strategies from my younger days. CBT is not simple. It is hard work both in the here and now and to go from one's easy to get, "I am not good enough", to find the assumptions beneath that and then to find other assumptions (living-rules, layer by layer) until one finds the core belief from an earlier stage in life. When one has found the core belief one can decide to change it.

I was very optimistic after the CBT therapy, but low in energy, when somebody almost spit in my face and told me among others that CBT was a simplistic theory. Of course everybody don't have to feel well with the same sort of therapy, but we do not talk down the frame of therapy that another struggle to use. This lasted for a while (I have cut that person out of my life), but my energy is still low.

I need to pull all the pieces together and raise up in slow motion. An old body doesn't have the same capacity as a young, so one has to be more clever about the balance between rest and activity.

It was a little help in writing this. The feeling of hopelessness left me. I can see that I have done many "things" well in life.

We will always meet people that are very different from us, and sometimes they will "slap us in our face" probably without knowing that they are doing so. It is unfortunately when that happens when one is low in energy, but it should not make us feel miserable because we were not able to cope when already low in energy. It should be seen as a bad happening and nothing else. One cannot blame oneself for the mistakes of others, but be kind to oneself and take the time it takes to heal either one uses this or that strategy to come over the dump in the road.