mindfulness

Can i bounce thoughts off people?

Mindfullness (stopping and focusing on feeling the body, monitoring its sensations, hearing, tasting, and experiencing being here and now in the present) has given me a new awareness and way of being

...and negative thoughts and feelings still come in, the black beast still lurks there and I dont feel right.

I still 'break down' when the stressors get too much....

but is that just how it is?
is it broken just because it seems to not work as well as other machines work?
just because i dont function brilliantly... does that mean that i need fixing?
maybe this is all i can lookforward to in life... mudling through?

after several weeks of seeing a psychologist I feel that maybe... this is it? Maybe there isnt anything that can make life seem ok and balanced? maybe... life isnt ever balanced and okay...maybe its a continuuum of more and less balanced?

When I first learned about mindfulness I was elated b/c I became aware of all these things but utterly frustrated b/c I couldn't do a thing about it with no way to respond. It turns out that was the point of it. You don't have to act on them; the thoughts and feelings come and go and it is our choice to do something even if it is the choice to do nothing, they will still just come and go. We don't have to act on them but being aware of them helps us make better choices in the future.

My choices now involve doing what I can, moment by moment. I find though not functioning at someone's else's level (who definitely can do more), I do what I can and know that once upon a time not even that was possible. It is important to take credit for even those things no matter how small they may be especially since that time may come again. However, I do wish I could get away from the feeling of muddling through things too.

I know we all have things we'd like to work on. It definitely doesn't mean we're broken only that our strengths and weaknesses are coming through; we just have to find a way to adjust them, improve them or compensate for them. Being aware is the first step and mindfulness helps with that as annoying as it may be. Definitely hang in there.

PS RE: Balance, I'd go with the continuum, between everything in life, balance fluctuates; I just don't think it's possible to be in perfect balance. If it is, I'd love to know how!

You know, I've wondered this a lot myself. Whether or not people actually ever fully recover from depression or if it's just something that they're stuck managing day in and day out much like diabetes.

I wonder if something that prevents us depressives from actually recovering is our unreasonable expectation to be happy all the time. Maybe you dont have this expectation, but I seem to have it. I feel like everyone else is so much happier and joyful than me.

I hear of so many people having to manage this disease that we have, Depression, that it makes me wonder if there is ever hope for complete recovery. I am not entirely sure what the face of depression looks like.

Perhaps it's something to read up more on.

I don't think we can count on anything, even depression, as staying the same. Time moves on and situations around us change, as does our physical body. Sometimes we have a "week" of rain, and other times, only an hour; no way to tell when/how much our spot will get.

I was having a horrible time with a romantic breakup, I'd been involved with the man for a couple three years at least, and couldn't imagine life ever getting better, as it seemed it had fallen back into previous untenable levels, lower than low. Somewhere in there I had to get a job (part of why life was so bad, I had been out of a regular job for over a year and losing money/not making ends meet) so did and started it. The job was interesting enough but coming home still was not and caused a crash. Then a man I met on the job and I got romantically involved and life began to change dramatically. Five+ years later we married and now, 20 years beyond that, I consider myself living happily ever after. Didn't happen all at once or just as a result of the new love; I had 9 more years of good therapy in that 20 years and both my parents, an important mentor, and some good friends/other relatives died.

You can't tell when a thought, interest, job, person, situation is going to blow in like a cool breeze and shake up your world so it starts to move in another, "better" direction. I only know from my own experience to hang on tight and wait for the opportunity I recognize as being a start of a better way of being for me.

I think mindfulness is important because one of the most dangerous parts of depression is not realizing that we're depressed. For me, the worst part of depression was before I was diagnosed, because I didn't have a name for how I was feeling, or a REASON for how I was feeling, I just thought that life in general was crap. Once I realized that it was an ILLNESS affecting my moods -- that I could be brought down by nothing more than brain chemistry --- it was actually a huge relief. Mindfulness, to me, helps keep me from going into that zone of "everything is terrible/pointless" and reminds me that even though I'm feeling pain, the pain does have a root cause. There's some comfort in knowing that this isn't just me, that I'm legitimately sick, and being aware of the indicators of that illness help me take a step back when I'm trying to make key decisions or evaluations about myself or my life.

I sometimes wonder if depression is something that we just manage forever, or if it's ever going to go away for good. I have my good days and I have my bad days, and since I found a medication that works, I've had more good days than bad ones, and I'm grateful for that. Occasionally I still slip, when I'm particularly stressed, when something like a death or a breakup triggers me, but I use mindfulness to remind me what parts of my pain are the depression, which voices in my head are the ILLNESS and not the true evaluation of my worth, and just knowing that this kind of pain isn't my fault is enough to see me through to the next upswing.

DocJohn has said more than once during chats that he thinks everyone can overcome the illness. One of my therapists scolded me for not believing that. After so many therapists and so many medications, I have to wonder. For ten years or so, the professionals have not been very encouraging. Right now, the hardest think for me is being depressed about being depressed. My focus is wrong.

Even when I am locked in to the positive, I still realize management of my depression will always be a work in process. Like most thing, the harder I work at it the better it gets -- to a point.

Good luck, georgiegeorge. It is obvious some are better at getting better. I hope you are one of those.

There are numerous types of depression and episodes of varying strength last for varying amounts of time. I know that severe depression (7+ years) can be overcome because I have seen it in someone who is close to me. Clinical studies have even shown some medications to be especially effective at aiding the move into remission.

I have a tendency toward black and white thinking and I am afraid to get caught in the old thought process that says "I would be normal, I would be successful and my life would work - if I didn't have this illness." To counter that, the way I look at it right now in my own life is more like management. I have hope that one day (soon) it will be gone. But right now having the illness is more like having to deal with something like diabetes. I can relate to justfloating as some days are very hard and some days aren't as hard. But this doesn't mean I will give up on my dreams. I just know that right now dealing with the illness takes precedence as I'd rather not sink any lower. You know?

Thankyou all so much for your replies, i wasnt very together/well/feeling very good when i posted... having read your replies and seen my T yesterday everything is much better

<I wrote another post but forgot to hit post :s ...and i have to go out but will re-type it when i get a chance > thankyou all x

Lovely to hear you are feeling much better! It's strange how our attitudes and feelings can change so dramatically in such short spaces of time. I'm beginning to practice positive thinking, I think often it is not our situations making us down, but the way we think of them. Easier said than done to change negative thinking into positive thinking though.

Hope you continue to feel better x