You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.
- Chinese Proverb
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With depression, you can either think your way to new feelings and actions -- change your 'self-talk',
Or you can act your way to new thinking and new feelings...
It is much harder to be depressed when you are active....
Depression brings everything inside you to a grinding halt...
All circulation more or less stops...
All life stops....you feel like your life is over...
Lost loved ones...lost self-identity....
Your mind is going around and around on the same toxic track...
If only this, if only that...I should have done this, I should have done that...
Everything is stuck in past tense...
Maybe I can do this or maybe I can do that...
And my loved one will come walking back through my door....
If only I could hear his or her voice...
Grief, for the most part, is a healing, cleansing emotion....
Bringing emotional closure -- or at least partial emotional closure -- to a lost loved one...
There will always be a place for that person in your heart...
But depression is unfelt grief.....hanging on to a person who does not want to let go...
Depression is a 'pit bull, hanging on, bite'....where we won't unclench our jaws...
We're biting ourselves over and over again...
Depression is at least partly internalized rage....
Externalizing that rage -- in the right therapeutic environment -- is a key step to moving on...
Activate yourself...
Go for a walk...
Meet new people...
Stop toxifying yourself...poisoning yourself, strangulating yourself...
With the words that you say to yourself, your endless, fruitless, depressive, merry-go-round...
Your 'ifs' and 'buts'...will drive you 'nuts'...
When someone smiles at you and offers you a lifeboat...
Don't go down with the Titanic...
-- dgb, May 13th, 2010
-- David Gordon Bain....
