Choosing how we think, feel and behave

If you are a person who suffers from depression, stress, have panic attacks, have low self esteem, anger management problems, then you may feel the title of this article is rubbish and that I don’t know what I’m taking about.

If you do feel this way and I understand those feelings very well, please read on and see if you feel the same by the end of the article.

Firstly, let me say that I do know from first hand experience as well as professionally. Yes, I have suffered from depression and quite serious depression a long time ago and know all about the title and may even have rubbished it myself when I was younger and less knowledgeable than I am today. Today I am much older and fortunately wiser than back then when it was very black and white and cast in stone for me.

My beliefs were the following:
• If I am depressed I am defenseless against it.
• If I am depressed I have no control over the awful negative thoughts in my head that I believe are right anyway.
• If I am depressed I am doomed to a life of negativity because that’s how it is in depression and I have no control over it anyway.
• If I am depressed there is nothing I can do to change my situation.
• If I am depressed I can’t change the way I think, feel or behave, the depression makes me that way and I must accept this as being the way it is.

These were my negative thoughts on my own depression and in those days I believed them. I believed it was my destiny to endure the pain and isolation depression brings with it.

I was wrong!!

My depression was “Reactive Depression” rather than chemically based depression, meaning I would become depression in reaction to certain situations. A bad thing would happen and I would plummet, time after time into wretched depression full of negative thinking, emotions and behavior. I would think doom and gloom. I would feel wretched and want to hide myself away from the world because my mood was so bad. I believed there was no escape from this, which made me feel a hundred times worse. This is what depression can do to us, right? makes us a little crazy.

However, when I was not depressed and was fine I could see another truth. I saw others who had similar experiences to mine who were not in the same state of depression as me. I wondered why and how could this be so? Their perception of the situation must be different to mine if they are fine. My perception clearly wasn’t the same as theirs. One of the things I quickly learned was that there is more than just one truth, more than just one way to see life and what happens to us, and because there is more than one way, more than one truth that explains why different people react differently to any given situation I knew it didn’t need to be this way, all negative.

Of course I also knew it is also dependant on other factors, but one basic truth must be if it is not a chemical problem, that we, each of us individually choose how we ourselves perceive and react to any given situation. That little truth is surely universal?

I wasn’t always depressed, just in those times where something very negative happened and I seemed to have no control over my negative reaction to it.

Let me just say here that Chemical depression is one thing, and reactive depression is another. Mine was definitely the second as many depressive states are. You would need to find out whether or not your particular depression is chemically based or not.

Having a genetic predisposition to depression may account for why some people react more negatively than others to negative situations, but undoubtedly negative situations like loss of any sort, losing a job, which in this day and age is contributing to the number of people suffering from depression. Losing your home, partner, a friend, a pet or even negative input from another can all contribute to the plummet into a depressive episode. For me it was losing a number of babies that was the trigger for me. Over a number of years I lost a lot of babies and we also lost a lot of pets. I don’t know why it was like this, but it was. It was all very depressing and each time I reacted to these situations by becoming depressed.
I would feel I was the only person in the world who suffered this fate as well as the depression that followed it. I became a negative person, seeing the world, my life and my fate in an unhealthily negative way. It was exhausting for me and tiresome for those around me. In fact in the end I distanced myself from people and situations, and they from me. I don’t know which one came first actually, them or me. Even though I was married and had my son, it was a lonely existence which only deepened my depression even further.

It all changed of course. It was a phase in my life, brought about by the repeated loss, but I learned a great deal, hands on so to speak.
There are many reasons why people become depressed. Life can be difficult and unfair, especially in this day and age. It often leaves us understanding little about why we have to go through so much pain and misery in our life.

Over time I saw for myself that people in similar situations to me (miscarriage) did not react in the same way as I had. Their rationale was different to mine. Their perception was different to mine. I should add that all this was before I became a psychologist.

I knew deep inside me that there must be a logical reason for this difference, but in those days believed it was “my makeup’ and that I was doomed to depression. They (for whatever reason) were lucky enough not to experience the same feelings as me. It was destiny one way or the other.

One day however I had a revelation. I suddenly realized that it is not what happens to us that’s important in terms of our well-being within that situation. Rather, it is HOW we perceive the situation and how well or badly we respond or react to that situation that becomes the deciding factor in relation to our mood and thinking.

I suddenly came to the understanding that I and I alone chose how to be. I alone allowed myself to stay in negative mode. I chose how to think, how to feel and how to behave and react to these situations when they arose. It was not a comfortable realization.
I realized that I was my own worst enemy when I was depressed because instead of helping myself out of my plummeting mood and the depression that became a part of it, I allowed it in without resisting it, without fighting it and without telling myself that my mood, my thinking, my reactions, my emotions were purely up to me, no one else on the outside, just me. This was before my days of CBT unfortunately.
I realized that in some mad way I chose to stay in the state of depression. I chose to live in it, in that state. I could choose differently, but didn’t.
I was so used to being depressed by now that it felt as though I really had no control over any of it. If a bad situation arose I would be straight there, my mood would drop like a ton of bricks leaving me in a place that by now I knew so well.
I was brought up in different times than those of today. I was brought up to believe others are responsible for making me better and that we have little say in the matter and even less control. In those days that kind of thinking was quite normal in our family. How absolutely wrong that attitude is.

Today a far healthier view is taken, which is that we individuals can be very instrumental in our own well-being. That we can choose and make things happen for ourselves and that we don’t have to be at the mercy of any outside person or situation as long as we choose to take matters into our own hands and do whatever we can and need to do in order to make changes in ourselves. This way of thinking is so wonderful, so healthy and so empowering, it is also us taking full responsibility for ourselves. We don’t have to put up with anything if we choose not to and this for many cases includes depression.

My revelation turned all my negative beliefs on their head. One day, and really one day, I suddenly realized that if I am the centre of my own misery, my own depression then surely I can also change it?

There are two things involved here. One, external situations we have no control over. For example I would lose a baby, or someone would inflict something negative upon me and I was the target or the receiver in the situation. Internally I would then react badly by becoming depressed, especially to the miscarriages. (internally meaning my thinking and emotions).

External situations or situations we have no control over are those situations where we can’t make our own internal choice whether it happens or not. These are situations beyond our control, whereas internal control comes from us choosing how we are going to manage that situation in terms of how we choose to think about it, negatively or effectively and secondly how we react emotionally, whether negatively or not allow negative emotions or thoughts to take control.
This revelation was a huge one and boiled to the fact that I and I alone had sole control over my reactions to situations. No external person or situation. How can a situation be responsible for my mood? I and I alone am responsible whether I like that fact or not. I either choose to do nothing to help myself out of my depressed state or better still ensure I never get into such a state of depression ever again. I can choose HOW I react to any situation. I CAN take control if I choose. It is not chosen for me by some voodoo. No, I myself choose and if I choose badly, negatively, then yes I will suffer unbearably negative thoughts and scenario’s, unbearably painful emotions and will behave negatively as a result. But all of it is actually of my choosing and the very choice I make for myself in this life that will impact on my well-being. No one forces their will upon me if I don’t choose to allow it, neither can anyone other than myself choose and be responsible for my own mood and how I deal with it apart from me.

I can make excuses and blame the outside factors people, bosses, doctors, situations but the bottom line will always be the same. I am responsible for myself and whether I choose to be positive or negative.
A situation might be a negative one, the situation itself might not be in my control because it’s external, but what is within my control undoubtedly is my internal state. I can choose that and change that, if I so choose.
If I don’t then I have to take the consequences and take the responsibility for having my own choice in the matter. If I choose negatively, so be it, I will have to live with that choice. I do have a choice whether I know it or not, whether I believe it or not, I do.
I can take control which actually feels very nice, very empowering indeed and leaves me in a place where I am NOT at the mercy of another, or a situation. I have the power to stop all that, to think differently, to feel differently if I so choose.

From that day onward all those years ago, from that revelation I developed a new strategy for helping myself out of the doom and gloom by empowering myself, by giving myself the choice, the decision, the prerogative. It felt great because for the fist time in a long time I was back in control of my internal state, my thought processes, my emotional state and lastly the way I reacted to all three. As I say this was way before I knew anything about CBT.
It was amazing, is amazing.
I now know one of the fundamental secrets of life which is that I and I alone am responsible for my choices in thinking, feeling and behaving. I do have this choice and that I have the power to change myself, correct myself and give myself the best quality of life I can, if I so choose. I can also choose to give myself a poor and miserable quality of life where each day is torture or I can choose not to. Whatever is internal to me is my choice, no one can coerce me if I don’t allow it, even my own thought processes which I suddenly learned I do have great control over if I so choose.

We all have choices, we just have to know we do and then we simply need to learn how to make those choices rather than continue to make the negative choices of accepting our negative state as cast in stone and as we are oh so used to doing.