When you’re depressed, it is so hard to believe that things really can get better. If depression becomes your familiar state, it can be scary to wade into the uncharted territory of feeling better. However, try to let yourself accept the possibility that although you don’t feel better right now, you will.
Depression and being entrenched in its pain often saps you of energy. Therefore, it seems much easier to give into it and live in it. Right now, the situation goes beyond your ability to understand it and, due to being depressed, you are in your own head. Therefore, your thoughts about it are distorted. The situation might feel dire right now because you can only see things the way you see them and feel them the way you feel them.
It can be hard and scary to try to let yourself feel better, no matter how deep the suffering. Why? Because the act of feeling better is the unknown and you haven’t been in the mood to venture too far lately. So why would you prevent yourself from feeling better? Perhaps, on some level, you worry that you are being disloyal to others, or to yourself, if you let yourself feel just a little better. Maybe somewhere within, it’s hard to accept that you “deserve” to feel ok, and to “be ok.” You may also feel that you are not seen as deserving of feeling better.
Either way, once you allow yourself to recognize that the pain you experience is associated with your depression, it can help you feel more willing to stop not only tolerating, but living in, the discomfort of this depressive state. You might be able to develop enough incentive to work on understanding your situation, responses, feelings from another perspective, one that is within a broader context. The very act of considering different perspectives about why and how you feel stuck, in its own right, can shift your experience. This shift in thought allows room to begin to feel better.
First, you just briefly allow yourself to visit this new, uncharted state of not feeling quite as awful. Your visit is on your terms. You don’t have to tell anybody that you are experimenting with letting yourself feel better, if you don’t want to. Start by just letting yourself recognize the subtle, as well as the more overt, ways that you feel better and lighter than you did before. That’s you healing. Go with it.
Just know that whether feeling better lasts a while, or is more fleeting, it is still worth the trip. You’re teaching yourself the way to get there the next time, so feeling better eventually becomes the more comfortable and familiar state.
No matter where your journey takes you, it’s powered by time and hope. But don’t worry if you don’t have access to the hope part yet. Knowing that it is there somewhere within you, waiting to be rediscovered and redirected is also comforting. It is also possible that as you work on accepting that feeling lighter after depression is possible even when life events haven’t significantly changed, it can be because you are demystifying the power of your depression. It is also possible that feeling better has come in a form you didn’t expect or anticipate, which helps you expand your view of what’s possible for you.
Acknowledging that you felt lighter, even briefly, allows you a foundation to build on. The periods of feeling better and lighter before the sadness sets in again then become longer, stronger, and more substantive over time. Monitor yourself. Look at your tendencies. Reassure yourself that what you are experiencing are basic human responses. After all, knowledge is power and self-knowledge is the ultimate power.
