What Is Depression?
Depression is often regarded as a mental health condition, a disease that can either be inherited genetically or that can develop due to environmental factors. Although this depiction often manages to fit the experience most of us will discuss when we talk about the topic, depression is in fact something much different and much more manageable than a non-physical disease that means you are stuck forever feeling miserable.
Depression is in fact a mind state, a state of mind, a state of being. It is a sense of many emotions together for an elongated time frame that can often be described as being synonymous with despair, misery and dissatisfaction. It is the perpetrator of almost all physical disease alongside stress and is probably the most undesired state of being one could wish to experience.
Depression is not in itself a disease or a state of illness, it is not something that is hardwired into anyone’s brain or anyone’s genetics and it is most definitely not something you have to experience for too long if you were to realise how to change it.
What Causes Depression?
Although we all have our own personal unique experiences, all states of depression come from one original place; a lack of expression. Whenever we experience an undesired situation in life, we experience a sense of negative emotion. In a healthy state of mind, we are able to express that negative emotion, understand it and move on to something more preferred.
However, when we experience an array of undesired experiences or situations, we have an emotional reaction to each experience and we fail to express and process what we were feeling. If another situation comes along before we can process the first, we ‘bottle it up’, we suppress the emotions and essentially decide that it’s not important, we have more important matters to attend to.
Constant suppression of emotion has a range of effects on the body and the psychology. To begin with, suppression of our own emotions emphasises a lack of self-worth to ourselves, we justify that the next situation that came along was far more important than us healing and processing our emotions towards the previous situation.
When we suppress something, we take it from the conscious (aware) mind to the subconscious (unaware) mind. Psychology has shown us that the subconscious mind is, in fact, responsible for up to 95% of all the things we think, the emotions we feel and the ways we act each day. Meaning that we recycle yesterday’s thoughts, feelings and actions today without knowing it.
“Psychology has shown us that the subconscious mind is, in fact, responsible for up to 95% of all the things we think, the emotions we feel and the ways we act each day. Meaning that we recycle yesterday’s thoughts, feelings and actions today without knowing it.”
Ever since you first suppress the emotions you experienced in an undesired situation, you’ve essentially played that emotion out on loop each and every day like a broken record. Having not had the opportunity to process the experience at the time, you’ve forever kept it present within your collection of emotions.
Having done so, you’ve likely found weeks, months or even years worth of more reasons to feel depressed as you’ve gone along. As you’ve kept this feeling present and unrecognised within your subconscious mind, this has also been where you’ve had your focus directed to. In summary, ever since you suppressed that emotion, you’ve experienced similar and greater extents of that same emotion and it’s had a constant growing momentum ever since.
So How Do I Change It?
You may not have realised but you have already begun to change it is a major way. As you come to realise and process the experience, you come to understand why it’s resulted in these feelings we all call depression. There are a number of ways you can begin to transform even the most horrific states of emotion no matter how long they may have lasted.
Below I have outlined a process I have used tremendously throughout the past years, either on it’s own or coupled with meditation as a practice of self-hypnosis and memory regression. Coupled together, these 5 methods create a powerful and full healing of past memory regression in an unbelievable way.
Some memories will be easier to bring up from the past, others may lie a little more dormant which is where the use of meditation becomes beneficial as it allows access into the subconscious mind a lot easier. This process is not my own, within the field of self-healing and hypnotherapy it’s a very widely used and respected technique of past memory regression. It’s important to know that you are not reliving the memories, nor are you having a flashback to the experience, you’re reviewing it from a neutral point of view, processing it, allowing it and then letting it go from your energy and from your subconscious mind forever.
If you’ve experienced flashbacks to any unwanted memories before, this is the way that you permanently stop that cycle. When we experience a flashback, it’s often a multitude of thoughts and emotion that come to surface from the depths of our subconscious mind due to the nature of the subconscious being that thoughts, emotions and actions are constantly played on a recycled loop. Through practice of the following exercise, you break that cycle once and for all. You completely heal a trauma you have had playing on loop ever since.
Step 1: Become aware of why you are where you are, understanding what’s caused it, the effect that has had and understand that this is why you have experienced what you have called this experience of depression. (Aka read this article)
Step 2: Think back to what you believe may have started the downhill spiral. Be brave, it may feel real momentarily but it’s not, it’s just a memory and if you can dig it up and reveal it, you will never feel it again. It’s a bit of a paradox but if we suppress negativity then we experience negativity, if we express our negativity then we transform and transcend through it almost instantaneously.
Step 3: Allow. Allow the past situation that you had once suppressed. Don’t try and argue it, reason it, justify it, blame yourself for it or be angry at it because you believe it shouldn’t have happened and don’t try to justify it because you believe it should have happened either. Just allow it. It has happened. That fact can never change. You will never fully know why. You don’t need to know why. Knowing why would change nothing. It is what it is and it’s okay for that to be okay.
Step 4: Once you’ve come to allowance with the experience, you’ve made huge progress. You’ve uncovered the buried memory, you’ve viewed it in its full and not added further negative emotion by trying to resist it further. You’ve transformed your perspective on the situation and you’ve released it permanently from your subconscious mind. Once you learn to allow it, the fact that it has happened does change, the only way the situation can ever effect you is due to denial of its existence which is a complete and utter paradox in itself.
Step 5: Understand that you have completely transformed a memory from your past. You may find that the memory comes up again in the future, but instead it’s the transformed perspective of the memory. If this happens and it triggers an emotion response, it’s simply a sign for you to further process the memory with another, even newer perspective that’s even more liberating and beneficial to you.
You can repeat the process as often as you feel comfortable. Doing so just once will have fantastic results. You will have released the emotional loop of the experience forever. You may only have one serious instance that’s affected you this way in which case in a matter of weeks you’ll come to realise your whole life has transformed, your emotional set point is of an unbelievable level and you feel more balanced and harmonious than you have ever done before.
If there are multiple situations or experienced you’ve suppressed then you will likely have to do the process a few times as you find different memories you have recently suppressed. Know that although this may seem to be something quite frightening, to begin with, there is an a beautiful liberation that follows each time we practice releasing a past emotion. Once you understand what you’ve begun to understand from this post, you can never truly be of the victim to the belief that depression is a disease you are associated with. Once you dip up the memory and bring it to your consciousness, it has been brought to your awareness forever. It can no longer be on autopilot loop within you ever again.
Once you begin to practice allowance of the memory of the experience or situation, then you master the power of transmutation. You take what you would once associate as the reason you were miserable and hating lie with utter despair and transform it into something you can grow from immensely. As you change your perception, you restore the memory as a brand new, fresh memory and you remove the old, you no longer have the past memory, you no longer associate with it and you no longer experience situations of similarity ever again.
Upon completion of the process, you have forever liberated yourself from something that was forever going to cause your depression otherwise. Each time you go through and practice these steps, you will be dramatically altering your neurochemistry each and every time. Balancing out your hormones and feelings in ways no antidepressant medication has or could ever do. From this day forward, what has forever held you back will have changed forever. It may take a few days or so for you to really notice and come to grips with the change but you have changed yourself forever. You are no longer the victim and you are no longer having your life controlled by this broken record of unwanted emotion you’ve played on repeat each and every day without knowing it.