Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
BROADEN YOUR PERSPECTIVE: TRUTH
The following section might repeat a few things from the previous section because they are both about broadening your perspective. Self doubt seems to be a common problem with many people who are depressed, including myself. Self doubt extends depression because in order to heal yourself you need to trust in yourself and your capabilities.
Most people will attempt to tell you about some truth that they know, whether it's truth about their area of expertise, truth about life in general, religion, spirituality, etc. The real truth is that everything that people think they know to be universal may not apply to you because of lack of experience.
The only way you can "know" anything is to experience it and to experience it's opposite, the rest of the time you merely "think" things. The English word "to know" gets abused all of the time when a majority of the time the person using it really means "to think." Someone, myself included, may tell you that they know that if you devote a whole day to smiling, you'll feel better and feel happier; but what they really mean is they think that if you devote a whole day to smiling you'll feel better and happier.
The way our human knowledge works, we have to experience the outcome and the inverse outcome in order to claim we know something. We know about gravity because we have seen an object at rest and an object being pulled by gravity. If all we saw, or rather all we recognized, was one of the two, we could make no assumption about the universal force called gravity.
Another example of truth: most people are able to claim, rightly, that they know what it means to be loved, because they had parents and family who loved them, and they have probably felt the uncaring world where there was a lack of love. However, some people grow up sheltered enough that they don't really know what love is because they remain among those who love them for such a long time. When they finally face the uncaring world, they don't know what to make of it and they don't recognize that it is the lack of love. It takes a few experiences for them to recognize the difference between what being loved and not being loved is like.
Taking "truth" further, it is possible to know something then to forget it: for example, people who drive a manual transmission car and then switch to an automatic for the majority of their life have a hard time remembering how to drive a manual transmission vehicle. Some people go for extended periods of time without love and forget what it feels like to be loved. The conclusion I am trying to lead you to is that it's possible to be depressed for such a long period of time that you forget what it means to be happy and you forget WHAT makes you happy.
There is a lot of false information out there--I don't mean that it's necessarily wrong either, just that it might not work for you. Each of us is unique, what works for one person might not work for another. Whenever someone gives you advice, myself included, keep your perspective broad--it may or may not work. Even all of the ingredients in my All-natural Anti-depressant might not work for you--they worked for me, but that doesn't mean they will work for you; you have to find what works for you through experimentation.
The Firth ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is broaden your perspective of the truth. No one can "give" you the truth and the only way you'll "know" anything is if you try it. In other words: until you try those things that other people tell you to do or not do, you won't know if they will make you happy or if the opposite will make you happy. You might be surprised what you discover!
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