INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
BE INDIVIDUAL
American culture is deep rooted in Independence, yet we often lose focus and trade independence for dependency. The social pressure and cultural desire to be independent often creates an internal conflict that contributes to depression. Furthermore, dependency--whether emotional, physical, or intellectual--can cause further conflicts as we try to juggle the desires of those who we depend on. Conflict with others we depend on can leave us feeling hopeless and can wear on us physically and emotionally. Worse still, conflict with ourselves can be the worst kind of conflict because we think we ought to have full control over ourselves and yet we realize that we do not.
As children, we are very dependent on our parents and caretakers to survive. The institution of the family provides us with our most influential learning experiences, it teaches us how to cope with our emotions, develop relationships and make decisions. The natural progression of a man or woman is to leave the confines of his or her parents and venture into the world on our own to ultimately start our own families and continue the cycle.
Venturing into the real world is a difficult process and many individuals struggle with integrating into it. When faced with difficult situations, we tend to revert back to what we know and what is familiar--this includes our family and friends. We give up our independence and our chance to learn independence in order to keep things the way they are, but we aren't meant to stagnate in life, we are meant to adapt and change and move forward.
Because we prefer to revert back to the familiar when life becomes challenging, I have found that depression and independence tend to be at odds. Instead of dealing with emotions on our own, we revert back to our childhood when we would cry and whine and our parents or other family members would take care of us--this is a familiar pattern that has worked for us in the past and so our instinct is to remain in that dependent state in hopes that it will continue working into the future.
The sixth ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is to look at yourself as an individual. Individuals make decisions for themselves, by themselves. Individuals, although they may be apart of social units such as family and community, remain independent of those social units.
I originally planned to put this article in part 3, but I realized as I was writing it that I needed to refer to the previous parts in order to explain the importance of this ingredient.
The first ingredient to my anti-depressant may be to create space, but the space isn't an end, it is a means to an end. It is difficult to gain your own independence if you rely on your family, friends, religion, school, or other community membership to tell you whether you are living life correctly. If you use other people to gauge whether you are making correct decisions or you use them as a comparison to determine what happiness is, you will never learn what makes you happy--all you will know is what makes other people happy. Without experiencing things you cannot develop a refined enough palate to truly understand what is making you happy or unhappy.
The hardest thing for me to overcome, and I recognize that this is true for many other people, was learning how to comfort myself and deal with my own emotions. When I was angry, I always--ALWAYS--attributed them to other people. Sometimes I did this directly by telling myself that X made me angry or Y made me unhappy, and sometimes I would do this by saying I did this to myself because of what X has done. It took me a long time to realize that other people trigger emotions in me, and emotions are my subconscious' attempt to influence my decisions based on patterns of events in my past, however that does not make them good or bad. I used to always think loneliness was a bad feeling (I still do sometimes) but it isn't the feeling that is bad, it is how I react to it. If I embrace loneliness and it leads me to make new friends and break out of my comfort zone, then loneliness has served a good purpose. But if I resort to blaming other people for my sorrows, then I am merely slipping back into that dependent stage that I did as a child.
If you want to learn how to be happy and not slip into depression, you need to learn how to do it independently. Other people can't give you happiness, you have to learn it; and because each of us is unique, what makes one person happy doesn't necessarily make another person happy. The only way you can know what makes you happy is to broaden your perspective of the truth: to experience many things that make you happy and many things that make you sad.
It took a long time for me to realize that other people were telling me what would make me happy and what would make me sad. Because so many people told me about things that would make me sad, I avoided those things only to realize that they made me very happy. Getting a degree in English was one of those things: many people told me that it was a useless degree and would not help me to have a nice career. --What those people didn't realize is that I don't value the same careers that they do, and now that I have obtained my bachelors in English, I know that it has made me more happy than not having a degree. I also think there is still plenty of time for me to have a "nice career," even if it doesn't lead me to be a doctor or engineer. If I would have listened to other people, I would have been limiting myself to a state of less happiness, it wasn't until I ventured out independent of other people that I was able to learn for myself what made me happy.--And guess what? My degree in English was a crucial component along my path to discovering this All-natural Anti-depressant.
As an individual I make decisions on my own rather than follow the decisions of others. Sometimes my decisions coincide with decisions others wish I would make, but most of the time I have to make decisions for myself because no one else knows my situation better than me. To be happy, you need to be an individual as well. You need to become less emotionally dependent on other people and discover ways that you can be physically and mentally independent as well. When you can embrace who you are because you made all of the decisions that lead you to where you are now, you will be less prone to feelings of depression, you will have more control over your happiness, and you will have a new sense of purpose in life.
NEXT: Part 7
As children, we are very dependent on our parents and caretakers to survive. The institution of the family provides us with our most influential learning experiences, it teaches us how to cope with our emotions, develop relationships and make decisions. The natural progression of a man or woman is to leave the confines of his or her parents and venture into the world on our own to ultimately start our own families and continue the cycle.
Venturing into the real world is a difficult process and many individuals struggle with integrating into it. When faced with difficult situations, we tend to revert back to what we know and what is familiar--this includes our family and friends. We give up our independence and our chance to learn independence in order to keep things the way they are, but we aren't meant to stagnate in life, we are meant to adapt and change and move forward.
Because we prefer to revert back to the familiar when life becomes challenging, I have found that depression and independence tend to be at odds. Instead of dealing with emotions on our own, we revert back to our childhood when we would cry and whine and our parents or other family members would take care of us--this is a familiar pattern that has worked for us in the past and so our instinct is to remain in that dependent state in hopes that it will continue working into the future.
The sixth ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is to look at yourself as an individual. Individuals make decisions for themselves, by themselves. Individuals, although they may be apart of social units such as family and community, remain independent of those social units.
I originally planned to put this article in part 3, but I realized as I was writing it that I needed to refer to the previous parts in order to explain the importance of this ingredient.
The first ingredient to my anti-depressant may be to create space, but the space isn't an end, it is a means to an end. It is difficult to gain your own independence if you rely on your family, friends, religion, school, or other community membership to tell you whether you are living life correctly. If you use other people to gauge whether you are making correct decisions or you use them as a comparison to determine what happiness is, you will never learn what makes you happy--all you will know is what makes other people happy. Without experiencing things you cannot develop a refined enough palate to truly understand what is making you happy or unhappy.
The hardest thing for me to overcome, and I recognize that this is true for many other people, was learning how to comfort myself and deal with my own emotions. When I was angry, I always--ALWAYS--attributed them to other people. Sometimes I did this directly by telling myself that X made me angry or Y made me unhappy, and sometimes I would do this by saying I did this to myself because of what X has done. It took me a long time to realize that other people trigger emotions in me, and emotions are my subconscious' attempt to influence my decisions based on patterns of events in my past, however that does not make them good or bad. I used to always think loneliness was a bad feeling (I still do sometimes) but it isn't the feeling that is bad, it is how I react to it. If I embrace loneliness and it leads me to make new friends and break out of my comfort zone, then loneliness has served a good purpose. But if I resort to blaming other people for my sorrows, then I am merely slipping back into that dependent stage that I did as a child.
If you want to learn how to be happy and not slip into depression, you need to learn how to do it independently. Other people can't give you happiness, you have to learn it; and because each of us is unique, what makes one person happy doesn't necessarily make another person happy. The only way you can know what makes you happy is to broaden your perspective of the truth: to experience many things that make you happy and many things that make you sad.
It took a long time for me to realize that other people were telling me what would make me happy and what would make me sad. Because so many people told me about things that would make me sad, I avoided those things only to realize that they made me very happy. Getting a degree in English was one of those things: many people told me that it was a useless degree and would not help me to have a nice career. --What those people didn't realize is that I don't value the same careers that they do, and now that I have obtained my bachelors in English, I know that it has made me more happy than not having a degree. I also think there is still plenty of time for me to have a "nice career," even if it doesn't lead me to be a doctor or engineer. If I would have listened to other people, I would have been limiting myself to a state of less happiness, it wasn't until I ventured out independent of other people that I was able to learn for myself what made me happy.--And guess what? My degree in English was a crucial component along my path to discovering this All-natural Anti-depressant.
As an individual I make decisions on my own rather than follow the decisions of others. Sometimes my decisions coincide with decisions others wish I would make, but most of the time I have to make decisions for myself because no one else knows my situation better than me. To be happy, you need to be an individual as well. You need to become less emotionally dependent on other people and discover ways that you can be physically and mentally independent as well. When you can embrace who you are because you made all of the decisions that lead you to where you are now, you will be less prone to feelings of depression, you will have more control over your happiness, and you will have a new sense of purpose in life.
NEXT: Part 7
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