Depression as a message that your hope tank needs a refill
Continuing with our series about the messages our emotions give us, today we are looking at depression as a message that we are in desperate need of refill of hope. Hope is such a vital substance for wellness, and there is so much we could explore on this topic. For today, I just want to hit on a couple ideas:
Firstly, locating the places in our life where we feel an absence of hope shows us the places where we are feeling powerless and in need of emotional first aid.
And second, once we are aware of these deficits, there are some things we can do to proactively feed our hope so it will grow over time.
What is hope? Dictionary.com defines it as “the feeling that what is wanted can be had,” or “to look forward with desire and reasonable confidence.” True hope is stronger than maybe. True hope has an expectation that what you expect in theory you will experience in reality. Hope is oriented from the present to the future. It is a forward-looking feeling of encouragement that things will not always be as they are now, but an assurance that you have permission to expect something new.
When we are depressed, we have often been driven to a place where our hope has eroded over time. Instead of living with an excitement about the future, we experience dread about what’s to come because we anticipate it will be more of the same. We feel so weighed down by the pain of the past, it’s become too difficult to imagine anything new. In this place, the idea of hope can seem like nothing more than wishful thinking.
When we are feeling hopeless, we often feel like a victim. We feel disempowered and unable to change things. This is the ultimate feeling of powerlessness, like life is happening to us and there’s nothing we can do about it. This powerlessness feeds our depression.
So what are we to do? The first step to healing and a revival of hope is becoming aware of the parts of our lives under the influence of hopelessness. In these places you are sure to find likely what feels like a fountain of pain. Are you dealing with disappointment that this chronic sickness might never go away? Grief about the passing of a parent? Bitterness from the betrayal of a friend? Blinding pain from years of buried feelings of self-hatred?
It’s important to explore these feelings and find the source. This requires courage. Maybe we are so used to burying painful feelings like this we don’t even know how to know where this is coming from. This is where working with a therapist can be especially useful to have someone to ask questions, hold space for your story, and gently help you locate these entry points in our stories where pain led to a breaking place of hope.
Once we find those places, the task before us to actually feel that pain, not run and hide from it. Really feel it. Allow it to exist. Validate it. This will help us begin to heal. Empathy and compassion (from both self and others) are the ointment and bandages in our emotional first-aid kit. The symptoms of depression can be the screaming signals from the nerve endings meant to lead you to the injury—”Here’s the wound! Help needed here!”
As we allow ourselves to feel our pain and validate that it’s real, we can start to understand how that pain began to warp our perception of ourselves and the world around us. Spiritual teacher Bill Johnson often says, “Any area of my life for which I have no hope is under the influence of a lie.” These lies are the vultures that feast on our pain and siphon off our hope. Lies like:
“I’m too fat, no one could possibly love me.”
“I’m so needy, I will always drain people and drive them away.”
“I’m so stupid, I never have any good ideas, I should stay quiet.”
“Everyone close to me always leaves me, I’ll always be alone.”
“The best years of my life are behind me, it’s too late, why bother dreaming anymore?”
First you address the emotional wound, then you break-up with the lies that have been holding you hostage far too long. Through this process, we can gradually introduce ourselves to the truths that become our pipelines for hope:
“I’m worthy of love.”
“I’m enough.”
“I was made to belong.”
“I can trust again.”
“Who I am inside and out is beautiful.”
In places where lies have been wreaking havoc for a long time, the truth is going to feel unfamiliar. But with past pain addressed and healed, we can absolutely change our mindsets and internal beliefs and becoming intimate partners with truth in these parts of our lives. And crazy enough, feeling hopeful will actually begin to attract into your life the positive experiences and relationships to start backing these new beliefs up. The process unfolds and now you have a positive feedback loop, gaining steam and feeding hope in your life.
So let’s take this into the practical—what are some things you can do to start refilling the hope tank in your life?
Allow yourself to get honest about the places in your life where you feel hopeless. Pull out your journal and let yourself explore what you are feeling and why. Follow the feelings of sadness, disappointment, anger, resentment, etc. to their source.
Let yourself feel. Cry, scream, rage—whatever you are holding in your body that needs to be expressed. Allow it to exist. Feel it, and validate those feelings as being okay.
Open up to another human. Find someone safe—your friend, your therapist, your spiritual leader, and share your story. “What has been wounded in relationship, heals in relationship.” Whoever you share with, find someone who loves you and can give you the empathy and compassion you need to help you heal. This can be immensely freeing.
Ask yourself, “What lies did I come to believe because of this pain?” It can be helpful to journal these out or talk with a friend. What are the lies about how you are seeing yourself? Other people? The world? Your future? Tapping into your intuition and/or your spiritual higher power is very helpful for this. Invite Love and Truth to come and guide you in this.
Continue the conversation with Love and Truth and ask, “What is actually the truth in my situation?” Have a friend tell you what she sees in you: that you are beautiful, worthy of love, that you are more than enough. If you are a spiritual person, allow God, who is Unconditional Love, to cover you in love and speak these good things about who you really are over you. You can also work with a therapist to explore what the truth is in these areas and start applying that to your life.
Be on the lookout for signs and circumstances in your life that point to hope. Be a detective for what in life is going well. Then take time to write it down, take a mental picture, or say a prayer of gratitude for it. Even the smallest things—a text from a friend, a moment of beauty in a sunset, a blue bird landing close to you almost like a friend, a random memory crossing your mind of a time you overcame something hard—pick up these as clues for hope and encouragement, see how many you can start to collect if you are looking for them.
Feed on stories of hope from friends or whatever you can find online. Be discerning of the sources of information you are consuming. The news is really great at reminding us of everything we have to fear and be discouraged about in the world, and sometimes we need to turn that off. Take time to intentionally take in stories of hope, overcoming, goodness, beauty, and love in the world. Have coffee with a friend and share stories about times you have overcome pain, things you’ve come through that way back when you weren’t sure if you could. Feed off hope in the lives of those around you.
Finally, I highly recommend journalling a lot about the idea, “what would my life be like if I was not depressed?” Especially when we have been dealing with depression or disappointment for a long time, we forget to ask the question, what do I want instead? Put energy into imagining how it will feel to experience joy—in your body, in your relationships, in an average day. You can even journal about an entire day, from waking up to going to bed, where you feel joyful and hopeful. What’s different? Hope do you feel in your physical body? What is your routine like? What’s it like to be full of hope at work? How do you enjoy your kids when you feel this way? Maybe notice who or what is not present in this exercise—habits or people you have let go of that makes room for more joy.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when in comes to hope—there’s so much more richness to be explored in these things. If you’d like to delve deeper, give me a call to see how therapy can set the stage for you to make these kinds of shifts in your own life.