Hey, Warrior! Happy Wednesday! 🙂

I was just reading an email from a very wise, emotionally healthy woman, clinical psychologist Dr. Gail Brenner. I have two of her books. One is called The End of Self-Help: Discovering Peace and Happiness Right at the Heart of Your Messy, Scary, Brilliant Life, which I haven’t finished yet, but has helped change my outlook on things.

Her newest book (2018) is called Suffering is Optional: A Spiritual Guide to Freedom from Self-Judgment and Feelings of Inadequacy, which I just bought yesterday and haven’t even had the chance to look at yet. But I highly recommend you check them both out.

Her email was about how you look at the world. More specifically, she says that “…our worlds are a projection of our inner state.” In other words, our perspective on the world is not necessarily a reflection of reality; rather, it is a reflection of the way we think about our world.

TRUTH V. REALITY

If you take any given situation and plop ten people into it, you will likely get ten different interpretations of said situation. The differences will be not only in what we see, but how we think about it and – perhaps most importantly – how we react to it.

Let’s face it, the brain chemistry of people with depression is whacked. I know this now, but it took many, many years of struggling, therapy, and introspection to realize (and believe) this. It is the nature of mood disorders.

That being said, I have often believed that what I think – what my brain is telling me – is the truth. Fortunately, I was wrong. (I wrote a post about this, called “Don’t Believe Everything You Think”, a while ago. You can read it here.) I have since learned that a thought is just a thought. It has no inherent value.

The trouble comes when we assign certain values to it. We judge it. We see it as an unmitigated truth. Or, such as in the case of a compliment, we scoff and dismiss it as someone “just being nice.” In essence, we choose what to believe.

This kind of behavior (and it is a behavior) is especially harmful when, for instance, you tell yourself that you suck or that you are not worthy of love or success (however you see that) or even of being alive. Those thoughts can start to snowball in an instant and take us down a very dark road. Some of us – way too many of us – never find our way back.

Now, I realize (finally) that nothing in this world is black and white. But one of my many theories on life is that there are two kinds of people in this world: There are people who are naturally optimistic, who are able to see negative thoughts and judgments for what they are – a bunch of shit. They are able to bounce back quickly from negative thoughts.

Then there are people like me. I have always believed deep down that I’m just one of those people whose disposition is more bleak, and I fall down the rabbit hole quickly, fighting myself and everything around me the whole way down. I have struggled with bleak, depressive thoughts and feelings all my life. It became my truth early on.

BUT – and this is a big but – maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe, just maybe, I am not destined to suffer for the rest of my life. Maybe it is possible that my brain chemistry, and therefore, my thought processes, can change. Maybe I can figure out how to challenge those negative thoughts.

Maybe my “truth”, as I’ve seen it all these many years, hasn’t really been true at all. I just thought it was.

NEURAL PATHWAYS AND DEPRESSION

I have a good friend who I am in constant contact with, and she has a sunnier disposition than I do. She’s going through a lot of heavy shit right now. She recently ended a 24-year relationship with her partner, is in need of a job, and is wondering where her life is headed. I think we’d all agree that she’s in a tough spot right now.

But, rather than wallow in the sadness and allow her fears about her future to control her, she sees possibilities. She is ready for the changes that will inevitably come. She has her moments, sure, but they don’t last long. She is able to come out of the darkness rather quickly and starts to reassess her options.

I find that more than amazing. The neurotransmitters in my brain don’t work that way, they are out of balance; they always have been. It used to be that my negative thoughts consistently captured me. I was not able to see things any other way. I saw no end to my suffering and expected the worst. My negativity grabbed a hold of me and started running, as if on automatic pilot.

But I now know it doesn’t have to be that way.

In the last few years, I’ve been receiving a new treatment which is meant for treatment-resistant depression. It’s called TMS. You can read an earlier post about it here.

TMS has changed my life. Actually, it is partially responsible for changing my way of thinking. You see, when you have a recurrent type of thought – like you’re not worth the trouble – it digs into your brain. And I mean it actually starts building a “rut” into your brain, called a neural pathway.

From then on, whenever you have that thought (or a similar one), it falls into that rut of negativity and stays there. Over time, this rut gets deeper and deeper, and it can seem, quite literally, impossible to get out of. It feels like the negativity will last forever.

It makes me say, “This is just the way I am. There is no escaping it. It is my truth.”

And you know what? It IS my truth at that moment. Continual negative thinking isn’t simply a habit and it’s not people looking for sympathy. It has its roots in biology.

Thankfully, there is a way out. If you can change some of your thoughts, if you can catch the negativity before it starts to take you down, you can either replace it with a positive thought or you can challenge the belief behind it.

At that point, the rut starts to shrink. You actually start to build “positive ruts” (for lack of a better term), new neural pathways that DON’T take you down the rabbit hole. The old pathway, your old way of thinking, the old negative tapes your brain has replayed over and over and over ad infinitum start to go away. The rut gets smaller and smaller.

The new pathway starts to grow wider and deeper, making room for positive thoughts. It gets much easier to challenge your old thoughts and beliefs. This is called neuroplasticity, which is really hard to explain. I’m sure the Google machine can tell you all about it, though!

You get to take back control of your thoughts, rather than them continuing to control you.

Think about that for a moment. If you’re able to start changing your thoughts, the new pathways allow your positive thoughts to start taking over. The world begins to look like not such a shitty place after all. Your life starts to seem worth living. You start to feel better about yourself and your future.

You begin to see that you finally have a choice: Will you continue to automatically believe the old, negative tapes that have always played so loudly in your brain? Or will you challenge them and start to see the possibilities? You realize that you finally have options.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

So, this friend – the one with the sunny disposition and the ability to move on with her life rather than allow her negative thoughts to control her – must already have these positive neural pathways. The ruts of negativity in her brain are apparently not as developed, not as deep as mine are.

At first, this made me jealous. But now I get it. Now I realize that I, too, can start to build these positive pathways.

So how do you do this? How does one start to “think positive?”

Well, it’s not easy. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it takes a lot of practice. But there are things you can do to make it happen.

GETTING THE APPROPRIATE KIND OF TREATMENT

TMS treatments, DBT, CBT, and other methods can help you change your negative ruts into positive neural pathways. They give you the option to start thinking differently.

They give you the power.

They allow you to start challenging your old thought patterns and ways of thinking. They allow you to actually change what you believe about yourself, your future, your life.

They give you freedom.

One of my problems is that I’ve never thought I had the option to think differently. I believed that I was doomed to live a severely depressed life until I died (which, for most of my life, couldn’t come soon enough). I actually thought that I would be making trips to psych units for the rest of my life.

But now, after trying CBT for years (which was difficult for me), taking a year-long DBT course (which really helped), and doing TMS whenever I start feeling depressed again (which has really helped), I know that I have something I thought I would never see again – I have options.

You know those people who say, “Happiness is a choice”? I’ve always hated them. Well, okay, I don’t hate them, but I’ve always hated when they say that. Why? Because I didn’t have that choice. I didn’t have the option to be happy. My brain chemistry was fucked up AND I lacked the tools to be able to “choose” happiness.

But now, with the help of all of those therapy modalities and decades (!) of talk therapy, I DO have the choice. It’s not simply a matter of choosing to be happy, though. Fuck, if I – if we – could do that, we would, right? Who wants to be depressed? Who wants to end up as a frequent flier to psych units? Who wants to be suicidal? Who would choose that kind of life?

Nobody I know.

WRAPPING IT UP

I bet you’ve heard this statement before: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” (Personally, I’ve always hated that saying, too. I mean, I get it, but I’m big into semantics. I don’t like it when people sling around words like “insane” or “crazy” or “psycho”, etc. I also know that this is not the actual definition of insanity, particularly in the legal sense.)

Most people don’t understand the nature of depression, especially how it’s so strongly related to biology. Hell, most of the people who have depression don’t understand how they got that way in the first place.

Depression and other mood disorders are complex. It’s like they are living, fire-breathing dragons that try to kill you every chance they get. (For a good read, check out the book How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me.)

But it turns out depression is not necessarily a death sentence. If you can get to the point where you can challenge your faulty beliefs and the myths you tell yourself about how you don’t deserve to be alive, you will gradually get to a better place. A much better place.

If you are depressed and can’t seem to find a way out, I recommend getting professional help. My experiences with CBT, DBT, TMS, and talk therapy prove that it is possible to feel better. If it can work for me, it can work for you. Trust me.

I know, I know. It may seem impossible, but honest, it’s not. Like I said, it takes a lot of hard work and you have to continually practice thinking differently until it becomes your default, but remission is possible. I don’t know if full, permanent remission from Major Depressive Disorder is possible (it hasn’t been for me), but feeling (and thinking) better is. Even if it’s only temporary, it is SO worth the work.

Just please don’t give up. I know the world seems bleak, especially in today’s political and social climate (IMHO), but there is Hope. If there’s Hope for me, there’s Hope for you, as well. If you are unable to find any, use some of mine. I have a lot of it right now, and I am more than willing to share it with you.

You ARE worth it.

As always, thanks for reading. It doesn’t get any more Real than this!