Foundational Concept: You have the keys to your house.
YOU … NEED … to control them.
Keep them in YOUR pocket.
Do you remember when you received the keys to your first car, your first apartment, and your first home? Putting them in your pocket felt good. They were yours. With them came a sense of ownership, empowerment, excitement, satisfaction and even success.
It time to think of yourself in those exact same terms. You have the keys to ‘your’ house in your hand. Your body is your primary house. Its emotions, feelings, attitude and actions are the rooms and decorations within. You can use your keys to lock or unlock the doors of your rooms, its emotions and everything about you. You can walk into the room of depression, or you can close the door on it. You have the power. At this point, you may have just a few keys or many.
In this book, I am going to provide you with a variety of keys that you can chose from. You can insert some into today’s locks. You can leave others until later. Whatever you decide, it is up to you.
Perhaps you have been spending too much time in your depression room. You may have wanted to do some tasks in other rooms, you may have wanted to explore the attic, but this room seemed to hold you. In reality, it does not have the power to control you. You have the key in your hand and can do with it whatever you choose. Now is the time to actually start doing different things. In reading this book, you have already begun launching yourself; now keep going forward with a new future in your mind. Your future is all about how you handle your keys and your choices.
Key 3: Set Boundaries around your keys and your heart.
Know that everyone has legitimate “reasons” why they are facing depression. And I know that facing down depression is not easy. So what can you do? You cannot accomplish everything at once. You must do it in stages.
To give you some freedom to move along your pathway, I suggest that you set up a set of boundaries that will initially restrict your path to a narrow perspective. Know that everyone needs emotional, physical and mental boundaries. Boundaries help us define ourselves in our world along with finding our place and purpose. It is in setting boundaries that we grow with new insights as to differences between how we have been and how we want to be feeling. Gain success in one small avenue and then expand.
Setting boundaries sets emotional limits on your feelings and is an effective way to manage and gain control over your emotions. Boundaries will assist in providing you with cognitive insights into your emotional pain and over reactions. Your ability to discern differences will increase, as will your capacity for tolerating the problems of life.
As an example, you may observe your life and notice that your depression is frequently sourced in external factors. Things do not go smoothly in your life, upsets happen frequently and you cannot control or handle them, yet.
In this case, the boundary you would want to set would be between you and the upset. Put an addition on your house and designate it as the room that particular upset will reside in until you have time to deal with it. Remember Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. When problems beset her, her response was a determination to “think about that tomorrow.”
This approach works. It disencumbers you from the distress of dealing with the uncontrollable now. It frees you to focus on things you can control, which in turn empowers you. As you become more and more empowered, you will be able to better control the upsets in your life. In the meantime, you have relegated them to “their place,” even if only temporarily.
Some of you might be facing internal warriors. These come in many forms such as self-loathing, fear, shame, and so many others.
Decide to put these in a Steamer Chest in the Depression room. Remember those nostalgic wooden storage chests that some people place in rooms as coffee tables, side tables or use for general storage. They are old and comfortable and give any setting an ‘at home’ feeling. They are a perfect holding place for your “old” self-concepts. They can be stored and locked away for the time being, then dug out later to see if they are still relevant.
Take a moment more and consider “What are the things, events, relationship issues, and work/family interactions that make me sad or depressed?
Make a decision to place these on one of the shelves on the bookcase in your depression room. You may need to refer to them on a momentary basis, every once in a while, but for the most part, they can be left in the depression room for as long as expedient.
Now, as you leave, lock the door on your depression room and attach a sign to the outside of the door that notifies everyone “I am perfectly imperfect and that is OK.” Now, every time you are tempted to enter the depression room you can read the sign and decide to go back later at a more convenient time.
You have now set the stage for your success. You have temporarily locked the door on troublesome factors and you are stepping out along the path to an exciting new future.
Let’s begin by examining the physical location where depression starts.
FACTOID: “You am perfectly imperfect and that is OK.”
Say it: “I am perfectly imperfect and that is OK.”
THE ANATOMY OF DEPRESSION
The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication.
Daniel Goleman
Have you ever noticed how new knowledge can provide new understanding which in turn opens up new possibilities in life. Take the example of learning to drive a car and how that knowledge and eventual ability opens up a whole new world of places to explore.
Likewise, knowing the anatomy of your physical body and how your brain works can provide your with new understanding into the reasons why things are working the way they do. Like driving, as you discover the body’s natural system, you will be better able to tweak those systems to work better for you in the future. Knowing how your limbic system operates can provide you with a tool for controlling your emotions and defeating depression.
You might not know it, but depression originates inside the brain. Sure there will be outside factors that are problematic and result in negative thinking. And yes, there will be events that are difficult to endure and cause trauma. But really, how does depression form? Where does it reside in the body? And what makes it last long after the trauma has past? To answer these questions we need to know more about the brain and how it functions.
HOW IT WORKS
The brain has a built-in structure with a system that operates in a pre-determined manner. There is a part of your brain that is involved in setting the emotional tone of your life. In the medical world it is called the Limbic System. It is found in the center of the brain and is about the size of a walnut. It is comprised of several parts including the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala and several other nearby areas.
The hypothalamus is responsible for regulating various functions and sub-systems such as hunger, thirst, response to pain, levels of pleasure, sexual satisfaction, anger and aggressive behavior, and other similar systems. It also regulates the functioning of the autonomic nervous system that includes such things as pulse, blood pressure, breathing, and arousal in response to emotional circumstances. Its main assignment is to maintain homeostasis. That means it works to maintain equilibrium in various systems through a balancing process of returning things to normal whenever they go askew. It works like a thermostat on the furnace;