Depression, loneliness, suicide. It’s the modern epidemic. In Australia someone attempts suicide every 15 seconds, every 4 hours someone actually commits suicide. When I think about this my stomach feels like it has a rock inside. I just feel sick because I want to make all these people feel better but I don’t even know where they are.
Sometimes I forget how bad it used to feel. I would just feel dead inside. There was no life. Most the time I couldn’t put into words what I felt or even know why I felt so depressed – all I knew is that I felt yuck. When I started talking about it I felt worse initially because all the suppressed emotions where brought to the surface. But it helps to talk even though I didn’t think so at the time.
I hated myself. I hated everything about myself and I hated the world around me. I wanted to be someone different – someone who was the complete opposite to me. Because I hated myself I didn’t think anyone else would like me either. This attitude often caused relationship problems and paranoia, which compounded the depression.
I don’t like to dwell on the past but maybe someone out there can relate to how I felt. It was like being in a dark pit, a prison that had no windows and no doors – no way to escape. I prayed and constantly cried out to God but there was no magic wand that instantly cured me.
Eventually I went to counselling – I gained two things from it. Firstly, the counsellor told me it was okay to feel whatever emotion I felt. I used to be a schoolmaster constantly telling myself off for feeling certain emotions such as anger. So instead of venting the emotion and getting whatever it was off my chest, I would suppress it, telling myself that my thoughts are now positive and happy (you know, all that positive self help crap that we are brainwashed with). If you lie to yourself it comes back to bite you until you start being honest with yourself. That’s why it helps to talk and sometimes it’s easier to talk with someone you don’t know. It took me years to talk about it because I told myself that I shouldn’t feel depressed, there was no reason for it. I felt stupid and embarrassed and wanted to sort myself out on my own. Of course I was wrong.
The second thing counselling helped with is to gain more control on my thoughts. My thoughts were completely out of control – like a class of naughty school children running riot in a classroom. The difference was my thoughts were not noisy or obvious – they were very quiet, sneaky and so fast I didn’t even know what was going on. I heard somewhere that I should start to listen to my thoughts and if anything negative cropped up I should question them and challenge them. I didn’t realise the connection between my thoughts and my emotions. All feelings and emotions actually begin with a thought.
I would spend days and maybe months trying to catch my thoughts but they were always too fast and all I would be left with was the negative feelings. I would often walk home from work and suddenly start feeling depressed – I never knew why. At work I didn’t like to talk to people because I was shy – I preferred it that way because I hated being in the spotlight. Then one day I was walking home from work and the depression came upon me. But I actually caught the thought ‘No one at work likes you’. It made me stop and think is that really true? When I really questioned the thought I had to admit that there was no evidence that no one liked me. In fact if I made an effort to talk people were really friendly and nice to me. That was a real turning point because it turned upside everything I had believed about how I related with people. It was really difficult but I had to learn to be sociable – I know how weird that probably sounds.
The turning point regarding hating myself happened one day as I was looking through some old photos. I came across a photo of myself as a toddler. It started to think about what kind of personality and nature I had as a child. I imagined how I would feel about this child if it someone else and not me. I had to admit it would be hard not to like her – how could I hate this child? It didn’t make sense. The more I looked at the photo from an outsider’s perspective the more I grew to love the child for who she was. I would not insist that she looked different or wished for a different personality because if this was someone else I would have loved her just the way she was.
I don’t think my prayers to God went unanswered. But God has been very patient with me. Something is changing. I am starting to think more and more about God and what He wants and slowly becoming less interested in thinking about myself. I am starting to feel a freedom inside and I’m not sure when it started or how it is happening. But I thank God – for Jesus said He will complete the work that He has begun in us.
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