MOVE OUT FROM UNDER THE DARK SHADOW OF DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY
There is help for your problem!
Psychotherapy can play an important role in the treatment of individuals suffering from depression and/or anxiety. These individuals need to work through certain emotional layers. Often there are multiple layers, or year-rings like underneath the bark of a tree, many years of trauma and/or emotional baggage that have to be worked through in psychotherapy. Emotional baggage has the power to form a stumbling block to lead an optimal life - even in your spiritual life.
Talk about your problems
To really be able to talk about your problems with someone you can trust, might be the first step in the right direction, to overcoming your problem. To communicate about your problems is to bring them to the surface, out from your unconscious, where they have been repressed, or kept secret for perhaps a very long time. To talk about your problems is to uncover them, and uplift them from an unconscious level and to let them surface to the conscious level. The problem then loses the high voltage of its emotional power, and the impact it had on the unconscious, and can be handled on a more rational level. It is like bringing a dark object to the light, only to find it was never as dark as you thought. To want to be helped, is therefore to realise that your hidden problem is dark only until it is brought to the light and examined thoroughly. Dr. JO Steenkamp (clinical psychologist and author of ‘ SHIP’) said: “It is like diving into your shadow in order to discover the light...”
Stop repressing your problems
Someone once compared repression of underlying problems to a person sitting on a chest, inside of which are kittens. From time to time they scream and scratch, trying to get out. The screaming and scratching which is hidden under the lid, will not stop by itself. However, to lift each kitten out by the neck, and look it in the eyes, is more likely to be part of the solution than to sit on the lid.
The problems that people store in their unconscious minds, due to trauma or unfortunate events from their past, are considered as negative energy. This negative energy lies on the border of negative and irrational beliefs – an essential part of the problem with depression and anxiety. Sometimes it is not the traumatic event per se, but the negative way in which it is processed, which can unleash so much power that it starts to dominate your life and mental state. Examples of such happenings are: A young child’s parents get divorced; a girl is molested or raped; a son does not make the first sports team, or does not achieve distinctions in all his subjects. Maybe you do not get the position you applied for, and start believing all kinds of negative things about yourself. You do not communicate about it, and keep it to yourself for so long, that you build negative and irrational beliefs based on it. All this negative information about yourself eventually becomes part of who you are, or affects your self-esteem negatively. On the basis of this information (which you have stored for a long time in your unconscious mind) you tend to devaluate yourself in all situations. In the meantime however, all you really needed from the start, was someone you could trust and talk to as a potential soundboard; a friend, minister or psychologist who could have helped you to put the things that happened to you into perspective.
The negative energy of these underlying problems you have stored in your unconscious mind, will manifest as the symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, especially when stress impacts your life. An image I like to use to explain the impact of stress on problems in the unconscious mind, is of a stone you pick up and throw into a dam or pond...immediately it creates a ripple effect on the water. The stone falls to the bottom and unsettles the mud and mire there. The water, which was previously blue, now turns murky and brown. That is exactly how stress impacts your life. If there are any unresolved or underlying issues in your life, the stress will probably bring these to the surface in the form of the symptoms of depression and anxiety.
A qualified and registered professional, like a psychologist, psychiatrist or counselor, is trained to lead in you into a new perspective – to move from under the shadows of depression and anxiety towards the light.
