Scion of NLP

Posts Tagged ‘unending joy’

So, there has been a lot happening in my own life recently, as well as in the lives of those people closest to me, and all the stress, chaos, & misfortune have taken a huge toll on my faith in any unending joy of life, in the belief of that our universe has unlimited abundance, and in the ‘love’ inherent within all of mankind — all of these things I have begun to believe in less and less every day. This ongoing constant barrage of problems, issues, attacks, and setbacks have done a lot to feed that part deep in the back of my mind where my depression lays sleeping and dormant … allowing it to grow stronger and stronger … stirring it to wake.

With all these external issues and incidents, combined with the strengthening of my own negative thought habits, it’s no surprise that discussions in my home have often turned to the ‘pointlessness of life.’ In several of the more recent conversations my girlfriend, Jodie, and I have talked extensively about the Depressing Mind and how it works … and I’ve learned a lot through trying to explain it to someone who can’t relate (and when I say can’t relate I mean totally-opposite-end-of-the-spectrum unable to understand — Jodie is the pollyanna to my jaded darkness).

After all of our talks one very simple explanation of what a Depressing Mindset looks like finally came to light in the form of a metaphor:

If you think of a person as having an internal balancing scale that weighs the good experiences of life against the bad ones, then you can think of human perception as being a type of sorting machine. As events enter a person’s awareness they are sorted to one side or the other — sorted into things that bring the person good feelings (ex. happy, joy, love, humor, excitement, compassion, etc.) and the things that create bad feelings (ex. anger, frustration, hate, fear, sadness, guilt, etc.).

Now, for a normal person that sorting machine is usually somewhat balanced. Occasionally it might be a bit sensitive — the spring would too tight or too loose — in certain contexts or with certain people, but for the most part of life it’s normally quite balanced. Overall, the majority of experiences in the person’s life will fall onto the positive side of the scale, making them feel their life is fairly good.

In a person who is afflicted with depression the whole process is exactly the same, except for one small difference … the sorting machine is broken. Whether it’s because of a chemical imbalance in the brain or simply unhealthy thinking patterns, the little metal sorting arm is twisted and bent out of shape. The result is that even when events ‘should’ be sorted as being positive/pleasurable experiences, some of them accidentally fall onto the negative side of the scale.

A good example of this kind of mistaken sorting in the mind of a depressed person would be the idea of Family and Loved Ones — where the average person might experience these people as being a positive part of their life that bring them joy because of the good feelings they bring (having a positive effect on their life), a person with the depressing mind will only see how they are unable to support and take care of their family and loved ones (having a negative effect on their personal identity and their ability to create a good life). In this way the depression is able to twist almost any life experience (no matter how great it might be) to be proof that life sucks and truly isn’t worth living!