Good Days and Bad Days . . . but why?

In the early days the horrific image of the accident was about all that occupied my thoughts.

It just kept popping up, time after time, seemingly ensuring I remained aware that things are going to be quite a bit different from now on, (as if I hadn't noticed!).

Once the image had served that purpose, it really started to get in the way.


I know a bit about what makes us tick so I was able rationalise what was happening, I just hope I can explain my approach in terms that you can try for yourself; because what I did helped me enormously.

My difficulties came once I'd come to terms with the impact that my injuries would have on the rest of my life. The problem of the image persistently popping up in my head was not so much the picture itself, but the series of emotional explosions it triggered.

I might be feeling OK, but then my thoughts drifted and in an instant I was staring yet again at the dangling innards of my wrist and forearm and the horrified look on my son's face as he set about stemming the bleeding as my wife relayed instructions by phone from the emergency services. Thank God for their composure.

The image made my tummy and lower chest area physically twist deep inside triggering all manner of depressing thoughts. All of which used to conspire to almost instantly change my emotional and physical state into that of an acutely depressed person.

A word of clarity on the term 'state': I'm mindful of the fact that I have no idea who you are or why you're reading this, but most people wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between their physical and emotional state. Our emotional state is simply the way we feel inside, our physical state is the way that we display our emotional state to others. When we feel depressed we look depressed, when we feel excited, we look excited etc. The reason I mention it here is that appreciating the difference is critical in what follows.

There are a few things here you might consider if you think you're in danger of getting depressed about whatever you're facing at the moment. If you're like me you'd be rightly cautious of any attempt (particularly from a complete stranger) to get you to change the way you do something. It's for that reason that I want to make a distinction.

If you're reading this because you've recently suffered a traumatic accident; then look at it that this is not challenging anything you have been doing for years; it's simply a resource offering advice on avoiding a situation that you haven't experienced yet.

For the vast majority of people there's a big difference between 'feeling depressed' and actually 'suffering depression'

If we do nothing and just allow nature to take it's course, it's very likely that a serious trauma such as we are describing here could be enough to depress us and keep us that way. For us to 'feel depressed' about  something, a number of things have to happen without interruption:

To become depressed about something, we need to:

• Remind ourselves of the event.
• Replay the event in our mind.
• Experience the negative emotions that the memories trigger. 
• Let our thoughts find anything else that's bad about having experienced the event.
• Have those negative emotions effect our physical state; our head drops a little, shoulders sag, our breathing becomes shallow, facial muscles drop etc..

For us to 'suffer depression' we just have to become very used to feeling depressed. The above steps have to be repeated, time after time.

• The more this happens, the more normal we assume it is.
• The more normal it seems, the more we expect it to happen.
• The more we expect something to happen, the less we question (or even notice) it, when it does.
• We notice that we spend more time feeling down than we do feeling anything else.
• Other people notice too, they confirm what we suspected; that we've become depressed.  

Unless we interrupt this cycle of behaviour, it develops into a habit.

It takes a level of self-awareness to appreciate this; becoming depressed requires us to follow a series of events time after time. The more it happens the more depressed we can get. The thing is that every spell of depression ends at some point. But as we don't usually notice how we became depressed in the first place; equally we don't notice how we managed to pull ourselves out of it.

The next post looks at this cycle in more detail. Sadly, if we don't understand that there is a process involved, we might think that depression lasts for an indeterminate length of time and then we mysteriously perk up a bit. For most people that's how it is, but the fact is that for us to 'perk up a bit'; something interrupted this pattern.

If we understand a bit about what's actually happening, we can interrupt the pattern ourselves; but it takes a bit more than just reading this; it requires practice and persistence; both of which I'm more than happy to assist you with.

See "Remote Controlled Depression"