If you have depression: step-by-step instructions from a psychotherapist

Help from a psychologist for depression

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Psychological help for depression.
Psychologist in Moscow Have you somehow lost your zest for life? Lost interest in hobbies? Has your activity decreased sharply? And communication with friends has ceased to bring pleasure? Yesterday you were full of strength, enjoying life, making plans, you were inspired by a feeling of lightness and ease. But today everything has become different - the sun is not happy, and there is no strength, and desires have faded, there is a feeling of heaviness in everything, you want to withdraw into yourself, immersed in painful thoughts. “In the morning I drink coffee - and without any pleasure,” one of Chekhov’s heroines described her condition.

Depression struck—the dark night of the soul. You are trying to somehow shake yourself up, but nothing seems to help you get yourself out of a state of despondency - neither positive thinking, new views, nor willful efforts, and even new acquaintances and social activity. Alas... What is the reason? Why suddenly this lifelessness - and how suddenly? How to live with this and what can be done about it? There are only questions in my head. If so, it may make sense for you to seek help from a psychologist now. You can come for a consultation and we will try to understand the situation and these complex and painful issues.

Are you tired of depression? I invite you to sign up for a consultation.

Goleneva Lada Viktorovna - psychologist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Moscow. tel., daily from 10 to 22 hours.

Depression - wandering in the labyrinths of your own soul

Depression is an affective disorder in which affective, sensory and cognitive processes are inhibited. Depression varies in severity of manifestation (mild sub-depressive background, psychogenic depression and endogenous depression) and in the severity of polar affects, i.e. a tendency to alternate between depressive (apathy) and manic moods (overexcitement and fussiness).

Who doesn’t know this painful state of loss of joy and meaning of one’s life, when you don’t want anything, everything seems meaningless, and there are no feelings, no desires, no strength? At such moments, life seems to decline, and we become locked in an endless series of petty and fruitless thoughts, in a labyrinth of self-flagellation and contemplation of pseudo-truths that poison us.

And what can be done to restore the vitality that has fallen into decline, how to change the internal and external circumstances that cause such a painful extinction of the meaning and flow of life in us? And the paradox is that the cure for this scourge is not outside, but inside you. It will be revealed to you in understanding your own soul; you should understand these intricate labyrinths in order to find the path to rebirth.

Characteristic symptoms and manifestations of depression

Changes in affective tone, mood - decreased mood, despondency, feelings of melancholy and enduring sadness, apathy, depression, even deep melancholy. Anhedonia of feelings is clearly expressed, i.e. inability to take pleasure, joy and surprise.

Changes in motivation and activity - all forms of motivation are reduced - both biological and social. A person doesn’t want to do anything, see anyone, or go out anywhere. A person is incapable of becoming interested in anything. As a result, vital activity drops sharply.

Changes in the mental sphere - motor and mental retardation is characteristic, the head seems empty, the person cannot concentrate on anything, he doesn’t want to, he can’t. Interest is lost even in previously beloved hobbies and activities.

Autonomic changes – nutritional problems (decreased appetite, or excessive compensatory need for food); sleep disorders (intermittent, restless sleep, often insomnia); problems of self-regulation, decreased sexual desire.

A change in attitude towards oneself - a feeling of one’s own worthlessness, insignificance, abandonment, guilt, sinfulness arises. There is a lack of prospects for the future; there is no tomorrow for a person; in depression there is no future. The person seems to be under the yoke of something.

A depressive state manifests itself at all levels of human activity - thinking, feeling and acting.

A common characteristic feature of any depressive state is asthenization, i.e. feeling of lack of strength and energy. The movement of libido and energy in us is blocked, clamped, hence the lack of interest in anything, exhaustion, depression, instability of attention. In this state, a person is not able to decide on something, cannot make a choice for himself, he moves only by inertia, choosing for himself the safest paths and methods of functioning. And the person gets bogged down in everyday life, intellectual jungle or inert activity.

The emotional background during depression decreases sharply. The mood can range from feelings of depression and melancholy to acute bouts of despair. Often coldness and frozenness of feelings are accompanied by anxiety - vague excitement and anxiety.

Due to a sharp decrease in the emotional background and the associated drop in energy potential, changes also occur in mental processes - a person’s perception is difficult, thinking is inhibited, memory may deteriorate, in his activities a person shows lethargy and lethargy, or, conversely, motor restlessness and fussiness.

In a state of depression, the feeling of self-inadequacy sharply worsens, a person’s sense of self changes and a negative image of himself prevails. This affects the fact that the level of self-esteem is greatly reduced: a person is unpleasant to himself, he is dissatisfied with himself, prone to self-criticism and self-accusation, he feels his own worthlessness and uselessness, sometimes becoming completely deprived of energy, up to the desire for suicide. A person exhibits negativism in his perception of himself and other people. Naturally, the level of motivation drops to almost zero, a person finds everything boring and unnecessary, and has no desire to do anything or make decisions.

In such a state, it is very important not to try to suppress your difficult feelings, but to seek psychological help.

Dark Night of the Soul

The occurrence of depression is associated with extremely vulnerable aspects and layers of our psyche – existentia minores. For each of us these zones are different, and each person has his own limitations associated with the weakest, most vulnerable and fragile aspects of his mental space and his individuality. And when, faced with life’s problems and stressful situations, we approach these zones, we feel our own helplessness, and we want to protect ourselves, hide, run away...

None of us wants to encounter the destructive and flawed aspects of ourselves, but this is an encounter that happens to all of us periodically. By avoiding this meeting, by evading it, we doom ourselves to stumble upon the same obstacles and limitations in our lives. Without being aware of the dark side of ourselves (and those with whom we interact), we will never gain clarity and understanding of ourselves and what is happening to us and in the world in general. Our ignorance makes us vulnerable. Perhaps the most difficult thing is to accept the fact that everything in the world is not as it seems to us, as we see it. It is only when we become familiar with other states of being, perceiving, understanding or seeing that we are cured of this illusion.

Facing disappointments, losses, betrayals leads us to our vulnerability, to the loss of a sense of our own strength and abilities, the loss of self-confidence, leads us to existentia minores. At such moments, a person may feel the collapse of all hopes and his entire life. And the most unbearable thing is disappointment in oneself, the consequence of which can be soul-destroying self-hatred. And in order not to fall apart, we must heal these parts of ourselves, breathe soul into what hurts and requires revival.

What is behind your depression, why is the movement of life in you interrupted, what made you quit the race? Where and from what are you running or hiding?

When the most cherished things are destroyed, we are overtaken by the dark night of the soul. The dark night of the soul is the time when we are closest to our unconscious. And here we find ourselves face to face with our pain, embarrassment, and weakness. Without feeling the strength to cope with all this, to cope with our lives, we doom ourselves to languish in captivity of depression.

Depression is exhaustion, a psychological withdrawal from life. Pain makes you leave the distance. And in order to protect yourself from the feeling of this pain and your own vulnerability, you kill your feelings, and therefore the very life in yourself. Apathy is death. But for life, for all living beings, confusion, excitement, worries and pain are normal, the worst thing is apathy, death of the soul.

Depression itself is a marker of some intolerable condition for a person. And behind depression there may be hidden experiences and mental states that are not brought to a person’s consciousness, because... it seems too dangerous and difficult to bear. Something is lost in life, the most cherished plans and dreams are destroyed, and in order to protect himself from pain, a person begins to avoid everything that reminds of these destructions - to avoid people and events that stir up old traumas.

And you begin to avoid everything that awakens you to life, to desires, because... With this, old wounds also awaken, and the memory of past failures haunts you. But we must develop our ability to endure any situation, regardless of whether we feel pain or not, and only then can we change our lives, bring new meaning to it.

In most cases, depression, melancholy, and loss of orientation are caused by strict self-restraints in one’s life, when any impulses and creativity are restrained or prohibited.

A person becomes pathologically stuck on painful facts, fixated on traumatic fragments of life or history. And this fixation is associated with a refusal to process one’s life experience, especially those associated with its negative and frustrating aspects. Some fruits of life experience are not assimilated by a person due to fear or embarrassment. A person denies and represses unpleasant parts of his experience, as well as parts of himself, thereby giving rise to an internal lie, but what is rejected falls into the pit of the subconscious to decompose there.

Distorted perception of time

Depressive states are characterized by the psychological experience of the absence of a future. But the future is a powerful stimulant for each of us. After all, the future is entering our lives now; time is what takes us into the future. First, the experience of anticipation occurs, here and now we anticipate future experience, we build images, draw pictures in our imagination, thereby setting ourselves programs. We are determined by tomorrow, the next day. Tomorrow - this day programs us, it inspires us, makes us strive for something. He encourages us to get up and start the necessary movement, because just getting up and getting up is already a certain process, this is an application for some kind of dynamics, for inclusion in the flow of events.

In depression there is no such inspiration and aspiration; a person is not able to feel either inspiration, inspiration, or the meaning connecting his present with the future; he is not motivated to do anything.

In our normal state, we can perceive three times: the past - with which we are connected by memory, the present - associated with our vision and understanding of current experience, and the future - which is associated with our expectations, with the images created by our imagination and intuition. We constantly process our experience - both past and current, comparing what is happening with our expectations, constantly creating new images and pictures. But in depression, this movement of thought and imagination is interrupted, and time seems to be immobilized.

A person is stuck in a painful experience, his psychological clock has stopped. Some part of the emotional experience that a person cannot perceive, process and assimilate blocks movement, creating an obstacle, taking attention to itself. And the person circles and circles around this emotional block, not daring to move from the dead point and move on.

What makes time stop? At the heart of these psychological mechanisms is a feeling of fear of the unknown. This fear contains traces of memories of past failures that are sources of shame, lack of confidence in the present, and fear of unfortunate consequences and outcomes in the future.

We lack confidence, we feel too vulnerable and weak to allow ourselves to come into contact with frightening uncertainty and the unknown. And in order to protect himself from feelings of fear about possible inadequacy, a person mortifies his feelings, thereby trying to protect himself and maintain the status quo and his integrity.

The feeling of inertia and immutability is always an illusion. Boredom is an attempt by our psyche to block time, to stop, to remain in the eternal present. In fact, it only seems to us that today is like two peas in a pod, and that everything around is monotonous, routine and nothing changes, and we are tired of everything. In fact, everything (including ourselves) is in constant motion, constantly changing. Everything around us is constantly changing, and today we become different than we were yesterday. And the feeling of monotony, emptiness, boredom, monotony, routine - this is an attempt to keep everything as it is, this is an attempt to stop the time of your life.

But the problem is that time that does not move forward deprives us of the meaning of life - and if everything is unchanged, then there is no event that could please and surprise us. And the person falls into a trap that he created for himself. Therefore, in depression, meaning is lost, new pictures and images are not formed, the prospect of the future is vague and frightening. The signified is separated from the signifier, i.e. everything we come into contact with and interact with is not filled with any content (i.e. meaning) for us. This is how the protective armor called depression works.

Behind this phenomenon may be an inability to accept that any wonderful experience ends, this is an inability to accept the end, the finitude of relationships, the finitude of life itself and our existence.

Optimal motivation

Optimum motivation is the ability to inspire yourself, create your own mood, mobilize yourself for achievements without falling into exaltation, without bringing yourself to extreme degrees of excitement, without a “storm in a teacup,” without excessive pathos and drama.

There are two deep problems, when faced with which we are thrown into a zone of limitations, pain and suffering. The first is when we want something too much, then we fall into passion and no longer see reality, and instead of entering into dialogue, we begin to push the situation through force. The other pole of this problem is too weak, sluggish desire, sometimes reaching the feeling of complete emptiness and lack of understanding of what I want. In this situation, we are closed from our feelings, and we need someone who will know and do everything for us.

The pole of falling into passion is hypermania, overexcitement, when we don’t feel, don’t hear ourselves, and in this hypostasis we seem to be separated from ourselves, cut off from our feelings and instincts, we run away from ourselves, thinking that where Happiness awaits us there.

The pole of lack of desire in us is the unwillingness to do something with ourselves and with our lives, leading to depression, and here we are not separated from ourselves, but are fixed on the destructive sides of the soul to the detriment of others who nourish and develop us. In this form, we are filled with skepticism and doubts; we are critical of ourselves, other people and our own future.

Both when we fall into manic passion and when we freeze ourselves in the suspended animation of depression - in both cases we are driven by the same fear - the fear of facing the unknown and frightening aspects of life experience, the fear of our inability to cope with reality .

The best approach in all things to maintain your integrity is to admire something not too much, but not too little, to be inspired and driven towards the goal, but not to the point of recklessness, not to be overly enthusiastic, but also not to slide into cynicism or skepticism.

Action should be inspired by our desire and will, but not by passion. If I have a passion, I may be looking past the target. When passions go off scale, they interfere with vision and obscure the eyes. This is an illusion, I do not affect reality. Passion is a blindfold, try it - walk around with a blindfold.

It is important for us to be able to not fall into passion, but at the same time maintain our motivation at a fairly good level. So, if you pull the string too tightly, it will break; if you pull it too loosely, it will not sound. Therefore, our task is to learn how to tune our string so that it is sonorous, but at the same time, so that it is not in danger of breaking.

If emotions go off scale, our passion goes beyond all limits, the secretion of adrenaline glands is too great, excessive tension accumulates in our muscles, which we do not know how to cope with. Then an uncontrolled release of negative energy occurs, and we are carried away.

In the opposite case, the desire for movement, the emotional charge is so weak that a person cannot bring himself to act due to constant fatigue, decreased muscle tone, mental tension and confusion, the inability to compare one thing with another. We ourselves don’t know what we want, we are not able to create desires, and we cannot figure out what to do with our lives.

In depression we feel a lack of feelings and emotions. Disappointment in someone and the associated pain has caused us to become insensitive to both ourselves and other people. But such protection can bring nothing but harm into your life. Skepticism and doubt eat away at your soul like rust. This self-defense mechanism is very harmful to your psyche.

Our emotions are the fuel that runs the power plant of our entire body. This is the switch that turns on the power plant of our forces, so we must learn to interact with these forces. And this can only be done by opening up to all your feelings and experiences, including the most painful ones. It is important for us to understand ourselves and untangle our feelings, because... To remain ignorant of one's own mental processes is to expose oneself to risk.

By ignoring and killing your own emotions and feelings, repressing and denying them, you make a mistake, because of this you live in a lie. Denial and repression - when it seems to us that this is so, but in fact it is not so. We need to identify this inner lie. When a person lies, he is stressed, he stresses himself, everything jumps up in his head, the person pushes himself. The ability for emotional stability is rooted not in the denial and repression of difficult feelings and emotions, not in an artificial decrease in sensitivity to various emotional stimuli, but in a high degree of openness of a person to emotional experiences, his emotional plasticity and the ability to self-regulate in any of his emotional states.

Medicines for the soul

The cyclical nature of life

If you feel that your life has come to a standstill, you feel exhausted and faded, and your life is a joyless and dull series of boring gray everyday life, you need to take some psychological steps to correct this deplorable and harmful state.

The first thing that is important to understand and what you need to figure out is what caused the decline in your life. This may be a decline, which is a reflection of the natural cycles and rhythm of your life, associated with alternating declines and rises, or this decline is associated with the activation of psychological blocks (self-doubt, fear of rejection, doubts about one’s adequacy, fear of intimacy, etc.). d.).

Harmony is associated with synchronicity, with the rhythms of our lives, with the natural cycles of waxing and waning energy. Living harmoniously means being in sync with your natural rhythms and cycles of your life. We cannot be in a constant feeling of satisfaction and excitement, in endless euphoria and bliss, and we also cannot be forever young and beautiful 24 hours a day. Any process has its beginning and its end point, at which we experience fatigue, a feeling of powerlessness and satiety. It is quite natural that from time to time we become exhausted and lose our taste for previous ideas and goals. And perhaps this is exactly what is happening to you, then there is no need to panic, but you just need to give yourself a break to regain your strength.

This process of respite and recovery is very important, although many people underestimate it, but it is part of a natural cycle. The time of rest and recuperation will allow you to breathe new energy into your ideas, deeds and relationships, because... there is a break in conscious work on the problem, due to which the creative energy of the subconscious mind is activated.

The state of contentment is a certain death. It is a series of satisfactions and dissatisfactions that gives a person development, gives this evolutionary path; we are driven by crises, and not by a narrowly understood harmony and contentment. After all, even physiological sex is a model of a cyclical creative process. A certain impulse arises, excitement increases, it turns into a certain process, energy is pumped up, then the energy increases, becomes denser, discharge occurs, activity declines, dying, satisfaction occurs. Then everything goes to a new cycle.

Instead of being sad and reproaching yourself for imperfection, your own weakness and helplessness, accept this state, this stop. When a goal is lost, the worst thing is to rush around trying to find it again. This will get you nowhere. Perhaps you need some quiet time. “The most important things happen when it seems like nothing is happening” - Lao Tzu. You need to grasp the meaning in your inaction, this will produce a shift in consciousness.

Running and bustling do not lead us to the goal, it is a kind of illusion of movement, of the fact that something is happening to us. In order to live harmoniously and synchronize our rhythms, it is important to remember - wherever we go, we are already there. Only when you find the center within yourself will you gain energy and new goals.

Devastation

Depression is often associated with feelings and states of emptiness and anxiety. And these are the obstacles in our lives that are generated by the action of psychological blocks within us.

A feeling of emptiness occurs when you lose touch with yourself, with your true Self, with your own desires, needs and feelings. The loss of psychological, emotional and spiritual strength occurs because a person merges too much, attaches himself to his external social and family roles, choosing for himself false goals and ideals that do not reflect the true needs and characteristics of his personality. A person identifies himself with a person, i.e. with a mask facing society, other people. Trying to correspond to the attributes external to him established by someone, he misses the main thing - himself, his essence. This gives rise to a feeling of inauthenticity, a feeling that you are not living your life.

And when a person finds himself in an acute situation, i.e. when his leading roles and teams change or collapse, he may find himself completely at a loss and begin a feverish search for what or who he can attach himself to in order to find himself again. The problem here is that without any external roles and situations, without something that gives him external self-identification, without belonging to any groups, a person loses his sense of self, which causes a painful feeling of emptiness.

The outside world may encourage us to rush around seeking and achieving false values, and we get caught up in this game, aiming ourselves to receive gifts from life that will endlessly feed our self-esteem and sense of self. But thinking that a love affair, professional achievements, career or money will provide us with meaning in life, we are greatly mistaken. And when faced with the collapse of an ideal dream, with the illusion of having only the beautiful and beautiful in life, of always experiencing delight without any effort, a person experiences total disappointment in himself.

To cope with this disappointment and the overwhelming feeling of emptiness, you need to develop the ability to perceive and experience both the pleasant and unpleasant aspects of your life, maintaining connection with yourself and with others in any situation. You must endure periods of joy and abundance as well as failure and hardship. When striving to realize your values ​​and ideals, it is important to maintain contact with reality, this means understanding and taking into account human weaknesses, fears and limitations, and, first of all, your own.

And if you are now experiencing emptiness, coldness, boredom, an unbearable feeling of your own worthlessness - you need to endure it and treat yourself with understanding and warmth. You need to stop rejecting the ugly in yourself in order to become whole. This is work that needs to be done without running into unrealistic fantasies, whirlwind of affairs, shopaholism, alcohol or unbridled sex. After all, if you don’t untangle your frightening feelings now, they will come back again and again. By getting in touch with these ugly aspects of ourselves - hungry and disadvantaged, accepting and loving ourselves even as we are, we help ourselves correct our mistakes and reduce our suffering. It's time to stop being victims of yourself, you need to identify what is ruining your potential. Loving yourself means giving yourself the opportunity to change your way of seeing and living, to fill yourself with nourishing truths instead of destructive and destructive ones.

Anxiety and depression

Often depression marks hidden anxiety, increased anxiety, exhausting the entire body from the inside. Anxious states are characterized by a general feeling of tension, heavy forebodings, a vague and diffuse feeling that something bad is happening, that life is unpredictable, dangerous, there is nowhere to get help, and I will not be able to cope with all this. Moreover, all these disturbing sensations are very vague, not tied to anything, and have no direct connection with real events and circumstances of a person’s life, which is why they seem even more frightening.

It is natural that people try to cope with anxiety. And one way is to isolate yourself from everything that causes a feeling of tension. A person builds his life so as not to encounter anything frightening and uncertain. A person limits his lifestyle, avoids tension and risks, is prone to psychological inertia, excessive attachment to habits, avoids activities associated with a significant number of interpersonal contacts, devalues ​​and mortifies his own feelings. All this leads to a general decrease in the emotional background of life, and, consequently, to apathy and depression.

This life strategy greatly limits a person, forcing him to restrain his impulses, needs, activity, and energy. A person tightly closes the doors to the world, depriving himself of power, depriving himself of the necessary emotional nutrition, depriving himself of life itself.

But, despite our fears and anxieties, we must set our inner life in motion. Anxiety and fear drove us into a corner, we surrounded ourselves with a palisade of prohibitions and artificial restrictions, but by protecting ourselves from life, we deprived ourselves of life itself. And in order to regain our vitality, we must sacrifice these fears, as well as illusory claims to guaranteed security and happiness, and simply follow the flow of life, letting everything take its course.

You may ask yourself, “What am I afraid of?” It is in the dark night of the soul - in moments of confusion, excitement, tension and anxiety - that we are closest to ourselves, to thoughts and feelings that we usually do not allow into consciousness, and to our unconscious. This closeness gives us the opportunity to find clues and answers to questions. The main condition is not to be afraid to look your fear in the eyes, to withstand fear and anxiety.

Everyone knows that when we are full and satisfied, we are not creative. An increase in emotional stress contributes to the activation of brain activity, creates dominant foci of excitation, which carry both a destabilizing value for a person’s consciousness and the activation of previously ineffective neural connections, which stimulates a person to search for new, more productive approaches and creative solutions. Thus, the quality of emotional experience, its strength and direction in some cases, for one person has a creative, productive character, and for another person it has a destructive, destructive character.

If you don't overcome fear, your life will never begin. Anxiety provides a powerful incentive to get out of a broken stereotype; this is the path to a breakthrough, reaching a different level. It all starts with the sender. Getting up is already a process. When something bad happens in your life, it means that you need to try something new, you need a new impulse, new energy, a fresh idea.

If you choose the safest places for yourself, don't be surprised that one day depression will come.

Psychological inflation - depreciation and skepticism

When there is no mature sense of one’s own identity, a person falls into psychological states of either unrealistically inflated self-esteem and self-perception (grandiosity of the “I”, hypermania), or unrealistically low self-esteem and self-perception (defectiveness of the “I”, depressive state).

Being in the self-awareness of the grandeur of his own “I,” a person is prone to self-idealization, emotional exaltation, exaggeration of his own strength and capabilities, embellishment of all his manifestations, dreams of an ideal life, feeding himself with fantasies about future unprecedented successes. When faced with obstacles and lack of confirmation of one’s merits, or if the real life situation does not correspond to a certain ideal picture, a person slides into a feeling of inferiority of oneself, one’s “I”. Then he experiences deep disappointment in himself, in those close to him, shows a tendency towards pessimism, belittles his merits, does not believe in anything, and minimizes all his achievements.

The devastating invasion of the flawed “I” in your life is the habit of constantly criticizing yourself, devaluing the events of your life, and treating other people with distrust and skepticism. All this carries with it enormous destructive power, these are those complexes and doubts that corrode the soul, which lead to the fact that feelings become dead and there is no strength to cope with life.

We must oppose these destructive complexes with the positive and creative forces of the soul, which can balance us and help us resist destructive forces.

To do this, it is important to nourish yourself with good impressions from life, raising your sense of self and self-esteem, relying on your real capabilities and achievements, without exaggerating or belittling them. Constant dissatisfaction with oneself and self-criticism make one feel tired of life, because libido flows away, it is spent on the dream of unrealistic perfection, and this is precisely the reason that real spiritual needs are on a starvation diet. It is important to learn to do what you want and enjoy it. You need to gather all your energy to cope with complexes and destructive tendencies, to reorganize the most base aspects of the soul.

The source of any complexes is a negative attitude towards your life and its fruits. When we devalue the results of our life, we thereby introduce a negative and dull background into our life. When we have a negative attitude towards life, we have negative emotional reactions to the events we experience, we devalue our flow of life, we do not learn from life and do not develop.

Lack of faith in ourselves and in other people extinguishes the fire of our life, it leads to self-destruction and deadening of feelings, kills the potential from which the possibilities of a new life develop.

To heal yourself and not become a victim of your own complexes and harmful impulses, you need to stop judging yourself, not allowing derogatory thoughts about yourself and your life to grow. It is important to notice these habitual destructive mental patterns and counter them with life-affirming and nourishing truths. Each of us has the most vulnerable places in our souls - hungry and disadvantaged parts of ourselves, and we need to accept ourselves fully, without reproaching or despising ourselves for our weaknesses, we don’t need to be cruel to ourselves.

If there is some truth in your self-criticism, you need to take into account the fair and useful part of it, and act in accordance with it. Perhaps you really need to change something in yourself or in your life, and something must come to an end.

A feeling of stagnation occurs when the life situation changes and something new appears in life, and we, faced with something frightening and unknown, feeling our psychological unpreparedness, resist change. If you are overcome by melancholy or emptiness, it means that you are afraid to take the next step, you cannot accept new things, you do not allow what needs to happen to happen, thereby not allowing yourself to live the next stage of your life. And then the cure is to take this step, to allow your consciousness to expand and let in something new.

And if you succeed in doing this, you will again gain access to your power, and your inner life will begin to move. After all, to live means to constantly meet the challenge of new circumstances, generated either by internal growth and expansion or changes in the environment. To learn from life means to fully assimilate the fruits of experience, without discarding anything, even what seems painful, meager or unpleasant.

The main medicine for the soul is to maintain and develop what you like and escape from what you don’t like. Therefore, it is so important to be able to notice destructive movements in our own soul, robbing us of libido, energy and mental strength. It is important to find something that fills you with a feeling of joy and life, something that will nourish you, and not weaken and torment you.

Learn to value yourself, value your thoughts, hobbies, plans, your creativity, even if this does not coincide with the opinion of those around you. You need to free yourself from introjects that prohibit you from having your own voice, you need to call yourself names that encourage you to feel like a free and capable person. This will give us prosperity, because we were created for it.

Psychological work with depressive conditions, psychotherapy for depression is a careful and painstaking work aimed at healing and restoring the soul, personal integration, overcoming psychological blocks and complexes that interfere with life, preventing one from living fully and enjoying it. I offer you psychological help to free yourself from depression. In my work, I rely on a psychodynamic approach, which allows me to better understand a person’s problems, gain a new vision, heal old traumas, change my life in accordance with a new understanding, and improve relationships with loved ones.

You can sign up for a consultation and ask questions by phone..

The cost of consultation is in the “Services and Prices” section. If necessary, consultation via Skype is possible.
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3. Do the opposite

There is one concept in Dialectical Behavior Therapy that I really like. It's called "reverse action." People suffering from depression often have a desire not to communicate with anyone, not to get out of bed, and to avoid certain situations. In this case, you need to force yourself to “do the opposite”:

• If you want to avoid any communication, call your friends or relatives and arrange a meeting.
• If you just want to lie in bed and not get up, think about what kind of active activity you could do.

It is important to force ourselves to communicate with people and leave the house - this way we are most likely to lift our mood.

How to behave to loved ones?

Do not ignore the complaints of a depressed person and, especially, do not prohibit them!

Perhaps they will help identify the true cause of the condition. Do not try to cheer him up or remind him of past successes - this will only depress him even more, because his inability to rejoice or clearly understand the picture of what is happening does not depend on him now. But you can remind him that his sad condition is temporary and that if he cooperates with the doctor and takes treatment, he will soon get better! Try not to reproach him for anything and relieve him of all responsibilities as much as possible. Don't let him feel helpless or guilty. But he must take care of himself, perform basic daily toileting, and also regularly visit the doctor - so make sure that these functions are performed.

What to do if you or a loved one is depressed?

If you understand that you have depression, then a combination of three factors will help you:

• visiting a doctor;
• prescribed pharmacological treatment (drugs);
• support from loved ones.

The help of a psychologist for depression, although very important, is meaningless if loved ones ignore the patient’s condition, consider him a whim, and complaints as simple “whining.”

The fact that mental illness cannot be seen or touched only makes the problem worse!

Therefore, only the combination of the three listed elements of treatment will help you or a loved one suffering from depression get out of this condition.

Signs that it's time for you to get help

Luckily, our body sends us signs when we've been neglecting our needs for too long. When the lack of psychological or self-help becomes critical, we may begin to experience the following:

• lack of energy;
• fatigue;
• unexplained physical pain;
• unexplained weight gain/loss;
• extreme stress, anger, or irritability;
• difficulty managing feelings;
• difficulty remembering or concentrating;
• panic attacks;
• poor sense of time;
• desire to spend more time alone.

As we can see, many of the consequences of psychological problems and lack of self-care or psychotherapy overlap or intensify the symptoms of depression. This is why it is so important for people with depression to take time to help themselves. It is much more difficult to pull yourself out of depression when your daily life feels like running in circles, with no time for your own health.