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The task of mapping the thoughts and behaviors that reveal that we feel stuck and more unhappy than we care to admit was undertaken by Dr. Evan Parks, clinical psychologist and professor at Michigan State University in an article in psychology today.
Although it is relatively easy for us to perceive that someone from our work or friend environment is sinking into depression and has lost the balance in his life, it is usually very difficult for us to perceive it when it happens to us.
The stereotypes that often dominate what a person struggling with depression looks like doesn’t help either. A depressed person may seem sad and withdrawn, but it could also be your hard-working colleague, the teacher at your child’s school, or the cashier at the supermarket where you shop and nothing in their behavior gives it away. what goes through his mind and how trapped he feels.
It is interesting at this point that Dr. Parks’s observation of his own patients is that even when someone has been evaluated by a specialist and has a high “score” on depressive symptoms, when asked if they think they are depressed, almost always will give a negative answer. In other words we are very good at the art of deceiving ourselves. We carry on or try to carry on as if nothing different is happening in our lives.
And yet there are certain signs, certain thoughts that reveal that not everything is going as smoothly as we would like to think about ourselves. That we are mired in hopelessness and despair, but insist on ostriching it.
Complete disconnection
You have lost touch with what matters to you. You feel disoriented about your values and the direction of your life. You have lost your meaning and purpose, you feel disconnected from what matters to you.
In vacuum
There is a gap between what you desire and what you have, between who you are and who you want to be. While this kind of gap isn’t necessarily bad, it can be a motivator for change and growth, yet it can also be incredibly stressful, exacerbating hopelessness and pessimism about life itself.
You charge negative thoughts
As you are under stress and trying to explain what is happening to you and why, you tend to choose all the negative and pessimistically charged explanations your mind could think of and evaluate them as the only explanations available. You somehow activate the “self-loading” of negativity and unhappiness and relentlessly perpetuate the mindset that triggers it.
Destructive behaviors
In order to escape dark thoughts and control your bad mood you resort to certain stereotyped behaviors to distract you from them, from shopping and gambling to abusing food, alcohol, drugs or tobacco, and in the worst case scenario you try to hurt yourself.
Cycle of despair
You become trapped in a vicious cycle where the temporary relief of your misery by the above means inevitably ends up leaving you in the same or worse psychological state and with some additional problems due to the previous abuses which in the long run worsen the quality of your life.
Thoughts – trap
You are convinced that in order to move forward you need to get rid of your unhappiness, replace black thoughts with “right” positive ones. You assume that the “normal” human condition is happiness, and you must be wrong somewhere and it is your fault that you are not happy. And this way of thinking locks you into a vicious circle that progressively worsens the situation.
Do the above thoughts sound familiar? Do you feel like you wake up every day thinking that this day is going to be as hard as yesterday and that tomorrow will be no different? Then you’re probably stuck in one vicious cycle of grief and you need to break free. You are not alone. We all fall into the vicious cycle of gloomy thoughts from time to time. But there are ways to break free.
The steps of change
The first step for Dr. Parks may seem very simple to us and surely we have heard or read it somewhere before, but it is true and effective: it is important to have compassion for ourselves. Our minds are great at self-flagellation and rarely so good at compassion or recognizing our positives.
The second step requires you to honestly assess how beneficial your gloomy thoughts are to your development. Are they costing you way more than you can afford?
Don’t try to control your discomfort and sadness. Change them like magic. This is not possible. Accept your situation and take small steps in the direction you desire. This approach will help you.
Remember that you are not defined by your thoughts. You don’t have to be controlled by the dark voices of your mind. You write the story of your life, and in that story you are the protagonist, not the victim.