I hope that this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something
--Neil Gaiman
Imagine that you are floating down a river on an inner tube.
You have never been to this river, but it is easy to relax as the water moves slowly. You are at peace and at ease. But soon you hear the sound of rushing water. You look ahead and see rapids. The water is no longer flowing gently. It is moving swiftly and crashing up against rocks and boulders.
You are probably no longer relaxed. You hadn’t planned on going through this churning water, so you tense up. You body becomes rigid. Perhaps you paddle with your hands back upstream to avoid the rapids as long as you can. You may feel your heart racing. You may have lots of thoughts of dread about what is going to happen to you.
This is similar to how you respond the challenges and hassles that create the stress of living. Even though they are part of life that everyone experiences, you weren’t planning on these things. You feel your body tense up, and you do what you can to avoid them for as long as your can. You have lots of thoughts about how these stressors are going to upend, even ruin, your life. Maybe you blame yourself for not being able to handle them.
In their book The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression, Kirk D. Strosahl and Patricia J. Robinson state that when “you run into a barrier in life, the goal is to soften into and roll with it so that you can continue on…until the next barrier. This is somewhat like floating down a river on an inner tube. You have to relax as you make contact with boulders and stretches of rapid water, and then allow the water to carry you downstream, trusting that there will probably be a stretch of calm water somewhere ahead” (31, Kindle Edition).
Strosahl and Robinson go on to say that “this message is not commonplace in our society. We are taught something very different: to resist the experience of pain and to show how strong we are by conquering our emotions. This notion makes us vulnerable to all kinds of problems, including depression” (31).
These words can help you identify two sources of vulnerability to depression that everyone experiences.
One source of vulnerability to depression comes from dealing with the array of life stressors that are part of daily living.
Because they are a part of your daily life, you may not be aware of what these stressors are and how they are impacting you. Some people have called this living on autopilot. You are able to get your daily activities done, but it has the feeling of simply “going through motions” without any sense of how these activities contribute to a life of meaning.
To cope with this vulnerability, it is helpful to be more intentional about recognizing, even anticipating, daily activities or life events that can become stressors. You can take a few moments and look ahead to the day. If you have a challenging meeting at work or school, or you are meeting with family members with whom you have conflict, just being aware and mindful of what is coming can make you more open to an experience without going into autopilot.
A second source of vulnerability to depression is that we are all socially programmed to avoid emotional discomfort.
From a very young age, you receive lots of social and cultural messages that encourage you to control your emotions. You probably have heard a parent say to a child, “Stop crying…there is no reason to be upset…why are you being so emotional.” You may have heard similar words from your own upbringing. The implicit message in all these statements is that emotions are not a good thing, and so, they, must be controlled or avoided.
But the stressors you are experiencing and the emotional responses that go with them are not good or bad, right or wrong. They are part of normal life experience. If you go through life with the expectation that it is wrong to have these feelings and there must be something wrong with you if you can control them, it can lead easily to depression.
In counseling you can learn to develop a more flexible, accepting, curious stance towards these life stressors. This stance gives you the flexibility you need to choose from a place of meaning, instead of getting caught up in depression. To learn more, I invite you to visit my depression treatment specialty page.