Learn One Essential Step to Start Healing Your Depression Today

It’s you, alone in the world, in a constant fog of intense sadness and lethargy. You alternate between hiding your misery and sobbing uncontrollably. You feel empty inside, as if nobody loves you. And your self-esteem is at an all-time low. You wonder if there is any point in going on alone. Maybe if you wait long enough you’ll eventually start to feel better. But depression doesn’t work that way.

As tough as it is to believe, acceptance is one essential step that you need to start healing your depression today. Of course, it seems a radical concept to consider accepting the very depression or hopelessness that is making you miserable. But we know for a fact that turning your back on depression or putting on a happy face mask and trying to pretend everything is all right doesn’t work well in the long-run.

The great psychologist Carl Jung stated, “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” Before you can start to make improvements to feel better, it is imperative to first acknowledge and accept what you are experiencing right now.

Stop, Breathe, and Accept

In my recent book, Your Highest Potential I pass alog a popular Zen story that tells of an old man who accidentally fell into the river rapids. The man was swept up by the river into a high and dangerous waterfall. Onlookers feared for his life. Miraculously, he came out alive and unharmed downstream at the bottom of the falls. People asked him how he managed to survive. “I accommodated myself to the water, not the water to me. Without thinking, I allowed myself to be shaped by it. Plunging into the swirl, I came out with the swirl. This is how I survived.”

While the point of any Zen story is to draw our own conclusions, I see this story as suggesting that first we must accept whatever emotions or situations are currently upon us. There is no point in fighting or attempting to stop depression or our emotions. Instead, we can cry, shout, or do whatever is helpful and positive to move the energy of the emotions. We can speak the words of self-pity and unfairness. We can crawl into bed and curl into a little ball for days on end. Then we stop, breathe, and accept the situation.

Separating Pain and Resistance to Pain

Acceptance of the situation helps you sort out the difference between true reality and false reality. If you are depressed and have not yet achieved acceptance, it’s like you are sitting in a pitch black box with no remembrance of ever having been outside the box, and no sense that anything exists beyond the box. In response to the situation, many emotions and beliefs share the black box with you. It’s not uncommon to feel:

Overwhelmed
Confused
Angry
Stressed
Anxious
Physically sick, including headaches, migraines, aching muscles
Distracted and unfocused
Tired and lethargic
Pressure or expectations, from yourself or others
Hopeless
Self-hatred

Acceptance of the situation helps you sort out the difference between pain and the effects of your resistance to pain. True reality is what is happening: you are depressed, you are sitting in a pitch black box, you don’t yet know how you will move beyond this experience, and you’re feeling a whole lot of hard to endure emotions and physical pain. False reality is that you believe you shouldn’t be experiencing this depression, there is no hope, things will never get better for you, or that you won’t ever move beyond what is happening.

Acceptance Invites Spirit

Acceptance of depression allows you to bring your spirit into the darkness. Once your spirit is involved, you are no longer expending energy denying your suffering. Instead, you have new perspective to learn how to cope with the situation. Rather than giving in to passivity, helplessness, guilt, or self-hatred you can face reality and tell yourself, “All right. This is how things are right now, right in this moment. It’s time I took a breath, stop panicking, and see where I am.”

Acceptance doesn’t mean you are giving up. For example, accepting your doctor’s assessment that you have a toe infection doesn’t mean that you will go home, allow the infection to spread, and eventually die. Instead, it means that you accept the situation and begin to get involved looking for acceptable treatments to deal with the infection. Perhaps the first doctor thinks it wise to cut off the toe. You decide to seek a second, third, and even fourth medical opinion. You look into alternative treatments. Maybe you begin to read some toe infection literature. You talk to other people who have had similar toe infection experiences. The point is that acceptance gets you back in the driver’s seat exploring options to move beyond the situation you are experiencing.

Acceptance of depression or hopelessness doesn’t mean your pain will go away. But it does mean that you can look around and say, “Now that I’m here, what choices do I have?” It doesn’t matter how you were the one who ended up depressed. It doesn’t matter that you don’t like being in this much pain. What does matter is that here you are and this is your journey.

If you or someone you know is depressed, Depression Freedom is a powerful book that reveals new insights about the nature of depression… and how to move through it. Depression Freedom is a must read for anyone who has ever been depressed, everyone who struggles with deep depression or is even now feeling like there is no way out, their friends and family members, as well as counselors and therapists seeking practical, real life healing tools and an empowering message of hope and transcendence.