Tag: Depression

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Depression Series – Empaths and the seasons or ‘Tis the season to be jolly… I wish.

Seasonal depression

Each season has an energy to it. For instance, Spring is the energy of renewal, and Winter is the energy of withdrawal and rest.

For the empath, Autumn / Fall, can be a terribly depressing time. It’s the time when things are dying. Leafs are falling off the trees, the days are getting shorter and the weather is growing colder.

For me, there were two weeks in May, our Autumn, where I would fall into a deep, deep depression. It was debilitating and I could barely function.  After a couple of week, things would settle, and I would still feel depressed, but could function again.

It wasn’t till Spring came that things would seem to shift, and there was hope again. My depression even lifted for a few months.

But the cycle would repeat every year. And while I made the connections as to what was happening, I was powerless to do anything about it.

It’s been a long time now since I’ve suffered that, and I believe that clearing my past shock and trauma had a lot to do with that.

The energy of the season, especially for the empath, can magnify how you are feeling.

Apart from clearing the causes of your depression, it also is a good idea to work with the energy of the season.  While you may not be able to do this on a professional or work level, it’s possible to do this on a personal level.

Fall is the time to withdraw and rest, but Spring will come, and make hay while the sun shines, as the saying goes.

It is said that light therapy, and burning orange essential oils helps with seasonal depression.

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Depression series – Empaths and the holidays or Where has my holiday cheer gone to?

Holiday depression

The holiday season is very hard on empaths. This is especially true for the Christmas and new year period, where everyone feels they should be with family, out celebrating and just having a good time.

Problem is that so many people are alone. They feel like they are missing out on a party where everyone is invited but them. They feel as though they should be enjoying things, but they can’t because they have nowhere to go. No-one to turn to.

What should be a happy and blissful period becomes a wretched and miserable experience.

People get lost in the memories of the past, of better times, of loved ones lost and some view how it was with rose coloured glasses; remembering the good old days.

Multiply this by several thousand, and then by several thousand more, and you have an energy that knocks the empath for a loop during the holiday period.

They will pick up on this intense feeling of depression and hopelessness, and not know why. There will be a sense of loneliness and separation, even if they are with loved ones.

In the northern hemisphere, it’s even worse, as it is winter in many places, and the lack of sunlight contributes to depression.

Add to that the Solstices (either longest or shortest day of the year) which tends to have chaotic energies, you have a recipe for massive depression.

How do you heal such a thing? Not easily. You can’t go around to each person, and help them. Many have their pride, and many are stuck in their own dramas, and unwilling to shift.

I know, personally, I spent my fair share of birthdays, Christmases and birthdays alone. Once upon a time it used to bother me greatly, but I reached a point where I realized that it really didn’t matter. It just meant I got to do what I wanted to do, which works for me.

For the New Year, instead of feeling the need to go out and party, I’d use that as an opportunity to send positive energies to the world and hopefully help bolster it.

Perhaps that is all you can do for now. Have a group prayer. Send love and healing energies to those who need it, and know that it will reach those who need it, and are ready to receive it.

But be aware of the fact that it’s a miserable for many. This is very important. Otherwise, you will feel depressed and will have no idea why there is so much pain.

Bach Flower Remedies: 
Red Chestnut  – Concern for others
Walnut – Protection against external influences (link breaker)
Star of Bethlehem  – For shock / trauma

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Depression series – Empaths and the dark night of the soul or My world is falling apart and nobody even seems to notice.

The dark night of the soul.

Check list

  • You feel there is no hope. You’ve tried everything and nothing has worked.
  • There is no yesterday no tomorrow, just a desperate and empty now of desolation and anguish. 
  • The emotional pain is overwhelming.
  • You feel pushed way beyond your limits of endurance to the point of breaking. 
  • You feel all that you believe in is coming apart. 

The dark night of the soul, as it is called, is a very traumatic and severe type of depression.  It feels like your entire world is coming apart. Whatever hope you once held has been lost and all you can do it hang on for dear life, and try and survive.

No matter what you do, you are overwhelmed by waves of negativity, even when you are trying to be positive.

This is a terrible state of depression.  There are no obvious solutions and chances are those around you will not understand what you are feeling, because you can’t explain it to them. Some may even choose to take offence and make it about themselves.

I remember when I hit this stage. I found the people around me had varying reactions to me.

Many were oblivious that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A couple asked me what was wrong and tried to help, but I truly felt there was no hope left, so they stopped trying after a couple of days. One took offense and made it a reason to have a vendetta against me, even long after the event passed.One chose to use this information against me when I confided in him.One first denied I was having any issues, and then used it was an opportunity to talk about themselves.

I had a mixed response to my dark night, but regardless, while I was in it, I didn’t feel anyone could help.

The dark night of the soul is something you can’t understand, not really, unless you’ve been through it.
But what is really going on? Why do we arrive at such a point?

What is happening is that this is our last, desperate attempt to hang onto a belief system that no longer serves us. One that has ceased to work for us for a while now, but we refuse to acknowledge it.

We hang on with all our might to what we believe should be, but really, we need to let go, and embrace a new line reality.
There are many old belief systems that might no longer be valid for us.

This could be in regards to a relationship that needs to end.

Maybe it’s time to change your lifestyle or belief system. In my particular case, I believed that I would never be loved, have a partner or find someone and I was destined to always be alone.

Today, such thoughts seem inane to me, but at the time it seemed like a very real concern. I felt I had tried everything, and everything had failed on all levels.
I was stuck in a set of beliefs that no longer were relevant to the direction I had to go. Until I was prepared to accept something greater, I would be unable to move on. However, I was so convinced I had worked it all out that I was no longer allowing growth to continue.

The dark night of the soul is actually a blessing in disguise. It heralds the start of new spiritual growth. Some say it is the doorway to true spiritual growth.
A new way. A new start. It means that it’s time to let the past go, and accept that there are things you do not know, and let new ideas come into your life.

It’s a purging. It’s a breaking of energies. And that’s what makes it so painful.

This was just before I was introduced to the Bach Flower Remedies, and so I had to get through this alone. When I finally emerged, I found that I had new hope, and things were shifting and my life was never going to be the same.

Remember, at its most extreme, Yin will become Yang (and visa versa). They say it is darkest before the dawn, and this is true.

If you are experiencing your own dark night, know that things will get better and it may herald a much greater and amazing journey.

Bach Flower Remedy:

Sweet Chestnut is the remedy for this state. It allows you to embrace a new belief system, and let go of the old one, without breaking you.

It works well with Walnut, which is the remedy for change.

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Depression series – Empaths and Trauma or why am I clinically depressed?

Shock and trauma

Check list:

Do you feel depressed without any cause?
Does even the slightest setback send you spinning into depression?
Do you ignore traumatic events and quash them so they don’t bother anyone?
You feel dead inside.

This is an insidious type of depression. It is certainly a clinical depression and sometimes it may be identified as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

This is one of the worst types of depressions because on the surface, there is nothing wrong. Your life might even be going extremely well, but still you feel down, depressed for no apparent reason, and worse, the slightest setback will send you spiralling into a deeper state of darkness and gloom.

Onlookers will not understand. In fact, they will just dismiss this as someone in a drama, or someone who is just depressing to be around.

This is the type of depression that will power cannot overcome. Sure, you might be able to shift your mood for a bit, but the moment something doesn’t go quite right, you will come plummeting down.

What is actually happening here is an accumulation of shock and / or trauma over a long period of time. When something traumatic happens, we should process it, get support and validation, and do what needs to be done to resolve it.

The type of shocks and traumas we are talking about might be an accident, a death, separation, loss of a job, illness, near death experience, abusive childhood, rape, incest, or any one of countless life events.

Even the process of being born can be traumatic.

So, over time, we accumulate a backlog of these unresolved issues that become toxic and affect us on an ongoing basis and the chances are that we are not even aware of it.

Talking about how you feel can help and if you are fortunate, you will find a friend or a confident who will listen. If you’re really fortunate, they will know how to help you.

However, what seems to be more likely is that people don’t want to know about it. They will tell you to ‘get over’ it,  give you a pep talk, or worse, make themselves the focus, and make your problems all about them.

If you try to bring it up again, their response might be: Yes, I know it already, while they will go on and on about their own issues, thus making you more inclined to no longer discuss what is going on. This will compound the problem as there will be no outlet to discuss those feelings. It is not their fault, though. They just don’t have the knowledge or the tools to help you.

It’s not surprising that we get angry and frustrated with this from time to time, and then decide to supress those emotions, making things even worse.

But most of the time, apart from feeling depressed, you will just feel cold and dead inside, as if all the joy has been sucked from you.

Empaths tend to put their own needs last and often at their expense.

The accumulation of shock and trauma, especially over a long period, will produce clinical depression. What’s worse is that you may feel it’s somehow your fault and that by being depressed, you are inconveniencing other people. You might also be tired of the same thing happening time and time again, and so start to withdraw from others because you no longer wish to inflict yourself on them.

This really is one of the more insidious types of depression because the cause is not obvious. Most don’t know they have uncleared trauma. Most won’t remember much of it, because they have repressed it.

I’ve not seen too much out there on this subject. I hear a lot of reports about people suffering from depression, but not the reasons why, let alone how to really cure it.

There is a cure for this type of depression. (As I believe there is a cure of all things) and I accidently stumbled upon it around 2002.

For years, on and off, I would experience clinical depression. It would be debilitating, and it was as if all the life force was being sucked out of me. Emotionally, it was extremely painful and I had no hope for myself.

On my birthday, I experienced a really bad episode (brought on by my partner of the time attacking me on something that was not in my control).

One of my life’s missions is to find cures for those conditions that are said to be incurable. I think I’ve tried a good many things, but the one thing I keep on returning to are the Bach Flower Remedies, which are a an effective, safe and gentle healing system.

To that point, even though I had not found any that helped me for my depression on a long term, I would keep on trying different remedies in the hope I would hit upon something I had missed. For this particular episode, I took Rescue Remedy ™ to try and obtain some relief.

I noticed that I felt slightly better. Not a lot, mind you, but it was enough to make me wonder why. As the Rescue Remedy contains five Bach Flower Remedies, I ran through the list in my mind, and found that the only possible one that could have made any difference was Star of Bethlehem, which is the remedy for clearing Shock and Trauma.

At that point, I had never used it on its own because I believed that being part of the Rescue Remedy, there was no need.

I took out the bottle from my kit and placed a couple of drops on my tongue. The relief was instant. It was as though an enormous weight had been lifted from me.

It was then I realized that uncleared shock and trauma had caused my clinical depression. The key was that you needed to take Star of Bethlehem by itself in order to gain full healing from it. When it was mixed with other remedies, its effectiveness was severely reduced.

Initially, I kept on taking it every time I felt my depression returning. First it was every few minutes, then it lengthened to hours and after three days, it was gone.

I am now mindful that if I do experience a traumatic event, to make sure I take some.

I have duplicated this result with other people. One case was a lady who e-mailed me a few days later, saying she was considering going on anti-depressants, but asked if I had any last minutes suggestions. I told her my experiences. She bought a bottle of Star of Bethlehem, and wrote to me that night, saying that she had never experienced such a profound relief. In the morning, she wondered how she would get through the day, and that evening, she was at peace with the world and happy to be alive.

While this is not the only cause for depression, it is a major one and well worth looking into if you are experiencing such symptoms.

Nearly everyone suffers from traumatic events in their life. From their birth to the present and they are rarely cleared.

Bach Flower Remedy: 
Star of Bethlehem.

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Depression Series – Empaths and Guilt or I’m feeling guilty, but I’ve no clue why.

Empaths and depression – Guilt.

Checklist.

        Do you feel anxiety that makes you want to hide away?
        Do you feel you let others down?
        Do you feel an emotional pain that borders on anxiety that just won’t let up, but     there is no defined cause.
        You feel suicidal. 

I call guilt the great destroyer. It literally brings your life to a halt. It makes you feel suicidal, and you can barely function as a normal person.

The worst thing about guilt is the painful feelings of anxiety that  you can’t seem to shake.
You can feel something is wrong, that something is bad, but you aren’t sure what it is.

This is normally due to some action you have taken, and how another person appears to have reacted badly to it.

It does not matter if the action was done with the best of intentions, you still feel terrible that you might have made someone feel uncomfortable or made them feel embarrassed or awkward.

Or  perhaps it might be due to something  where you feel that you can’t rest or relax until others do. For instance, if you’ve done all your work, and others haven’t, you may feel bad because they are working, and you are not, even though you have done what you should have done.. and sometimes more.

The tricky part of guilt is that you feel guilty, and you may not even know it. All you can feel is this deep seated feeling of depression and anxiety, and no way to end it.

It can bring your life to stand still as every action becomes an effort, and all your energies go to just trying to function.

Guilt, as a cause, for depression, is often overlooked, because it’s not what we are expecting feeling guilty to be like.

Indeed, the general perception of guilt is that you feel somewhat bad about doing something, but hey, that’s life, right? It tends to be trivialized.

But what is guilt? One view is that it’s the feeling that you are to blame for something that has happened or is happening.

It’s a feeling of self-blame for a situation we may have somehow contributed to that could hurt others, or make them feel uncomfortable in some manner. That might be their perceived disappointment in us, or some other thing or event. Perhaps you have made a recommendation to someone and found that it didn’t work for them, so you feel bad about it.

It can also be the belief that we are not living up to others expectations. Somehow, their disappointment in our efforts means that we are responsible for how they feel.

This is a major problem. Way too many have suicided over such feelings.

It also appears that the greater your success, the more likely you are to suffer from depression brought on by guilt., as you feel the pressure mounting for you to not only to continue to perform, but to not let others down. Sad fact of this world is that we love our heroes, but bury them alive if we feel they disappoint us.

Many turn to drugs and alcohol to try and cope with such emotional pressure, though it actually doesn’t do much to help in the end.

But it is not our responsibility to make others feel better. It is not our responsibility to let others live their lives through us. All we can do is our best, and that is all we are meant to do.

This type of pressure happens for so many teenagers who feel they must do well at school, at sports, or whatever someone else is making them do.

They are not doing it for their own reasons. They are doing it for others, and because of that, when we can’t live up to expectations, we feel we have failed everyone, including ourselves.

We never really fail, though. Not as long as we keep on trying. And the simple fact is that we may not be all that good at some of the things we are asked to do.

And oddly enough, we feel guilty because others aren’t happy with what we’ve done, but ironically, those who have expectations never seem to feel guilty in turn about putting such pressures on us.

But this is your life. These are your choices. Make them to reflect who you are, and not what others think you should be. Those people are just living through you as an extension of themselves, and not seeing you as an individual who has their own needs and desires.

Guilt generally isn’t a productive emotion. Some might say it stops you from doing the wrong things, but do we really need something like guilt for us to do what we consider to be right?

From a holistic point of view, as long as you’ve acted with the highest intentions, then you have no reason to feel guilty. You can’t control how others feel and how they react. Furthermore, it’s not our responsibility to do so.

We play our part in their lives, and they do the same for us. It’s all agreed to at a higher level, where we know exactly what is going on, and there are no surprises. Indeed, spirit is always fully aware of all that happens, which is why nothing is ever random.

This is why life unfolds in the way it does, and when you look back, you can see what seems like an amazing, but contrived story. (Of course, if you choose a random life, then there is chaos in the order, but that’s still a choice.)

From this perspective, you might say that any part you play in another person’s life was agreed to, and part of their own soul plan.

Remember, we cannot control how others feel or react. All we can do is act with the best intention.

If you are suffering from depression, anxiety and a complete drain of energy, consider looking to see if guilt is the cause. This is easier said than done because often we won’t let our mind look at what we might find… or fear to find. And yet, most of the time, it’s never as bad as it seems.

Bach Flower Remedy:
Pine.

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Empaths and depression – Introduction

This is a repost of a recent depression series I wrote. It specifically written for empaths.

In these articles, there will be suggestions for what Bach Flower Remedies will help combat the type of depression being discussed.

Introduction

One of the main issues empaths face is depression. This is a really crippling emotional state to be in, and it can literally bring your life to a standstill.

It wasn’t too many years ago when those of us who suffered depression had to suffer in silence and just put up with it.

Often, we were told to:

Get over it.
Not to be silly.
It was all in our mind.
There was no reason to be depressed.
Stop being a wet blanket

…amongst other things.

Fact was, and is, as empaths, we are very, very susceptible to depression and it’s not our fault.

Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t do something about it, though and this is what this article will be about.

Being aware of the reasons why we feel a particular way can be very helpful. Often, I find that is half the battle. I also recommend using Bach Flower Remedies, which help restore the balance and can stop depression affecting us.

I wish there was just one cause for depression. I really do. It would make things so much easier. You could then just take the one remedy, pill, maybe meditate, or what have you, but the simple fact is that there are quite a few causes and we will explore them one by one.

For some type of depression, I have added a check-list at the start. That way, if you find you can relate to the points mentioned, you can read the section and see if it relates to you.