The Key To Overcoming Depression
In order to be able to deal with any issue, you need to have deep trust in yourself.
Trusting yourself means having the inner motivation and strength to take care of your own needs, and to continuously make the decisions which are good for you, while feeling deep love and compassion for yourself. To free yourself from the negative beliefs and emotions that keep you hostage to your old ways, there are a few steps you could go through.
They are summarized in the acronym TRUST:
T: Get clear about what you are feeling – be honest and tell yourself the truth.
R: Remember where you acquired these models of thinking and behaviour.
U: Understand that you are the key to healing and transforming your life!
S: See your strengths.
T: Take action every day in the direction of your aligned goals and dreams.
Let’s look at these steps one by one!
T: Get clear about what you are feeling – be honest and tell yourself the truth even if it hurts
- Who are you now and how do you feel about yourself?
- Let me remind you that depressive moods and depression are characterised with an overall feeling of gloom and doom. Self-hatred and being angry with yourself is a natural state of being. You are a shadow of your own self.
- What feelings and thoughts get you most overwhelmed?
- What makes you shrink yourself?
- What type of future do you imagine for yourself?
R: Remember where you acquired these models of thinking and behaviour
- How did they become a part of your identity?
- What was your family like when you were growing up – did you feel loved and happy as a child?
- Was it safe to express all your emotions, including anger and dissatisfaction or were you supposed to be the good child?
U: Understand that YOU are the key to healing and transforming your life!
- What role were you given while growing up in your family – the sick one, the brilliant one, the carer, the black sheep?
- Who gave you that role and are you willing to get yourself in a different place?
- Are you ready to put the blame aside and take the exciting responsibility of being the author of your own life?
S: See. Learn to see your strengths!
- I know that seeing any positive traits in yourself while being depressed might seem unlikely or even impossible, but if you are able to recognise what kept you going and what aspects of your true self you did manage to preserve, once you get rid of the negative beliefs you acquired, your authentic personality will shine through!
- Question what your parents, friends or society taught you about what your life should be like and find out what you want for yourself!
- What is important to you?
- How can you use your strengths to start living your life from a place of wholeness and being enough as you are?
T: The final and most important step is to take action.
- Take action every day in the direction of your aligned goals and dreams.
- Be clear about what you want because your mind takes everything you think repeatedly as a mental command!
- The more you think about something, the more your mind will strive to make it happen.
- Understand that positive thinking is not enough – you need consistent positive action to prove to yourself that you are not a helpless child anymore and that you actually have many options to choose from as an adult!
- Make a list of your short-term and long-term goals, give yourself a deadline and just start! Take it step by step, day by day, every day!
How can RTT help with all of that?
The fascinating thing about RTT is that during the session and then after that, with the individual recording each clients gets, constructive work is done on subconscious level where all memories, beliefs, emotions and preferences are stored. When the client is in a pleasant relaxed state, they are able to concentrate fully in their inner world, thus getting in contact with this vast informational database. From the point of view of an adult person, they review scenes from the past which caused them to acquire deeply negative beliefs: “I am not enough”; “I am not lovable”, “I am different and that’s why I cannot connect”, “I don’t belong”; “Something I want/need is not available to me”.
In the case of depression, not being enough or being too much is very often the root, the reason and the cause of the depression itself. Feeling different and not belonging anywhere leaves the client living like a tree without roots. The RTT session helps the client get clarity on the links between past and present events, helps them re-frame the negative beliefs, get rid of them and choose something that works for them. The session is in a way similar to cleaning up the garden before putting new seeds in the soil. RTT is a way to do a clean-up and then install the beliefs that the client chooses in order to move on from a place of wholeness and feeling enough.
This is a game-changer because everything the client does after coding in, or rather re-coding the truth about themselves, that they are enough and lovable, helps them put a high quality energy in everything they do! This changes how they think, feel and behave which in turn changes the results they are getting while moving in the direction of their own choosing! Clients stop reacting to situations and people, they are able to respond in a constructive way.
The individual recording each client receives at the end of the RTT session helps the mind learn and remind itself of these new, exciting ideas for at least 21 days. This time is required to acquire a new habit and strengthen the neural pathways created as a result of this internal refresh. In the case of depression, the fog starts lifting during the session and clients are able to objectively decide what they need to do next to bring about practical changes into their lives. All of this is done according to their own pace and according to their upgraded mindset – a mindset of being enough and worthy as an individual.
Conclusion
RTT helps the client go through all of the abovementioned steps, questions and realisations in a couple of hours so they can understand why depression had to manifest in their life. They don’t need to rationalise anything, they don’t have to waste time to wonder what happened because they already know. In the state of internal focus, the client is capable of getting in touch with their truth. They can finally get it by remembering how the interpretation of the events from the past caused how they were feeling. RTT helps the client get their TRUST back! It helps the client reveal the causes for the state they were in, helps them get clarity on what story they have been taught to tell themselves and supports them in moving on with an upgraded and improved self-concept which is healthy and grounded. RTT gets the client back to themselves, this time, back to their authentic self that was probably sacrificed years ago in order to fit in and survive. It helps the client get back their life and live it for themselves. And by getting them back home, where there is peace and joy for just being authentic, RTT helps the client build the life of their dreams, every day, day after day!
References
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- Ray, W. (2019). Abnormal Psychology. Translated from English into Bulgarian by Publishing House Sofia: East – West.
- Seligman, M., Rashid, Т. & Parks, A. (2006). Positive Psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 61 (8), 774-788. Article
- Torres, F. (2020). Depression Is Different From Sadness or Grief/Bereavement. Physician Review, October 2020. Article
- VandenBos, G. (Ed.) (2015). APA Dictionary of Psychology. Second edition. Washington: American Psychological Association. Dictionary
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Main – Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
Written by Antoaneta Dimova
