Kensray.com

Over the past few years I’ve tried various different therapies for depression. Here are my experiences:

Family doctor – My family doctor never thought there was anything wrong with me. I had to try repeatedly to get a referral to see a therapist/psychiatrist. He kept saying “don’t worry, it’s just stress! Everyone has stress these days, it’s no big deal!”

Psychiatrists – I saw a few different ones. Few of them saw nothing wrong with me as I seemed to be knowledgeable about what might be causing me stress and what I could about it. They said “you know what to do, you don’t need anything, and you’ll be fine!” While one suggested I could try to go on medication which I refused at that time.

Talk therapy – Quite effective. I worked with a good therapist and she knew just the right questions to ask me to make me think deeper about my issues. By just talking with someone who’s not going to judge can be very comforting in itself.

Only thing is that it can easily make you dependent. Plus those were one hour sessions and she would always be looking at her watch to keep track of time so I never really felt comfortable opening up as I would always be thinking of trying to summarize every thing so it could fit in that one hour session.

Eft – I mentioned in a previous article about how I cured my lower back pain using EFT. After that I worked with an EFT practitioner for some time to resolve a lot of deeper issues. Even though she thought everything was ok, working with her actually did not help directly. She was very good practitioner and a good person but I think the problem arose because she tried to use techniques of EFT without really taking into account my background.

After we had stopped the sessions I continued with EFT for another six months at least and for 1-2 hours every single day so I got quite knowledgeable in applying EFT. Every time something negative happened in my life, I would just apply EFT and get rid of the negative association to that event. This enabled me to look objectively at the situation and thus learn from it but overall it did not help me resolve deeper issues.

I eventually stopped using it so much when I started using NLP.

NLP – I worked with a highly qualified NLP practitioner. He was highly recommended and had done a lot of good in the community using NLP. He had helped a lot of people deal with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and not to mention a whole lot of other disorders and phobias very successfully.

We went through really extensive NLP sessions. He assured me that I did not need to remember specific events in order to deal with them with NLP. Interesting thing is that nothing worked. We went through a lot of issues, with many different NLP techniques, but not a single one of them went away. So, that was kind of disappointing.

Thus, I found both NLP and EFT to be very good at dissolving negative feelings if I could remember specific events. They’re both relatively easy to learn and use. They’re also very good at curing phobias as you know specifically what it is that’s causing you discomfort.

On the same note, I have found that unless you can get to the core issues, it’s very hard to totally resolve an issue with them.

With EFT, the set up phrases and phrases that are recommended to be used while tapping may not work for everyone either. Problem is similar to problems with using affirmations, as I mentioned in my previous article.

So, there you have it. Please keep in mind that every single one of these therapies has actually helped a lot of people. Just because I didn’t find help using them doesn’t mean they don’t work.

This is just my experience and they did not help me. Also, I could have tried going to different people with in the same field but I was fed up with it all.

Still, I actually learned a lot about myself, from each of these different forms of therapies, so these experiences were not totally wasted.

What exactly is depression? You can read my previous post for the symptoms of depression. But what is the cause of depression?

Let’s remember one thing! You were not born depressed. Therefore, your depression is not permanent.

Please keep in mind that I’m not talking about some disability though, which is different all together. I am talking about people who’re born healthy otherwise but fall into depression due to the circumstances in their lives.

Also, there are a lot of people who’ve cured their depression without medication so we know it is possible. This is a very good start.

You have a bad experience in your life. Now every time you think about it, it causes you to feel some kind of negative emotion. Not only that, but negative feelings get associated to anything that reminds you of that experience, or even anything that’s a little similar in nature.

What if you have many different negative events in your life? For example, what if you grew up in extreme poverty, experienced racism, had poor health, and grew up without real friends and so on?

Now, almost everything you look at might put you in a negative state.

You’re feeling sad all the time. More you feel sad, more you reinforce your current state and harder it gets to get out of sadness.

In a law of attraction term, you are always in a vibration of sadness. And since you attract in your life what you’re vibrating, you keep attracting other people, circumstances, and things that keep you in your current vibration, which is sadness. You’re stuck in a vicious cycle.

You stop to think about why you’re feeling sad but there is no answer since it’s been going on for quite some time now. It might have been a simple new gadget that someone bought that you didn’t have. Even though you might be able to afford it now but subconsciously it took you to a time when you were unable to afford anything. Or it might just be the way someone looked at you on the road, or way someone was dressed, or certain smell, or certain tone of voice, or people of certain religion/culture and so on.

It can be anything at all. It all depends what was around you when you had your negative experience(s) in your life. If in your negative state you focused in on a certain person then everytime that person’s around you, you might feel the same negative emotion. Actually, this is called a negative anchor in NLP. That same negative feeling gets anchored to that person.

So, how do you deal with it now? What do you do when you can’t even pin point the cause of your depression, of your sadness?

Take your attention away

One way is to take your attention away from sadness and by deliberately placing it on something that you like, something that makes you feel good.

If even for one moment you change your focus to something positive, at least for that moment your depression is no longer there. For that one moment you are feeling good.

You could try focusing on your breath. Focus on one complete breath, inhaling and exhaling. For that one breath your attention was taken away from depression to peace and tranquility. For that one breath you were at peace.

When I experimented like this, that’s when I realized that I did not need medication but needed to deliberately focus on things that brought joy to my life, things that made me feel good.

So, even if I couldn’t pin point the root cause of my depression but if I could feel good for just one moment then there there is hope that I could feel good for a whole day. It is just a matter of being in that state for longer periods of time daily.

This again is encouraging!

This is similar to the post I’d written previously about me getting sick every single month. I don’t get sick that often but for as long as I can remember I have been tired. Every single day is a big struggle for me. For the longest time I just thought it was my diet or lack of exercise. I would try experimenting with different food and exercise routines but nothing changed

Here are my symptoms

• I have no energy to do anything at all
• I feel a little better when I’m among other people
• I feel extremely lonely when I’m by myself
• I can’t wait to leave my house in the morning
• After work all I want to do is lie on sofa and watch tv
• Feels like someone is sucking energy out of me
• Eating a lot of fruits and vegetables give me different type of energy. I feel fresh and clear minded but that feeling of fatigue, of energy being sucked out is still there
• I feel very sad all the time
• Feels like I can’t breathe
• Feels like someone is choking me
• Feel chained down because just can’t seem to get up when I am by myself
• I can’t concentrate on simplest of tasks
• I forget really simple stuff
• I want to do so much stuff but when I’m by myself I just can’t even get up from sofa or bed
• I have constant body pains
• I get irritated over smallest things
• I can’t seem to decide over simplest matters
• I experience strong feelings of guilty, unworthiness and hopelessness
• I constantly feel overwhelmed
• Whenever I am stressed I get sick
• Just feel like crying for some reason. I don’t cry but still the feeling is there

Depression

Recently it’s gotten much worse. And I figured out that it’s got nothing to do with my diet or exercise. I’m depressed. I used to be severely depressed when I was younger and I thought I had gotten out of it. I worked hard to get myself out of depression and in some ways I was quite successful. Even at my worse I don’t feel suicidal now.

So, that’s good news!

Looks like I hadn’t really recovered from depression. I sort of distracted myself from it. All the time I just kept myself busy with either watching tv, or hanging out with friends.

When I get home no wonder nothing gets done. On the way home when I’m amongst people on the subway I feel quite good and full of energy. I feel like going home and doing this and doing that and even feel like going out for a run. But as soon as I open the door to my condo and sit down I feel really drained. Feels like a vacuum is attached to me and my energy gets drained/sucked out of me. I just fall on the sofa unable to move around.

I don’t even have the energy to get up and get a glass of water or turn tv on or off or go on the computer.

I feel extremely lonely and loneliness eats away at me. But I am actually not lonely. But I just feel lonely. I’m afraid to be alone and now that cable tv is gone I don’t have the television to distract me. I watch some dvds but it’s not like before when the television used to be on all the time and I would hear it in the background no matter what I was doing.

Few days ago after I got home from work, I couldn’t even get up from the sofa. No matter what I did I was just unable to get up. So, I decided to meditate and see if that would help. I wanted to get up and set the timer for meditating but I just was totally unable to get up. It wasn’t until I had an intense need to go to the washroom that I was able to get up.

Meditating while lying down seemed like the only thing I could do but still was a step in the positive direction. Since I couldn’t get up, I just laid there and relaxed. I relaxed and concentrated on my breathing for about 15-20 minutes.

After meditating I felt a little better. Enough for me to pick up the laptop behind me and go to youtube and start watching music videos. Literally, that’s all the energy I had but it was enough. I had saved a few songs that I really liked. I had enough energy now to get them started.

But after listening to the first song I was feeling a little better, so I actually got up. Then I listened to more songs and kept this up for at least one hour. During that time I got out of sadness and was totally with the music and was feeling great.

That’s when I knew for sure that diet has nothing to do with the way I was feeling. I was only able to get myself to feel better by focusing on good thoughts and good songs in this case.:-)

This is last year’s story. I had not done any sort of weight training for a number of years. I tried doing pull ups and I could barely do only two! I was not over weight and seemed like I was in decent shape but still two is two! No getting around it!

That’s when I decided to see if I could increase the number of pull ups I could do. Pull ups or chin ups to me are the same thing. Ones I am referring to are where hands are about should width apart and palms facing you.

Grease the Groove

I decided to try Pavel Tsatsouline’s grease the groove method. It’s quite interesting.

Basically, you do a number of reps through out the day. Trick is to never exert yourself and you should feel fresh after every set.

For example, if you can do 10 pull ups, then max you should be doing at any given time is maybe 4-5. As you can do those without really forcing yourself. Do 4-5 (40-50% of your max) through out the day. Slowly increase your intensity by either doing more reps per set or doing them more times (more sets) during the day.

I started doing 1 pull up 3-4 times a day. Slowly I increased to 2 reps, then 3, then 4 and so on.

I would do these for maybe two weeks straight then check my max number of pull ups over the weekend and then take a day or two off after that to recuperate.

I had a pull up bar at home that would go around the door frame. It was awesome until it broke my door frame.

Anyhow, I did one set in the morning, one set at night after work and 1-2 sets during work. Doing it at work was where it got interesting. I found a bar at one of the stalls in the washroom so I started doing the pull ups there.

The washroom door had a combination lock so I would always know when someone was punching in the code in order to enter and that was perfectly safe for me. It gave me enough time to stop doing the pull ups and be washing my hands before anyone entered. Perfectly natural!

One day that combination lock broke so instead of fixing it, they just totally took the whole knob and lock out. Now people could just come in without any warning.

One day a senior manager walked in and I quickly stopped but he noticed what I was doing. I don’t think he ever told anyone but he would look at me differently now.

That kind of put a stop to my pull ups at the washroom stalls at work. And now the door frame being broken by my home pull up bar so I couldn’t do them at home either.

That’s when I stopped doing them but not before doing 14 pull ups all the way up to all the way down, with perfect form!

Needless to say I was quite impressed with myself and with this system by Pavel Tsatsouline.

I have been noticing for the past few years now that there are waaaaayyy more women that are running than men in downtown Toronto! Why is that?

I’ve been working in downtown Toronto for the past few years now. We’re pretty close to Lake Ontario as well. So, sometimes I go walk by the lakeshore. No matter where I go I have noticed that there are indeed more women outside than men.

More women are walking to work in the mornings and walking back in the afternoon. More women are biking in downtown. More women are jogging, running, roller blading! During lunch time I see them just go out for a jog by the lake as well. I would see you see at least 5 women for every man you see walking, jogging etc.

Why is that though?

I mean it’s always nice to see more women outside than lots of men But I really thought about it.

Is it because women are a lot more health conscious than men? If that’s the case then why is that? Do they really believe in remaining healthy?

Or is it because of the media? How we’re shown images of out of this world women with perfect proportions. We all know the kind of negative impact media has on us, especially the young kids these days. But is it possible that that negativity is also imbedded with in ourselves?

Are there more women that are health conscious because of low self esteem? Is it because they really want to be in good shape because it’s considered supposedly ugly to be a little over weight?

I’ve actually noticed how women that look good actually advanced fairly rapidly with in the work place. Not only that but they’re also treated differently than a little over weight women. A beautiful woman giving you an attitude and you might understand but an over weight one doing the same thing and you would never understand and actually treat her totally differently. I’ve seen this happen actually. An over weight woman was giving attitude to a few people at my work and they started commenting on how fat and ugly that woman was and she was still giving attitude and how if she was pretty they would actually understand her behaviour.

So, is that the reason that more women are into health than men?

What if they actually learned to totally love themselves for who they are? Is that possible? Of course it is possible but may not be as easy as it might be for men. I spoke to a friend of mine about this and he said that a man could be fat and ugly and still get girls as long as he had money but it’s very hard for women in this world to attract men as easily if they’re over weight.

This post is not something I intended to write. It’s just me thinking out loud basically. I’ve seen what low self-esteem can do to a person. I’m really curious to know how different people would be if they accepted themselves as who they are and totally approved of themselves.

Maybe we should have some sort of an experiment. Take someone who’s really into health and fitness but with low self-esteem and then help them fall in love with themselves and see what happens then.

On the other hand if you love yourself you treat yourself much better anyways. So, you would be really conscious of your health as well. hmm.. that doesn’t take me any closer to an answer.

Maybe conclusion is: if you like yourself and are happy with yourself and that’s why you’re health conscious then that’s wonderful but if you’re exercising constantly because you want to maintain a certain figure because you believe you would look more beautiful if you were a certain weight, then that’s not good!

Love yourself completely no matter how you look. Fall in love with yourself because no matter where you are, you are the only one that’s going to be accompanying you. So, you might as well make yourself your own friend rather than an enemy