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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!

I think I let myself feel bad about my debt a little too long now. In my previous post, I mentioned how I had a talk with my friend about my debt. I had started to feel bad afterwards. I let myself feel like that just to observe what was happening to me.

Now, it’s been quite a few hours and I still feel pretty bad. Whenever I feel bad about money, I feel like I’m really tired, along with the out of breath feeling I mentioned previously. All I want to do then is to go to bed and rest. I do not have any energy then either. It’s one of the worst feelings that I’ve felt and it’s stayed with me no matter what I do to take care of it.

NLP and EFT

I’ve tried NLP and EFT therapy with some successful therapists but nothing helped. These were the people who had actually helped war veterans with post traumatic stress disorder and so on but it didn’t seem to work with me. Actually, it did not even help me 1%. Weird!

But both of these methods have helped me when I’ve used them by myself. I guess because I know myself better so I could change them to fit me.

I’ll talk more about both of these techniques in a later post. So far I feel pretty bad.

I am going to try a few things to make myself feel a little better. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve tried some self-talk but that didn’t seem to work. Let’s see…