More on Moods and Feelings and Their Control Over Us

The last couple of posts I have been talking about my latest experience in changing my mood from a downer to a real up mood. I wondered if it might be helpful to include this snippet from my book Depression is a Choice, which I am now trying to reformat for Kindle but not quite through yet. 

It occurred to me that, unless you have at least the intellectual idea that you are separate from your feelings and not a prisoner of them, as people believe who believe that depression is a brain disease, changing your mood as an act of will might seem preposterous. 

I ran across this early experience of my thinking where I was just starting to get the idea that I could actually separate myself from my feelings. In the past I always “was happy” or “was depressed.” I didn’t separate out myself from my feelings and look at them as simply a part of me. They so enveloped me that I thought I was my feelings. Certainly I didn’t think I could change my feelings as an act of will. Here’s an example of my first work on separating  myself from my depression.

“At first I thought of the difference between depression and “feeling good” in terms of being“conscious” or “unconscious,” because Freud’s model of the mind was what I was trained in. The minute I realized I was depressed, I would remind myself that I had “gone unconscious,” and that any “conscious activity” on my part would get me out of it. I remember having an “insight” once that went something like this, “Oh, I get it now. Depression, being a defense mechanism, means it is “unconscious,” and any “conscious” thinking or behavior takes precedence over any unconscious thinking. I refined these concepts later but perhaps seeing depression as “going unconscious” was a necessary step. Ultimately I saw that I had to differentiate myself from my enmeshment with my whole mind, not simply from my depression.

I began to understand that if I was depressed I was never in present reality. I would test this out. When I got depressed I would ask myself questions about exactly what was wrong “right now.” My fears were always either regret or anguish about the past, about what I had lost; or anxiety about the future, and what I was not going to have. Any time I started to question myself seriously about my situation I could always see that in this exact instant I was really “not so bad.”

One of the mind tricks I created to help me to a more objective view of my moods was that when I was depressed I would visualize “saving some of it in my hand” to take into the next high, to “remember” how I was when I was down. This was not terribly difficult. And when I was really high I would “save some of it in my hand” to take into depression to “remember” how it was when I was high. This was much harder.

          Since depression by its very nature is “hopeless,” it necessarily seems “endless.” Thus, it is hard to remember “being high” in the midst of a down, with the implication that another high will also come. But I insisted on doing the exercise and slowly, little by little, I got to the point where I could hold onto the idea of both extremes as being temporary moods.
  
Switching from the idea of one mood to the reality of the other, back and forth, back and forth, regardless of which mood I was “stuck” in, I learned to feel my strongest feelings without losing my sense of objective reality that I was not my feelings, I was simply having them. I learned to raise my awareness and observe myself carefully when I was deep in depression, but not to the point of experiencing myself, until one day my depression was separated out, and I was alone, looking at it."