The Way To Relating: Sadness Versus Chronic Depression
By Ph.D. Sherrie Campbell. Posted on .
Chronic depression is not a natural emotional state. The body is not meant to handle this as a container, and you will find the chronically depressed never feel well physically or emotionally. The entire frequency of a chronically depressed person becomes dense and diluted. With enough repression the chronically depressed person lives in a distortion around relationships, people’s intentions, their abilities or lack thereof etc. This is not how we were meant to live.
We were meant to feel the first feeling, to express that, have it validated and understood so the emotion can pass through and be free. Imagine if that is how we were allowed to exist in the space of this natural emotion. How different we would feel with our sadness. It really does not take much to validate another person’s pain. This natural emotion is one that visits and travels with all of us often throughout our lives. Sadness is an emotion we can ALL relate to. However, we cannot all relate to chronic depression, which is why it is so isolating for those who experience it. They have packed all of their sadness into the basement of their emotional house until they became like hoarders and it took over their whole system.
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Once we begin hoarding the emotions they become so overgrown they become fixed. This makes them unnatural. Once anything is fixed it is unmoving. How can that work in a world that is in constant motion? The more fixed one is the less flexible and the more difficult life becomes. Once chronic depression is created, the person actually becomes attached to the depression just like hoarders are attached to stuff. Why? They essentially become their sadness, and lose touch with the reality, with the choices open to them and all the power they could have.
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When you are with your partner and you sense they are feeling sad, get in touch with what that feels like to be sad within your own memory recall and relate to them from that universal space of knowing what something feels like. Lets say you were the cause of your partner’s sadness, instead of defending right and wrong, why not try and identify with how your partner is feeling instead of diminishing them, or defending yourself and see how much better you can relate. It is their sadness they are feeling. It may have been triggered by you on purpose or on accident, but it is still their feeling so you can try and see it from an objective distance.
