How to heal your depression

There are three major causes of depression.

1. Painful life situations

When life is very painful, of course we will be depressed. Situational depression is normal. Life events can cause great heartbreak, grief and feelings of helplessness. These feelings need to be felt with much compassion, and then released out of the body, rather than being numbed with meds.

Rather than suppressing extremely painful feelings, you need to learn to lovingly manage and release the feelings from life situations such as the following:

Loss of a loved one

Loss of a job

Natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, or fire

Marital and parental challenges

Child abuse

Violent situations such as rape, beatings, or theft

War

You need to grieve and compassionately embrace your feelings of heartbreak, grief, and helplessness rather than suppress your feelings with drugs. Suppressing the feelings can cause them to get stuck in your body, and I believe that stuck feelings can cause illness.

If there is PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), you may need some form of trauma therapy, such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), TRE (Trauma Release Exercises), SE (Somatic Experiencing), or EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), in order to release and reset the stuck traumatic energy.

2. Physical causes from the gut

There is some literature (see Gut and Psychology Syndrome by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride and Brain Maker by Dr. David Perlmutter) indicating that certain imbalances in gut flora (leaky gut, for example) are linked to depression.

A gut imbalance and the resulting gut permeability could be caused by sugar, wheat, gluten, and processed chemical-laden foods, or by a lack of macro- and micronutrients from clean organic foods. Other factors include stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, and lack of sunshine.

3. Self-abandonment

Medication covers over the feelings that let you know you are abandoning yourself — emotionally, physically, financially, organizationally, spiritually, or relationally.

There are many ways you might have learned to abandon yourself, such as:

Ignoring your feelings, rather than being present in your body

Judging and shaming yourself

Turning to various addictions as a way of numbing yourself out and avoiding responsibility for learning from and lovingly managing your feelings

Making others responsible for your feelings of worth and safety

Eating badly

Lack of exercise

Lack of sleep

Procrastination

Overspending

Under-spending (even when money is available)

Being consistently late, disorganized, cluttered

Lack of a spiritual practice

Giving yourself up to others

Healing Depression

I've worked with thousands of people who have healed their clinical depression by learning to love themselves rather than continuing to abandon themselves. People heal their depression when they:

• Get the psychotherapy and trauma therapy they need.
• Learn to take loving responsibility for their feelings.
• Learn to connect with a spiritual source of love and comfort to help them manage the pain of life.
• Eat cleanly, exercise, and get enough sleep.
• Learn to lovingly manage stress.
• Learn to take loving care of themselves in their relationships.

There is no quick fix for depression, but there is a way to heal!

Healing Depression

People heal their depression when they:

Get the psychotherapy and trauma therapy they need.

Learn to take loving responsibility for their feelings.

Learn to connect with a spiritual source of love and comfort to help them manage the pain of life.

Eat cleanly, exercise, and get enough sleep.

Learn to lovingly manage stress.

Learn to take loving care of themselves in their relationships.

There is no quick fix for depression, but there is a way to heal!