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It is easy for people who suffer from depression to get caught up in thoughts and feelings that allow the depression to become entrenched. It can reach a place where these depressive thoughts and feelings become a lens through which you look at and interpret the world. The depression shapes and forms how you see yourself and how you see others; it begins to give direction to the actions and choices you make.
If you have experienced trauma, control might be a big issue for you. By definition, trauma is an event that creates a high level of stress or fear, but you do not have the chance to escape or get away from it. When thoughts or feelings about the trauma show up later, it makes sense that you would want to avoid these negative internal experiences. So, you exert control, and you can do this in lots of ways.
Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and suddenly realize that you have heard little of what they were saying? Have you been talking among a group of friends and suddenly realized that your mind has wandered? Perhaps you have had someone complain that you aren’t listening. It is not unusual to respond to that complaint with something like, “I’m sorry; my mind was somewhere else.” So where, exactly, is that somewhere else, and how do you get back to here?
You may not realize it, but there is a lot going on when you breathe. For example, when you breathe in, you activate what is called your stress response; it is also call your fight or flight response. When this response is activated, your heart rate increases, and your pupils dilate. You become more alert and the tension in your body increases.
One of the signs of depression is the tendency of your mind to produce negative thoughts about yourself and your life. Your mind is always generating thoughts. It is always looking at qualities and characteristics about who you are and how you are in life and judging if you have been right or wrong, good or bad. With depression, it seems like the only evaluations and judgments that get through are the negative ones.
You hear it all the time: “Well, you just need to be more assertive.” There are even classes you can take that are called assertiveness training. Assertiveness is an important skill to have in close relationships like marriage. A crucial part of communicating effectively and meaningfully with your partner is learning to assert yourself.If you struggle with being assertive, you may confuse being assertive with being aggressive.
When you are dealing with something like anxiety or stress, the only way you can imagine the presence of laughter and humor in your life is to see it as a temporary distraction from the anxious and stressful thoughts and feelings that seem to dictate the way you see and act in the world. But there are many ways that humor can be a therapeutic tool in your struggle with anxiety.
One of the myths of relationships is that a good relationship involves little or no conflict. In fact, all couples have conflicts. Every couple is made up of two unique people, with differences in worldviews and life experiences. Each person has their own way of dealing with the thoughts, feelings, and happenings of life.
Learning how to develop response-ability to your anger means understanding how anger develops. You may not think that there is a process to anger; it just seems to happen, and you have to figure out how to manage it. In their book, ACT on Life Not on Anger, Georg H. Eifert, Matthew McKay, and John P. Forsyth identify five components to anger.
