Helping Someone with Depression Means Overcoming Our Reluctance to Learn About Something Unpleasant
Helping someone with depression starts with caring enough to learn. But it isn’t just learning, it is learning about a topic that is anything but fun to study. What makes it interesting is that depression is like a ferocious bear that needs to be tamed. When you are in the cage with such a beast, you become interested in anything and everything that might help you tame the beast of depression. A good start is to learn the signs of depressoin and the difference between normal sadness and clnical depression. The two are very different, but frequently confused with each other.
Helping Someone with Depression Means Overcoming Our Distaste for Emotion Pain
It’s often said that men like to fix things. In reality, none of us enjoys hearing about a problem or a challenge that makes us feel helpless. Just thinking about depression can make us feel the unpleasant feelings of frustration and helplessness. Sometimes, we lunge for quick solutions such as, “Just snap out of it!” or “Well, I’m sure that you feel better soon.” But these are really a way for us to distance ourselves from the distasteful pain of our emotions.
It's a fight!
Helping someone with depression means coming along side them, knowing that it will not feel good to you, knowing that you may feel overwhelmed at times. One thing you can say to yourself when this happens is, “Wow, I do feel helpless. Everything in me wants to get away from this person and their depression. But now I see that this is exactly what my friend (wife, husband, son, daughter, mother, or father, etc.) feels. He wants to get away from this dreadful feeling, but he feels trapped.”
Helping someone with depression is joining them in the maze
When we take this perspective while helping someone with depression, we start to see that helping doesn’t mean fixing. Rather, it means that we step into the cramped helplessness maze with the person we love so that they won’t be alone as they feel such dark helplessness. This is difficult because one of the common signs of depression is irritability. A depressed friend or loved one can be prickly, grumby, and unattractive. “What happened to your sense of humor?” you ask. Furthermore, it is important that you take enough care for your own well-being that you don’t become clinically depressed yourself!
Helping Someone with Depression Means Coping with Stress More Effectively
This leads to the third obstacle to overcome: we must recognize that we are dealing with the a huge amount of stress for ourselves and we must learn how to cope with stress more effectively. This usually means that you make a few tough decisions to create a little more space in your schedule and your list of commitments so that you have time and mental space to deal with the stress. Stress? Yes, stress. It’s stressful to keep an eye one someone who has made rumblings about wanting to die. It’s stressful to have your overtures of care rebuffed and discounted.
So helping someone with depression means learning how to manage your own stress in better ways. Creating space in your head and your schedule to have time and energy to care is usually the first step. The second step is to help find a good therapist for the person you care about. Notice that I say this as a step for managing your stress. Helping someone with depression is difficult enough when the person you care for is in the care of a competent psychologist. It’s a hundred times harder if you are being forced into the role of therapist–a role you are not trained for. Sometimes, it helps to say to the person
“Look, I love you and it pains me to see you so unhappy. I am committed to helping in whatever way I can, but you make it harder than it needs to be by putting off going to therapy. Your fear of this is, by default, put huge responsiblity on my shoulders. And, it remains there even when you tell me to not worry about it.”
In a nutshell, helping someone with depression involves overcoming 3 obstacles: (1) our reluctance to learn about unpleasant things; (2) our distaste for feeling helpless to fix something; (3) the weaknesses in our own ways of copiing with stress. But, helping someone with depression is not all darkness and gloom. There is quite a thrill when you begin to see someon you love start their own serious journey out of hopelessness and despair. It’s an even bigger delight when you see positive changes each week and evenually… (drum roll, please) the return of joy.
The Return of Joy
{ 0 comments }
