One of the first obvious things to discuss around depression is unpleasant feelings. Difficult emotions. And if you look, its easy to find that we all operate from a box around our emotions. A very simple, obvious box.

We all have emotions we like feeling. A normal list are things like Love

pleasure

Happiness

Excitement

Enthusiasm

hope

Enthusiasm

These feelings we all call “good emotions.” We like feeling them and want to do so all the time. However, what are some feelings we don’t want to feel? Consider if a lot of these emotions fit in that category for you;

Fear

Anger

Fear

hate

loneliness

hate

Hopelessness

humiliation

These we call “bad emotions” and we do all that we can not to feel them. If we must feel them, we try to get rid of them as fast as we can.

What then is this paradigm or box we operate from concerning emotions? That there are “good” and “bad” emotions, of course. Each one of us just seems to “know” that there are good emotions and bad ones, and the point of life is to work to feel good ones and avoid feeling bad emotions. This assumption about emotions goes unexamined by all of us. Of course that’s how you manage your emotions!

Therefore, all the feelings that go with the condition of depression we classify as “bad” emotions, to be gotten rid of as quickly as we possibly can. Thus the box we’re stuck in around depression is that depression is “bad.” And we believe we should avoid or resist all the emotions that go with depression.

But there is an underlying problem to this approach of trying to avoid or get rid of all the feelings that go with depression. It is founded in an “emotional mistake” we make every day. This mistake is about not trying to feel bad emotions.

Consider the idea that we all, each of us, have an emotional body, just like we have a physical body and a mental body. And your emotional body has a purpose and function, which is to simply feel feelings. All of them. Good emotions like joy and happiness, and “bad” ones like fear and anger. Its job is to feel feelings. You can’t actually keep your emotional body from feeling feelings.

Your skin can’t help feeling hod or cold, smooth or coarse sensations. You skin is an organ and it feels whatever it comes in contact with. In that same way emotional bodies are supposed to feel all emotions. Not just good ones. You can’t keep from feeling negative feelings. It goes with being human. And when you try to resist or avoid feeling bad feelings, they just tend to get stuck. They stay around longer. In a way, then, trying not to feel the emotions that go with depression can cause the depression to stick around, it can keep the depression from simply passing on through you!

So for help with depression, you need to get outside the box of resisting and avoiding all difficult emotions. One approach to doing this is to learn some basic emotional intelligence so that you can process difficult feelings more efficiently and quickly so that they don’t get “stuck.” No room here for all the details, but just 5 minutes a day of exploring a difficult emotion rather than resisting it can provide surprising depression help.