Hi Silvio,

That is wonderful news. You are now in my opinion well on your way to beating this.

Now that the meditation, doctor and medication parts of your treatment are essentially out of the way and have been tried with usually only temporary and limited success, it appears that your only real problem is as you described it so well in your response.



This connoting each positive sign with a negative meaning is an addictive habit you have picked up through repeated practice over a period of time, and it would be deceitful of me to say that I feel that you are likely to turn it around within the space of only a weekend.

But this does not necessarily mean that your situation is hopeless, although some further professional help from a qualified counselor using what is often called cognitive therapy is possibly the way to go to be able to bring this back under reasonable control.

Basically, and I am not an authority on this by any means, it is not so much what happens to us, but rather what we tell ourselves about our experiences and the meanings we give to them which actually give rise to our feelings. Now if you tell yourself that you do not deserve to have good things happen to you now and then like any other person, or that you are a bad person and therefore should only expect to be endlessly punished for doing or not doing something in the past which you may not even remember (which seems grossly unfair), then no wonder you might feel down on yourself.

On the other hand, what if when something good happens you told yourself that this is a positive sign that things are really turning around for you and that you deserve to be as happy as you are able under the particular circumstances that you live?

So the identical positive event could happen to both person A (the negative thinker), and person B the positive one.

Surely person B would then feel much more motivated than person A to want to stay around and keep trying to attract more positive energies into his life, while person A could understandably feel that nothing is ever going to get better whatever he does to make them, and it would be far better to stay in bed or wallow in self pity (which is something I have never known you to do).

As I said in my subject heading, you are not a loser, but a winner who is just having a bad time of it at the moment.

And I would now like to add to my original statement the words "because of your acquired negative thought habit, rather than you being a negative person or constant whinger as such. I also said that bad things often happen to good people. It is your thought habit which is at fault here, and not YOU!

To add to your problems you have never intentionally set out to develop this faulty habit of thought. Like most human beings the learning process was completely unconscious in nature, meaning that to a large extent it was beyond your conscious control.

In the absence of professional help being available, if you are interested in trying some basic cognitive therapy for yourself, I can only highly recommend the following book which you may be able to pick up cheap secondhand, or in your local library. Come to think of it, there are two I can recommend to you for self help with a mild case of depression which does not always require a doctor. If you are clinically depressed however,  get to your doctor ASAP.

1. "Feeling Good - The New Mood Therapy - The clinically proven drug-free treatment for depression" by David D. Burns, M.D. (1980) [William Morrow and Company Inc USA]

2. "What you say when you talk to yourself - Powerful new techniques to programme your potential for success!" by Shad Helmstetter (1986) [Thorsons]

My advice would be to see if you can get a copy of of either or both these books and try the simple methods they describe until at least the end of this year (which when you think about it is not so far away in time).

Then return to this forum at the beginning of 2010, and tell me how you got on. Once I am satisfied you have at least given this a good try, then I would be more than pleased to follow this advice up with a reading as promised.

Hey I am on your team, and there is no way that I am going to give up on you now, after getting you this far. All I can say is that these methods have greatly helped me when combined with conventional medical treatment including 8.5 years of taking tricyclic antidepressants against my better judgment, until I finally said enough is enough.  

I pray that they will similarly help you as my friend.

V is for VICTORY over your negative thought habits,

eye_of_tiger

Thank you, I will definitely check out the recommended books and I'm going to try to think more positively. This is totally off topic, but it's very funny and coincidental you would say "Victory", today a colleague of mine went up to me and joked by exclaiming "VICTORY!" with his hand up curled in a fist, because it had the word victory on the front of this workbook I was using, maybe life's trying to tell me something? I'll learn to be in control of my thoughts and emotions one day, I'll live for that. Thanks again, for directing me to the right path.

*hug*

i can sympathize with you completly silvo!
i know how it feel, of course not exactly b/c everyone has different experiences.
but in the spectrum of human emotion. definatly.
andbeing young, i personally didnt have much of a childhood.

life is what you make it.
and sometimes we all need alittle help to fight out pain and our demons.

somtimes its hard to pull ourselves out of the hole ourselves.
so take a hand thats reaching out

EVERYTHING you go through is for a reason, and the outcome will just make you stronger in the end if thats the way you choose

if you need to talk i, and im sure so many others are here for you