Friday, February 17, 2012

"The Trumpet" on Depression

I was reading an article from the The Philadelphia Trumpet magazine entitled Defeat Depression-Master your Mind published in December 2011 the article written by Dennis Leap, and he works out an outline on how to operate your mind. He does so by quoting the Bible and digging into scripture.
He states that twisted and distorted thinking is the major cause of suffering for people flattened by depression. The twisted thinking is illogical, but it seems so real that you have convinced yourself that your depression will go on forever. This was shown to me in a most dramatic way.
I was suffering from allergies big time, so sensitive that even being outside a small amount of time would send me running inside to clear anything out of my lungs by breathing the filtered air from the air conditioning system. I would do slow breathing through a cloth and in about twenty minutes I would calm down. I would have an air purifier in my bedroom and a dehumidifier in there as well. I could not sleep because of the noise. The air, being drier, stopped the dust mites but being drier gave me trouble as well. These things played on my mind. Did life have to be this way? I was already on a restricted diet because of allergies, now even my work outside in the pollen and dust filled air and house full of dust mites were against me. I had been involved in a car accident in May of 2011, and so the body was in shock as well. I had, in essence, a nervous breakdown and ended up in a mental hospital, twice in a six week period for depression and anxiety.
Now I want to illustrate how this mind of mine works and relate that back to the Trumpet article. My allergy symptoms were greatly exaggerated  and multiplied and when the time came to get an allergy shot I let them know about how the allergies were affecting me. The doctor came in and told me that he could handle the allergies, what ever else I had was something else (ie in my mind). I came home and the room that I was in was not as clean as I wanted it to be, and for me a source of some of the allergies. But as my mind grasped what the doctor had told me, the allergies symptoms abated immediately. My mind had made the hell that I was experiencing. I began to relate this experience to the depression and my brain began to unlock, to wake up from the depression. I began to trace my thoughts just as I have been tracing food, and environmental and chemical allergic problems.
The article in the Trumpet quotes David Burns, author of Feeling Good: "Every bad feeling you have is the result of your distorted negative thinking. Illogical, pessimistic attitudes play the central role in the development and continuation of all your symptoms."Dennis Leap in his article states "To recover from depression, people must learn that every depressed feeling has its corresponding distorted or illogical thought. That negative thought came before and created the depressed feeling. If you are depressed, you must isolate, examine and replace all your illogical thinking with thought that is based on true facts. 
This stunned me each time I thought about it. I had been told of this time and again, but until I suffered it blatantly in my experience with the allergies, I did not believe it. Preferring to blame it on outside sources I have wallowed in depression for most of my life. Perhaps I am working toward a real release here.

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