When you read the experts, you’ll find a list of the causes of depression that usually include:
- Alcohol or drug abuse
- Health problems or chronic pain
- Recent stressful life experiences
- Unemployment or underemployment
- Family history of depression
- Early childhood trauma or abuse
- Marital or relationship problems
- Loneliness
- Lack of social support
- Financial strain
Unfortunately, they’re all wrong. It’s common for people to go through many of the items on this list without getting depressed. The items above may make for a harder life experience, but they don’t cause depression.
Of course there can be contributing factors to depression, such as childhood abuse. By themselves, though, they don’t really cause the depressed state to occur.
I am not a doctor. But I did go through severe depression. For decades. I ended it completely, and I’ll show you how to end it completely, too.
Before I do, let’s look at what really causes depression.
You’ve got a flow of emotion. A flow of raw thought, and raw feeling. (An emotion, by the way, is simply a package of feelings and thoughts.)
Out of this raw energy come our thoughts we think and feelings we feel. But we’ve been taught almost from birth that our feelings have no value and we shouldn’t even have them. So while it’s okay to think, there’s no need to feel.
Or at least keep the feelings under control. And don’t feel a whole lot. And for goodness sakes, don’t feel your feelings with any kind of intensity.
Originally, we simply try to shut down the ‘bad’ feelings – the objectionable ones.
“Good girls don’t get mad.”
“Big boys don’t cry.”
But that’s just the beginning.
The problem is, you can’t really shut out certain feelings while letting other ones through. Because all feelings travel on the same pathway. If you crimp a garden hose, it restricts the entire flow. And that’s what happens here.
We want to not feel certain emotions, but instead we’re restricting all of them.
Emotions give you power. They are the very source of our aliveness. When you don’t feel your feelings, you start shutting down. But you don’t know why you keep feeling worse. You mistakenly believe feelings are creating the pain.
In reality, it’s not feeling the feelings that cause the pain. Not feeling your feelings is painful. It takes effort and work on your part. You’ve got to come up with all sorts of stories about your feelings.
The stories are like little structures that impede or block the flow of feelings. And the structures become the very source of emotional pain in our lives.
Also, your heart wants to feel your feelings. And its being denied. When your heart longs for feelings, and you wall off your heart so the feelings can’t get in, that is a guaranteed recipe for emotional pain.
So how does this cause depression?
You could define depression as the absence of feelings. Blocking your true feelings from entering your heart will lead you to depression. But the problem is we keep making the situation worse by thinking our feelings are what’s causing us to feel bad. But in reality it’s the structures that block our feelings which become like little pain factories. Plus, it’s the absence of feelings in our heart.
The cause of depression comes from blocking your true feelings – step by step – until we lose the aliveness that feelings give you. So I suppose you could say that the loss of aliveness actually causes our depression.
Here’s what you want to keep in mind:
Your heart longs to feel! It’s painful to not feel. So start letting in the feelings. And for more details, just go to this page on the causes of depression.