Self-Soothing, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Moment.

A lot of times people say you need to let go. Yesterday I finally understood it. I discovered something that helped me. Hopefully it will help others.

I am not a psychologist, a psychiatrist , or a psychic. But it struck me with a particular pop profundity.

Depression causes me to hold on tightly to negative experiences instead of positive ones.

Experiences are how we build self-identity. What we experience informs who we are. In self-soothing, we are asked to experience, in a positive way, a moment in our day.  We are to focus on the five senses. they say, for ease of remembering, this mnemonic: 5 sights, 4 sounds, 3 touches, 2 smells, 1 taste.

For example:

After my workout, I sat in McDonald's and watched a breeze play over a pink dogwood. The leaves rippled and swayed, I imagined, in an extemporaneous and improvised dance. As I watched, a woman leaned urgently over an envelope in a table to my left. She would carefully write in small letters, then look up at me tersely. Her arms warded off onlookers.
I sipped my ice water. Condensation collected on the outside in spite of the the air conditioning. I lifted the cup to my lips, and I was struck by how heavy and leaden it felt in my hands.My knee pressed into the half-wall near me. I felt grave. I moved my knee away and suddenly felt as if I might fly away. I turned and set it again to the wall.

In therapy we discussed some moments in our past that were pleasant. As we relived them, even the most unhappy of us smiled wistfully. It was then that the thought struck me that for the briefest instant that telling these stories, these details, made us seem like people without depression.  When "normies" talk, they share positive experiences. In sharing them they relive them. Most often they share humorous, happy, and pleasant stories. Let me emphasize: They are routinely connecting with levity.

I hold tightly to negative experiences and ignore positive ones. So my self-identity is made up of a remarkable number of sadness.
 And in pandering to this depression caused me to avoid positive experiences. I often suffered bouts of depression that kept me from engaging in and enjoying positive experiences. Parties, concerts, dinners with friends.

I see it a lot in my father. He will have a bad day if he has a single bad experience in a day. If I attempt to argue that his day went well, he will refuse to acknowledge it.

Depression is described as a black hole. I can't argue. i use positive emotions to try and fill that hole, but can't seem to. And while I won't discount biology (Well, I will for me), I will say that depression has trained me to connect with negativity. I feel intimately tied to it. It's cliche to say, but I wrapped myself in it.I gave unhappy moment s more gravity than they deserve.And I've spent years practicing this.

People without depression seem to have a much easier time letting go of  sadness. They have an easier time finding pleasant experiences that connect them to happiness. they, in fact, have a long history of practicing self-soothing.

Self-soothing is connecting with positive experiences. Pleasant experiences. As trite as it sounds, self-soothing trains people with depression to look on the bright side. Something we often dislike being told to do.

This module has convinced me further that dialectical behavioral therapy simply trains you to think and act like a normal person.