Depression
Depression is a negative state that affects thoughts, feelings, motivation, and behavior. From a body communication perspective, it's caused by nodes expressing strong needs long term. The nodes end up taking more drastic actions to stop your current behaviors, to make their directed behaviors more likely. Symptoms worsen as their actions escalate and the number of nodes with non-conflicting, need-based complaints builds up. The solution involves getting ahead of the problem and staying ahead of it.
Current Literature
 | Warning If you or someone you know feels like harming themselves, please find help immediately. Many countries have crisis help lines to help people in need through these terrible situations. If someone you know feels like harming themselves, know that talking about it with them will not make suicide more likely. You can be there for them. You can get them help. There is always a way.
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| Warning The following content is from my observations related to body communication. None of it has been tested in a lab setting yet. This is not medical advice. |
Observations
Background
I used to deal with severe depression. It would interfere with my work. I didn’t want to eat or drink. I would, instead, focus on computer games or the internet to distract myself. I was very lonely. I moved around a lot as a child, resulting in never really having a social group. All of my social connections were temporary social straight lines, not social circles. As I got older, I tended to have a lot of long distance relationships. This seemed to help my loneliness issue sometimes, in the short term, but exacerbate it in the long term. I wasn’t getting the social connection that I needed. I didn’t know how needs functioned, but the problem was getting worse and I could feel it. I hated it. I hated everything about feeling lonely and depressed all of the time. I burnt out of programming. I couldn’t be motivated.
Fixing the Body
After I discovered body communication, I eventually started using it enough to take care of all my major bodily needs. The ignoring of those bodily needs turned out to be the real source of my depression. When those needs were well taken care of, depression became far less frequent. I was getting enough water, eating exactly what my body wanted me to eat, I was sleeping very well at the same time every night, and my body was encouraging me to work out. I had even found solutions for my social issues. All of that was great, and it solved the greatest part of my depression and loneliness: the bodily needs that were causing them. There was, however, another aspect to my depression.
Fixing the Mind
I still dealt with my depression sometimes, but it was different. It wasn’t triggered by bodily needs anymore. Instead, it was triggered by thought patterns and learned behaviors. I had spent so much time depressed that one of my modes of behavior was depression. I didn’t fix this problem. I didn’t even recognize it as a problem to be fixed. Instead, my body took action to fix it for me.
One morning, I noticed that I couldn’t access my memories of my feelings of depression. My memories of those time periods were weirdly lacking in sensations. I could remember events, but nothing about the feelings. Additionally, the depressive behavior patterns were also blocked. I recognized the block. These were aversion walling it off from me. The same thing that makes you not want a particular food after you eat it too many times in a row, that aversion is what was blocking me from accessing these parts of who I was. I was freaked out. I was unsettled. I didn’t know what to think about it. I knew how these aversions worked. They last over a month. They get stronger when you push against them. They fade over time, but by the time they are faded, the thing that they were blocking tends to be forgotten, at least for me. Basically, this was part of myself being permanently deleted, without my consent. It was incredibly unsettling. It was a terrible part of my life being removed, but it was part of my life. I feared that I wouldn’t be able to empathize with others that were going through depression. That had been a big part of my life. I had always been the person others went to when they were going through something. Now, how could I stand in their shoes if I couldn’t even remember what those shoes felt like? Logically, I knew this change would be good for me. That first day, though, I was upset.
Since then, I couldn’t be happier being completely rid of that part of my life. No depression, no suicidal feelings. All of it gone, permanently, with no risk of a relapse. I’ve been depression and loneliness-free for six years now. It doesn't matter if I’m in a relationship or not. It doesn't matter if I have much of a social support system or not. I feel great without that burden, and I love it.
