I was down in the dumps the last few days, and last night it broke. The first sign of coming up from the pit is crying. The next is the step of telling yourself to "stop it" (meaning to stop bashing yourself or pitying yourself, or making some little thing into a drama).

After that you think of one little thing that might be the first step in correcting what ever it is your upset about (in my case it was erase all recorded contact information I have for 3 ex boy friends of mine so I can stop stirring up old feelings that I don't plan to reconcile, so all of us can go on with our lives).

And I got a bonus step back out of the pit that is the most therapuetic of all. You sit down with a friend who is depressed, and you pep them up and take your own advice...especially when they try to feel no one understands you get to remind them that you spent the last few days in your own personal parallel hell.

You give them the formula for getting out of it. The last step I told her were different than the one I prescribed for myself...but for her, I prescribed to get a note book, tell the person that one of her many issues on a long list of issues exactly what she told Me, and start the first entry of that journal about it (how you wanted it to go, what you wished you had said, what made you hold it back, how can you make a second call to get out what you couldn't say before, how you feel it turned out, and what you think is the next step in getting what you need to happen out of your relationship with that person).

When you are depressed every little thing is a problem so this one was the one that was most easily approached, pick one and one that isn't so deep rooted that it needs some inconcievable first step. Take on what you can, getting one thing of the list, or just bringing yourself closer to fixing one thing will automatically lighten the depression episode.

Then you keep that journal and try to write in it everyday, write as long as you can, because the longer you write the less of your ego and more of your subconcious appears in the writing. Go back every month or so and read what you wrote, call bullshit where you were fooling yourself, look for where your subconcious has answered your own questions about what to do in another issue you have.

Another thing to remember is loving yourself is different that thinking you are wonderful in everyway, you can still know where your short comings are and be brutally honest about them, (or how else how could you set to improve them if you aren't honest about them existing, and have a realistic view on how it effects your life, so you can decide if it is a priority on your list of self improvement).
Start to learn that selflove is seeking to understand yourself for better or worse, and understanding where some new problem was made by it some how triggering you to feel like you do when you relive some of the things in your past that made such issues (re-reading journaling helps do this).

Another ridiculous thing I can't stress enough to people is that it isn't week to expose your imperfections, or your issues, or your negative feelings about yourself...infact leaving yourself so exposed, risking that that person could make your feel worse or use these most intimate insecurities against you later is just about the most strong and courageous thing one can do. Anybody that uses these confessions against you is someone usually who isn't as strong as you, they resent that you are aren't so insecure that you hide behind some image of false strength, false confidence, false selfworth.

Every person has these feelings. Some people maybe in a different stage of emotion that they have a guard up protecting them from being in that slump with you out of turn. Some may not experience it as often or as intensely as other people. Some actually work on it, and some of those continue to work on it even when they are feeling better and it isn't in their thoughts, where others just work on it long enough to feel like they don't need to and they just have that same issue build back up and surface in the next low point of the cycle as just as bad as it was before, and then you have to work on it from the very begining again. Some people don't do anything to remedy the problem, not even halfway, and those people keep perpetuating the depression and issues sometimes to the point of physical illness or suicide. Many self medicate when it works, and get even more depressed when self medication doesn't work sometimes...sometimes they self medicate in bindges, others continuously medicate until they are addicted and need more and more to just feel kind of okay and never feel good anymore.

Mood Disorders are diseases, just as serious, cripling and fatal as cancer, but it's so easy to not remember that. The consequences of not remembering is is that you can often treat the person suffering in a way that adds just another scar for their next bout. It can really damage relationships when you don't see that this person is legitimately ill and at the phase their in you have to let anything upsetting or offensive they say wash over you because they are going to attack just about anything with the same negativity they feel about themself. You have to keep being a bit tough with them reminding them of their responsibility to address these issues with the people that are involved in them, or with people who have the power to help...usually this talk is all the person they confide in is capable of doing because you almost never confide in people that you have issues with, and if you do it in the first stages of a depression cycle you are going to say things that may worsen the situation.

Even though I believe in Euthanasia and that depression is just as valid a terminal illness as any other most suicides are people that don't work on it...even prescribed medicatons just do some masking quick fix, some making you more depressed, their side effects and withdrawl sometimes are worse than illegal forms of self medications. If you actually work on the issues that the brain chemistry attacks, and don't stop working on them even though you feel better, your brain chemistry will still cycle but with less for it to feed on the episodes become shorter and more managable with each one after that.

Being sweet, and not somewhat harshly real with someone who is confiding in you about this shit just enables them to not identify where they can get fix things. It usually does no good because the depressed mind believes what it wants if said lightly, delicately avoiding to address something that needs to be address as blunt as possible.

I have had so many therapist that did absolutely no good because they didn't have the balls to literally callout "Bullshit" when they knew that the patient didn't wholely believe their own moaning, and especially when the therapist can produce evidence to the contrary. If they called Me out on it their lack of emphasis allowed me drown them out in my own depressive confessions.

Another amasingly ridiculous thing is being told how embarassed she was for dumping all that on Me, and how she wished she hadn't... EMBARASSED! I respect her far more for opening up and being strong enough to let down the facade to show a real whole and complete person. One of us has to do it first, trust the other with such sensitive subjects so the other one feels that they can trust them with something that makes them feel foolish, insecure, weak or like an awful person. Slowly overtime the partygirl image and smalltalk/trivial conversations would have me slowly lessen in my respect for her, just on the grounds that it would make her appear to really be lack depth. Pain makes people interesting. Pain is at the root of most truely moving art. Most artist that have such impact on people earned respect as artist by exposing their pain, how many people who make Hallmark cards get that from their work.
I have nothing but respect for someone who does that.

When I gave her such a blunt but not insensitive, judgemental, or humiliating lecture it came from what I have been going through, and hopefully it did her as much good as it did me. I think that should be the last step everytime I am on the ascension phase out of My pit...ITake the lecture someone needs to give Me, and give it to someone who is just begining their phase so both of us can hear it.

Much of my lectures My mother gave me them but didn't know how to do it in a way that worked, hers were attacks, she wasn't being bluntly honest she was being hateful. Therapists pretended to have some interest or concern, but the truth was they were so detatched under the act that they didn't care enough to be a little really notice that things would go in one ear and out the other. Some therapists allowed their personal issues with My spirituality, My sexuality, My lifestyle and My profession to have already to blame everything on these personal choices because in their mind or religeon these things I represent are believed to be shallow, dysfunktional, and lack intimacy of what they think is a normal life.

Even writing this for all to see is another little bit further out of the pit of this week.
I hope it is read by someone else that could use the same lecture I needed, but ended up having to give myself through friends. And hopefully every judgemental fucker out there that treats people with any mood disorder like shit, uses it against them, or doesn't acknowledge that they are serious diseases made worse by people like them , I hope you smug little assholes start see the light...it makes coping with people with these disorders more barable if you even partially understand instead of attack.



Mistress Genevieve
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