Dealing with Depression

You may find you go through mild to somewhat heavy episodes of depression during your grieving process. Anyone who leads you to believe you will never feel depressed or blue is simply sugarcoating it.

Tips for keeping depression in check:

— Remember, your emotional ups and downs are to be expected. You may have a feeling of being on a roller coaster. Sometimes you feel like you’re at the peak, other times in the pit. You may find yourself saying, “Stop the world; I want to get off.”

In the beginning, you may feel a zigzag of emotion. Up and down. Up and down. One minute you’re happy, the next minute you’re sad. There may be times when you can’t control those emotions and it gets you very rattled. This is normal and most of us go through this.

As time goes on, instead of our emotions fluctuating in steep peaks and valleys, they start to soften and become like hilly terrain. Now the peaks start to round off at the edges and the minute-by-minute survival has decreased. It now becomes an hour-by-hour, or day-by-day, or week-by-week survival. The edges become softer on the roller coaster ride. Now thoughts of our loved one enter our every waking moment, but later we will think less often of them.

— One of the most healing effects is for you to keep interested in other people and their problems. Now you might think this is absolutely idiotic for me to say, but I’ve found for myself (and heard from many people whom I have counseled one-on-one and in support groups) that when you take the focus off your pain, you are less likely to experience a severe depression. You instead focus on someone else’s problem.

Now this doesn’t mean you have fooled yourself into believing you are fine; rather, it takes the focus off your pain and provides assistance in some form to another.

Well, what does that mean? Perhaps you’ll go the local hospital and help in the children’s ward. Maybe it means doing volunteer clerical work at the church. Or perhaps it’s helping sort clothing at Good Will. Maybe you’ll baby sit occasionally for someone juggling family and career, perhaps once a week or twice a month. What better way to memorialize your loved one than to help another family?

To keep balance, don’t overdo it. If you go to the other extreme, using every free minute to help others, you run the risk of convincing yourself that you are just fine and your grieving is over. If you play that game with your head too soon, you will do a disservice to your mental health. So, slowly introduce yourself to outside projects, while still keeping time for yourself to reflect on your emotional needs.

— Another fantastic way to release pain is through journaling. Buy an enticingly beautiful journal and write down your innermost thoughts. Many times, when you’re going through grief, you’ll have sleepless nights. This is the perfect opportunity to release all those emotions that seem like they will explode within you at some inopportune moment. Maybe some have spilled out already.

The wonderful thing about journaling is you get to dump out all these fears, frustrations, feelings, anger and guilt onto blank sheets of paper, which strangely become your friend and confidante. You can tell your journal anything. All the pain you have bottled up inside can be released through one free-flowing pen. There is nothing more freeing than writing it all down, every inch of the agony, because when it’s now safely on paper, it’s no longer inside of you. And if you do this on a regular basis, a few pages each day, you will feel a sense of peace. You will no longer be carrying around all that pain - you’ve now released it, at least for today.

As you move forward through the grief journey, you will be able to read what you wrote and see how far you’ve come. And that will encourage you to move forward at a more constructive pace. You will see that there is actually progress here. And that’s important.

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