I spent 12 years in the military and another 15 months at a forward operating base in Afghanistan as a civilian. It prompted me to immediately write the following words. Acknowledge the good parts (no matter how small), and establish a genuine reality in which you can share a healthy life with your depression. Your mental health is a huge part of who you are, but it is not the only part. The days during which you are successfully anti-hate/pro-self-like will prove to you that it IS possible to not hate yourself entirely. Hate waxes and wanes as you practice being nice to yourself. You may not be able to shift it off of yourself, but you can shift the level of hate that you feel. The more I say nice things and the more I practice recognizing a nice reality, the more genuine that reality will become. But they are often based in some sort of reality. If I tell myself good and nice things, they feel fake. It is a "fake it 'til you make it" sort of deal. I generally prefer the latter option, because it's not as harmful to my brain or my friends/family. Do I prefer hating myself and the anger/pain that comes with it or liking myself even though I feel that it may be false? I ask myself to choose the lesser of two evils. I absolutely understand the mentality that you wouldn't believe what you tell yourself, making it fake. You can also find Erin Schulthies on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and her blog, Daisies and Bruises: The Art of Living with Depression. So if you want to get better from depression, feel happier, get more meaning in your life, you have to start being nicer to the most important person: YOU. That includes you being mean to yourself. You can't be happy when someone's being mean to you all the time. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, right? I think of my feelings like little kids that I need to take care of. Now I even love myself enough to care about stopping self-injury. Self-loathing thoughts still trouble me every day, but I've begun to recognize them as being wrong. The more I practiced liking myself, the easier it became. I started tolerating myself before I liked myself, and when I liked myself, it was only sometimes. I started reminding myself that everyone makes mistakes and that it's impossible to be perfect. First I started removing words like "should" from my vocabulary. It didn't happen overnight I had to go slowly. Loving Yourself Instead of Hating Yourself Worksįor years I thought, "Yeah, yeah, loving myself is a bunch of cheesy crap."īut do you know what? As soon as I started even being a little bit nicer to myself, I started to get better from my depression. Mental health stigma, especially self-stigma, can really make it easy for us to blame ourselves for being depressed. But as adults suffering from depression, blaming ourselves can be very dangerous. It's the way our brains are built and so it's the only way we comprehend things. So listen to me say it again: It's impossible to hate yourself out of being depressed!Īs children, we grow up thinking that the world revolves around us. I often used these kinds of self-harm to cope with my feelings of depression, but they only made me create more pain and problems for myself. I've suffered from self-injury, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts as long as I've suffered from depression. Sometimes these thoughts of self-hared can spiral into self-harming thoughts and actions. Then we think, "I need to pull myself together!" or "Why can't I handle my life like everyone else does?" Self-Hatred Can Lead to Self-Harm When You're Depressed Often the first thing people think when they realize that depression symptoms are interfering with their life is, "What's wrong with me?!" Not what's wrong with my body, not what's wrong with the world, but what's wrong with me. Hating yourself is no way to accomplish anything, especially when it comes to recovering from depression. It can really stand between you and your recovery. In the long list of recovery tips I could share with you, the most important thing I've learned is that you can't hate yourself out of being depressed. I've learned a lot of things from over a decade of treatment for depression.
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