Our modern world seldom allows emotions to be expressed in an uninhibited voice. If we continue being disallowed to express our true emotions the feelings become de-pressed into the subconsciousness and manifest outward as a state of dissonance.

If a person becomes depressed doctors attempt to treat the depression - like a rash. Instead of facilitating the exploration and release of the suppressed emotion a person who is depressed is often regarded as someone who is sick.

The main problem that comes up when emotions are blocked is that our own responses and feelings get labelled as inappropriate or wrong. Often this causes a person to shift their perspective from expressing their true feelings to feeling broken and needing someone to fix them. It is no wonder that there are few stories about people who have fixed depression, but there are a lot of stories about people who have understood the emotions being suppressed and in dealing with them have overcome their depressed state.

Depression and Suicide

Once again more serious depression is often approached from the perspective that it can be treated or fixed. Have you ever heard of a child being depressed and suicidal? It is our emotions that harden to cause us to confuse ourselves with our internal states. Of course on this basis a person concludes that in ending their own life their emotions will stop haunting them too - but it is the other way around.

Emotions

If the feeling of suicide is perceived as an ending of one phase of life and the beginning of a new phase of life then it can be understood as an internalized process. As we move through life various parts of ourselves die, to be reborn as something greater. However, often we have this stigma that death and the end of one phase of life is bad and something to be avoided. Resulting from this people develop mechanisms like depression to avoid being pushed into the next phase of their emotional and spiritual development.

Our emotions wrap themselves around us, but sometimes we also wrap ourselves around these emotions. It can become difficult to let go when the time comes and due to the lack of emotion-based skills taught in our world we often resort to dealing with them poorly - by suppressing, ignoring, or projecting them onto others.

Be The Moment

How can a person assert so surely that there is no method to deal with their depression when he or she takes a look at their life how it was 5 or 10 years ago? This constant changing that we undergo should suggest that our problems are almost all non-permanent. Yet one of our problems as human beings is perceiving things as absolute, black and white truths. If things are bad now, this must mean things will be like this forever, we often generalize.

Each element of yourself is a part that is under your control whether it is fragmented or integrated. Your thoughts, feelings, and inner states, all belong to you. During childhood a lot of the parts of ourselves are together - not fragmented. This causes our lives to flow in a much more natural process from moment to moment and from phase to phase of development.

However when we encounter lost parts of ourselves and lost emotions sometimes these come back as hostile energies wanting to re-integrate with our whole being. Most people tend to ignore this process as being real and perceive the fragments as threats, rejecting them, fearing them, and medicating to escape them.

Reacting

Rather than giving our unconditional love to all the elements of ourselves to allow them to die and be reborn as something new, we hold on to these things, calling them demons, bad sides, and negative parts of ourselves. This process of reacting rather than accepting our emotional states causes an infinite dissonance that no amount of medicine can cure. The process of self-acceptance is what makes the fragmented parts of ourselves re-join us in a natural process of spiritual growth.

From the Spiritual Blogosphere

There are two great articles relating to what I have written here, one posted last week at UrbanMonk titled How Our Cravings and Attachments Cause Our Pain And Suffering and How Does Awakening Relate to Bipolar Disorder? from Tom Stine.