“It is very difficult to focus if I feel depressed.”
Marianna writes:
“It is very difficult to Focus if I feel depressed. I try to Focus with this feeling, but it seems to be even stronger, this bad feeling. You wrote that positive thinking will not work, if we ignore actual feelings. My life theme is depression. I feel often depressed, and I think it is because of this that I cannot do Focusing. What am I missing?”
Dear Marianna,
Thank you for sharing your question. It sounds difficult, what you’re going through, and I feel for you. At the same time, your dilemma speaks to the heart of what I would like to say about how this work is different.
Most of us learned only two ways to be with feelings. We feel them, or we ignore them. If they are bad feelings, ignoring them feels better…but the bad feelings build up, they burst through, and that feels worse. Should we feel or not feel? Either choice has problems.
But there is a third way. Not to feel bad, nor to ignore feeling bad, but to be with the bad feeling. To be with something in me that feels bad, keeping it company.
Now that is really different!
But how do I do it? How can I be with my bad feeling without feeling bad myself?
The answer is simple, but not so easy to do. You need to be Self-in-Presence, your larger Self, larger than the feeling, so you can feel it AND know there is more to you. And it also helps to feel very specifically how it feels in your body right now.
Here is an analogy that may help. Imagine that I ask you to close your eyes, and I hand you a rock. Your task is to feel the rock, sense it exactly: how heavy it is, how smooth, if there is a pointed side, and so on. You are feeling the rock…but YOU are not the rock.
In the same way, you can feel the place in you that is depressed, and yet YOU are not depressed. When you find it in your body, the depressed feeling, let go of the word “depressed.” No labels, no words for a while. Just sense it, as you might hold in your hand the rock. Sensing how it feels right now, how you would describe it right now. Maybe it’s heavy, like a heavy pressure. Now just be with that.
Just be with what is there
If it’s hard to just be with the feeling there — “heavy pressure” — you could acknowledge something in you that finds it hard. You might find, for example, “It scares me.”
“Ah, so it’s hard to just be with the heavy pressure because it scares you…something in you feels scared. Maybe you can be with something in you feeling scared. Now you have both —the heavy pressure and something in you feeling scared. YOU are bigger, you are the space that can hold them both.”
This bigger “you” is what we call being Self-in-Presence. Self-in-Presence is something to cultivate; it grows easier and stronger over time.
“Depression” is not simple. It’s a whole tangle of feelings, reactions, frozen places, and protections and it’s different for every person. You might find yourself needing to say Hello to something in you feeling discouraged, something in you feeling doubtful, something in you feeling tired of it all. You might find that this so much easier if you don’t have to go through it alone, and having a Focusing partner or professional Guide or Focusing-oriented therapist would be a gift to yourself.
But the first gift to yourself is to sense into your body until you can say “something in me feels…” and then describe that, using fresh, immediate language. This is a huge step. You might find that even feeling bad can feel, in an odd way, good.