What went wrong?

I am going to disappoint you from the beginning: I do not know what went wrong in my case. I do not know what caused my depression. I do not even feel like I need to know whether it was because of something that had happened in the past or because of somebody. I am simply comfortable to say that nothing in particular caused my poor mental health symptoms. And that is because, after I started online therapy, I understood that my feelings were simply a reflection of my thoughts, which most of the time were far from being realistic.

I guess it is easy to blame something or someone, but I am not sure if it’s the most intelligent thing to do. Looking back, I realise that I was constantly expecting to be happy while I was feeding myself with negative thoughts. I eventually learned how to analyse thoughts, decide whether they were realistic or false and change them when it was the case. There is a difference between: “Tomorrow is going to be a great day” and “Tomorrow is going to be a bad day”. If you focus for a minute on what could go wrong tomorrow you might already experience negative emotions. While going through an extensive period of poor mental health your mind automatically chooses the negative thoughts; hundreds, maybe thousands a day. It’s true that it’s hard to analyze and change every single thought, in fact it’s impossible. But at least by tackling some of them, you leave room for those that you cannot or do not have time to control.

Yes, everything does seem to be simple right now, even for me when I write this. But trust me, without professional support, I wouldn’t have accepted that there is a solution, I wouldn’t have had patience to consider a way out that starts from me and most probably I would still be waiting for something to happen and change my “mood”.

There was nobody’s fault for what I went through and there was no one else other than my therapist, who was able to change me. Stop waiting for that change to come to you and make you feel better, be the change that you need. At least try!