Hi Stu,
I can relate to virtually everything you have written above. I battled 20 years with depression.
I’m not a counsellor, so I hesitate to write this, not wanting to make things worse, but the thing that helped me was of course the mindfulness based cognitive therapy course. However the biggest breakthrough for me was when I realised with the help of the course leader, that my mind was talking complete bollocks 99% of the time.
When you think about it, minds really are monstrous things. Compulsive thinking, ie the inability to stop the constant mental chatter is a terrible affliction. Minds can be like that loudmouthed guest at a party, demanding to be heard whether everyone else likes it or not. You can’t shut minds up. They can be a good tool, but in the wrong circumstances, minds prevent clarity and focus and sow confusion and chaos. Your own mind is probably doing just that right now, which is causing you to suffer.
Notice I said ‘your mind’ I did not say ‘you’ and that is an important distinction. There is ‘you’ and there is the ‘thinker’ and at the moment, the thinker is pulling your strings.
An important way to start mindfulness is to silently watch the thinker in operation and learn its thought patterns. You can’t stop it thinking, but you can watch and be curious about what it gets up to. Think about a timeline, draw one.
At the left hand end write ‘past’ and at the right hand end write ‘future’ and in the middle, write ‘present’
Notice where your mind is right now and you will find that 99.999% of the time it is either at the ‘past’ end or the ‘future’ end of the line. The past end of the line represents exactly what it says, your mind is in the past. At this end can be found, anger, regret, frustration, indignation, feeling hard done by, grief about what has happened to you etc.
If the mind is at the ‘future end of the line it will be feeling anxiety, fear, worry, it’ll be planning, coming up with problems, there may be an urge to procrastinate.
Neither end of the line is healthy. The place where you want to be is in the middle, ie in the present. In the present there are no problems, no worries, no regret no fear, only now, but to the mind, being in this region of the line is not what it wants. It will do anything to be at one or other end rather than in the middle, so we have a problem.
As I said, if you could start by trying to watch the thinker, it will begin to help you to understand what is happening and knowledge is power in this situation.
As a fun activity, try saying to yourself, ‘I wonder what my next thought is going to be,’ What happens is quite interesting.
You might like to have a look at this link.
https://www.oxfordmindfulness.org/learn ... tic-world/
The courses are based on ‘Mindfulness Finding Peace In A Frantic World,’ which in itself is a great book. It was recommended by my course leader at the time.