Hi frankie2024
My heart goes out to you as you work so hard to make it through this period in depression. Wondering if your therapist mentioned what the cycle can look and feel like. I've found knowing how this cycle works for me doesn't necessarily make it easy to get through but it at least mean becoming familiar with the kinds of things that can take me into it, through it and out of it. I've found it becomes about learning what produces the down shifts and up shifts and the cyclic nature. Like yourself, I find I try to analyse the hell out of it all, so as to return to some resemblance of heaven on earth.
Not sure if you can relate but just say the cycle's starting point is where everything appears to be fine. Life can be good or even great. Then, as some trigger or set of triggers come into play, I can feel myself having moved out of what feels good or great. Btw, it's typically only in hindsight that I can make sense of what those triggers are. As I feel myself shift further out of 'good' or 'great', I start to feel myself in a depression. While going through an incredibly sad time, I'll try and make sense of it all, so as to stop the heartbreak and soul destroying feeling. I'll tend to become more isolated during this time of going inward, unless I have someone analysing things with me (helping me make sense of things). As some revelations can become angering, I can become angry with myself and/or others. Then, all of a sudden, some major revelation can hit that helps me make sense of the whole thing and I'm back at the start of the cycle, having risen to a high through the revelation, through having evolved to a greater level of understanding. So, the whole thing is not about cycling 'round and 'round, it's about cycling up into greater consciousness. It's a seriously tough way to evolve, that's for sure.
If you can relate to the cycle maybe being a little like this, I wonder whether you've also found that when you come back into the high part, you've brought some new aspect of yourself to life or maybe an old one that you'd missed so much. For example, if the major revelation is about fulfilling the need to no longer tolerate certain people's depressing behaviour, the intolerant boundary setter in us may come to life, as opposed to the people pleaser in us continuing to let people overstep boundaries when it comes to the questionable ways in which they may treat us. Or if the major revelation is about some part of us that we used to love and thrive through, it could involve breathing new life into it, bringing it back to life. A bit of soulful CPR. I have a vision of a defibrillator and a charge being sent to some part in us that appears to have died. Putting it back in charge (energising it) while channeling a significant amount of energy into it is the complete opposite of letting it slowly die off. Whether it relates to a part of us that is highly imaginative or a part that represents the adventurer in us or even a facet of us that is jam packed with an inspiring sense of wonder (our wonderful nature), when they come back to life, you feel them.
