If you're telling yourself that you might be falling for a bit of a sneaky misconception about your problems. Take it from me, there's a big difference between realistically accepting a mental health problem and making it into your whole identity and wallowing in it.
There's also a big difference between mental health denial / "get over it already" and making steps to finally stop it from totally dominating your life in the future.
Depression is like a separate animal inside you with its own drives for survival and reproduction. You don't turn your back on it, but you don't let it devour you and steal your name and face either.
If it can manage to, it would love to take control of you and make you believe that there is literally nothing that can help and you're utterly powerless to change anything, and that anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is just one of those people who doesn't understand and thinks you can just cheer yourself up out of depression by smiling and going outside or whatever. That's a false dichotomy.
Not fully. The point (I think) is not letting oneself be consumed by a problem & constantly identifying to be about it. There are way more things to define you.
There's a huge difference between saying "I have severe depression, and it takes great effort for me to get through a day without buckling" and saying "I have severe depression, so my daily mental breakdowns aren't my fault".
True, but I think they were alluding to the difference in outlook that suggests who takes responsibility for the downsides. One way is using it as an excuse to dismiss others concerns and the other way is having empathy toward how your situatiom affects others and acknowledging their side of the same challenge.
The author doesn't say that she doesn't like people who give themselves a negative identity, but rather that it's a habit which makes them miserable, which is plausible.
She also doesn't say that any of the habits can be casually broken, if only they are recognized.
not necessarily - he could just be invoking the "do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity" rule
It's not always so easy to tell apart the things you have control over vs. the things you don't, but I think that all these rules can be summarized in one line, which is basically: If you're feeling sorry for yourself, you'd better find something more productive to do.
> It's not always so easy to tell apart the things you have control over vs. the things you don't, but I think that all these rules can be summarized in one line, which is basically: If you're feeling sorry for yourself, you'd better find something more productive to do.
I wholly agree with this. There's something deeply insightful, subtle and difficult about recognizing one's own control in a situation. I've thought about this a lot in the last year. The way I phrase it right now is: people don't have a choice until they realize they have one.
