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Depression is supposed to be this genetic disease. Really? What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. What gets pushed down in depression? Your feelings, your emotions. Why would a person push down their feelings? Because they are too painful, they are too much to bear. In other words, the pushing down of feelings becomes a coping mechanism in an environment where you are not allowed to feel because your feelings threaten your attachments. So you learn to survive by pushing down your feelings and then 15 years later or 30 years later you are diagnosed with depression. Now, as a medical, biological problem, they give you a pill.
I'm not here to fight against pharmacology. I've taken anti-depressants and they've helped me. They work sometimes. But they are not the answer. Because the answer is how does that childhood experience manifest in your life today. If you understand all of these historical, cultural, familial stresses imposed certain behaviors on you, certain self-view, certain patterns of emotional relating, now you can do something about it. Now it is not longer "there is something wrong with me", it is just that "this is how I adapted to what happened to me." And therefore I have the capacity now, as a conscious human being, to become aware of all this and to transform myself.
It's not so easy to transform yourself because, of course, these adaptions that I've talked about, originally related to our very survival as young children and so we think we have to be that way. And we don't know any other way of being, except there's something telling us that "this is not right." Something is telling us. So we can see individual problems like depression or ADHD or multiple sclerosis or anything else as problems to get rid of or we can look at them as warning signs that we are out of sync with our true nature, that we are misaligned somehow with actually who we are. And that something in us is trying to wake us up.
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