A reader last week responded to my blog "Be Your Own Coach" with a reference to Cognitive Therapy - an approach to addressing negative ways of thinking that are often implicated in certain forms of depression. This prompted me to look up the term and I followed a number of threads that I found quite useful.
The reader had also reminded me of lessons I learned some years ago while sailing alone in the ocean, when the only therapist aboard is oneself.
I did not know at the time of that journey that I was suffering anything clinically called depression, which I would discover later in life. Depression can have many root causes, both genetic and experiential, and often reflects a dilemma that one cannot solve. One such dilemma might have contributed to mine, about which I then knew very little. No one had ever told me that melancholy, or deeper, darker states of feeling are not man's natural way of being.
What I did know was that a strange and uncomfortable sense of emotional distress could creep into the cabin with me. Call it a dull whine, a high or low frequency background noise, a trembling in the system that might be associated with nails on a blackboard, or strange footsteps. Something creepy, but more deeply rooted. A slipping downhill with an uncertain endpoint, not good.
Part of sailing alone is knowing that there is no one around to help, so the experience teaches you to be your own best friend, even if that has not been your habit. (I had learned by then that mechanical self-steering devices for single-handed sailors, on which they rely heavily, are often named after their mothers. Need we wonder why?)
I discovered quickly in the ocean alone that the background noise or whatever it was could deepen to a point where I would not feel like doing much of anything, even those things required to keep the boat balanced and steady under existing sea conditions. And it did not take long to learn that this was a bad situation to develop, and I could not afford to let it happen.
I found I could intervene in that sense of slipping downhill. It was actually as simple as taking action - early - to do something to make me feel better. Make a cup of hot chocolate and drink it slowly. Concentrate on the pleasure and comfort it brings. Read a chapter in Patrick O'Brien's sea novels. Revel in that world. Play a favored aria from La Boheme loudly on my little boom box. Sing along. Possibly take a nap - but be careful not to take the system down when something needs attention, or was about to.
All this came back with the reader's note last week and served as a healthy reminder:
If that bad feeling is coming on, take care of yourself in simple ways that you know will work. You are the first one to get the warning, and the one who will benefit the most.
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