never feel as though you are alone in the pit of depression

I am writing this for those of you who feel as though there is no one who cares.  No one who understands the loneliness.  No one who understands what it feels like to feel like your drowning in your own self-pity, low self-esteem.  Well, yes there is.  Yes, there are.   I was one of those people and for years I struggled with hating life, those around me, myself.   As a child I began to make my life go down a road that eventually was my own self destruction.  I spent my childhood making everyone else pay for what I thought was a horrible childhood and as I grew into a teenager that way of thinking caused me to become a depressed, self-mutilating, suicidal, manipulating young adult.   I thought no one cared about me when in all reality it was me who hated me.  I hated who I was.  I blamed everyone else for my way of thinking.  I had no one to show me that I was truly a beautiful person waiting to get out.  

I had pain of emotions because I had spent a whole life trying to get my dad to love me that I forgot to love myself.  When I got upset I cut myself for years.  I would do it just to be the one who had control of the amount of pain I received.  Do I want pity for these actions?  NO.   I have already been washed of this way of thinking and I feel millions times better now.   The point is, I wanted to be in control for once.  All that fighting for attention, never being the favorite, being selfish.   I eventually go put in an institution. Not once but twice.  Do you know that it only made me worse?   I learned new ways to inflict harm in secret and how to kill myself without anyone suspecting.    All the while thinking it was best for everyone else if I just died.

I spent a while looking for affection with all guys trying to cover up the loneliness I felt because I thought my dad didn’t care if I was in his home or not.   I was even a heavy drinker because when I drank I was fun.   I thought that was who people wanted me to be.  Psychologists tried to diagnose me with this or that, no one really tried to help.  They couldn’t.   None of them truly cared about who they were either.  Pills were the answer for everything.   A lot of my behaviors carried into my adulthood and caused rifts in my marriage and affecting my parenting.   I see a lot of my old behaviors in my children.  Not the self-mutilation but the ways of thinking.   Those were things I did not want my children to live with.  

Now to the point where the healing begins.   Several years ago I had a therapist who was of a Christian raising and she looked me dead in the eyes and told me, “I will not give you medication and I will not lock you away.  You do not have a disorder you have a product of your raising.”  Do you know that in all my years of therapy and pills that I never once had someone tell me that?  This woman was crazy as far as I was concerned but at the same time I was so happy there were no more pills involved and it wasn’t something I was born with.   The words of my father rang through my head, “you are crazy just like your mother.  You’re going to end up psychotic like her. “Thing is, my mother is none of that either.   She had a very rough childhood that most would never be able to comprehend.  If anyone has the right to be nuts, it would be her.   She was actually the only one that really ever understood me when I was a kid but I never knew then.   But that is something else altogether.

I finally found that it was in my head the whole time.  It was the devil and his lies that had me thinking this and I was hurting everyone else around me.  I found myself after a lifetime of this.   Well you can tear a house down in a day but it takes a long time to build one right.   I still have my days where the evil tries to rear its ugly head but now I have weapons.   I know in my heart that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of me as long as I remember that God loves me because he made me.  I am at peace with my life now.  I do not look back and hate.  I look back and learn.  My children know my past.  I do not hide it from them or anyone.  It’s an open book I hope that others can use to learn from.   I am also learning that by having control issues I crutch those who are trying to help.   Is it hard?  Oh yes, definitely.  Can I make it?  Oh yes, definitely. With God’s help and a new way of thinking, over the last 5 years I have become secure in who I am as a person, wife, mother, and friend.  I use my past to help others now.  And I am going to school as well to help even more.   There is nothing you can’t do if you remember that there is “no weapon forged against us that can prosper” and “we can do all things through the strength of Christ”   please, if you ever feel as though rock bottom is the last line of life, then please seek someone who can help heal.  Always remember though, selfish thinking is the tool of the evil.   No one can erase your past or heal for you.   That is something that we have to accept.   But there are people who know what it’s like to live that way.  We are not problem people who need medication to erase, we need to be taught how to heal from within and move forward.