One of the first obvious things to discuss around depression is unpleasant feelings. Difficult emotions. And if you look, its easy to find that we all operate from a box around our emotions. A very simple, obvious box.

What are some emotions you like having? The usual list is Love

pleasure

Happiness

Exuberance

Excitement

Inspiration

amusement

These types of emotions we call "good feelings." We want to feel them as much as we can. Just so, there are many emotions we don't want to have or feel at all. See if some of these negative feelings would be on your list:

Sadness

Anger

Fear

loneliness

loneliness

Anxiety

Meaninglessness

humiliation

These are what we call bad emotions and we try to avoid them as much as possible. If we cant avoid them, and cant help but feel them, we try to get rid of them as quickly as we can.

Now you are ready to understand the box we operate from about our emotions. The box is that there are "bad" emotions and "good" ones. Kinda obvious, right? All of us just "know" that when it comes to emotions there are bad ones and good ones. Further, we know that part of the point in life is to feel good ones and avoid bad ones. This goes unexamined in our lives because it is so obvious and plain. Of course the way to deal with emotions is to feel good ones and avoid bad ones!

Given that, all of the emotions that go with depression we characterize as "bad" emotions, and we just "know" that our job is to try to avoid or get rid of these feelings at all costs. So you could say that we're stuck in a box about depression, which is that depression - and all the feelings that go with it - are bad. And we should resist all the feelings that go with this condition.

However, there is a large issue to this approach to depression. It starts with a very common mistake we make emotionally every day. This error has to do with resisting or trying not to feel bad emotions.

Consider the idea that we all, each of us, have an emotional body, just like we have a physical body and a mental body. And your emotional body has a purpose and function, which is to simply feel feelings. All of them. Good emotions like joy and happiness, and "bad" ones like fear and anger. Its job is to feel feelings. You can't actually keep your emotional body from feeling feelings.

Notice that your emotional body is a lot like the organ of your skin. You can't stop your skin from feeling soft or rough sensations, cool or warm. Our skin feels whatever it comes in contact with. In exactly that way our emotional body feels all emotions. You can't just feel only the good feelings. When you try to suppress bad ones, you only cause your feelings to get stuck. Then these bad feelings tend to stick around much longer, because they are "stuck." So trying not to feel the difficult emotions that go with depression is actually a way to keep the depression around, keep it from passing through!

So for help with depression, you need to get outside the box of resisting and avoiding all difficult emotions. One approach to doing this is to learn some basic emotional intelligence so that you can process difficult feelings more efficiently and quickly so that they don't get "stuck." No room here for all the details, but just 5 minutes a day of exploring a difficult emotion rather than resisting it can provide surprising depression help.