Yes, you really are wiser than you think. In this post, I’m going to tell you how you can use that wisdom to both heal and overcome your depression or anxiety (or both if you have both).
But before I do that, I need to explain a little bit about the process of healing and overcoming depression and anxiety. The healing process consists of two main parts. The first is getting understanding, caring, and compassion. It’s an essential part, and it’s a large percentage of the value that good therapists and psychologists provide to their clients.
The second part of the healing process is determining the specific changes you need to make and the steps you need to take to make your life better. Depending on your situation, some of those steps could be saying things you haven’t said to people in your life. They could be finding things to do you enjoy and finding people to do them with. Or they could be improving your skills and getting a job you like, or at least don’t hate.
Your wisdom will play a crucial role as you tackle those two parts of the healing process. You may not believe that you have it, but I assure you that you do. You just need to access it. And a very effective way to do that is to imagine that right now you don’t have any depression or anxiety, but that someone you care a lot about does.
That person can be a child (and you can imagine that he or she is now an adult and that their situation and challenges are similar to yours). Or that person can be a spouse, a partner, or a close friend. He or she can be anyone you care a lot about.
Imagine being with that person. Because of your wisdom of understanding what it is like to live with depression or anxiety, you would know what it’s like for her. Knowing what she was going through, you would feel compassion. And by showing her that understanding and compassion, you would help her (or him) in the first part of the healing process.
It’s often hard for us to see clearly what we need to do for the second part of the healing process, but when it’s someone else we can usually see things they can do to make their lives better. So continue to imagine that you no longer have depression or anxiety, but someone you care a lot about does. And think about steps they could take and things they could do to make their life better. Those could be some of the things I wrote about above, or they could be completely different. Write all your ideas down.
Finally, decide which of the things you wrote down is the best one to do first, and do it. And acknowledge and thank yourself for doing this exercise. You’ve accessed more of your wisdom and you’ve taken a significant step toward healing your depression or anxiety.
