Mental Health Support Site

By listening to what the experts have to say about the causes of depression, you’ll find a list of factors such as:

• Unemployment or underemployment
• Health problems or chronic pain
• Recent stressful life experiences
• Financial strain
• Alcohol or drug abuse
• Early childhood trauma or abuse
• Family history of depression
• Loneliness
• Marital or relationship problems
• Lack of social support

Too bad they get it all wrong. Many people have dealt with these stress factors without going into depression. The above items can certainly cause hardship and suffering, but that doesn’t mean it turns into depression.

Now sure, there can be contributing factors, such as childhood shame. But that’s not really causing the depression.

I did receive any medical training. I am not a doctor. But I was severely depressed myself. For decades. I finally found a way out, and I can show you exactly how I did it.

But first, let’s look at the real cause of depression.

You’ve got a flow of emotion inside you right now. A flow of raw thought, and raw feeling. (An emotion could be defined as a package of feelings and thoughts mixed together.)

And from the raw thought and feeling energy, we create our actual thoughts that we think and feelings we feel. However – we’ve been taught, practically since birth, that feelings are bad and wrong and you shouldn’t have them. We’re taught it’s okay to think, but not to feel.

Or at least keep the feelings under control. And don’t feel a whole lot. And for goodness sakes, don’t feel your feelings with any kind of intensity.

At first, we simply try to turn off the ‘bad’ feelings – the distressing ones.

“Big boys don’t cry.”

“Good girls don’t get mad.”

However, that’s only the starting point.

You can’t really block out the feelings you don’t want to feel, while letting all the other ones through. That’s because all your feelings come into you through the same pathway. If you crimp a garden hose, it restricts the entire flow. Which is what occurs here.

All we want to do is block the unpleasant feelings, but what happens is we restrict them all.

Emotions give us power. They make us feel alive. When you don’t feel your feelings, you start shutting down. You keep feeling worse, but you don’t know why. You mistakenly believe feelings are creating the pain.

But in actuality, it’s when you don’t feel the feelings that pain starts. It’s painful to not feel your feelings. It takes work, and effort. You have to make up stories about your emotions.

Like invisible structures, these stories block the flow of feeling. And it’s the structures themselves that become the source of emotional pain.

Also, your heart wants to feel your feelings. However, it is being denied. Because of your heart’s longing to feel, when the feelings are blocked off, that will also cause emotional pain.

So where does the depression come in? What causes the actual depression here?

You could define depression as the absence of feelings. Blocking your true feelings from entering your heart will lead you to depression. The problem is, we keep making the problem worse because we think it’s the feelings that make us feel bad. Really, it’s the structures (which become like a pain factory) coupled with the absence of feelings coming into our heart.

The root cause of depression is the shutting down of your feelings – little by little – until we lose touch with the very aliveness the feelings bring. So I suppose you could say that the loss of aliveness actually causes the depression.

Here’s what you want to keep in mind:

Your heart longs to feel! And it’s painful when you don’t let it. So start letting in the feelings. To get all the details, visit this web page on the causes of depression.