Latest Online Counseling
Latest Online Counseling
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The Counseling SituationI am trying to get help with my depressive state and dealing with issues from my past, that I haven't faced. I feel real lonely, I am 20 years old and I am a religious person, at times I feel like I shouldn't feel this way since I believe in God. There are times when my friends may make a statement and I get depressed the rest of the day. When people say something negative towards me I take it to heart and feel like I am really no good and worthless. I wonder why it seems like all my life I've been rejected, my mom gave me up, my dad tried to hurt me. I was sexually abused, and try to push those feelings deep within me so I wouldn't have to face it again. I have been passed on to different family members never feeling love, they never showed affection. I have been in bad relationships, just wanting to be loved, but I end up getting hurt and I don't understand why I get hurt all the time. I ask myself what's wrong with me if I can't find someone to love me. I trust no man, I've been lied to and hurt so many times, I just don't believe their words. I keep on messing with the same guy even though he's hurt me so many times. Is it because I feel I can't get any better or sometimes I say to myself, maybe that's what I should settle for. It all gets so depressing, any happy moments I have are rare, and I hide my feelings most of the time. Just knowing that my mom and dad aren't there for me, hurts so much. I really feel alone. I feel ugly a lot even though people say I'm a beautiful person. I want to learn how to love myself. Once we received the counseling situation, we needed to get more information to create the most helpful counseling response. 1.
What do you enjoy doing? What brings you small moments
of happiness?
I enjoy reading, dancing,
going out with friends and listening to music, the things that bring me
small moments of happiness are building memories with my friends by going out
and doing things together and dancing.
3. Are there certain
things that happen over and over in each relationship?
The lying, and my doubts of
their sincerity.
4. How many serious
relationships have you been in? Define what a serious relationship means to you.
I've been in two serious relationships, sincere relationship mean that you and that person has been
together over a period of time and u both spend a lot of time together and both
have established the relationship to be monogamous or exclusive.
5. Is there anyone you
can talk to about how you're feeling out of your friends, family, workplace, or
anyone else face-to-face? If so, how much have you told them about how sad you
feel?
Nope.
6. Please give the
top ten negative self-judgments (thoughts) you have about yourself.
I am ugly, I am fat, I don't
love myself, I am a negative person, I am not talented, I have a fear of
failure, so I am scared to try stuff, I've got reflux laryngitis and it's
messing my voice up, so I feel useless, I doubt mostly everything why my family
treat me they way they do. I worry too much.
7. Please give me the
top ten positive self-judgments you have about yourself.
I am kind, I am generous, I
have a nice shape, I am a good friend, I am an easy-going person, I got some
patience, my friends appreciate the advice I give. People warm up to me.
8. How
do you define "loving yourself"? Describe how you think other people
love themselves. I
define loving yourself as accepting the good and bad about yourself and
accepting your faults, if someone says negative things to you, you know better
because you feel good about yourself and have a good attitude. You don't
take things to heart what people say, you don't try to please everyone. If you
can look in the mirror and say or think to yourself, I am a beautiful person and
love who you are.
9. What do you fill
your spare time with? Being on my computer,
reading or listening to music, also going the gym.
The Counseling Response
The
first thing any person who is feeling depressed should do is to go see their doctor. If you don't have a doctor or
have a trusting relationship with
your current doctor, talk to friends, acquaintances, or co-workers to find a
doctor. It’s important you find someone you can trust enough to tell them how
you’re feeling and how it’s affecting your life. Your doctor can make a
diagnosis based on what you’re experiencing. They look for
specific symptoms that have lasted certain periods of time to be able
to diagnose if you are in a depression, as well as what category of depression
you may be in. Depression
occurs for many reasons, physical and/or physiological, and is usually triggered
by a stressful event or a series of events that wear you down over time. The
treatment varies from pharmaceutical intervention to correct the chemical
imbalances that occur in depression, to varied forms of counseling, or any
combination of the two. A doctor can rule out if there are physical reasons that
are causing a depressed state of mind. Because of your experiences as a child, you have a great
deal of suppressed pain and anger. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to
suppress the emotions, and eventually your body, mind, and
spirit get tired of hiding them. You need a safe place to look at the emotions
that you’re not allowing yourself to feel, work through them, and eventually
release them. There’s a lot of pain inside of you that is covered with
numbness and sadness that you don't know how or are afraid to express. Your attention is drawn away from the outside world and
is focused internally. Your body is telling you that now is the time to deal with
these suppressed issues. Most
of your life has been spent trying to get the approval of others, and those
attempts have resulted in what seems like a deeply personal failure. You have a good understanding of how a healthy
self-esteem works, yet don’t know how to get from the point where you are now
to the point where you love yourself.
To understand how to be able to change yourself so that you stop
experiencing so much pain, you need to first understand where these
patterns come from that you keep re-experiencing as an adult. You
were taught to make choices when you were a baby. Depending on the
sounds you made, you got certain results, be it food, warmth, love, soft words, comfort,
etc, or the opposite. When you were a toddler, you
made endless attempts to get love from your parents and others. No matter how often we are hurt or
rejected, we always keep looking for love, without knowing it. Throughout the period
of development as a child, you learned that to be loved, you felt pain. Let's
look at trust. Logically, you know
that what
people say and do are generally two different things. Yet how many
times have you believed what people have told you, only to be hurt when
they didn’t follow through? What
if the concept of trust isn’t what you think it is? What if trust didn’t exist? The way society uses trust, we hear a communication and decide
whether or not to believe what we hear/read/see. Yet, I don’t know of a single person who has never
gone back on their word at least once in their lives, so what is all of this
really about? Everyone
has their own set of fears and patterns that affect how they interact with
others. In each hurtful situation where your
trust was breached, people responded from their
own unique set of fears. Because you wanted to believe them, you ignored the
truth to keep
seeking love. Every time fear won
over that particular person's ability to show love. The same is true for
your parents and those who cared for you. Their fears and how they were
taught were the only way they could express themselves to
you, which was filled with their own anger at how they were betrayed and their
own experiences of lack of love. Rather
than ‘trusting’ somebody, an option is to learn that people are always
seeking approval and acceptance from others. No matter how sincere somebody is when they speak, ultimately the
fears THEY have will win and what they do is a result of their own
patterned behavior. So if you were to stop looking at people as to whether or
not they can be trusted, you will be less disappointed when they don’t do
what they say. Understand that everyone is in
internal conflict about what they want and what they are capable of
doing. As
a child, you saw many examples of people unable to express
love. You're seeing similar examples now. Your fear of not
being loved becomes your reality over and over because you're
innocently repeating what you taught. When you understand this, you develop
compassion for yourself and others. This means that you're learning
to understand other's behavior and not take it personally.
You'll eventually learn how to apply this to your past, so that you're able
to understand that your parents and relatives only repeated what they were
taught and you'll be able to forgive them for the pain you experienced. It’s
really only at that point that you'll be able to make changes in how you
approach relationships today, including the one you have with yourself.
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