Mouses. Its common for issues in childhood to affect you in later life. As a child you block things out, ignore things and do what you have to do to grow up. As an adult, you can relax enough for it to all come back.
You are on meds, from what I can gather. What else do you have? Counseling? Support network with friends and family?
Depression is the worst kind of illness anyone can have in my opinion. Everything that we see and perceive comes from our own mind. For our minds to then get sick and to be unable to trust it, see a way forward is more scary than most people realise unless they have ever been through it.
Counselling and pills can only do so much. The rest and the majority has to come from you. What I can tell you, is that its a battle worth fighting. Because it can be fought and it can be won. When you come out the other side of mental health problems, you are much stronger and it changes your whole perspective.
When I was at my worst with my breakdown, everywhere I looked, people said you had to do it yourself. Then i started counselling and they told me I had to help myself. I came so close to giving up so many times. I felt like they didnt understand. Noone would choose to live in such hell so didnt they get that I was already trying to help myself?
Thats the worst part of depression and anxiety. It makes you think things and behave in ways that arent logical. It makes you unable to see a way out, so although you dont want to die, you want the pain to stop and its the only way out you can see.
Thats when you have to realise you are at rock bottom. Things actually cannot get any worse than wishing you are dead. And I believe that its only when you get that close, that you can start to help yourself.
If you are feeling suicidal still, the pills arent working. Ask for a change or a dose increase. Lean on those that love you during this time. Until medication stabilises you, you wont be able to help yourself.
Once stable, then you can start putting things into practise. Learning to question your own thoughts...because thats all they actually are. Thoughts. It helps to assess them, like you would an exam. Are they logical, is there evidence, are you making a huge deal out of something thats actually not all that big when you look at it from a different perspective.
Getting out in the fresh air, taking a walk, feeling the sun on your skin, the way a flower looks, how calm the water is. All these things are good for the soul. There is no getting away from the fact that there is a lot of pain and hurt in the world. So much more so than the good sometimes it seems. Learning to focus on the good, or looking at a bad situation and finding the good in it, helps.
Our brain is complex, but its also habitual. You tell yourself enough times that you are a failure, not worth anything, better off dead, will effectively program your brain to think just that. Its called learned thinking. It gets to a point where you stop thinking it, and your brain tells you it, because thats what you taught it. So you have to teach it again. Teach it to make positive connections. Take every bad thought and imagine it was someone elses bad thought. How would you advise them. What would you consider before deciding they have true grounds to think such thoughts.
Its the hardest thing in the world IMO, to be in the depths of depression and anxiety and have to fight your own way out of it. But that is how it is. The tablets and the talking help, but not nearly so much as the helping yourself. x