Depression — the action of lowering something or pressing something down

I believe that herein lies the answer I’ve been searching for since my dad took his life. Through everything I’ve shared about my experience with my dad, there’s been one common theme; we suppress the emotional output and self expression of people who are dealing with depression. Not because we don’t love them, but because we’re conditioned to do the same within ourselves. Emotions are meant to be in motion, yet we spend our lives shutting them in without allowing them to flow naturally. Experiencing those very emotions is what allows us to feel alive.

What I want you to take away from what I’ve written here is this…

There are three layers to understanding another human being, and I strongly believe that this alone can save a lot of lives.

We must first understand the words they’re speaking. These words are neither positive nor negative, they are just words; take them at face value. Most of us will never make it past this layer in our lifetime, because we spend the entire conversation giving these words meaning they were never intended to have. Complaining, negative, ignorant, and righteous; these are just some of the meanings we attach to the words people speak.

This is because we view the people in our life through a filter. Somewhere along the way we decided that our father is righteous, our mother is nosey, and our best friend is negative. Through these filters we stop seeing these people for who they really are — our intellectual father who wants to contribute to us by sharing his knowledge, our loving mother who cares so much about our lives that she’ll ask us a million questions every day, and our best friend who trusts us so much that they’d come to us before anyone else during the lowest times in their life.

Second, we must understand the emotion behind these words. Though the words themselves have no inherent meaning, there is an emotional motivator behind why they’re being expressed at all. Are they frustrated? Angry? Overwhelmed? Upset? Check in with yourself; if you think they are simply being negative, you’re still stuck on the first layer. If we are unwilling to let down our walls and feel what they feel in that moment, we will not leave them feeling heard.

They need to know that we can actually feel the emotions they’re feeling. Think about it; have you ever sat with someone without saying anything at all and cried together, but felt more understood in that moment than you have in most conversations in your life? It’s that connection of feeling exactly what the other person is feeling that leaves us with the experience that they truly get what we’re going through.

Third, and most important, we have to learn to understand their current experience or perspective of life. A perspective isn’t about what’s right or wrong, it is nothing more than a view, formulated by personal thoughts and experiences. So long as we remain unwilling to put our own perspective aside — that they’re complaining, that they’re being irrational, or that they need to be more positive because life isn’t so bad — we will not be able to hear what they actually need us to hear.

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, put your judgements and everything else you think you already know about what they’re dealing with aside. Challenge yourself to see the world through their eyes, and for a moment, experience life as they do; isolated, hopeless, unheard, and believing no one is willing or able to really understand what you’re going through.

When we are standing on their rock bottom with our own two feet, only then will we understand what it’s like to look up at the climb above; only then will they feel like we’re climbing out of the hole that has become their life with them, rather than looking down and telling them the view of life is not that bad from where we’re standing. It is through this that we will develop a new found compassion for that individual, and our past judgements of what they are dealing with will simply fade away. More importantly, we will give them the gift of finally feeling a sense of companionship on their journey through life, because we were willing to experience it with them instead of trying to talk them through it.

Be patient, be compassionate, and most of all, give yourself permission to be self expressed. Recognize the filter you’ve created for the person you’re speaking to, and allow yourself to remember who they really are for you. Knowing kills off any possibility of curiosity, so ask questions, even if you think you know how they’ll respond. This is not the time to prove to them how well you’re doing in life or how much you’ve learned through your own experiences by giving them advice; a new perspective must be discovered, and it’s up to you to echo their thoughts and feelings out loud as they piece that perspective together outside of their own head.

The more freely you can speak about and express your own emotions, the easier it’ll be for them to do the same. If you cannot be with your own emotions, you will have a difficult time being with someone else’s. Begin and end each day in front of the mirror — not just to wash your face or brush your teeth, but to experience your own self expression; sing, dance, laugh, cry, smile, or just start by making eye contact with yourself. Do this until the person staring back at you is a reflection of your authentic self, not the image you’ve created for the rest of the world to see. To become who you are in life, you must first let go of who you want to be. Understand that you only want to be that person because you think it’s who other people are looking for. Trust in who you are, and the world and everyone in it will begin to show up differently.