Why “counting your blessings” doesn’t help highly functional depressed people

We all have that friend telling us to look on the bright side. And we all want to fucking punch them.

Bless their hearts for trying to help, but they don’t get it. They don’t get that you already wrote a list of 100 things you have done that, on paper, are awesome. They don’t get that you already tried to start your morning with a mantra. You also bought one of those fucking self-love journals, but nothing.

The weight of your inadequacy keeps crushing you.

It might not look like that on the outside, because you’d rather keep fighting than letting the world see how defeated you feel. Whenever the mask cracks a little bit and your sense of unworthiness shows, everyone around you thinks you are having a bad day and they try to get you back to the high-performing, overachieving badass you are by telling you “c’mon, count your blessings!”

You smile, pretending that lame-ass advice fixed the void in your soul, and you continue to live, dragging the monster of NEVER GOOD ENOUGH everywhere you go.

Here’s why the well-meaning advice doesn’t work.

“With classic depression, a primary goal in the healing process is to reconnect the person with their external world…with perfectly hidden depression, the overall goal of healing is to connect the person with their internal world — the world of their rigid beliefs and hidden emotions”

- Perfectly Hidden Depression

Your unworthiness has nothing to do with you not doing enough to be (insert identity). There is absolutely nothing in your external world that will change this perception, because the feeling is internal.

So, how do you fix your internal world? Being conscious of your starting point is a start.

This post was created with Typeshare