Cure Your Own Depression

In the past, my reference group told me that if I did what they said in the present, they would Love me in the future, which means they were withholding Love from me now—which means they were withholding Love from me always!

No wonder I felt worthless. They were giving me conditional love, which is not Love at all!

By always withholding Love from us now, our reference group—the group whose standards we use as our own—sends us off on a wild good chase, hunting for treasures outside ourselves, only to be found some day, off in the distant future, so that we can bring these treasures back to them and thereby win their approval and our joy—which means we are just like a dog fetching a bone to his approving master—when the treasure—Joy –has actually always been within us, all along—and this Joy is ours regardless of social opinio

Don’t delay! Joy is within you, now! To bend ourselves like a pretzel to win love or approval from others is to only limit our happiness, not gain it.

Maybe a parent or caregiver or partner told you that they would love you once you acquired money or status or a job— for some, it’s a big house, a fancy car, a degree from Harvard, whereas for others, the standard is something else, like becoming a chef or doctor or becoming physically strong or skinny— but maybe that day never came, so to this day, they continue to withhold love from you, reminding you of how you never measured up to their standards of success or goodness or worthiness— they remind you of all you haven’t done and tell you that you are not enough—so you hate yourself, feel worthless, shameful, unloved, unworthy, helpless, a victim. You feel depressed, immobile.

Hey, wait a second!

Is this person a valid source of Truth? No! The good news is that this person withholding love from you is not a valid source of Truth, nor is any conditionally loving reference group.

Unfortunately, this person is representative of the insanity on our planet right now. It’s time to get back to sanity: Only unconditionally loving reference groups are valid sources of

Truth—people who love us as we are, now. So, what are we to do?

If you are like the rest of us, we almost never measure up to the social reference group standards as we are, which keeps us on a treadmill of self-loathing and self-doubt, and makes it easy for them to control us –to bend our behavior to their wishes –if we let them, which we may do, if we are emotionally dependent on them for our own self-acceptance. The secret is to disentangle this “self-acceptance on social acceptance” dependency, so we are free to love ourselves regardless of social opinion.

We are much easier to control when we doubt ourselves or feel worthless, whereas if we loved ourselves, we’d be unstoppable.

Become unstoppable! Learn how to love yourself today, now!

Copyright 2015 by Wendy Treynor. All rights reserved.