I've had a severe double down depression for most of my life. It started at around 10~11, after my father died and it peaked at 26 where I could not get out of bed without extreme amounts of stress or sleep deprivation. This ruined relationships, friendships and left me with practically all of my teenage years and most of my twenties lost to self-hatred and self-denial.
Medication was the life preserver for me when I finally got myself to accept that I would never be able to deal with this alone. Medication gave my brain some well deserved rest, let me take stock from a more balanced point of view.
CBT was my ladder to climb out of hell. Without CBT I would be still where I was those years ago, just less affected by it. Sitting in a room that was on fire, but just not caring about it that much, that's still a shitty place to be in.
The important thing about CBT was for me that it gave me tools to work with. A chisel for my mind so to speak. It is not at all about talking oneself into happiness, for me it was about NOT talking oneself into sadness. About giving me the logical framework to force myself to see good things where they were, instead of focusing on the bad things. It gave me ways to correctly differentiate between tackling bad situations and just glooming about non-issues.
I'm pretty sure without CBT my life would be nowhere where it is right now, so i'm very glad for its existance and would recommend anyone in a similar situation to try it with a GOOD therapist (mine was a guardian angel, battling the worst parts of my reasoning when I wasn't strong enough to do so).
Medication was the life preserver for me when I finally got myself to accept that I would never be able to deal with this alone. Medication gave my brain some well deserved rest, let me take stock from a more balanced point of view.
CBT was my ladder to climb out of hell. Without CBT I would be still where I was those years ago, just less affected by it. Sitting in a room that was on fire, but just not caring about it that much, that's still a shitty place to be in.
The important thing about CBT was for me that it gave me tools to work with. A chisel for my mind so to speak. It is not at all about talking oneself into happiness, for me it was about NOT talking oneself into sadness. About giving me the logical framework to force myself to see good things where they were, instead of focusing on the bad things. It gave me ways to correctly differentiate between tackling bad situations and just glooming about non-issues.
I'm pretty sure without CBT my life would be nowhere where it is right now, so i'm very glad for its existance and would recommend anyone in a similar situation to try it with a GOOD therapist (mine was a guardian angel, battling the worst parts of my reasoning when I wasn't strong enough to do so).