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Look for Hope!

Look for Hope!

In times of crisis it is always important to look for signs of hope. It is very tempting to give up hope when you see nothing around you changing. I'm a firm believer that when you feel like you have been abandoned or are in despair try to look for signs of hope. We might feel desperately alone, that no one is hearing our cries, that God is being cruel and is justified in bringing us so much pain, but we mustn't lose hope. Even if you feel oppressed, like God has forsaken you, you still have the right to hope. We are human beings and we need hope, we are like the sunshine. We can't live without feeling that someday maybe even now, our burdens will be lifted, and the light will shine through.

With so much going on we can get lost in feeling that God has been cruel and unfair to us. You may not believe in God anymore, but that doesn't mean you have to give up hope. This life will not last forever and we have to be ready to truly live, not die. I remembered something very important about my life last night. What has been giving me grief for many years I had blocked some of it from my memory. It was a time when I was truly happy and at peace in my life. Remembering that time in my life brought me clarity, I realized that I was beating myself up about a time in my life, that only lasted for three years! I was mad at myself because I couldn't replicate that feeling in order to get me out of my current depression. I was trying to figure out the cause of my depression without accurately remembering the past.

It's not that something traumatic happened to me, the trauma came later when I realized that I had forgotten who I used to be. Remembering that, gave me a sense of peace, not closure because I am still that same person, regardless of how smart I think I am now! When you have been through a trauma you can forget parts of your life, when you were just living your life. In suffering sometimes we forget how to live. We are consumed with coping skills, and things that will alleviate some of our pain, that we forget to be normal. When a crisis hits we instinctively go into survival mode, because we don't want to lose ourselves and our current way of living our lives! When this happens we feel like something in us has died, and then we try to spend the remainder of our lives trying to bring that thing back to life. Essentially we go through a grieving process.

What caused me the most pain is I desperately wanted to remember the way it was for me before I had depression, but my mind was suppressing those times when I had a greater sense of self! Why was I doing that? I was doing that to avoid the pain that my trauma was causing me. It was dangerous for me at that point to reclaim what I lost, for fear that I might lose it again. In creating a new normal, I chose unconsciously to suppress memories because of the fear of self rejection. Now that I know those memories are not going to cause me further pain, I can live with those memories. I can embrace the Mike that loved himself and others then, and I can stop the self-condemnation that is brought on by my own thoughts. I can incorporate those times in my life, into my current life, and have full acceptance of who I am now, and what made me happy then. This is Mike!

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