1. When you are feeling ‘normal’, meaning you are doing reasonably well with manageable feelings and being able to perform reasonably well chances are you are influenced by beliefs such as: “If I am having difficulty with this task, then this is often the human experience and I am often able to work through this most of the time. 

2. However, what are likely to experience while you are believing " if I am having trouble accomplishing this situation then it means I am doomed, crazy,or  inferior”?   Which set of these “if—then” beliefs will create the best results?  You need to learn how you sabotage yourself “for ‘good’ reasons” by the set of negative beliefs and to keep a log about how you think when you feel normal and the opposite. 

3. Do you have beliefs that it’s in your DNA that you are more dysfunctional and have very negative emotions which might spiral into disability or social rejection?  Many of your beliefs are habits you learned unwittingly, maybe when you were young and these thoughts served to make the ‘best’ of what was going on, but you learned newer beliefs as you grew older.  If you strongly believe things are hopeless then you need to work on this, possibly with a therapist.

I suggest you keep an ‘if……..then‘ log each day to see if you can ‘catch’ yourself  creating evaluations, mostly spontaneously, and often without your conscious knowledge, that are likely to maintain states of anxiety or depression or feeling ‘ok’.  If you feel anxious look for: "If I can’t follow through with these tasks, then I’m going to have something very bad happen." If you feel depressed, the prediction might be: "If I can’t complete this assignment then it means I’m worthless and doomed.

I have purposely taken the extremes of the beliefs you have and you might not be aware of that much negativity but you will notice that at the times you feel really down and out, compared to those you feel ‘ok’ your beliefs are quite different.

I welcome your comments or questions about your own experiences.
 

I am a licensed therapist in Orange County, servicing Huntington Beach and area. My services include anxiety therapy and depression treatment.

How might you be keeping yourself from happiness from avoiding painful emotions?

You could be hitting the wall that you can break though.

• The greatest problem I see in my private practice is people like you trying to escape from painful emotions. Read on to learn about a couple of examples of people I treated who were stopped in their tracks from recovery.
• A woman and a man just like you were immobilized because they formed a bad habit, by: trying to block out very painful emotions. They numbed themselves and created lots of pain and fatigue from trying to block out emotional pain. They couldn’t regulate their sleep cycles and zoned out losing several hours of consciousness.
• Do you often distract yourself and block out severe emotional pain because you are afraid you’ll get worse and let yourself believe experiencing the pain will be useless?
• Don’t let yourself be defeated by the fear of painful emotions because with help you can learn to achieve peace by finding solutions from these emotions.
• Facing these powerful and scary emotions is, surprisingly, the way home.
• How can you find out how to fight your depression or anxiety if you don’t allow yourself to experience the emotions and find out the thoughts or memories maintaining the pain?
• You have within you the ability to recovery with tools you can learn if you are willing to let yourself experience the pain and discovering much more about the distorted deep beliefs and pessimistic thoughts you might not even be aware of..
• Pasting happy thoughts in your mind without knowing what your deeply held negative experiences are hasn’t helped you yet, so what are you waiting for?

I am a licensed and experienced therapist in Orange County servicing Huntington Beach and area. I have worked with hundreds of clients to help them overcome the challenges they are facing. I would love to give you a free phone consultation and help you decide if therapy is right for you. To get started, contact me at my website or phone me at (714) 960-2490.