Feel free to give your kids whatever printout you like. Whatever helps the family. 😃
I'd like to add, some of us are more positively inclined people who focus on "actualizing" our futures. Much of society seems to "push" that as the default way to live--as if it's the only way. They say, "ignore the negatives" "don't sweat the small stuff" "concentrate on what's good in your life" "envision your future happily and work towards that". Obvious stuff, right?
Well, that works for the people already living like that. It helps them overcome their hurdles. They have the momentum.
When you're already down, tricking yourself into positive thinking "may" help. It works for some, so they think it works for all, all the time. No. At times, positive thinking is being delusional about what is happening, ignoring the problems needing to be addressed, and having us downplay what is happening, so we get closer to the edge being so damn positive before realizing we're at the edge. It's sometimes being blind, and us depressed people "know" it, without understanding those thoughts explicitly. It's our subtle knowledge.
The rest of us aren't the positively inclined, at least, not always.
We might be realists, in the middle. We call it as we see it. We can see the good, the bad, and that real view allows us to accept the world as it is, the events, and not trick ourselves into "having" to feel a certain way about it. Not display ourselves in the emotions socially accepted for others to be comfortable. We can feel our emotions, and not be ruled by them. The great ones and the not so great feeling ones.
When it starts to click, you finally wake up depressed one morning and can smile, laugh, and just enjoy the ridiculousness of having that feeling AGAIN, like nostalgia, but feel normal as well. You have happiness too. Tiredness. Motivation. That depression. And laugh it off, sincerely. And you live okay through the day and never notice when it fades out. You just realize, "huh, I haven't been depressed for a while now and didn't notice." The guilt and failure of feeling depressed, like it was your job to fight it, vanishes. Instead, you have it for whatever reason, plus your full range of other emotions. It can make you vulnerable in an approachable way, sexy even, and be an odd turnaround to use as a positive emotion. Depression is valid for more than one reason, and we need to relearn that. It's our environmental cue, and our history.
We focus on the negatives to avoid them, tackle them, or to respond to our environment. It is like PTSD with triggers. We shut down emotionally and behaviorally to avoid that pain, but that causes different pain from the lives we aren't living. We feel like we cannot control aspects of our lives (we can't for some), but we can avoid at least the type of pain it causes by avoiding the situations completely, and "choose" our own pain--the lesser pain of being bedridden. It's not that explicit in our heads though. Depression is the instinct and "bad" habits we learned to cope. It was a good habit for coping in appropriate circumstances, to recover and heal, but we end up falling into that tool use more than other psych tools, so we get lost in the moments/cycle, unsure "why".
If you are a negative person, focusing on those aspects in life, you need to develop the critical thinking tool of analysis. Criticize yourself, not put yourself down. The difference is, you take as many steps back to look at the situation from MANY new perspectives. It takes time to learn. You look at your habits and realize your pattern. Accept it, and accept your future as having that pattern as well--but now you can direct yourself better through it. Not fight against it, or "positive think" yourself into a lie that it won't happen again--if you do that, you feel like you "fail" just for feeling sad again. Try looking at yourself from a different person's view point. A person that would insult you, a person that would complement you, a person that admires you. It helps you see that your personal stuff has different multiple layers, and you can better accept yourself.
By being critical, you "blame" the correct things in your life, but with understanding, not resentment. You develop another psych tool to cope. The avoidance became habitual to a point of causing depression. Cool, now you relearn to use “depression” appropriately again and add new tools as well. Depression can have us take time to rest while also plan to move forward to fix the issues in ourselves or life.
You need to feel comfortable being "negative" and not being a bad person for it. We wrongly get taught that negativity is bad. It’s not, only our actions from negativity. You can "blame" yourself for your faults, other people for their actions to you, how society leads people into the cracks and forgets them--but instead of feeling guilty for doing so, just accept that is how you feel and there is truth there. Accept you can be overly blaming and in the wrong as well, at the same time, but give yourself that, because you are aware and just need to work through it.
Add to that, by understanding the situations you were in and be critical of them. Allow yourself that. Allow yourself to understand the other people that you blame, they are partly guilty and partly innocent too. We all make mistakes and only learn in hindsight.
It's okay to not "know" what is at "fault" since we are not islands--we all interact and influence each other through micro-actions that pool into larger feelings. We forget the original "source" since there never was just "one" but a few reasons. It's normal to have no understanding "why" we feel that way, since it's now habit and the original actions (possibly never "big" enough to register with us) were in our past, dealt with, and we forgot about them--but still carry pooled baggage, unaware, into how we view new events. We trigger our depression in a new event, without recognizing why. It can be a "happy" event even. It's habit we can't control, like PTSD.
Remember that positivity can work, but it can also distract us into ignoring issues with rose colored glasses. Realism can be depressing if we are stuck in a cycle without a recent period of relief, but realism can relieve if we are matter of fact about situations and dropping our expectations of success and failure. We are okay on down days, and we just need to remember that, not pressure ourselves to an imaginary standard handed to us by an expectant society. That society isn’t healthy, so why conform to its ridiculous standards of how we should be feeling, succeeding, comparing, competing, etc. Don’t bother, and instead live relaxed. Negativity can be positive when you allow yourself to be angry but not reactionary, depressed but not shamed, and critical of the broken world around us to make it better, for our own environment or our own self.
People exist that "see" the real us, through the pain, and see the needs we have that we can't in ourselves. They look at our "weaknesses" as strengths. We can make them so. The struggle gives us insights. We can't appreciate our gifts being miserable, but we can during our recovery periods. There is nothing wrong with being soft, emotional, or not a stereotypical society member. I personally am an army "though" guy that cries in public, can't hurt bugs, and YELLS and lectures people who violate their positions of responsibility--like lawyers, law enforcement, and social workers (been dealing with the lack of resources for a schizophrenic friend, so I been laying into a lot of folks lately, with all my emotions showing, and getting my way--needs to be done when they drop the ball, and our "weakness" can be very strong).
After all this, I just want him to know, he doesn’t “need” to do anything since there is no real standard he needs to live up to. He learned from the world to expect from himself a 100% success rate if he just “tried”. That’s not real. We all try. We all go above and beyond even, until we get burned out, guilt ridden for seeing others succeed while we struggle, and ignore our actual successes. We don’t appreciate what we ARE learning, since we never chose to learn that. Life side tracked us from our expectations. People can’t know our personal life, society teaches us not to share negativity too much, we bottle it up, and it creates impossible expectations. He only needs to rest, find us type of friends that don’t get phased by depressed friends, and be okay with himself for feeling terrible—nothing is wrong with that. I avoid friends to not depress them when I’m depressed but I have some that are not phased by it. I myself am not phased by depressed people having lived through it myself. He might find that he has a new social circle to discover, that is unique to us. Depressed people complaining about everything and we laugh at how it’d sound to outsiders to hear such “unacceptable” whining. It’s venting for us, connecting, sharing, relating, and realizing it’s not a big deal. We already know positivity, and that didn’t work, so embrace more choices and allow those feelings.
