Emotional Scales

Hayley Lau is a creative philosopher who plays with words, paints and life over at thinkermaker.com.au.

I was reading a book about the Law of Attraction the other day (yeah, I had been rolling my eyes at my idea of the concept, too, before I delved in and realised it’s actually full of useful information) and I came across what Jerry and Esther Hicks call The Emotional Scale.

It’s based on the idea that you can’t jump straight from being depressed to being full of joy. You can’t jump straight from being angry to feeling optimistic. You can’t jump from feeling despair to simply feeling worried. Feeling angry feels better than feeling depressed. Feeling worried feels better than being angry. And feeling bored feels better than feeling worried.

So if there are lots of stages in between feeling good and not feeling good, trying to skip the in-between feelings, or thinking that we should be able to skip them and go straight to feeling good immediately, leaves us feeling even more disempowered.

And I think this is really important because when I feel depressed, it makes me feel worse if someone suggests that I stop being so pessimistic and to look at all the good things I have going on. When I feel depressed, happy people seem so out of reach that I barely know how to talk to them without pretending. When I feel depressed, I don’t want to talk to anyone for this reason.

And it’s because they are out of my reach. I can’t access them from where I am on the scale, and vice versa.

After my daughter was born, I settled into the deepest depression I have ever experienced, and I’m still suffering from the after-effects of it, and she is four now. I was supposed to be doing things, you know? I was supposed to be enjoying this beautiful time. I was supposed to be coping better. I was supposed to do what I had always done before that, which was that if I didn’t like a situation, I would change it. But I didn’t have the power or the belief in myself to change much about my situation then. I made small movements that felt like going backwards. I believed that this was all there was to life and that I just had to make the best of it.

Fortunately, things got worse.

I say that it was fortunate because if things had stayed kinda manageable, I would have stayed deeply depressed. But I eventually reached a breaking point and in the ensuing chaos, I turned my entire life around, because what did I have to lose, right?

I split with my daughter’s dad, and in the freedom that bought me, I learned what it meant to take care of myself again, to feel empowered, to put myself first, to say ‘no’, to forgive myself, to be childishly creative and be more okay with who I am in this moment.

And even though I don’t consider myself deeply depressed anymore, I still feel completely disempowered sometimes. I still cry almost every day. I still get scared and anxious over things. I also have times of pure joy. I laugh more. I choose to do things that light me up. I have a confidence that I can rely on, even if I lose touch with it for a time.

I’m always wary of people who say they have ‘made it’ to the other side, and that their depression is a thing of the past now. Because when I see or hear those accounts, I start believing that I need to get to a place where fear and depression and anxiety and despair don’t exist. And this is not true. I don’t need to get to that place, and honestly, from where I’m standing, that place is fictional.

Depression is just as much a part of the human experience as joy. Anxiety is just as valid a feeling as optimism.

Who decided which feelings were valid and which were invalid, anyway? Which feelings are right and which are wrong?

The only difference between feelings is that some feel good and some don’t feel as good. Some hurt and some don’t. When we start labelling the ones that hurt as wrong, we try to turn off an entire half of the human experience, and that just makes it persist more vehemently.

Here is what I wish I knew when I was feeling really depressed, and it’s also what I need to remind myself of every day that I’m alive:

I am here and I am not wrong for being here. This is how I feel and I am not wrong for feeling this. My darkness is just as valid as my lightness, and anyone who tells me otherwise is not whole themselves. I am allowed to stay here. I am allowed to feel this.

I am human. This is what humanity looks like in me right now.

I am not alone.

Tagged: depression, post-natal depression