Lucky...yes! I'm back, thank you for the reminder!
Ok - step one = understand that you CAN control your thoughts.
Step two = remind yourself constantly that the people you love could be gone tomorrow, so that you will value and love on them all the time.
So here's step three...
Stop having self-pity.
This was hard for me, because after several bad things happen to you, and you are in counseling and the counselor is helping you understand that you DO have the right to feel sorry for yourself because it is normal given the circumstances....so you go ahead and allow yourself to feel that self-pity...
But in my case and I think other people with depression issues, it became a bit too much of a habit for me to feel pity for myself. I found through study and self-reflection that if I felt pity for myself, then this refuted what I believed about my ability to change my circumstances toward a better life and outcome. If I felt self-pity, then it meant I had no control over what happens to me or what I think or feel, because "someone or something else" had control over what happened to me...and "someone or something else" handed me this plate with some tough cookies on it, and obviously "someone or something" had the control over this, not me.
But when I changed this attitude to something more empowering, such as "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" or "gee, I must be quite a powerful person to be able to overcome these challenges and still not become bitter", or "wow, I can see in retrospect how much I learned and grew from that bad experience, therefore, I can be thankful for it", or "I thank you God for the chance to show you my true colors in the face of adversity"...this helped me tremendously. Its not like I was saying "oh I just love to be beaten down by life, tra-la-la"...it was more like "no matter how down I can get, it only makes me stronger and better" and I lived with that kind of message playing in my head for many weeks, months, years...until it finally wiped out the old self-pity tapes of "why do these things happen to me, what did I do to deserve this?" and replaced them with "I am strong, I can handle anything, I know that my spirit will carry me through".
So that's step three = learn to replace self-pity with empowering thoughts. These steps all take lots of time and effort, I'm not saying it can happen over night. I'd say this was a 5 - 10 year process for me, with incremental improvement over those years, until by the end of it, I am left with only the occasional situation induced temporary depression, but where I had started with an overall serious depression issue that pervaded my entire life!
