"Depression is like..." - Carl G. Jung's Tip for Dealing With Depression

"Depression is like a woman in black. When she shows up, don't shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest, and listen to what she has to say."

- Carl Gustav Jung

First and foremost, I would like to state that I have not had full-blown depression until now.

However, I think this quote can also be applied to depressive phases. Even if they are only phases in which we do not feel well and feel sluggish, lacking energy or sad.

I am a great friend of the idea that when a situation happens to us, there is always something to learn from it, no matter how trivial it seems to us. This is also true, of course, when we have a bad day, even if we don't know why that day is bad.

Of course, it is much easier to analyze where our bad mood comes from if we have a clear cause. For example, our partner has left us or our pet has died. In such a case, it is easy to identify the problem, but this does not mean that we immediately know how to deal with the situation.

What Carl G. Jung (Swiss psychoanalyst of the late 19th and 20th century) says very clearly in this quote, however, is that we should not shoo away the woman in black but invite her instead.

In other words, we should not downplay it (the depression/depressive phase) and not try to ignore it, but look: where does it come from? What can it tell me about myself? How can I learn something important about myself from it?

Because if we always ignore our dark sides, we can never locate our inner problems and try to work on them.

Getting angry or sad about a hole in a bicycle tire is easy and happens automatically as soon as we notice the hole. But if we never find out where the hole is and try to fix it, the situation will never change and the negative feeling will remain - trying to make us aware of the problem.

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