How I Avoid Antidepressants with Daily Mental Affective Meditations

In nearly 30 years of mental health exploration, personally and professionally, I've tried many different techniques. Nine years ago, I began a regimen of antidepressant therapy but quit 18 months ago. I've since developed ways to tend to my emotional health without medication. Here's a home-grown technique I call "mental-affective meditations."

Why I developed mental-affective meditations

Zero to Three says early experiences, particularly abuse, trauma, fear, loss, neglect or deprivation, can affect how we think, feel and behave as adults. Later negative experiences add more layers of unhealthy thinking and behavior. It's easy in recovery, to push myself to "let go" of negativity before I have fully processed how it affected me. Letting go before I am ready makes me vulnerable to further hurt if I don't know or understand how it hurt me in the first place. By taking personal thought and feeling inventory, I can heal from the old negatives and learn new positives.

How I do mental-affective meditations

First, I list 5-10 memories I'm healing, behaviors I want to change, issues I'm dealing with or goals I have. I note these goals in specific, manageable steps, as it's easier for me to see progress that way. Each day, I assess where I am with the issue, using investigative reporting techniques:

* What am I doing? What happened? What negative things did I learn from it and what do I need to relearn?

* When and where did it happen? (By plotting them in time and space, I acknowledge that painful experiences did indeed occur.)

* Who was involved or responsible? (This helps me to stop blaming myself if I am taking responsibility for someone else's choices).

* How did I respond? How did this affect me? How did it leave me feeling? How am I letting this control my life? How am I healing from this experience?

* Why did it happen? Why did I respond that way? (No excuses or blame, just honesty.)

How I replace old negatives with new positives

I replace my negative self-concept with by saying say nice things to and about myself. I exhort encourage myself, as I would a despondent friend. I consider new ways of looking at problems. I force myself to look at the big picture instead of my sometimes cloudy, one-sided version of reality. I poke holes in the faulty logic behind the wrong things I learned. I look at each thing that I am afraid of and analyze whether it is healthy to be afraid of it. I reteach myself new patterns of interacting and thinking.