With the rise of stress, anxiety and depression in today’s world, chances are you know at least one person who struggles with depression. If that person is someone you care about deeply, it be can be tough to navigate. How can you be there for your loved one, support and contribute to them, without being consumed by their challenges?

Here are three tools that can contribute.

1. Commit To Your Life and Living

For starters, you have to commit to your life. All too often, when in relationship with someone who struggles with depression, people give themselves up. They put all of their attention and energy into helping the other person; and in so doing, actually stop creating their own life. This never works for you or your loved one because it brings you both down. When you commit to you, you have all of you.  In this space, you are more able to not only contribute to yourself, but also you have the energy to contribute to your loved ones.

2. Don’t Take it On

Have you ever noticed how aware you are of the thoughts, feelings and emotions of others? You are like a gigantic radio picking up on everyone and everything around you. When you are consistently around someone who is unhappy, you can start to feel unhappy too.

The next time you feel unhappy, ask, “Who does this belong to?” If you feel lighter when you ask, you’re not the unhappy one. Let that unhappiness go! Choose the happiness that is available. Even if it makes your loved one uncomfortable. Giving up your happiness in hopes of changing them only leads to two depressed people. You continuing to be happy invites your loved one to do the same.

3. Invite the Ease, Joy and Glory of Life

When you wake up in the morning and throughout the day and before you go to sleep at night, say, “All of life comes to me with ease and joy and glory.” In saying these words, you are opening the door for everything that comes your way to be filled with ease. You are requesting and inviting joy to be your reality. You are saying YES to the exuberance and adventure of living that is possible. And your choice to do this and BE this changes the world around you.

Your loved one may or may not go beyond depression. The good news is, you can be kind and caring and present and available and still continue to choose for you. You can be with the other person, without walls and barriers, knowing you don’t have to fix them. Knowing that whatever they choose, you still get to create your life and it can be filled with ease.

What if so many more possibilities are available to us? And what if we all can thrive?

Dain

P.S. For the full article in Conscious Living Tv Magazine, please visit here.

P.S.S. And for more tools and possibilities, please visit my page here.