[Benjamin Fry]

Generally speaking, depression is seen as the antithesis of an expression of fairly strong emotions; and most often linked with a reluctance or difficulty expressing anger. However, what can be most confusing about it is that these emotions (be they anger or whatever) are not always connected with events that you're familiar with from today, yesterday or even last week, or last year. More often than not, they are the mind-body system's attempt to resolve trauma from much, much earlier in your life.

Itís likely that you will have no recollection of the events that contain these traumatic emotions, and that it may indeed be the case that no one who knows you or was around at the time would even perceive what happened to you as being traumatic. Trauma is simply the freezing of the emotions which the mind and body are experiencing. It does this because they are overwhelming at the time. When there is no longer an emergency, you then have the opportunity to deal with what was not possible at the time.

It is often the case that as people find themselves in situations in their lives which feel more and more safe, the mind-body will then decide that the circumstances are right for it to start to process some of its stored, frozen emotions, repressed from the traumatic experiences in the past.

One very big step on the route to feeling safer is the passage in a person's life from child to man or woman. During these teenage years a person goes rapidly from being a dependent small version of an adult to becoming someone physically capable of challenging adults on their own terms; someone who could actually survive on their own if they had to. I do believe that this is the reason why teenagers experience such a particularly virulent onset of emotions as they rapidly get older, taller and stronger, and are more accepted in the adult world.

It may be that youíve experienced depression during these years as your mind and body has tried to release trauma stored from earlier experiences in childhood no longer available to your memory. As you have hung on to those emotions, youíve had to shut down your entire bodyís response to its emotional content. It is this shutting down that may have manifested as the depression which you have experienced. Antidepressants will seek to chemically alter the chemical consequences of this shutting down. However, as you have probably realised by now, they may not necessarily be a terribly good long-term solution; even though they can have dramatic short-term benefits.

Depression and low self-esteem are very often found together, and may also both be separate consequences of similar experiences in early childhood. If a baby, an infant or a young child is not given validating experiences from the people in whose care it finds itself, more often than not (particularly the younger the child is) the child will believe that the fault in the situation is their own. For example a child who grows up in a house with two parents who argue a lot (even if it is not yet old enough to understand the words of the argument) will absorb the fact there is a great deal of tension and hostility in the house and, oddly enough, internalises this as being in some way caused by them; and therefore their own fault.

It is this heavy emphasis on responsibility that young children give to themselves that can lead to low self-esteem. If life is going wrong all around them, then in the end they begin to believe they are wrong inside of themselves.

The path out of this trap is to embrace the difficult emotions that you may be repressing, to feel them fully and to release them. A person who is not clogged with a backlog of emotional detritus will find it much easier to engage with the positive a wonderful things about the world around them, and this will be reflected in their own view of themselves

Itís really a very hard lesson to take on at the age of only sixteen and itís a terrific credit to yourself that you are beginning to think about these ideas. For now I think it's enough just to accept yourself as you are, not to judge yourself, and not to allow the opinions of others to leave you feeling that you're less than you should be, or less adequate than the ìnormalî teenager.

Gradually nurturing your mind, your body and your emotions, you will find that you are able to move on to the next stage of your existence. You will become more connected with yourself and your environment. What is seen by you now as a very negative and difficult experience could give way to a very positive and engaging self if you can learn to become friends with those nasty emotions that are currently backing up your system.

Counselling and various physical and spiritual practices like yoga and t'ai chi can be helpful to certain people to access and to release these emotions. However for every individual there is always a different preference and a different path to finding the way back to themselves.

Try to see what appeals to you instinctively and try to find the time and the discipline practice anything that you already feel is of emotional benefit to you.