if you ever were in similar situation, how did you deal with it?
Keep yourself busy; do some dishes, do a little dusting, clean the fridge, go take a little (or long) walk. Don't beat yourself up or wallow in the situation; accept it for what it is, focus on what you actually do have control over, and don't spend too much energy stressing over what's out of your hands.
Through a few years of therapy and
really changing what I focus on, I went from BMJ-style self-beatings regularly and gun-to-my-head spirals to laughing off a layoff and rental potentially getting sold out as just 'one of those things I guess'. It will work out, it'll always work out somehow. There's not an alternative. Just focus on what you have control over, and what small things you can do here and now. You can do it too.
I forgot to say, but for therapy (if that's accessible to you), CBT was what I did for about three years. It's awkward at first, the worksheet stuff always felt like toddler stuff to me and my therapist managed to work around it completely with me so I never did it, but what I took away from it was learning to manage distorted thinking; thinking in extremes/absolutes, assuming what people are thinking, coming to drastic conclusions with no proof to justify my feelings, things like that. I found it to be extremely helpful, and while at first it took a lot of 'manual' thinking and walking myself through the techniques, it eventually just became second nature and I don't even have to use them anymore. It'll feel kind of dumb at first, but if you can incorporate it you'll eventually just develop a healthy enough thought process to where you no longer rely on it. It's something that you definitely need to 'force' yourself to keep at the front of your mind for a while, because it's not natural to approach problems in a rational way (if you are in the position I was in anyway).
And don't forget to just take a nap and watch some clouds now and then.
and while i cant say that im cured of my depression, I finally feel like I have a handle on it.
I like the way you put this, and for anybody out there who's dealing with
chronic depression (this is my experience), this is something you slowly learn to come to terms with. There
will be some things that happen that bring it out, and the journey becomes less about how to
stop it from happening period, but how to
manage the feelings, and to just generally anticipate them. You learn to
live with it, and by 'live' I mean to actually live and have a life. That little voice is always going to be there somewhere, but you get better and better at working through it and not letting it direct what you're doing.
I'm not a stoic, but at a point I spent some time lightly reading some Seneca trying to find a silver bullet to the worst throes of depression. While I can't say there
is one (really it's a culmination of many small things you learn), I
will say that the man had a lot to say that one might find helpful.
De Ira in particular is an outstanding read, and even if you're not planning to practice Stoicism, it has some nuggets you can incorporate into your life. Some that stuck with me (and I'm going to butcher these) were:
The anger you feel is more dangerous than whatever it was that brought it on. To anticipate hardships is to manage them better; a sailor isn't surprised by a storm, a man in a crowded market is not surprised when being jostled in the street. For as long as you live, continue learning how to live.
He was full of things like that, and if you can find just one or two things like that to incorporate into your daily thoughts you can use it as a foundation to build healthier mental habits.
