How do I overcome my melancholic temperament?

Hello,

 

Thank you for your question, I hope my response may be of some help to you.  You said that you have a melancholic personality, being melancholy means we can feel a type of sadness, despair, depressed and emptiness, we are usually unsure as to why we feel this way. 

 

First of all I would ask you to consider reframing this as a weakness, being melancholic can be due to a number of factors.  Perhaps at this stage it is more about learning to understand the factors that may contribute to this feeling in your life rather than feeling like this is a weakness.  It could be that your current position is reinforcing this feeling, it could have been in your life for many years.  I wonder what your first thoughts are on that?  Having a good look at our lives and the things that have been difficult will hold many clues to the solution you are wanting.  

 

You may have grown up in an environment where being melancholy was the way that influential people were around you.  It may be that being melancholic is a learned behavior, in which case the good news is we can always learn a new behavior.   Have you known anyone else in your life who you might consider has been melancholy?

 

Sometimes we are melancholy because we have experienced grief, loss and trauma and therefore it may be that some help, in the form of counseling could help you to work on that and how to live with it in a different way.  

 

When we think a lot it can be really helpful for us to figure things out, so there is actually a benefit to it.  However if we find ourselves ruminating and going over the same things and finding no resolution it may be that you are getting a bit stuck.  In this case speaking to a counsellor or doing some reflection work like journalling can help.  If we hold a lot of this information in our heads and do not talk to anyone this means we only have our perspective and it might be helpful to talk to others to see if getting some more balance to what you are feeling melancholy about may help.

 

I understand the feeling of being lost, it is a hopeless and helpless place at times and this can tie in to whether we can be a committed and consistent person.  If we are always thinking in our heads it is hard to make decisions and to live a fulfilling life with direction and achievement.  If you think about it in a different way for a moment, being melancholy and over thinking could be a coping mechanism for dealing with life.  What would be the benefit to living life this way?  This would be one of the questions I would be focusing on in order to understand the behavior better.

 

In summary your question makes me feel like that feeling of being lost and the thinking could be making you feel stuck and that deep down maybe being stuck is safe and helps us in some way.    Counselling can really help you with this if you are open to exploring things and having someone to bounce those thoughts around with someone else. 

 

All the best,

 

Julia