Depression sits in those backside brain areas that didn't get the memo that you are not a child in danger anymore. The brain areas that understand language have no access to those areas. Talk therapy is frying an egg with a catapult.
Depression is when parts of your brain "depress" dopamine and adrenaline. Those brain regions do this on purpose. No "reflecting" about them will make them stop doing it. You can't talk yourself out of a depression.
To me, the power of occult practices is in what it does with attention and awareness. You can use your attention and awareness to send and receive energy. Some mediums call this "dialing into a signal". It's a form of deep concentration without consciously thinking. It is not "thinking really hard about my childhood". It is "thinking in a state of non-being", which makes these "non-thoughts".
The right occult pracice for me would be to practice what I call "bullet time". It comes in two parts.
1) learn to "slow down time" in the exact moment you sense that you default to thoughts like "nothing makes sense", or "I'm so tired", or "I feel far removed from everything", or "nobody gets me", or whatever words your frontal lobe invents to talk about the sensation of adrenalin and dopamin suddeny being lowerd drastically. You will probably have unlearned to have attention in that moment and also the quick loss of those transmitters sucks the life energy out of you. But this is trainable. Some tie a ribbon around their wrist, or wear a ring as a mnemonic to remember to not space away in that moment.
2) then to slow time again, but in remembering what happened immediately before you experienced that loss of transmitters. Usually it is also something that you have not seen, felt, heard, but that your unconscious reacted to, by immediatelly putting your system to sleep. This is a childhood reflex. Something related to what you just experienced "reminds" your brain of that time back then, and as a precaution for you to not having to feel the shame you felt back then, it immediatelly makes you stop doing anything with the only means it has: powering down your motivation center. The idea is to just look at or listen to what happened, without thinking words. Just reexperiencing it, but consciously this time. Someone said or did something that seems harmless or meaningless or normal, but that was enough for your system to immediately shut down. What was that. A word? A person plus particular words? A particular dynmaic? A way you were treated?
It can't immediately power back up again an hour later, because it wants to make sure that you are out of danger by effectively making you a vegetable as long as necessary. The idea is that you don't show any motivation for anything. Doing that as a child would have triggered a particular person back then to shame you. Your system is basically highjacking your biology in order to keep you safe from that toxic person who back then was your survival line. While not getting that that person is now gone. It takes its cues from "similar" things in your environment. The brains main focus is always to keep us safe. Not to be accurate with reality.
By learning to slow down time and learning to just be aware and "present", you teach your system that childhood is over and that you are not a child in danger anymore and that those old brain areas don't have to highjack your biology and immobilize you anymore to keep you out of harm. Depression is a solution to a problem. The question is, what problem does it solve. I don't think psychiatrists are willing to accept this simple 1+1=2 survival logic. And also, if you were told this, they would lose a steady client.
So this is kind if like a curse that could become a blessing. If you manage to develop your "awareness muscle" to notice what happens in those split seconds within you, then this is the "gateway ability" to most other occult abilities. Because this is not a "the frontal lobe recognizes, sorts and verbalizes something", but as in "your whole system is aware and present". With this power of awareness, you can then start to understand, see and read energy signatures. The next step would then be to be able to direct them where you want. I am a Tarot reader. I don't do the directing through occult practices. I do everything up to this point, but what I can see is that anyone doing occult work who is not able to consciously direct their awareness this way will have a hard time doing anything that actually "does" something in other people. Sometimes I direct my attention for fun to a stranger and make that person come and say a few words to me. But to me that is manipulation. I only do this rarely, to see if it still works. So it starts with learning to direct attention towards yourself, and once you master that, then you can use this ability of directed energy onto others as well. I don't think it works the other way around. You can't direct others and not yourself. You will not know what you are doing. And in your case, you can use the learning of this ability to deconstruct your old depression "solution" brain pattern. . I'd say if you managed to do that, your ability is solid and can then also be used for occult practices.
I'm guessing you might have wanted a "quick fix". Something you can do that brings that awareness to you, without you having to do this hard work over several months. It might exist but I haven't seen it. To me, the muscle you would need to deconstruct your depression automation is not developed. That doesn't happen through talk therapy, but through very practical down-to-earth, directed attention and awareness energy work. It will feel like going through the alchemic steps of "standing in fire", "dissolving" "purifying" etc. This is what it feels like Not very pleasant. I don't know any other way, but this way. It works.
