Reddit reviews Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change

It's understandable to not want to be a burden, and I'm sure there are certain limits on your friend's time and energy given his schedule. It's important to not de-legitimize the pain you're experiencing by saying that you're not deserving of at least some small portion of his time and support. If the friendship you have for your roommate is as strong as you're letting on, you should trust him to want to be there for you in your time of need. On a basic level, that's kind of what friends are for, and while I can completely relate to the impulse to want to withdraw and bottle things up in order to not be a burden, look at it from his perspective: avoiding him might make him feel like the energy he already spends on you is being wasted, or that you somehow don't value it as much as you obviously do. These little blurbs probably does a better job of explaining it than I can:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/maybe-its-just-me/201107/why-its-so-difficult-love-people-who-dont-love-themselves
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/maybe-its-just-me/201008/self-loathing-and-the-paradox-selfless-love

As for your financial situation, that sucks. Life always seems to find a way to pile on the misery in a series of brutal incessant blows, doesn't it? If you don't mind my asking, what kind of therapy were you going through? Personally, I've had some decent success with mine who practices ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy), which doesn't as the name might suggest mean resigning yourself to your current situation. It's an empirically supported therapy method (not all rise to this level), and after reading some of your other posts this may be something that you would at least enjoy reading a little bit about. Some of the pieces on cognitive fusion might be of particular interest to you given your background: it seems you do get that the way things were modeled for you really did not prepare you for life in a healthy way, but that you've still internalized a lot of those rules. Cognitive fusion basically describes our attachment to these kinds of verbal rules we hold, and a very big portion of ACT is learning to loosen our reliance on them. The following books explain this concept better than I can:

http://www.amazon.com/Things-Might-Terribly-Horribly-Wrong/dp/1572247118
http://www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Commitment-Therapy-Experiential-Approach/dp/1572309555/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310155398&sr=1-6

The first is meant to be a little more accessible to the general public, and the second is meant more for therapists, but it's still pretty easy to follow. They do not read as lame self help books, if that's something you're worried about. ACT also tends to have a quicker turn around rate than some other therapy methods.

If you've managed to lose 45 pounds while struggling with some pretty systemic depression, you have a lot to be proud of. That shit isn't easy in the first place, let alone with all the bullshit that comes from being depressed, and you're still committed to working at it. Don't diminish the real importance of what you've already accomplished, and keep up the good work!

> What happens when someone you thought was a friend just says that they let you lean on them because you're needy and you were having a rough time?

I don't quite understand what you're saying: that's sort of what friends are supposed to do (let you lean on them when times are rough). Are you worried that they're only listening to you out of pity? That may be true, but you could also be selling them a bit short. If perhaps they feel you are leaning on them too much, it might be wise to cut back with that one particular friend and rely on someone else as well to talk to, but it is important to talk to someone.

If you're getting stuck in these vicious cycles and circular thinking, you should really see a therapist, because that's what they shine at untangling. The only way to break a vicious cycle is to throw a wrench in the whole thing and go from there. If you find that you're dealing with your depression by talking to the same person, and you say the same thing, in the same way, at the same time after having eaten the same sandwhich for lunch, and that he rolls his eyes at you the same way he did the 14 other times he heard you say exactly the same thing, maybe it's time to try something different. To go back to my being in a hole analogy, maybe that means that you stop trying to dig yourself out of the hole by doing exactly the same thing you've been doing for so long. After all, it hasn't gotten you out. And that's all beating yourself up as done: keep you in exactly the same place.

I had a lot of success with ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). It has a strong focus on mindfulness activities, and has a strong body of empirical research (which isn't as common as you might think) to back up its use. I also ripped my analogy straight from an ACT text, so if you didn't think it was the most retarded thing you've ever heard you might want to check out the following books.

A quick ACT primer:
http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/090208p36.shtml


The ACT "Bible". This one is more of a clinical manual but it is fairly accessible.

ACT Made Simple The content of the above made for non clinicians.

Things might go terribly, horribly wrong. This one is meant for clients, and isn't really a self help book. There's a big focus on dealing with anxiety, which may not apply so much too you but the strategies for cognitive defusion are kind of the same as what I think an ACT therapist would recommend for you to do.

Find an ACT therapist:
http://contextualpsychology.org/civicrm/profile?gid=17&reset=1&force=1
or
www.psychologytoday.com "Find a therapist"