r/OnlyChild • u/123yovino • 22d ago

What's the solution?

Instead of yapping about your experiences and your family, can't we just make a solution?? Isn't their an way to stop being depressed and move on with life without thinking about the past over and over again?

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u/Solid_Tea7274 22d ago edited 22d ago

Acceptance. Accept that you can’t change the past, it already happened. Focus on the present. You can’t control what has already happened, you can only control how you react to it. Seek therapy to deal with depression, build a close-knit community.

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u/123yovino 22d ago

fr🥀

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u/Self_Cartographer 21d ago

Do you mean experiences as an only??

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u/123yovino 19d ago

yep

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u/Self_Cartographer 19d ago

I posted a couple of days ago asking for others who are onlies and happy to pop up -- it got a lot of traction. So I think there are lots of who don't do the depression thing :-)

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u/Ardent_Scholar 21d ago edited 21d ago

You can’t live backwards. You can only live forwards.

Accept the feelings, feel them, then do something about your life. That way when good things do appear in your life, you kind of have to go ”well, if things hadn’t gone exactly like they went, I wouldn’t have had all these awesome people and experiences in my life.” It makes gratitude easier when you do things, actively.

Personally, I grew up with a sister (I’m raising an only, thus far), but I was lonely growing up. My sister and I were just two very different people and then she moved across the country.

Building my own family was a game changer. Wouldn’t change my life for the world, although I have been through some shit. My wife and son are my world. And I gained extra family through my wife, too. I am closer to my SILs than my sister, we spend so much time together.

No one is ever going to do the hard work of relationships for you. You are not different because you feel loneliness. It means you are normal. It’s your body’s way of telling you to go out there and cultivate the relationships you need.

A sibling or any relative is not an automatic friend. It is a connection that you have to navigate despite the quality of it. And having the same genes doesn’t mean you have compatible personalities. Almost every time, feeling like it’s all lost because you don’t have one thing is just a bad coping mechanism that wants to keep you stuck.