The Longing to Leave - 3

Posted by JohnD Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:11:00 GMT

Reading the comments that appeared at Beyond Blue about The Longing to Leave-2 has been a continuing inspiration. I realize how different everyone’s experience is about the impact of depression on marriage, and how desperately hard everyone works to reach what is for them the right answer about staying married or not. For some, the “longing to leave” is a justified move to safety from a destructive relationship. For me, though, it was a fantasy borne of depression. I often wonder how it is, given where I began in my struggle to build a loving relationship with another human being, that my wife and I have stayed married for so long. “Marriage is survival,” I once heard a pastor say at a wedding, and the uncomfortable laughter in his large audience confirmed the truth of it. Despite all our struggles, we’ve managed to survive the worst of times.

For so many years, though, and long beyond adolescent dreams, I was searching obsessively not for the real work of two people always learning about each other but for a drug-like love that would give me a shortcut to salvation.

Posted in Partners to Depression, Men and Depression | Tags depression, dream, fantasy, love, marriage, men, obsession | 10 comments

Depressed for Success

Posted by JohnD Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:17:00 GMT

Photo Credit: JesterArts – Stockxpert

I’ve been a bit overwhelmed reading the many moving responses to my post dealing with depression at work, Support or Defeat?, that have appeared on Beyond Blue and Furious Seasons. The comments describe many tortured work histories, some with good outcomes, others with no end in sight to an anguished battle. Through these wrenching stories, I’ve been trying to look more deeply at my own experience because it is all I have to offer by way of advice to others. In doing that over the past week or so, I’ve been tending to fall into memory holes of dark moments and getting a little lost there. So to regain perspective, I’ve been trying a new tack, stepping back and struggling to see if there’s something a little less heavy that I could bring to mind, if only as an experiment in cognitive therapy. Then I kept coming back to two ideas, two words, that strike me just now as – and please, I mean no disrespect – a little funny.

Posted in Surviving at Work, Fighting Depression | Tags depression, disability, healing, humor, SinCity, success, TheBigLebowski, WoodyAllen, work | 4 comments

Recovery and the Big Book

Posted by JohnD Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:36:00 GMT

I started thinking about the value of writing stories to deal with depression when I read Alcoholics Anonymous, the book that named the growing self-help movement in 1939. For me, it was not the method the book describes but the stories that first hit home so deeply. A psychiatrist I was seeing at the time lent me a copy because he had found it to be helpful to many of his non-addict patients, though he wasn’t sure why.

If you don’t know the book, it consists mostly of the stories of alcoholics themselves. One after another, they tell unsparingly how they lost control of their lives to alcohol, struggled repeatedly through failed efforts to quit, ruined everything they had and then, often by chance, linked up with other alcoholics who had gotten their lives back. Most of these story-tellers didn’t talk directly about feelings or causes – and they certainly didn’t use psychological jargon. They knew who they were talking to – other alcoholics, people like them who had tried and failed to get sober. To reach them, their stories had to be totally honest and absolutely free of pretension or any other false note.

So why did these voices talk to me so deeply since I hadn’t been drinking at all for several years and had never become obsessed with alcohol? There’s more to it than I can understand or explain, but one thing stands out. Woven through those histories I heard about the misery of hitting rock-bottom, having no self-respect, being good for nothing. I could touch the undercurrent of desperation that ran all too close to the surface of my own life. I couldn’t feel so immediately the parts of the book that described the 12-step method itself. Instead, I needed the telling of the stories, the sharing of experience among alcoholics. That’s what caught me.

Posted in Explanations, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags 12, AA, alcoholics, Big, Bill, Book, depression, Dr.Bob, narratives, recovery, spiritual, steps, story, telling, W | 3 comments

Creativity: Is Writing Safe?

Posted by JohnD Sat, 03 Nov 2007 22:10:00 GMT

Photo Credit: Kumar – MorgueFile

Depression shuts down creativity so completely that I think of these two as polar opposites. When I’m free of depression, my mind is working, my feelings are alive, and I can generate ideas, I can write, I’m effective at whatever I’m doing. But in the midst of depression, everything is shut down, and I can’t think straight about anything. In my case, though, something else seems to be happening when I experience a block in writing or any creative activity. Following is an almost stream of consciousness piece that I sat down to write in the midst of frustration.

I try to write, I get pretty far into something that feels good, feels like it’s coming from an amazing source of – what? a kind of power, a creativity that swirls things into life, a well of discovery – and then… I stop. What’s wrong? My mind is blanking out, I can’t seem to concentrate, I’m distracted, or I start to get sleepy, actually dive into unconsciousness for a while. What’s happening? What was that I was trying to write? Trying to imagine – no, it’s gone! Why can’t I do this? Why does it happen over and over again? Perhaps I’ll get back to that piece of writing, but it will be with a more mechanical mind. I’ll rearrange parts, revise the life out of them, make everything more rational. And then, it’s dead – it doesn’t work anymore! It will be safely dull.

Safe? Is it safe? I was forgetting that. It’s the latest signal, the latest shorthand warning sign coming out of a therapy session yesterday.

Posted in Fighting Depression, Creativity | Tags block, creativity, depression, Fear, Mr.Hyde, s, writer, writing | 1 comment