Storied Mind

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Here’s one part of a post from a couple of years ago, written a few months before I knew I’d really gotten past depression. Stephany at Soulful Sepulcher had suggested that I try assuming this: I have recovered. That really got me thinking and actually proved to be a turning point. I started imagining what it would feel like to be recovered and wrote this as if it were spoken by an actor in a play. It was an experiment to have fun with that helped me get closer to the real thing. It’s a method I can highly recommend.

What do you think you might say or do if you suddenly felt fully recovered?

You’re history, you busted old fool, unholy one, always stealing me. You trespass, you offend, you have nothing good to say, and surely nothing new. You bore me over and over again with the same stripped life, torn to its emptiness. I don’t want your lightless streak in my soul any more.

I’m sick of your dismal dispatches, your chemistry of night, your endless calls to inaction, your fog of unthinking, your poisoning of love, your invitations to deadly impulse.

I see shining faces around me again. How could I have remained so stuck in this sickening web, waiting to be a spider’s meal? It’s over, I’m out of here. I’m taking the power of my mind and soul with me into broad daylight!

NO! Scratch that. You’re out of here! Read the rest of this entry »

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Many women write here of the baffling strangers their depressed husbands or partners have become. Most often, they describe one of two versions of the unrecognizable men they’ve been trying to live with.

One turns on his partner, blames her for the pain he feels, acts abusively and then leaves, convinced that getting away from her will solve his problems. The other type retreats into silence and isolating misery, feels so bleak and wrong that he can’t stay around anyone, says he needs to sort things through on his own and wants to spare her the pain of living with him. He leaves too, often to sink further into depression.

Of course, there are many variations of these stories, but, in general, the men either blame their partners or they blame themselves. Some cut off every kind of communication. Others want to stay in touch, just a little. None of them get serious about trying to get better. They might sample medication or therapy in a perfunctory way but quickly give them up as useless.

I’ve written a lot about this behavior before (here and here are two examples) and don’t want to focus in this post on the men who leave. Instead, I want to ask a question about what happens to the women in these stories. I hope you can give me some more insight.

Why is the door always open for his return? Read the rest of this entry »

Courtesy of ONN, The Onion News Network

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This is an edited and shortened version of a post on meditation I did some time ago. The prayer at the end remains important to me, so I thought I’d put it up again. I hope it makes some sense to you.

Here are a few journal excerpts from many years ago about early experience with meditation. From these first attempts I found a method that has helped blunt the deep stress and anxiety that accompany depression. Sometimes it can even bring me out of a deep downswing.

……………

Today I tried meditating while getting one of my periodic bone scans, follow-up to the cancer diagnosis. This is the second one, and the first only showed the widespread spots of arthritis that one day will give me a lot more pain than they do now. To do the scan I have to lie down on a narrow gurney and be absolutely still while this big machine moves slowly over my whole body, just an inch or so above me.

Meditating during the scan helped the time pass more quickly. It also distracted me from the fear of the machine’s humming invasion that recorded every inch of my body’s deepest structure. I couldn’t help but think of death while this was happening, and even the narrow gurney reminded me of how small a body gets when the life is gone. I strained to hold still since there was nothing to rest my arms on, but I finally figured out that I could keep my hands from slipping off the cold side bars by tucking the thumbs just under my hips.

I closed my eyes and meditated on the things I was worried about and feared. As I looked them over in this way, those fears felt more distant and lost their urgency. They were more like brief flashes than stabbing realities. After the scan, I felt a peacefulness that made it easier to hear whatever the results might be. Read the rest of this entry »

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My new post at Health Central talks about picking up on the early warning signs of depression. Since I tend to need a big picture to figure out what to do, I found it when forced by desperation to look closely at my own self-defeating behavior. That was a key recognition that helped me spot the emergence of depression.

It may seem hard to miss, but it took a long time to wake up to what I was doing. Undermining myself at work could happen at either extreme of depression – when I was filled with shame and wanting to disappear or when I was angry and clumsily aggressive. At home, I’d jeopardize the closeness of family life by dropping out emotionally or by angrily blaming my wife and children for causing the misery.

I felt trapped in a cycle of building up a good life and then tearing it down. As I wrote recently in this post about trying to save my marriage, my wife and I couldn’t wait until depression ended to restore our relationship. The same was true at work. I had to find the early steps that would at least help me recognize when I was spinning downward. That recognition was vital to get any perspective at all on the way depression was distorting my behavior and my perception of what I was doing.

The Health Central post looks at these struggles and the first few steps in getting past them. I hope you’ll take a look at it and have a go at answering the question I pose at the end. How have you been able to pick up on the early signs? Have you found good ways to head off the main event before getting lost in a downward spiral?

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Here’s a post I wrote at Health Central about a year ago. There are a couple of China Beach stories I keep coming back to, and I hope this one is as helpful to you as it has been to me.

Quite a while back, there was a TV series about a group of nurses in the Vietnam War. It was called China Beach. In one episode of this powerful drama, a soldier who had lost a leg from the knee down is back home, feeling lost and depressed about his life. Desperate for a loving human bond, he drives a great distance to find the home of one of the nurses who’d taken care of him “in country.”

He finds her and talks stumblingly about his hopes to be with her, and it’s clear he feels like an ugly reject whom no one will have anything to do with. She sees at once that what he’s looking for is an emotional crutch, not a real relationship and gently explains that she can’t be with him. Then she does something amazing. Understanding what he feels about himself, she wants to give him the one message above all that he needs to hear and believe.

Taking him into a room with a full-length mirror, she tells him to stand in front of it and to take off all his clothes. He does that numbly, mechanically, revealing what’s left of his leg, and she tells him to really look at himself, not just the leg. Then she says, in so heartfelt a way:

“You are beautiful.”

Whenever lost in deep depression, I could never even hear, let alone accept a statement like that. I felt ugly inside and out, certain that everyone could see that obvious fact. I winced if anyone pointed a camera at me, especially if they asked me to do the impossible and smile. What I wanted to do was disappear. I couldn’t bear to look at a picture of myself – if I did, I just saw this ugly, overweight mess and wanted to rip it up. Read the rest of this entry »