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Thanks again to isabella at moritherapy and her post about Mental Health Camp, I’ve been reading Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing. She discusses at length not only the healing power of the writing process but also the need for a writer to care for the creative self.

Her own breakthrough in becoming a professional writer started when she discovered a demanding form of Japanese painting that grows out of the Zen tradition. It requires that the painter prepare by achieving an inner balance and “emptiness” that allows total concentration on the creative act. The painting itself is achieved with a series of strokes in one sitting that permits no changes. This is an art requiring an inner harmony cultivated through spiritual practice and a balance in all aspects of life.

There’s a similar tradition in the Chinese art of calligraphy, as explained in a beautiful book – The Way of Chinese Painting by Mai Mai Sze. The tradition is also described in Wen Fong’s Images of the Mind, which includes dozens of excellent reproductions of calligraphy, poetry and paintings. According to the Chinese “way,” the artist not only achieves spiritual, mental, emotional and physical wholeness but also captures the essential spirit and energy of external reality. There is a connecting energy that relates the individual to the larger world. The artist expresses that unity not only in the finished work but also in the act of creating it. During those creative moments, the calligrapher/painter stands apart from the tumble of thoughts and emotions and works in a state similar to meditation.

What DeSalvo drew from studying this tradition was that writing was not separate from life but an integral part of it. She felt a healing power through the detachment she achieved during the creative process that allowed her to observe difficult and destructive thoughts and feelings without being overwhelmed by them. Instead she could write about those feelings and explore in detail the most wrenching experiences of her life. The detachment she achieved helped her come to terms with the issues that had long troubled her and interfered with her writing. She found that this healing effect, repeated on a daily basis, strengthened the resilience needed to survive emotional shock.

To help others get past their fears, she developed many practical suggestions – which she calls her yoga of writing – about how to structure time, set realistic goals, remove fear about completing a long project by consistently doing small parts of it each day. The basic idea she conveys is that writing is an achievable practice, an integral part of living, rather than a separate reality requiring inspiration or special talent that one must be born with.

She mentions Janet Frame, the New Zealand fiction writer, who provides, I think, the most amazing example of someone who used the healing power of writing to end her mental and emotional turmoil. After years of breakdown, therapy and voluntary hospitalizations, she was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic and subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. She was also scheduled for a lobotomy, which would certainly have destroyed her creative powers, but avoided that procedure because of the great critical acclaim that greeted her first book of stories. She went on to write a series of novels, stories and autobiographies that helped her resolve the emotional legacy of her most difficult life experiences.

DeSalvo’s description of what happens during the writing process brought to mind two books by Anthony Storr, which I mentioned in an earlier post – The Dynamics of Creation and Solitude: A Return to the Self.

Storr compares the creative state to one of Carl Jung’s key therapeutic methods – active imagination. Jung urged his patients with mood and personality problems to spend time writing, painting, modeling clay or other form of creative expression. He observed that this brought them to a mental and emotional state where they stood apart from thoughts and feelings and could avoid being overwhelmed by them. This “active imagination” also induced a kind of free association that permitted new insight. Conscious and unconscious thoughts and symbols came closer together, and links could be made between areas of experience never previously related to each other.

For some of his patients, this led to dramatic breakthroughs in which they could achieve complete relief from disorders, such as depression, and help the mind and body return to what Jung thought of as a self-regulating condition. The organism as a whole, he believed, normally achieved a balance between extremes through a self-regulatory process, just as the biochemistry of the body returned to the optimum point – such as the system for maintaining a fixed body temperature or the appropriate level of oxygen in the blood. The breakthroughs achieved seemed not to have external causes but to come about through a deep inner change of attitude.

Observations like these led Abraham Maslow to believe that the creative state and the condition of being a healthy self-actualizing or fulfilled human being were likely identical. In that state, one is “lost in the present,” achieves a detachment from time and space and a form of transcendence of the normal limitations of self-awareness. He describes a fusion between the creative person and external reality that resembles DeSalvo’s sense of what the artist experiences in the Japanese tradition.

Jung and Maslow were concerned with the creative state itself as a mental activity that contributed to human fulfillment. They were not looking beyond that to the completion of a particular work of art. For Louise DeSalvo, however, experiencing the full healing power of creative expression involves not just the act of writing itself but also the ordering and support of daily living that leads to the finished work. That achievement brings creative expression into the larger context of life as a whole. She emphasizes that the healing practice of writing can be shared by many, not just the most accomplished artists. It is a way of life that can be learned.

That leads me to ask this question: To what extent have you been able to integrate writing or other imaginative work into a “yoga” of daily practice? What I have found so difficult over the years is integrating the practice of writing with all the other needs of work and family. What’s your experience of finding that balance?

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catatonickid recently published a post about facing your double, reaching a place where nothing can be explained, a place where no choice could possibly be right. She calls that the “ideal argument for healing,” or, in the quoted words of Marie-Louise von Franz: “the beginning of the process of individuation” – the joining of the separate parts of the self to form an integrated person.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about experiencing a kind of double life, I’ve been drawn to the theme of meeting one’s own mirror image as a separate being for as long as I can remember. I never understood why that should be, but every story or film I found about such an encounter simply transfixed me. The idea touched a part of me beneath awareness that felt like it was rolling in sea-like motion. For so long, I was afraid that this moving force could overwhelm me.

In dreams, meeting my double was the culmination of nightmares.
I was usually searching through locked rooms in mansions and castles until finding the one where he was sitting. He was always alone in the middle of a darkened space with his back to the door as I entered. When he started turning toward me – even before I could see most of his face – I knew he was my double and that I had to get out. The deepest fear and panic surged through me as I realized I couldn’t escape and in the next moment would be killed. In the midst of that terror I always woke up and had to wait for my breathing and heartbeat to slow down to normal.

Why was this encounter so terrifying and why was my double a Mr. Jekyll ready to savage his Dr. Hyde? Was that what awaited me if I should try to go beyond what my awareness told me who I was? Would it mean the unleashing of a monster or the beginning of healing?

I searched for possible answers, but none felt right – until I started rereading a number of essays by Carl Rogers. Here’s a passage that seemed to deal with what I felt, though not directly with the idea of the double.

Carl Rogers wrote:

An even more common reaction to the path of life I have been describing is that to be what one truly is would mean to be bad, evil, uncontrolled, destructive. It would mean to unleash some kind of a monster on the world. … I meet [this view] in almost every client. “If I dare to let the feelings flow which are dammed up within me, if by some chance should live in those feelings, then this would be catastrophe.” This is the attitude, spoken or unspoken, of nearly every client as he moves into the experiencing of the unknown aspects of himself.

Sometimes people express this concern by saying that if an individual were to be what he truly is, he would be releasing the beast in himself. … [W]hen one is truly and deeply a unique member of the human species, this is not something which should excite horror. It means instead that one lives fully and openly the complex process of being one of the most widely sensitive, responsive, and creative creatures on this planet.
- On Becoming a Person – “To Be That Self Which One Truly Is”

That sounded right – learning gradually how to release, to live, those feelings could help to diminish the fear of what might happen if I set them free. If I could set aside that terrible fear and step into the other me, instead of trying to escape, perhaps I would begin to see these separated selves not as enemies but as parts of a whole. I had spent so many years hiding powerful feelings even from myself that I did come to believe I concealed a monster that must be kept locked up at all costs. He was like the madman in the attic room that must never be opened by anyone, least of all by his keeper.

Kierkegaard wrote: “Dread is the possibility of freedom.” It is the sign that an opening into life can occur if that feeling is recognized as a step toward accepting everything you are.

And it’s true that the work I have done to get through recovery has diminished the intensity of fear about releasing the feelings I had hidden away. The dark part of me – the monster – really seems now more shadow than substance.

But as wonderful as that change has been, there is still a power about the idea of my own double that I do not understand. There is much to learn that even goes beyond recovery from depression, as critical and life-saving as that has been. So I keep searching – and I don’t know where this might take me.

I have no idea if the powerful draw that I feel to this concept is widely shared or not. Is it something that pulls at you? What have you made of it?

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Following the last post, I need to expand on the idea of changing the mindset of recovery to that of finding purpose for the future. Just as I could undo the belief in my perpetual illness, I could also undo the belief that there had been little meaning or value in what I had done in the past. In other words, purpose might not be something I have yet to discover.

The insistent verdict of depression that I’ve accepted for so long, with its refrain of my worthlessness and failure as a person, only undermined the idea that I could ever have done anything of value in the past, or could in the future. I’ve known for a long time that what depression told me wasn’t true, but I believed that it was. I had to be able to change that mindset, and I remembered a couple of famous quotes:

- Pascal said in his Pensees
about the search of a doubting man for God:
“You would not be seeking Him, if you had not already found him.”

- Gandhi once said in a speech, as quoted in Conquest of Violence
:
“The bond of the slave is snapped the moment he considers himself a free being. He will plainly tell the master: I was your bondslave till this moment, but I am a slave no longer…”

I had to stop thinking I was a slave to this condition; I had to see the purpose I had already found.

I do not in any way mean to imply that major depression is only a matter of mindset and belief. No distortion of thought and emotion that can drive people to kill themselves could only be that. But it has been true for me that until belief, conviction and thinking had started to change, there was no hope for dislodging depression as the major force in my life.

How could I begin to sort out my experience and find this purpose and direction – or meaning, as Viktor Frankl puts it? I wanted to focus first on my work life, where I had recently made a huge breakthrough. The new sense of excitement, however, had only served to heighten the contrast with the negative feelings I still had about what I had done in the past. To change that old belief about my life up to that point – especially my work life – I needed some method to start sorting it out and help me cut through the confusion that had previously made this task so difficult.

Though it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit it, I found a simple tool not in the writing of a philosopher, spiritual leader or psychologist but in a blog post by one of the online gurus of marketing. Chris Brogan *wrote* about the idea that people trying to market their own services needed to present a simple story about who they were, what their passion was and what unifying purpose tied together everything they had done in their careers.

Taking this method out of the context of “personal branding,” I looked back at the types of work I had done to find that unifying story. A couple of things stood out.

• I have always tried to interpret between groups and individuals of different values, cultures and histories so they could more effectively communicate and learn from each other.

• I have always done this work with people in conflict and have had a driving interest in learning what they had faced in their life experiences and how these encounters had shaped their values and beliefs.

• I have worked through many media and professional roles, but my most effective and fulfilling has been writing.

To get to the heart of my work life: I’m a writer, interpreter and mediator. Writing is what I’m most passionate about because I love the written word and because it is my method of discovery. It doesn’t even matter how good I might be. It’s what I do.

This is not news to me at an intellectual level. What has been building for some time – and is new – is the inner conviction, the felt belief, that there is plenty of meaning and value in the essential work I have always done. My purpose is already there, and I’m running with it. This is my way of acting in the world instead of hiding my fearful and doubting self in a thick blanket and imagining I’m invisible.

That’s an insight about my work life. It’s only step one.

What have you found in looking back in time to find the purposes that have shaped what you’ve tried to do? Whether you’ve been successful or frustrated is not the point. What’s been there all along?

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A strange thing happened recently in the midst of confusion over multiple recovery strategies. I suddenly realized that something had changed deep down – at the level of basic belief about myself. But before I can explain, I need to back up for a moment.

I’ve been searching for some time to find the right combination of therapies, medication, spiritual practice, physical activity – anything and everything I could work with. My goal has been to develop a new adaptation to depression – adaptation, not cure, because after decades of living with the illness I have come to assume there would be no permanent getaway, no final flag-waving victory.

What I hoped for was that I could believe, once and for all, that depression and I were not the same, that it was simply an illness that would strike from time to time but then pull back. I would no longer feel its presence everywhere poisoning my life. I would come to change the deep belief, that has never fully gone away, that the voice of depression is right, that I’m not worth much at all.

But I’ve been having trouble finding the right combination of actions to stabilize progress toward that kind of recovery. As I say, I’ve been trying many things – writing this blog, meditating, nutrition, therapy, and on and on. True to one of the worst aspects of depression, however, my mind often drifts and loses focus, motivation lags, and I lose track of what I’m doing, fail to sustain any strategy for long. I had begun to believe that I would never experience recovery in a meaningful way. – And then this strange thing happened.

I started to feel better – much, much better. Now this is a relative state for me – it’s not like springing out of bed for my morning Superman flight around the neighborhood nor even like Might Mouse flashing to the rescue in song. No, it’s a lot simpler than heroic leaps to a powerhouse life. It’s about taking steps in recovery. Usually, these are halting, stumbling, and I’ve had little faith that they would lead to permanent change – but there is something different about this. It’s not like the reprieves I’ve had in the past – even those that lasted a very long time.

This feels like the real thing. It’s not so spectacular that I can raise a shout of triumph. In fact, it’s hard to put a name to the feeling. In one sense, it’s as clear as can be. I feel like myself, I am full of purpose and have the energy and humor to do what I want to do. I also have the awareness and the presence to be a part of my family again, instead of the hidden husband and dad who might as well be away on a trip, for all the closeness I can have with those nearest to me. But the deeper part of this goes beyond even those most precious gifts. I’ve had that sense of myself restored before, I’ve returned to family life, I’ve excelled in what I wanted to do – only to lose it all over again to depression – and again and again.

I’m reminded of the stories of friends who are recovering alcoholics. They’ve told me of returning to rehab for 30 or 40 or 70 times until that 71st or 53rd or whatever visit (there is almost always a precise number) when they realized that something had changed, something was different, something had shifted. It might take them a while to confirm, or it might suddenly be clear as bright light that this was the turning point. After that, recovery took the lead, though they never lost the knowledge of the danger they were in, or the need to keep working at recovery every single day.

Similarly, I feel that shift going on in a deep place, and I know that I can build on that with new confidence. I don’t know why it’s happening – and I’m the sort who keeps trying to understand the why’s of everything that comes my way. Thinking hard about the why’s in this case seems meaningless. After all, there has not been a why for depression for decades. Sure, I can point to traumas of youth as the likely precipitating causes, but after many years the condition stopped being a reaction to any event – to anything at all. It was a background condition I lived with. At times it would take me over. At times it would recede. No cause, no provocation – it was just there.

So does there have to be an explanation when something much brighter and happier is taking the place of depression? No, not at all. I’ve learned through writing this blog that this inner shift had to happen before any permanent change could happen.

I had to believe – madly, truly, deeply – that I simply had the right to be alive – the right to take up space in the world, to love, to find happiness, to succeed. That belief may not have anything to do with the biochemistry of depression or genetic inheritance or family history or trauma or anything else. I didn’t have it before; I have it now. How it arrived is a mystery. Perhaps it results from the totality of efforts to date – but I have done all those things for years, so why now?

Perhaps it is simply a gift that can’t be questioned – a gift that may have been there all along. Now it’s part of me.

Can you share a story about a change of inner belief that started you in a new direction?