Posted by JohnD
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Ever since reading about Bill Wilson’s
Sick soul? Now I’m not saying that depression is a spiritual sickness, but my search for a way to get beyond that condition at least coincides with another lifelong search, the driving need to understand spiritual life.
Read more...Posted by JohnD
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.
Read more...Writing can help in the struggle to recover life from major depression. There are no miracles promised here but a hard look at what might help you. The focus is on changing the destructive inner beliefs and despair that can threaten your life. That takes time but the payoff is real change. How does that happen? Check the About page link for an introduction to this blog.
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