Posted by JohnD
Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:44:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by ...Zeyneeep! at Flickr
Recently,
Melinda wrote a post about the role of forgiveness in her recovery and the difficulty she has had in forgiving her unrepentant father for abusing her in childhood. Reading this made me aware that I wasn't very clear in my own mind about the meaning of forgiveness. It is always mentioned as an obligatory part of recovery, and yet there has always been something elusive about the idea for me. How was it different from understanding past trauma, dealing thoroughly with its impact and letting go of the feelings of anger or hate? For I did learn to stop the constant blaming of present problems on those who harmed me when I was so young and unable to stand up for myself. Is that forgiveness, or is there something more.
I started thinking and reading to stop the confusion about the ideas and feelings I have about forgiveness. I quickly found that I was not the only one who had a hard time getting at the deeper meaning of this concept. It has different meanings in different religions and cultures, but there are a few major approaches I've found that helped me grasp more deeply the connection between what I had experienced and forgiveness.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags anger, blame, change, childhood, depression, forgiveness, harm, recovery, soul, spirituality, vengeance, victim, violence | 13 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:56:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by xip at Flickr
I wrote recently here about masking emotions from myself as I grew up through my college years. Here’s what happened to change that, or at least start me on a different path. As often happens with me, it started in a dream:
For so long, I lived in a beautiful fortress made of defiant walls. It stood remote in sheltered hills, safe from attack at any angle, approached only over steep rugged trails that few could manage. I often flew over it in dreams, its great length and height visible in every detail, almost touchable in my smoothly gliding passes. I would sail higher to see more clearly the narrow isthmus between great continents in which it lay hidden. But always I would wake in stillness within it.
Daily I strummed inside its intricate corridors. They never grew familiar, no matter how many times I walked them, mentally mapping each turn and door. The picture never stayed in my mind for long. In a vast structure of dark rooms I could be lost for days, looking for light in windowless corners, testing each door for new discoveries. At times, its night-like shadows would envelope me in comforting invisibility. I could see nothing, nothing could see me.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Growing Up with Depression, Connecting, Men and Depression | Tags anger, breakthrough, castle, dreams, family, isolation, life, lonely, love, melancholy, rage, recovery | 6 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:41:00 GMT
Jelena Popic – Fotolia.com
Some years back I took part in a series of group sessions that focused on helping people confront and deal with inner shame that had haunted them since childhood. It was the first group in my experience that got me to interact with other people not just through talk but through dramatic reenactments of past painful encounters. This experience was one of the first to wake me up to the ways other people might see me, free of the projection of shame I usually cast over the judgments of others. By working with the members of this group in recreating traumatic dramas and talking through each one afterward, I could finally begin to see the inner shame I carried as a depressed belief, not an objective reality. The people I knew only in this setting were tremendously supportive and gave me hard evidence to fight back against a heritage of shame built up in my boyhood.
There was one moment of frustration with that group, though, that opened before me all the emotional violence of my boyhood and teenage years. I had a choice to face it openly or keep clamping down and forcing the powerful emotions to break under the pressure of my refusal to let them out. There was no clear ending to that crisis.
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Posted in Explanations, Growing Up with Depression, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags aggression, anger, belief, depression, family, grief, group therapy, hidden feeling, home, love, rage, shame, trauma, violence | 13 comments
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:57:00 GMT
Some rights reserved by Hamed Saber at Flickr
When my mother died, I didn’t know what I felt. Throughout my life, I had been struggling to shed the influence of her searing and shaming words, her anger, at times rage, above all, her depression during my childhood. How many of us spend adult years still trying to get the attention and love that we never got from a distant parent? We know it’s not going to happen, but still we play over and over again the same roles we played as children. Once I was part of a therapy group that helped people reenact painful scenes from their family past in order to help rid those events of their power. The therapist at one point walked up to one fellow and said to him, face to face, “Your mother doesn’t love you!” – over and over again until the message really sank in. The guy looked so stricken, but the therapist went on to remind him that he was a splendid man in spite of his mother’s inability to connect with him. He didn’t have to look for the love that was never going to come. His mother had done what she could, but that was all in the past. His present was his own, and he was getting along just fine. The therapist might have been talking directly to me too, but I can’t say I ever stopped trying to win the love and approval of my mother. When she died, she was a different person in many ways than she had been when I was growing up, but, sadly for her, she never got over a fundamental hurt and disappointment that rooted itself deeply in her, probably when she was a kid looking for approval and love from her distant father. These things seem to go on and on through generations.
Several scenes came to mind in the days following my mother’s death:
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Connecting | Tags anger, death, depression, dream, family, grief, love, mother, therapy | 9 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:14:00 GMT
Photo Credit: Eric Gevaert
Today gave me a lesson in the value of anger. Yes, I’ve heard it all: anger bad – positive feelings good. Fine. Too much anger, and I’d better manage it or I’ll be out of a job, family, the whole works. Right. But there are times when the purely valid human feeling of anger can save me.
That’s what happened today. I’ve been moving along at a nice clip for the past week, getting a lot done, full of a sense of well-being, as if (dare I think it) I might be done with depression and all the life saboteurs that keep it company. Then today, I’m sitting in my office, and – wham – I know I’ve got to get out of there. I just have to pack up and leave. Now!
Some force is pushing through from within, like one of those wet toothy jack-in-the-box aliens that like to pop out of normal-seeming bodies in the movies. Come to think of it, that’s one way to imagine the big D, Depression, stirring around in there, getting ready to emerge, to blow apart my mere host personality, to trot around as a substitute me. Is Mr. Big D getting ready to emerge?
That’s motive enough to move. The voltage of fear keeps building. As that nervous pressure increases, my mind suddenly empties itself out. One minute I’m buzzing with ideas of what I have to do, and then, poof! Nothing. I look around to see where those thoughts have gone – where are my mental lists! I’m dead without my lists! I try to seize a new thought – but as soon as I get one into that neuro-flow, it’s gone. Those thoughts know something I don’t. I’d better get out of there too! Perhaps I can step out of this troubled mind, go somewhere else and try a new one on for size.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Surviving at Work, Fighting Depression | Tags anger, depression, mind, rebellion, recovery, work | 2 comments | no trackbacks
