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, 04 May 2008 20:09:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by notsogoodphotography at Flickr
Which insightfully bewildered comic strip character was it who said: I never knew what I was missing until I lost it?
I read that line about ten years ago after a series of surgeries had removed a few expendable body parts and left me in a lot of pain during the weeks of recovery. Suddenly I thought of all the things a healthy body lets you do – simple things, like bending down to get your shoe on, that I had never imagined having trouble with, or complicated things, like climbing mountains, that I had never realized I might someday might dream of doing. So those words hit home.
Depression wasn’t so immediate in impact as surgery. Instead it crept up on me over such a long period that I didn’t realize how much energy of life and mind was disappearing until I got to a point where others had to tell me what I had lost. A basic force for life had gone missing, and I wasn’t sure I would get it back. It was no small part of depression’s voice to tell me over and over again how I had wasted life, and I hadn’t fully realized what was passing me by. Strange how a comic strip character can make you laugh about a condition that wants to leave you hopeless and humorless all the time, that wants you to think about loss, about what you lack that normal people still have. Comic insights often run deep.
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Posted in Explanations, Surviving at Work, Growing Up with Depression, Experience with Treatments | Tags change, cycle, depression, disease, energy, health, loss, normal, pattern, recovery, work | 8 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:45:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by fdecomite at Flickr
I’ve just gone through a six weeks experiment to see if a moderate dose of lithium would strengthen an antidepressant that’s been fading in effectiveness. No such luck. Instead, I went through a tortured sequence of headaches, dizziness, muscular wobbliness, loss of balance, tremors and thick mental fog that always hits in depression but this time was intensified by the strange poison in my blood. I felt mentally impaired for several weeks, with difficulty retaining enough organizing facility to give a short presentation. Try doing your job when you’re under that influence. The crisp one-two-three main points at a meeting become uh, one is something like this or maybe that and somewhere in here is two and was there another point, uh, let’s see, uh, well, never mind. Eyes glaze over, exasperation is high, things are said, I am called on the carpet afterward. That’s humiliating, though plainly justified, and it’s just not the way I’ve been regarded by my peers before the onset of this last period of illness that now adds up to several years.
The lithium experience may have intensified the sluggishness of thinking that always comes with depression, but that symptom even without the impact of lithium has done more to undermine my effectiveness at work than any other. I’ve written other posts about this problem, but things have only gotten worse in terms of performance. Since I can’t function at anything like the top of my game anymore, I’ve decided to pull back from active practice and instead focus on using the knowledge I’ve gained through 25 years in a profession to write and mentor younger people trying to learn the ropes. Those are things I can still do quite well.
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Posted in Surviving at Work, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags career, change, depression, failure, joy, mind, obsession, profession, work | 8 comments
