Posted by JohnD
Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:44:00 GMT
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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
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:55:00 GMT
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The other day I looked back at a couple of posts by Therese Borchard at Beyond Blue about the behaviors that distinguish men and women in their responses to depression. She quoted two different studies in posts she published about a year apart, and that’s how long I’ve been mulling over writing about this subject.
I’m less interested these days in explanations and studies than in looking directly at experience, but in this case important questions come to mind. What would set men and women apart in their behaviors? How much of the difference is due to our being conditioned to behave in certain ways to fit the social role of a man or a woman?
You can read the full posts and citations to the studies they draw on here and here. I won’t repeat the differing behaviors of men and women in full.
One of the basic contrasts is that men are more likely to blame other people or external circumstances for inner turmoil and to act out in overt, often violent or abusive ways. They self-medicate with alcohol, sex or other addictions and feel they aren’t loved or appreciated enough. Women are more likely to blame themselves and ask how they can be better as a spouse, parent or worker. They tend to self-medicate with food, friends and love and ask themselves how they can be more lovable.
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Posted in Explanations, Growing Up with Depression, Men and Depression | Tags abuse, alcoholism, boys, childhood, depression, disempowerment, friends, girls, medicate, men, mother, relationship, self, terrencereal, Therese Borchard, trauma | 7 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:12:00 GMT
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A breakthrough to healing can come at the most unexpected time. The other night I was trying to divert myself by watching a mystery episode from an old British series. Instead of taking my mind off things, this story pushed me into a past history I had long kept at a safe distance.
The film built its story around a soldier haunted by his experience of violent death in Bosnia, especially the sight of a basement floor piled deep with the corpses of women and children. Much later, after his return to civilian life, the shock of another act of violence brings back the Bosnian memories and plunges him into such an intense guilt that he loses his power of speech. A minister, he somehow internalizes guilt for such horrors that have nothing to do with his own actions and is even driven to seek atonement for them. And so he tries to find punishment by confessing to a killing he did not commit. It’s based in part on Pat Barker’s fine novel, Regeneration
, about a World War I combat veteran slowly brought back to health through the efforts of a gifted psychiatrist. These stories bring to life the hard work of recovery.
Certain dramatic scenes often have powerful resonance for me, often triggering grief and tears, but I have never been able to understand what was going on. Why should such powerful feelings fill me in response to fiction? I could see reasons for such reactions when brought on by the real-life stories of veterans suffering complete collapse from the traumas of combat. However, I thought of that more as empathy for their suffering rather than as response to my own far less violent family disturbances. The other night, though, things began to get clearer.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags childhood, family, feeling, grief, guilt, life, loss, love, mind, patbarker, PeterKramer, recovery, regeneration | 15 comments
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:38:00 GMT
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Do you think it’s possible to be going through some phase of depression and have your emotions so locked away inside you that you don’t notice a thing? I’ve written about feeling anger and rage and never associating those feelings with depression, though they were tightly bound together. But here I’m thinking of an earlier time in my life – mostly in high school and college.
Through the teenage years, I sealed all feeling up tight. I guess that was an extension of childhood and being one of those kids teachers admired as so precocious, so adult. The other kids might rage, cry, scream where I would analyze and shake my head at their childish behavior. That distancing got more extreme as a teenager. I didn’t show anything but mildly friendly feeling to anyone. I did feel things deeply, at least fear, anxiety and anger – but these were no-shows externally. I was calmly cheerful most of the time. There was a mask in place, and the only symptom I thought I had were frequent migraines. But that was something inherited from my mother. I knew that because she explained it to me as she lay on the sofa sinking fast into her own depression. I would grow out of that, she said.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Growing Up with Depression, Men and Depression | Tags childhood, college, depression, energy, face, family, game, high school, judgment, mask, men, mother, shame, social anxiety, teenage, women | 6 comments
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:48:00 GMT
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I have a family in my memory that can’t be quite the family I grew up with. Each of us is more intense than we probably were, as lived moments collapse backwards into a few vivid scenes. Who knows if what I recall is what happened? That doesn’t matter so much compared to the lifelong impact of the almost mythic figures I made of my mother, father, older brother. They took on this psychic life while hidden just across the border on the other side of consciousness, and then emerged again, endowed with new power. I’m remembering now this inner Brother, a figure a bit magical, a bit scary, a bit bigger than life.
His daring filled me with awe and fear. If there was a hidden spot to explore, he would charge recklessly into it. If there was someone to fight, he would start swinging, if there was a cop to defy, he would stand up to him. And if Mom needed a champion, he would go after Dad.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Connecting | Tags brother, childhood, depression, family, Fear, feeling, growing, memory, mother, up, violence | 4 comments
