Posted by JohnD
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:13:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by a whisper of unremitting demand at Flickr
Merely Me wrote a wonderful post on the importance of bringing play back into everyday life. It is the forgotten tonic among adults in general and depressed adults in particular. She paints a vivid scene of a group therapy session where she coaxed recovering addicts into playing rather than talking about themselves. Some brought in precious toys they’d probably had for years, and everyone got immersed in their games. It sounded like they felt the release of a long-buried instinct – for play is surely one of the basic human instincts.
Her post brought to mind one of the most extraordinary people I’ve known. He was a born teacher infusing his own life and the lives of those around him with imagination and play as a natural part of his instinct for life.
Steven and his lifelong friend Maria arrived in town one day, found a small space they could rent to start a school and dubbed it Little Earth. Its first citizens were both kindergarten age kids and the dozens of figures emerging from the imaginations of this gifted pair. The little kids referred to them as the grownup kids because they took the imaginative adventures and instinctive games of children as seriously as any event in adult life. They accepted kids on their own terms, could speak their language, play with them, win their confidence and teach them through play-adapted methods.
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Posted in Connecting, Creativity | Tags AIDS, angels, ceremony, children, circus, death, education, imagination, instinct, life, magic, medication, Merely Me, play, school | 10 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:50:00 GMT
Photo Credit: winterling – Stockxpert
An active and aggressive side of depression, especially painful to recall, is the rage that used to blast through me at my wife and three boys. There are few things to equal the power for healing of the connection and love of your own family, and it’s a sign of the depth of isolation and emotional distortion that accompanies depression when that very connection is abused and threatened. But so it is, and, as Beyond Blue summarized a couple of months ago, research is identifying hostility, aggressive blaming and need for control as more typically male responses to the underlying changes going on in the mind and body as the illness deepens its impact over time.
The rage, the urge to break away, the impossibility of talking freely to my wife (or myself) were at their height when I had little or no awareness that these were all linked to the same illness. I knew I was subject to depression, but I thought of that problem as a name for the episodes of despair and paralysis that had been part of my life since childhood. Maybe migraines were related, I wasn’t sure of that – doctors had always treated those separately. But I was active at this time, building a new business, traveling a lot, feeling like I was getting somewhere. And yet there were these times, more and more frequent, when I knew damn well I was really out of control. Something just took over, and I struggled to stop it.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Partners to Depression, Growing Up with Depression, Men and Depression | Tags children, control, depression, family, love, marriage, men, parent, partner, rage, shame, trust | 2 comments
