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In response to a recent post, Clinically Clueless commented that, for her, recovery was a process, not a destination. She needed to keep aware of it, like those recovering from addiction, in order to catch the signs of relapse. I’ve thought of recovery in a similar way, certainly not a state you arrive at and then take for granted. These days I consider it more like a set of skills that I have to keep practicing. I need them almost every day.

But I’ve also been unwilling to think of myself as always in recovery, as I wrote in this post last year. I want the different way of living that should come next, one with the vital energy that depression drains away so completely. Sure, symptoms linger on, and that’s why the skills to deal with them are so important.

In the past year, I came to believe that I had recovered, that I was “there.” It took quite a while before I felt OK with saying this out loud or writing it down in this blog. There had been so many false “recoveries” that I couldn’t quite believe I had changed so deeply. But it gradually dawned on me that my way of living each day had a new energy about it. I knew what I wanted to do and could get it done. I laughed about mistakes that I used to take as disasters. I started reconnecting with my family and friends, instead of lurking about in shadowy absence all the time. (However – tons of work to do in restoring relationships – much more about that coming up in another post.)

Most of all, as I wrote here at a critical moment, my belief about myself had changed. I no longer assumed I was all wrong as a person, a fraud, worthless – that endlessly replayed recording. There wasn’t any recording. I didn’t start thinking how fine and OK I was. I was simply feeling, thinking, behaving differently, without that constant bleak drag of heavy chains.

It’s true I’m not done with the symptoms, but I do feel done with the beliefs of depression. Without the power of those negative beliefs behind them, the symptoms are more like old habits. After decades of doing things their way, I have to remain aware when I find myself repeating one of those patterns.

For example, I still have a habit of reminding myself of every mistake and failure I’ve ever made. I can’t pretend I won’t keep thinking that way for a while longer – it’s a hard habit to break. However, running myself down for thinking negatively and trying to avoid those thoughts doesn’t work. Instead, I observe them and remind myself, that whatever actually happened back then, it’s over and done with. I can’t undo it now. The obsessive quality of those memories is gone because I don’t take them as confirmation of what a fool or idiot I am – as I used to do. I don’t believe that anymore.

In this sense of the need to change old habits, recovery is a process that keeps on – and on. I’m very much in the midst of it. But it’s also true that I’m living in a different place from the depressive home I used to live in. I guess I could say that recovery is both a process and a destination – but not the final one. It’s another step toward getting reconnected with people, restoring a sense of purpose, letting myself be surprised.

At that point, the mindset switches from getting over depression to sustaining wellness in all its richness. That’s where insightful guides like Evan become especially helpful. After perfecting the art of ill-being for so many years, I’m working on the skills of well-being for a change. And I have a long way to go. Feeling better is great

It’s a lot more challenging than depression because depression gives you all the answers to every experience in life. Of course, all the answers are pretty much the same – whatever it is, I’m no good at it and never will be. That explains everything – so, if you accept that answer, you can just sit back and watch the life seep away. Being present for my life definitely beats being absent, but after decades of doing things the depressed way, this doesn’t happen all at once.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was working on a series of ebooks about recovery. My hope is to outline what I’ve learned – and am still learning by trial and error – by drawing out those practical skills that have helped me get through this long effort to get back into life. This step-by-step experience is the theme of the new site I’m developing: Recovery from Depression.

Perhaps that’s not quite the right name, though. It might be better to call it something that gets at reconnecting with life – the third phase that takes you beyond recovery. Any ideas? How do you think about recovery?

Recovery from depression meant a lot of change in the way I lived, and cutting out the stress of a tension-filled job was at the top of the list. Once I had ended that life of constant pressure, I could feel the relief at the start of each day.

A freedom and energy filled me, and I could step at once into the work of writing that I had long wanted to do. That sounds like a happy ending, but things are not so simple.

Depression was not overwhelming me anymore, but the illness is generous with the legacies it leaves behind. Over the last year, I’ve had to deal with many of those. As I’ve often written here, there was no getting away from depression by going to a new place, finding a new job or trying different relationships. The same proved true of trying to leave stress behind by changing the kind of work I did.

I’ve kept stress with me almost every hour of every day. Instead of chasing the unattainable goals of someone else’s rules, I’ve set up plenty of my own. And not just rules about work. I’m too inventive to stop there. I have rules to follow about almost everything. At any moment, I should be following a rule or condemning myself for breaking one. Nothing is too trivial to merit its guidelines for measurement.

The rules are remnants of battered self-esteem – or rather the weapons of choice to do the battering. I would never have been able to push depression aside if I had not changed my belief about myself. Out went the assumption that I was worthless, bad, inadequate, doomed to fail (and on and on), but it’s taken awhile to dismantle the structure of rules that I had created to bind up that bad person.

Under the rules of depression, I wasn’t allowed to trust myself simply to take life as it came. No, rules had to confine me in narrow hallways allowing movement to certain rooms and not others. If I followed the rules, I could open another door – break them and doors shut in my face, just as I deserved. A judge was always present with a verdict of guilty, whenever I broke a rule by trying to do something too dangerous to be allowed. Writing drew on inner feelings that couldn’t be trusted out in the open, so the rules didn’t allow that. Judgment was swift for an infraction. My mind shut down – don’t go there, strictly off limits.

Without the force of depression, most of those rules disappeared, and I was free to do what I really wanted to do. But I immediately set about creating a new set of rules, most of them shaped by timing and deadlines. To start binding myself up with time might seem strange, but it’s a good route to the sort of self-judgment depression encourages. It’s an old habit, one that dies hard.

Here’s how it happens:

I was all set up to work full-time at online writing, but first I needed to set my goals and deadlines. Write many blogs on several different subjects, build a big readership, start to earn an income and do it all in one year. Having determined that I must meet those grand expectations, I needed projects with tasks, lots of them, each with its own duration and deadline, each having the highest priority. After that I created a daily schedule with pastel-colored blocks of time devoted to each major type of activity or project. It looked so impressive in my online calendar.

Of course, it’s the perfect set-up for disaster. With a long history of depression, I’ve had trouble meeting deadlines and finishing anything, and the old sequence begins again. Set high goals, fail to meet them, feel worthless, set more, try harder, still fall short – or, get everything done three times more slowly than I’d planned and feel hopeless about getting anywhere.

I can’t possibly meet all the goals with all those deadlines. I can see that clearly, but each time I try to drop something, I feel I can’t because it’s so important. If I don’t meet all these goals, I will have failed to…do what? Meet the arbitrary goals I have set for myself, of course. I know they’re arbitrary, but I can’t seem to let go of them.

Finally I have to face the reality that my work rhythm doesn’t match the schedule and need to make adjustments. I decide to give myself much more time – I move the task lines in the calendar days. Now those colorful blocks are bigger, more generous – but I still keep the schedule. There’s an underlying fear of erasing the whole thing. How can I face the day with a blank calendar staring at me – where’s the structure, where are the goals and tasks, the deadlines. No, they have to be there, just better suited to my style of working. Of course, it’s all still far more than I can get done.

On and on it can go. There’s no end to rules, to shoulds, to don’ts and dos. I’ve accomplished a great deal in the last year, but I haven’t met all my self-imposed goals, so it doesn’t feel like enough. If I don’t get out of the stress-by-rules trap, it will never be enough.

…….

I may not be depressed, but I haven’t fully shaken the habit of ruling myself into a kind of captivity. It’s self-willed rather than compelled by depression, but it’s still hard to manage. Fortunately, I know full well that it’s a legacy. The only purpose of the rules is to bring back the sense of worthlessness I’ve struggled to overcome.

So I’ve added the rule habit to the cognitive therapy list. Just as I learned to shut up the voice that kept condemning me as no good, I’m learning now the skill of undoing self-defeating rules.

Part of the problem is the perverse comfort of familiar misery tempting me back from the risks of a new and more fulfilling life. The deadly skills of living with depression were refined over decades, and I mastered them completely. I’m well on my way to kicking the old habits and learning the skills that support a richer life. But it’s taking more time than I’d hoped. ……

Taking more what? Time?? So who set a deadline on healing, John? It’s happening – amazingly, truly happening. So drop the deadline!

…….

Have you had a talk with yourself lately about rules and deadlines, time and stress?

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Lately, I’ve come across a number of questions online by plainly anguished people, asking: Why do I have no friends, no life? The first time I saw one this blunt, I reacted almost defensively, laughing as I recalled an old film in which a man hires a private detective to find out why he has no friends. Isn’t it obvious? But I knew so well how much the question implied. Lonely and depressed, I had often asked that same question, or at least felt the need to ask it.

I wrote an earlier post about the difference  I experience between loneliness and depression. Loneliness is a sadness at the loss of close relationships. It drives me to reach out to people. Depression pushes me away from them. When I feel these two at the same time – as I can if the depression is not too severe – the tension of these opposing forces makes it all the harder to find the help I need.

Thinking back over many years of living with depression, I can quickly find many reasons why I had such trouble finding a friend to talk to when I most needed one. (I’ll set aside the much worse problem of not talking to my wife. I’ve said a lot about the reasons behind that, especially in this post.) Here are some of the problems from my experience. I can’t say how true they might be for others.

1. Sometimes it wasn’t I who had an issue with reaching out but friends who had trouble opening themselves to listen. Many people refuse to talk about depression or other serious illnesses. I first found that out when I had cancer. It was stunning to me that a few people I had known quite well simply disappeared from my life. Though I never heard any explanation from them, my wife and I believed they couldn’t face the risk of emotional involvement and possible loss.

   Depression adds another dimension. Many may feel helpless in the face of a friend’s pain and despairing mood. When I reached out for support, some friends were sympathetic but at a loss as to what they could do to help. And, of course, some friends are not in the habit of probing their own emotional lives and run from the idea of listening to someone else trying to go deeply into feelings. That’s a language they haven’t learned and never want to know.

2. One habit of my own depressed thinking was to assume that everyone I met had the same negative and contemptuous view of me that I did of myself. I projected my own shame into their minds and then retreated before the dislike I was sure they felt. It’s so strange to imagine that this could have been such a common occurrence, but it was. I stopped myself from reaching out because I “knew” these friends wanted to have nothing to do with me.

3. Then there was the isolating drive of depression, the belief that I was in too much pain to face anyone – too lost in despair to move. I believed I could survive only by cutting myself off from everyone, yet that only intensified the feeling of having nowhere to turn. I ruled out the possibility that anyone could break through the wall I’d put up around me. The result was that I went more deeply into despair. Eventually, the crisis passed, but it wasn’t the isolation that had helped me survive. That only increased the likelihood that I might push myself over the edge.

4. When feeling more numb than despairing, I could often get out and talk to people, even at social gatherings. But I became very nervous at what I might say. It wasn’t uncommon for me to make an attempt at getting to know someone or to get into a personal issue with a friend. But the words I found myself speaking were not at all what I intended. They had an edge to them, putting a jab into each pleasantry, souring a compliment with a sarcastic tone, or pouring out so much so fast that I sounded impossibly egocentric and uninterested in anyone but myself. I acted like someone I would never want to know. Of course, people could tell at once that I had “issues” and walked the other way.

5. So often, I had to mix with people when I wanted only to hide. I made it hard for anyone to find me, no matter how many people might be in the room or how prominent my role was supposed to be. Emotionally, I lost connection with what was happening and just watched it go by. I felt so small and tried to be invisible. If anyone asked me a question, I’d become tongue-tied, or, if I tried to say much, the words and thoughts came with painful slowness. It was impossible for anyone to talk to me.

6. At other times, anxiety and fear could hold me back from talking freely. Taking part in conversation was hard because I had to double-think everything I wanted to say. There was a danger in the simple spontaneity of conversation among friends – a danger for me of any uncontrolled talking. I had to reflect to get the words just so, and then would miss the right moment as talk flowed on to something different. It’s hard to imagine now, but talking freely felt risky, as if an inner violence might escape my control.

7. Apart from all this, there was the natural reaction anyone might have at suddenly hearing from me when I was in need of someone to talk to. Wrapped up in myself and in depression, as I was, my reaching out was an attempt to meet my own need in a one-sided way. Not only that, but my friends would not find me at all even if they wanted to listen and offer support. I wasn’t the same person because I was driven by the strange, isolating rules of depression. Even if I didn’t want to be hidden, I was nowhere to be found.

All this added up to a comprehensive strategy for remaining friendless. And that’s what it was – a series of my own actions to keep me isolated from the help that friends might offer and pull me out of the life I’d had with them. This hit me one day when I was the one who was asked to listen to a friend in the midst of a terrible depression.

I met him at a restaurant for lunch one day, and I could tell at once that he had changed in a way that made him hard to recognize. Of course, he looked and sounded the same, but there was nothing in his words or reactions that was like my friend. He was lost, partly in rage, partly in despair.

When I tried to tell him the deep sympathy I felt for what he was going through, that only made him angry. More than that, I felt a deep rage boiling inside him as his eyes stared through me with steel intensity.

It was especially hard to see him this way since I knew I was looking at myself.

What has your experience been in trying to reach out to friends when deeply troubled?

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The question continues to puzzle me: How did I get over depression? That deep change began about 18 months ago, and it’s been a year since I knew for sure that something fundamental had shifted. The nemesis wasn’t after me anymore. In fact, I couldn’t find that thing anywhere near me.

After so many temporary recoveries, I was cautious about saying – or even thinking – that I could finally be free of it. So I just kept on moving through each day. That was fine for a few months until I finally had to admit that everything was different. I felt fully alive again.

Why did it take so long? I struggled with that question for a while and got nowhere. Then, I woke up one day and realized that at some point I had become strangely comfortable with depression. Even while working hard to get over it, I had also been working hard, half consciously, not to change.

That was a thought I did not at all want to accept, but at some level it rang true.

There had been a certain comfort in when I’d figured out that depression was far more pervasive than I’d ever imagined. The condition accounted for so many of the problems I had long taken as proof of how empty I was. Knowing myself as a depressed person was a big step up from knowing myself as a worthless one.

There was a big risk in the change I would have to go through to find another me – a recovered one. Even though I yearned to be free of the suffering, emotionally I was telling myself: I’m not ready yet.

I didn’t understand depression all at once. There were key moments when I suddenly grasped new dimensions of the condition. Each of them helped seal me into a depressed – and passive – identity.

The first was simply finding out in my twenties that part of what I was going through was called depression by a bona-fide psychiatrist. The word wasn’t just a general part of my vocabulary anymore. It was official. As far as I understood at the time, though, that simply referred to periods of despair when I had suicidal thoughts and no energy to move. The psychiatrists I saw shared a then common attitude that depression was a side issue. The important thing was to get to the depths of family history, trauma and all the hidden influences that had shaped me. In that context, depression could even be useful as a stimulus to probe more deeply into the real issues. Nobody talked about medication or any other special treatment for it unless I was in a full-blown crisis.

Much later, I realized that depression was a more serious and pervasive problem than I had thought. It may seem strange to say that, but I had convinced myself that the dark moods were a relatively minor problem. I thought I was highly functional most of the time, even when it became obvious to everyone close to me that I was often in trouble.

Depression, I now found, accounted for problems of mental clouding, lack of focus, slowed thinking and talking, intense anxiety and many other symptoms. The relief in that moment came from understanding that I wasn’t the only one going through this and that those mind- and will-cripplers weren’t evidence of my inadequacy as a person. Instead, all these problems came together in the illness of depression.

The next eye-opener was that periods of depression had no cause in immediate experience. I believed it was the background condition of my life. It was always there and would keep on returning.

In the 90′s, a doctor let me know that new drugs could effectively treat depression, and for the first time I regularly took medication. The drug was called Prozac, and I felt great for a few months. Then it stopped working, and I was off on a long journey to find the right drug with the promised cure. I never found it, but now I was looking outward for medication combined with other treatments to take care of the illness.

Then I found there was a term for the disappointing results with all the treatments I tried. They were not ineffective. I was the problem because I was treatment resistant. Now it seemed inevitable that I would never get away from depression. My version was self-sustaining and could not be treated successfully.

Later I discovered my full DSM diagnosis and the number assigned to it, and I felt more settled than ever into a life built around a struggle with depression. There was a strange security and comfort in having this bad news. I knew, or believed, that I had found the answer. I was a depressed person for life. That’s who I was.

It was painful, to be sure, but this identity gave me answers for everything I went through. I had constructed a home where I lived with depression. We were on intimate terms. It made me desperate at times, and I couldn’t understand how it could keep returning and ruining so much that I tried to do. I’d scream at it, but always felt – that’s me, and that’s it. Nobody can end it, so I have to accept a life of constant struggle.

That certainty was my comfort.

But another mind-flip suddenly made life much more complicated. There was a different way to look at this. How could I possibly get back to real living if I didn’t put myself at the center of recovery and stop waiting for “treatment” to take care of me? That was the beginning of real change, but the idea was both empowering and scary.

How would this work? Why did I imagine that I could trust the progress I might make? Would this turn out to be false hope once again? At times I was a determined warrior steadily advancing. At times I was afraid of the future and made a cautious retreat. My fallback position wasn’t so bad. I’d read many stories about people who had come to terms with lifelong depression, even finding a spiritual meaning to their lives. Surely, I could live with that.

But I kept at. I may never know exactly how or why I changed for the better and for the first time trusted recovery. But I do know how I got out of the trap of comfort that might have prevented me from trying.