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
Sun, 04 May 2008 20:09:00 GMT
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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
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:55:00 GMT
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In a previous post I started thinking aloud if my stance toward depression could change from hostility toward an invader to the acceptance of a primal force in my make-up, something that was giving me a message I was imperfectly grasping. I’ve found a remarkable book that helps me respond with new energy to this terrible condition. It is Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun
. This series of essays by a prominent French psychoanalyst evokes the ways in which artists have portrayed states of depression in order to transcend the suffering of this condition. Though at times the language is dense with post-Freudian terminology, it is also beautifully evocative of the experiences of melancholy and depression and the powerful insights of creative minds in grappling with the problem of living with an illness that takes hold of the mind and feelings so pervasively.
The psychoanalytic theory that tries to explain all this is less important than the fact that it pushes my thinking in the here and now to a new understanding of the strange interplay of basic forces inside me. It helps me consider the dynamic of what I experience quite apart from explanations rooted in past family history. Though psychoanalytic theory is rooted in that history, Kristeva presents the dynamic within the psyche in symbolic terms that make it possible to separate the forces inherent in depression from the particular circumstances of loss or trauma that initially triggered them. Those circumstances, after all, cannot be changed – the family past is completely gone – but the immediate drives toward destruction or hope are the experiences I have to work with right now.
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Posted in Explanations, Connecting, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags Black Sun, Dostoevsky, forgiveness, hope, Julia Kristeva, life, loss, love, Nerval, psychoanalysis, transformation | 3 comments
