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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?

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My mother survived two heart attacks but died twice before her death. That’s the way she saw it. Her heart stopped both times, but she fought her way back. The second heart-stopping attack occurred during an operation for a different problem. She was 94.

I only learned about this complication when I visited her the next day. She looked a bit worn down but beamed at me and announced that she had done it again. Even under anesthesia she had found the strength to fight her way back. She was radiant, triumphant.

The trouble was that her powerful drive to live was not matched by a drive to live happily. She had no path to wellbeing.

I often felt that way as I tried to make progress in recovery from depression. I made the fierce decision – not once but several times – to pull myself back from the brink and commit myself to living with every bit of energy I had. But then what? What’s the next step that helps me keep this going? I had no roadmap of my own, no sense of what recovery required or what I needed to do to sustain the drive that had kept me going through the worst moments.

Of course, there were things to do – get back into therapy, take these new medications, try meditation, eat this but not that. These were puzzle pieces handed to me with the assurance that each would help but without the larger picture of the complicated whole they fitted into. I waited for them to work. They didn’t.

This wasn’t what I’d had in mind when full of the hope that comes from renewing the basic commitment to life. I knew that recovery depended on my taking action, that I couldn’t sit back and wait to be cured by the latest treatment. And I knew very well that I’d have a hard time, that many periods of terrible depression would likely recur when I’d feel lost and hopeless. Especially at those times, I wanted to have a reference point, a sense of the overall arc of recovery to keep in mind.

Of course, I would know as soon as I was feeling better, getting mental focus back and losing the many other symptoms. But how could I expect to sustain that improvement if I didn’t understand how I’d gotten there? I didn’t want to keep worrying about relapses. As I’ve written here before, I wanted to get beyond recovery to a full life. I wanted my attention and energy to switch from sustaining recovery to sustaining wellbeing.

The books and theories on depression – and the therapists who put them into practice – provide descriptions of symptoms, explanation of causes, and lists of activities to undo its damage. There are lots of principles to keep in mind, lot of advice to follow, but something is always missing, not just from the books but from the treatments themselves. It took me a while to figure it out.

It’s this: I never felt empowered by them – or at least not for long, despite gaining many useful and important insights from each one. There are many different models to explain causes of the illness, and each model comes with its preferred treatment. In trying to apply them, it’s easy to forget the specifics of your own experience and focus primarily on what the model says. Too often, the treatments are promoted as the best buy in a therapy marketplace, and I wind up feeling like a consumer instead of the driving force behind my own recovery.

I found an example of a pattern of recovery while writing a recent series on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. From what I’ve learned, it isn’t used that often – the quality of available care is usually limited to the treatment of those symptoms that respond, sometimes, to medication. Among practitioners of more comprehensive approaches, however, there seems to be a high level of agreement on the phases of recovery. In varying forms, it has been recognized for over a hundred years, long predating the general recognition of PTSD as a disorder with its own DSM criteria.

Judith Herman, in her widely influential Trauma and Recovery, reviewed the recovery concepts described by several of the researchers who preceded her. They all had found that recovery required three distinct phases. (Some researchers identified as many as ten, but these could be consolidated under three basic dimensions.)

The first phase consists of stabilizing the worst symptoms of PTSD and creating a therapeutic environment that feels safe and encourages a sense of trust. Since personal safety and trust are primary victims of traumatic experience, healing cannot take place until they begin to be restored.

The second stage is an exploration of memories about the trauma and a re-experiencing of the events. The idea is to defuse the memories so that they become less terrifying and no longer have to be avoided. For Judith Herman, this means remembrance and mourning.

It’s the third stage that sets Herman’s pattern apart from the others most clearly. While most researchers talk about the individual’s need to rebuild or reintegrate the personality, learn new coping skills or rekindle an inner drive, Herman goes further and emphasizes the need to reconnect with other people. Once the sense of self has been restored, the task is to rebuild the relationships and sense of purpose that have been undermined by the impact of traumatic experience.

Her names for the three phases avoid clinical terminology and shift the emphasis from the techniques of the therapist to the experience of the person in healing: regaining a sense of safety and the ability to trust; remembering trauma and mourning loss; reconnecting with people. The role of therapy is to empower, and those trying to heal the wounds of trauma need to take the initiative at all times. Nothing can be done for them. The therapist’s role is to offer guidance and support.

This is the sort of basic roadmap that seems essential not only for initial healing but even more for moving beyond recovery to rebuild a damaged life. At every step, it emphasizes what those in recovery have to do for themselves and the conditions for recovery they need to put in place. It’s a whole person approach.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but having something like this would have been so helpful early on, long before I had experience of multiple treatments and was living in confusion, fear and hopelessness. At that time, I did the one thing I knew about and went to a psychiatrist. Today, the first thing you’re likely learn about is medication. There’s no context for healing and little sense of empowerment – in fact, passivity is usually expected in response to expert treatment.

From the perspective of recovery now, I’m looking back to reconstruct what I went through to be better understand how I was able to come this far. I’m not sure what I’ll find, but I will share it here.

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In a couple of excellent posts, Susan at the Wellness Writer has written about ecotherapy, a form of treatment that seeks to restore the lost connections with the natural world that are essential to health. (She cites a new book of, the same name as a good introduction.) Of course, reconnecting is an important part of wellness, but it drove home the fact that we’ve so lost the natural connection that it’s now a treatment rather than a part of everyday life.

Of course, lack of connection to people, places, emotions – pretty much anything – is a hallmark of severe depression, and multiple therapies are usually necessary to help get a depressed person out of a world of gray sameness. Awakening the feelings and senses by participating in the natural world, in whatever form it might be available, can be a powerful way to begin this process. It’s also true, though, that people without depression need that same restorative connection to sustaining wellness.

No matter how many places I’ve lived in or traveled to, I’ve always felt a strong response to the natural setting. It’s a need to reach into those spaces to feel their influence and to let them work on me. Susan’s post reminded me of that dimension of my experience. It’s all too possible to lose touch with it, not only when depressed but also when overly absorbed by work.

The book,Ecotherapy, is especially interesting because it brings together essays on psychological, spiritual, social and political dimensions of restoring the human relationship to nature. (In this post, I’m talking about the personal dimension related to healing, and will look at other contexts in future posts.)

The “nature” discussed here and in many recent books and articles is not a single thing, but includes the flows of life and earth even in lands changed drastically by human cultivation. Entering wildland, rural areas of farm and range, or gardens covers many forms of healing experience. Before there can be healing, though, there has to be an openness to the sensations of each place, a relaxing of mind, a different awareness of one’s own physical presence. As Jim Nollman puts it in Why We Garden, this is not something we are born with.

… A sense of place evolves as we live, experience, grow, touch and perhaps taste soil, learn to predict weather, garden. … It begins to evolve only after a person starts to perceive himself or herself participating … with the natural processes of place.

…[A] sense emanates from every part of the body. In other words, a sense of place includes attitudes. And perceptions. And a touch of spirituality: a sensitivity to dreams, perceptions and visions. And gut feelings – like the gut feeling that is currently prompting so many of us to put down roots … .

He also describes a sense of place as including the relationship to place. As he says above, it’s not just about the thoughts and responses but also about participating, getting close to the natural processes of growth and change wherever they may be found. It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic contrast of experience than that between remote wildlands of vast extent and the backyard garden. Yet both in their own ways can awaken mind, feeling, body and soul to the sense, relationship and sustaining power of the natural world.

The experience of wilderness is that of participating in and responding to a power of nature far greater than anything in our normal scale of living. It is a reminder of a vaster order in life in which we have a place but which we do not control completely. For me, at least, part of the experience is the hard work of getting there, hiking with a backpack for miles. That’s a sort boot camp to purge and sweat out the stress and preoccupations of a more mind-centered self, full of tension, worry and depression. That purging relaxes me and brings back the ability to be surprised. It opens the senses to awareness and awe in the presence of forces so much greater than the plans of human minds. Then the awareness, the sense of what’s important, the experience of time, all begin to change. Healing, for me, is almost incidental to such deep changes of perception, feeling and thought.

Experience of nature at the small scale of the garden is all about participating in a different way, through the daily, hands-into-the dirt work of digging, planting, weeding, watering, composting and a dozen other jobs. It’s about watching closely the daily changes of weather, the influence of heat and cold, rain and drought, the content of the soil and what it can grow. The sense of time turns to seasons and cycles of growth, fruit and flower-bearing and decay. All around are the presences of living, growing things that instill a close responsiveness to their needs. Gardening adds to who we are as we concentrate thought, touch and all our senses on working with the natural processes unfolding before us.

Of course, it’s possible to heal in the presence of nature without quite so much labor. Walking into a garden or seeing mountains and canyons at a distance evoke two kinds of responses in me. One is the feeling of beauty and balance I get in the presence of great art, a restorative harmony that fills my being. Allied with that is a kind of blending into what I see in a way I think of as spiritual. I can’t get it very well into words because the experience gets into some part of me that precedes words and thinking. It is the stuff that words and ideas try to capture but never succeed at expressing. Words like transcendence, transformation, vision come to mind. Whatever the experience should be called, it’s often overwhelming, and it’s always healing.

These experiences are shared by everyone to some degree. What are some of the restorative places and moments that stand out in your memory?

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There is a link, though it’s a stretch, among recovery and the nests of birds that occurs to me on this fine spring day, and I’ll get there in a moment. Of course, life is blossoming out everywhere. The stunning medleys of the mockingbirds are in the air, and there’s much courting behavior among all the birds: the strutting, chest puffing and singing of males, the coy approaches and retreats of females. And of equal importance, they’re building nests for their future young.

I saw a crow sail up to a high spot in our neighbor’s spruce tree, not far from the towering line of eucalyptus where his kind usually hang out, a hundred feet above us. This crow carried a single thin, flexible twig much longer than his body. I wondered if that one strand was the first for weaving the nest. How do they begin – what holds the first piece in place? How long does it take to pick out and carry back all the twigs of just the right type – one strand at a time – until the whole structure is woven together? The crows know by instinct the intricate pattern to follow, exactly the materials to be used and the right shape and depth of the final product. The purpose it serves is just as clear.

I may lack the instinct, but I’ve been learning to put together the pattern, the structure to support a new life. And there’s my homely analogy. I’ve been weaving a nest for recovery, one strand at a time. Getting started and having that first piece stay in place has always been the hardest part. I’ve learned all sorts of methods, patterns and step by step pathways to get out of depression. Time after time, the whole thing would unravel, no matter how strong it appeared to be.

I believe the problem of the various treatments was the way they handicapped my thinking from the outset. They were telling me how to stop something, to end addiction, to overcome depression, to reduce stress and anxiety. That’s aiming for a negative, and, as important as it has been to stop those plagues, I need to see the positive side too.

Recovering means coming back from a loss, regaining lost ground. It is an activity, surely as hard as they come, which will support the future, but it is not that future itself. I don’t want recovery to become a constant. If I assume I won’t ever be free of condition X and that I am always threatened by its return, I have to apply the techniques of recovery as long as I live. Whatever relapses I may have, I can’t accept recovery and illness as a life sentence.

I don’t want to understate or downplay the importance of recovery itself. It is a tremendous accomplishment. It has taken everything I had to keep going after so many failed attempts. I always knew there was a different self that could be a lot better, however dim the memory of that person might be. Only a deep instinct to survive, a will to live, kept me going. That’s what I needed to end the dominance of depression in my life.

I celebrate that and will never forget all I’ve had to do to get this far. For the recovery to last, however, as the earlier ones have not, I have to break out of the mindset that my life needs to be dominated by depression in a different way, as the condition I am constantly working to control. I have to turn my mind and feelings toward a life with new purpose, not just a life in recovery.

For one last shot at my metaphor, those birds don’t go about building their nests as part of therapy. They are building the means to nurture new life, to extend the species into the future. They are born with that simple and compelling drive.

The instinct in people to live is just that basic – though for us it can be warped into its opposite by a mind estranged from its own nature. But we also need more, an inner  meaning to guide the spirit to fulfillment. And that is what I’m moving toward now.