Some Rights Reserved by Jose Tellez at Flickr.

There are no more beautiful and moving stories of healing than those told by Rachel Naomi Remen. Kitchen Table Wisdom is one of those books I come back to again and again. Each of its brief stories renders a moment of discovery that reveals a life’s meaning to someone lost in pain or rigid routine. As moving as these stories are, I had never thought much about the relevance of such experiences to my own life. It didn’t seem possible that the sudden revelation of meaning – and the strength it provides – could possibly result from my own severe depression. Not making the connection probably means that I glossed over such thoughts as these:

The best stories have many meanings; their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows. Revisiting such stories over the years, one wonders how one could not have seen their present meaning all along. … .

Knowing your own story requires having a personal response to life, an inner experience of life. It is possible to live a life without experiencing it.

She tells many stories that capture the awareness of purpose through such re-readings.

• A young athlete, embittered by the loss of a leg, emerges from depression when he finds he can help other young people going through the same kind of pain that he has suffered. His loss and depression themselves became the means by which he could help heal others, rather than the pure loss he had felt them to be.

• An emergency physician, after delivering hundreds of babies, stares into the face of one newborn as she opens her eyes for the first time, and he suddenly understands the meaning of the work he had done more as a technician than a human being. This time “he felt his heart go out to her in welcome from all people everywhere, and tears came to his eyes.”

• An elderly man overcomes his fear of a risky cancer operation by recalling in a daydream his bonds of love with his wife, his best friend, his brother. They all appeared to him, their eyes expressing the love they felt for him in return – and more came. “[I]n the end there were more than fifty or sixty of them, crowding into the living room and even into the hall. In this way he had known that his life has been of value to many others and found that it was of value still.”

But how could such revelations come out of the depression I had experienced for decades? For a long time, I could only look back in anger, bitterness or grief at having lost so much of my life to this illness. It all seemed like such a waste. All I could think of was what I had not done, what I had missed doing, never believing that there was any other side to that story.

Somehow all that changed, as I realized that I had shifted at a fundamental level of belief. I was able to look back at depression as a long period of desperate searching to understand what it meant to be human. Of course, everyone doesn’t need to go through prolonged suffering of this sort to find meaning in their lives. But in my case, the only way to stop feeling less than human was to understand what it meant to be fully alive and to believe that I was capable of a “real” life. Depression continually presented one side of that coin. All I really had to do was turn it over.

But for a long time I put tight boundaries around the search for a way out of depression. I kept running rings around my inner self, trying to revive the belief that I could do so much more and escape the paralysis of will. How is it possible, I thought, to keep plodding through this cycle from brief energy to long depression to energy to depression over and over again, like the endless succession of seasons through the years?

I was always trying to heal so that I could write from my deepest self, be happy with my family, feel alive with hope about mastering whatever might come my way. It was mostly about becoming the star of the Me Show, and I was looking at the world as an audience. I could never get free of depression to find that sort of fulfillment.

In another re-reading, I found a passage in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning that complemented Remen’s stories.

…[T]he true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. … [B]eing human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is … . In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

Stepping away from the circular pursuit of my inner self was hard to do consciously, but it seemed to happen on its own. I gradually realized, for example, that the purpose of this blog was not limited to my initial idea: self-discovery and, to be honest, praise and recognition – the applause of an audience for an actor. It was also a reaching out to people with stories that might be helpful to them. There was a very different sense of fulfillment in that.

Frankl refers to transcendence of self, but that’s such an ethereal word. I can’t live transcendence, but I can respond to the calls for help I hear so often in the world of blogging – and I can learn much more from others’ stories than I can from journaling my thoughts in solitude. In that exchange of depression’s stories I’ve found meaning I had never grasped before. I’m still at work catching up with Rachel Naomi Remen’s idea of learning what such stories have really been about all along:

We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory. We carry most of those stories unread, as it were, until we have grown the capacity or the readiness to read them. When that happens they may come back to us filled with a previously unsuspected meaning. It is almost as if we have been collecting pieces of a greater wisdom, sometimes over many years without knowing.

Some Rights Reserved by tore_urnes at Flickr

Thanks to isabella, and her recent posts on writing and healing (like this one), I’ve been thinking more about the way writing, creativity and healing fit together. From the beginning of this blog, I had no doubt that creative expression of all kinds, and writing for me, could bring about healing, even if only temporarily. I’m quite sure now that writing has been central to my recovery from depression, but I’m not at all clear how or why it has that effect. I doubt there could be a definitive answer about something buried so deep in the mind, but I’m constantly trying to find new ideas about the process. I’ve recently been reading two books by Anthony Storr, a British psychiatrist, that bring together many insights from the work of leading thinkers and creative writers.

Solitude: A Return to the Self and The Dynamics of Creation explore the role of creativity in healing and the overall process of human adaptation to experience. Here’s a brief paraphrase of a few of Storr’s major points that I’ve found especially helpful.

1. The mind understands the bombardment of sense impressions it is constantly receiving by organizing them into recognizable patterns – that’s a tree, that’s a person, that’s a car. In the same way, the mind needs to find patterns in the welter of feelings, thoughts, associations, images, dreams, etc. that crowd into its psychic space. A wave of emotion is separated into feelings – this is grief, this is happiness. Images appearing in the mind are picked out as memories, not scenes in the outer world. A word is linked to this memory and that feeling. According to Storr, creative work plays an important role in this ordering process.

2. In his view, when creating something ourselves or seeing the works that others have created, we’re attempting to integrate and reorganize inner experience in a way that deepens meaning and produces a feeling of balance. That process moderates internal tensions and brings a sense of peace and fulfillment. The unruly flow of emotions and thoughts grows calm.

3. Depression leads to a feeling of helplessness and paralysis. Doing creative work, to whatever degree possible, is a way of coping with this problem. Each activity contributes to a sense of control and mastery by linking ideas and feelings from different types of experience – or areas of the brain, in terms of neuroscience. Instead of feeling completely overwhelmed, a person can regain some level of confidence in the ability to function by imaginatively organizing physical things, words or fantasies.

4. As I’ve written here, a depressed person can also feel detached from the outer world and need to retreat into complete isolation. Storr points out that creative work is one of the tools for rebuilding the sense of connection between inner and outer worlds. I experience this like a reopening of my eyes to everyday things, colors, sounds and allowing in all the associations they have for me. It’s a reminder that I’m part of the world after all.

5. Many psychologists see the process of human fulfillment itself as the uniting of different aspects of personality and need. Each person makes an ongoing adaptation to new experience and relationships that draws often on unexplored parts of the mind. By integrating these elements, one can build an expanding sense of self and capability. Creative or imaginative work involves ordering symbols and patterns that have deep associations transcending logic and even conscious awareness to draw together different levels of mental activity. This helps an individual achieve the inner wellness on which continuing growth over time remains possible.

6. In an interest analogy to Buddhist traditions, Storr describes the mental state induced by creative activity as one of detachment. The mind becomes absorbed in the task at hand. It can then observe every thought and idea more dispassionately and come up with news ways to work with them. It is somewhat like the state of being completely present in the moment that can be achieved through meditation.

7. While attention is focused on writing or drawing, a sense of peacefulness develops. I usually feel this as a rich sense of satisfaction – even without reference to the specific content of what I’m writing. The act of being in that mental and emotional place restores me at a deep level. The way I put this in one post was that depression and all concerns simply disappear when I get to that unselfconscious level of concentration.

8. Storr finds it important to the process of adaptation and healing that creative work continues throughout life. No one who needs to express themselves this way ever feels they have it right. There is always a drive to do it better next time. And as life and reactions to experience keep evolving, new ways have to be found to reorder the inner world and adapt to everyday life. I think that’s why anyone engaged in any sort of creative activity feels so frustrated when it’s not “right.” The inner balance being sought hasn’t yet been found.

I emphasize these ideas among many in Storr’s insightful books because they resonate so deeply with my own sense of what happens as I write. They also help me understand why the process of doing this blog has changed me, as I’ve tried to adapt to what I’ve gone through. I’ve been working for almost two years with all the inner realities of depression and its impact on relationships, work and just about everything else. It feels right to describe all this as a reordering and reworking of inner experience to create a more balanced whole. That brings me closer to a sense of fulfillment – and peacefulness.

As I’ve mentioned before, after writing about my experience for some time and doing other healing work, I suddenly realized that a basic shift in attitude and belief had taken place. Whatever that inner reordering accomplished, whether conscious or unconscious, I look at myself and everyone around me differently. Healing doesn’t mean getting rid of every problem, but it does mean I can be fully present for my own life and all that it brings. That is a kind of balance I’ve never felt before, and the process of writing feels like the most important activity leading to this change.

It would be helpful to know if these ideas make sense to you. Is this a useful way of thinking about the inner impact of creative activity – any kind at all that you may do?

Some Rights Reserved by visulogik at Flickr

1.

I walk around with a crowd inside – so many selves wanting to go in different directions. Too many voices are talking all at once, and it’s hard to pick out the one I need to listen to right now. Here’s the intuitive talker, waking up with the big picture and the ideas for what I’ll get done on my blogs today – he’s the one I want. Then that anxious kid, unready for the day, prickly at every detail, tries to noise the others out with TV static.

But here’s my writing, creative buddy, who pours peacefulness into a cleared space he holds open for me. But that physical guy is pushing me out the door to stretch all those muscles and finish the undone, hard work in gardens and fields. Always, of course, the damn depressive self, is trying to get back on top and sit with invisible weight on all the others, telling me I’ll never get anything done – so why try?

I am struggling to push aside the intruders shouldering into this moment and sit with the intuitive, creative me in my study. Right now they’re pushing me to get this blog post into shape, and it’s getting easier to hear what they’re saying. Of course, a worrying, list-maker keeps dragging my thoughts to the other 25 things I need to start doing. I tear up the latest scrap of paper he’s pushing in front of the computer screen.

However unruly and full of fight these competing selves may be, they have to stay together, and a gathering mind, always insisting that I’m just one man after all, manages to keep them in the right formation. They’re like flights of birds in migration – either they fly together behind this binding me, or, one by one, they fall by the wayside and are lost.

2.

Paul Bloom, a psychologist, wrote in a recent Atlantic article about research that reinforces the idea that we consist of different selves. This could be much more than a metaphor for inner conflict. Instead of a single self that tries to fight desires pulling in different directions, he sees something closer to what I feel goes on within me: multiple selves in tension with each other:

The view I’m interested in … is conservative in that it accepts that brains give rise to selves that last over time, plan for the future, and so on. But it is radical in that it gives up the idea that there is just one self per head. The idea is that instead, within each brain, different selves are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.

These selves aren’t really popping in and out of existence. They’re all familiar companions who compete for my attention, but I’ve known them well for a long time. I’m always working to keep the positive ones foremost and push the negative ones aside. That’s one way I’ve come to think of recovery – I’ve learned how to deny power to a depressive or anxious or addictive me and fill with energy the creative, spiritual and loving beings.

This may sound like a dissociative personality disorder, but it’s not. These different selves are not compartmentalized and out of touch with each other. They’re interacting all the time. They tell stories, some grim, some hopeful and become parts of the living narrative I put together to form the single sense of who I am. It may not be the most consistent narrative, since, as the lead character, I’ve often changed direction and spoken with many voices. But I learn how to live – and find meaning in what I go through – by working hard to put each self into the order that will keep me sane and functioning.

When I’m well, this happens without much thinking, almost effortlessly. Even when I’m well, though, the dialogue, the arguments, the pushing and shoving for control among them still go on, however muted they might become. I have to remain mindful at all times, especially about the quiet moves that depression is making. He’s the most artful one of all, as well as the most dangerous.

Mindfulness for this purpose has a special meaning. It is not so much the detached observation of thoughts racing through my awareness until they are all still and a different consciousness is achieved.

More commonly, the flow I’m listening to consists of coherent voices pushing me in one direction or another. The peace and harmony I achieve comes when I can listen calmly to them all and detach myself from their tension. Then suddenly they are in the places where they need to be, their struggle is a sideshow, and I am filled with a sense of life and openness that is more than the sum of all those parts.

You could say I’m in the lead again, working hard in this endless flight, heading toward a home that’s still out of view.

Have you thought of an inner battle in this way? How does the struggle feel to you?

Some Rights Reserved by a_whisper_of_unremitting_demand at Flickr

catatonickid recently published a post about facing your double, reaching a place where nothing can be explained, a place where no choice could possibly be right. She calls that the “ideal argument for healing,” or, in the quoted words of Marie-Louise von Franz: “the beginning of the process of individuation” – the joining of the separate parts of the self to form an integrated person.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about experiencing a kind of double life, I’ve been drawn to the theme of meeting one’s own mirror image as a separate being for as long as I can remember. I never understood why that should be, but every story or film I found about such an encounter simply transfixed me. The idea touched a part of me beneath awareness that felt like it was rolling in sea-like motion. For so long, I was afraid that this moving force could overwhelm me.

In dreams, meeting my double was the culmination of nightmares.
I was usually searching through locked rooms in mansions and castles until finding the one where he was sitting. He was always alone in the middle of a darkened space with his back to the door as I entered. When he started turning toward me – even before I could see most of his face – I knew he was my double and that I had to get out. The deepest fear and panic surged through me as I realized I couldn’t escape and in the next moment would be killed. In the midst of that terror I always woke up and had to wait for my breathing and heartbeat to slow down to normal.

Why was this encounter so terrifying and why was my double a Mr. Jekyll ready to savage his Dr. Hyde? Was that what awaited me if I should try to go beyond what my awareness told me who I was? Would it mean the unleashing of a monster or the beginning of healing?

I searched for possible answers, but none felt right – until I started rereading a number of essays by Carl Rogers. Here’s a passage that seemed to deal with what I felt, though not directly with the idea of the double.

Carl Rogers wrote:

An even more common reaction to the path of life I have been describing is that to be what one truly is would mean to be bad, evil, uncontrolled, destructive. It would mean to unleash some kind of a monster on the world. … I meet [this view] in almost every client. “If I dare to let the feelings flow which are dammed up within me, if by some chance should live in those feelings, then this would be catastrophe.” This is the attitude, spoken or unspoken, of nearly every client as he moves into the experiencing of the unknown aspects of himself.

Sometimes people express this concern by saying that if an individual were to be what he truly is, he would be releasing the beast in himself. … [W]hen one is truly and deeply a unique member of the human species, this is not something which should excite horror. It means instead that one lives fully and openly the complex process of being one of the most widely sensitive, responsive, and creative creatures on this planet.
- On Becoming a Person – “To Be That Self Which One Truly Is”

That sounded right – learning gradually how to release, to live, those feelings could help to diminish the fear of what might happen if I set them free. If I could set aside that terrible fear and step into the other me, instead of trying to escape, perhaps I would begin to see these separated selves not as enemies but as parts of a whole. I had spent so many years hiding powerful feelings even from myself that I did come to believe I concealed a monster that must be kept locked up at all costs. He was like the madman in the attic room that must never be opened by anyone, least of all by his keeper.

Kierkegaard wrote: “Dread is the possibility of freedom.” It is the sign that an opening into life can occur if that feeling is recognized as a step toward accepting everything you are.

And it’s true that the work I have done to get through recovery has diminished the intensity of fear about releasing the feelings I had hidden away. The dark part of me – the monster – really seems now more shadow than substance.

But as wonderful as that change has been, there is still a power about the idea of my own double that I do not understand. There is much to learn that even goes beyond recovery from depression, as critical and life-saving as that has been. So I keep searching – and I don’t know where this might take me.

I have no idea if the powerful draw that I feel to this concept is widely shared or not. Is it something that pulls at you? What have you made of it?