Posted by JohnD
Fri, 23 May 2008 22:15:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by jurvetson at Flickr
Are you ever able to get away from time in the sense of measuring what you do, day in, day out? I can’t seem to escape it very often, but I’m convinced that doing so is one of the ways I get myself out of depression. Of course, the clock is omnipresent, and almost all activities in the daily world are measured against it. Most people, with their usual ups and downs, adapt to schedules for everything. But psychologically, in a depressive mind, time is another weapon. It is the constant reminder, as it keeps on going, that I am not doing enough, that I am not getting things done, that I can’t do the job, that I’m not measuring up, and on and on. I feel time as relentless pressure, nonstop stress, an overlay on reality full of warning reminders wherever I look. And as writers like Richard O’Connor
and Robert Sapolsky keep telling us, living in a state of constant stress brings on the mood disorders as brain chemistry goes on overload.
There are times, though, when stress stops, time stops, inner voices meet their match and shut down. It happens to me not by changing a negative pattern of thinking but by listening to something other than thought. Today, I’ve been recalling and reliving one of those moments, the first one I was really conscious of, when by chance I seemed to step right out of time.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags anxiety, depression, fulfillment, healing, memory, renewal, resilience, spiritual, stress, time, wellness, writing | 9 comments
Posted by JohnD
Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:36:00 GMT
I started thinking about the value of writing stories to deal with depression when I read Alcoholics Anonymous, the book that named the growing self-help movement in 1939. For me, it was not the method the book describes but the stories that first hit home so deeply. A psychiatrist I was seeing at the time lent me a copy because he had found it to be helpful to many of his non-addict patients, though he wasn’t sure why.
If you don’t know the book, it consists mostly of the stories of alcoholics themselves. One after another, they tell unsparingly how they lost control of their lives to alcohol, struggled repeatedly through failed efforts to quit, ruined everything they had and then, often by chance, linked up with other alcoholics who had gotten their lives back. Most of these story-tellers didn’t talk directly about feelings or causes – and they certainly didn’t use psychological jargon. They knew who they were talking to – other alcoholics, people like them who had tried and failed to get sober. To reach them, their stories had to be totally honest and absolutely free of pretension or any other false note.
So why did these voices talk to me so deeply since I hadn’t been drinking at all for several years and had never become obsessed with alcohol? There’s more to it than I can understand or explain, but one thing stands out. Woven through those histories I heard about the misery of hitting rock-bottom, having no self-respect, being good for nothing. I could touch the undercurrent of desperation that ran all too close to the surface of my own life. I couldn’t feel so immediately the parts of the book that described the 12-step method itself. Instead, I needed the telling of the stories, the sharing of experience among alcoholics. That’s what caught me.
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Posted in Explanations, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags 12, AA, alcoholics, Big, Bill, Book, depression, Dr.Bob, narratives, recovery, spiritual, steps, story, telling, W | 3 comments
