Posted by JohnD
Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:40:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by anna_pearson at Flickr
These are journal excerpts about my fitful beginning work with meditation as a guide through depression.
After a day of feeling the chaos of panic, immobilized at work, I went to see JL, first therapist in years. This guy is real. He wasted no time, quickly running through some patterns he observed (explaining that he was hurrying things up because I had been through therapy) and then hit on something that caught me off guard completely. He said he knew how much I loved my brother, he could hear it in what I said, he could feel it in his body. At that, realizing it was true, I wanted to cry, almost did, but covered it with a forced jerky laugh, fooling no one. I was right there, ready to let loose with the feeling I have been sitting on for so long. He explained that he had methods, he did not shoot from the hip. He realized he could have pushed harder about my brother and gotten somewhere, but he prefers to work carefully, using the models he knows from Buddhist psychology. The guy wanted me to know he’d been around, as he says, raised in different cultures and countries. This should be good. I like his attitude: We can break that cycling, that pattern, we can break that, I guarantee it. Who talks like that these days? I sense in him that he’s witnessed, probably experienced, conversion or at least deep insight within the light of a powerful soul. But he’s not trying to become my guru – at least I hope that’s true.
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Posted in Explanations, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags anxiety, breathing, Buddhist, depression, kindness, loving, meditation, monster, Panic, peace, psyche, rage, relaxation, stress, therapy | 13 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:57:00 GMT
Some rights reserved by Hamed Saber at Flickr
When my mother died, I didn’t know what I felt. Throughout my life, I had been struggling to shed the influence of her searing and shaming words, her anger, at times rage, above all, her depression during my childhood. How many of us spend adult years still trying to get the attention and love that we never got from a distant parent? We know it’s not going to happen, but still we play over and over again the same roles we played as children. Once I was part of a therapy group that helped people reenact painful scenes from their family past in order to help rid those events of their power. The therapist at one point walked up to one fellow and said to him, face to face, “Your mother doesn’t love you!” – over and over again until the message really sank in. The guy looked so stricken, but the therapist went on to remind him that he was a splendid man in spite of his mother’s inability to connect with him. He didn’t have to look for the love that was never going to come. His mother had done what she could, but that was all in the past. His present was his own, and he was getting along just fine. The therapist might have been talking directly to me too, but I can’t say I ever stopped trying to win the love and approval of my mother. When she died, she was a different person in many ways than she had been when I was growing up, but, sadly for her, she never got over a fundamental hurt and disappointment that rooted itself deeply in her, probably when she was a kid looking for approval and love from her distant father. These things seem to go on and on through generations.
Several scenes came to mind in the days following my mother’s death:
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Connecting | Tags anger, death, depression, dream, family, grief, love, mother, therapy | 9 comments
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:34:00 GMT
Photo Credit: rustyphil – Stockxpert
It was more than a decade ago when I stopped believing my own fantasies of finding happiness by leaving my marriage. I could see that those dreams were only substitutes for taking a hard look at who I was. Depression, though, made that difficult task even harder by convincing me there was no one worth knowing in this mind and soul of mine. I had a dream at that time full of images of shame that took the form of people speaking in my own depressed voice all the messages I kept sending to myself. I sat shrinking in the corner of a big room, and each of them came in turn, looking twice their normal size, to tell me what a mess I was. The gloom of that dream woke me up. I could see so clearly how my psyche was devilishly busy turning my own thoughts into hammer blows to drive me deeper underground. Something snapped, and I was suddenly alert with purpose to fight back against that force trying to kill me. It was the same powerful feeling that woke me up from depression during an earlier bout with cancer. I wasn’t going to let that darkness prevent me from rediscovering who I really was and rebuilding a close relationship with my wife.
But exactly what do you do to regain this closeness with your partner?
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Posted in Partners to Depression, Connecting | Tags close, depression, intimacy, longing, love, marriage, partner, personality, therapy, Undefended Love | 2 comments
Posted by JohnD
Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:24:00 GMT
Photo Credit: Derek Benjamin Lilly – MorgueFile
Depression is a strange thing. No one seems able to explain exactly what it is, yet there is no doubting the reality of its pain. I've had it with me since boyhood, though at that time, I was years away from even hearing the term, let alone getting treatment. I grew up with it, not only experiencing my own moods, headaches and gradual isolation but also watching my mother succumb for years without ever seeking help. In those days, either you had a "nervous breakdown" (something I could only imagine as a kid as writhing and thrashing about on the floor) or you were fine. I was clearly fine – the top-of-my-class kind of fine. It was bizarre hearing people praise me often when I knew damn well that it was all phoney. Those grown-ups might be fooled, but I knew deep down how worthless I was. I lived in fear that this fact would be discovered.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags belief, depression, failure, family, hope, illness, suicide, therapy, treatment | 2 comments
