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It’s been one thing to get depression out of my life. It’s been another to get it out of my memory. Still holding on, it keeps playing tricks with the past. Vivid memories of old words and actions while depressed can still torture and twist through me, never flatter. Of course, the events I recall were never experienced in this self-centered way by anyone else who’d been part of what happened.

They became my personal fiction, screaming at me with the shadow truth I always used to look for – the one that confirmed a damaged man with endless wrongs to his discredit. They crowded me out, often when I was feeling well, as if to say – not so fast. We’ve been keeping your account, and you owe far more than you can ever repay.

There were so many scenes of the past I kept reliving, lingering on the critical moments of disaster. The insidious idea these depressive memories tried to instill was that I would always do my worst just when I thought I was feeling better. And at those times I did feel full of self-awareness, energy and optimism. Then I’d find myself doing or saying something so unexpected, stabbing, hurtful, deceptive, that I began to doubt my own sense of who I was. I couldn’t ever be sure that what I intended to do would get past the perverse second mind of depression. I felt unpredictable.

What would I do to the next person I spent time with? Would I share an honest moment or simply steal what I wanted, use them and keep myself hidden. It’s hard if you think you’re going to be kind and loving to someone and then wind up cutting into them. How often I wanted to be able to go back and undo some foolish or hurtful thing I’d done or said.

I knew the memories were only partly true, but I’d start to dwell on any poisonous detail I could find. The longing returned to go back and restore the trust of lost friends, but since I couldn’t change the past, I’d begin to despair over that as well. If I start to get into vicious cycle now, I move instinctively to stop its first downward swing.

The doubt, though, keeps trying to butt in. Is that secret underside of life still in control but less visibly? If I start thinking that way, I wonder if right now I’m really recovered or if in a few years some new knowledge will cause me to look back and say, oh god, I tricked myself again. My feelings can start shifting toward despair about ever separating the reality of who I am from the illusions of depression.

I’ve lived through long fantasies of change in the past, the sort of change you leap into, believing your life will turn around. Of course, it was never long before the truth became clear that nothing was changing. And the temptation was to believe that depression was permanent, that I’d just have to live with it. I’m done now with all those false changes and restarts. Except that the doubt is always trying to come back. It’s one sign of recovery that the doubt has steadily lost its hold.

That’s because there’s such a deep difference between a real recovery and the fragile, cautious sense I used to have about feeling “like myself” again. That temporary lift was always shadowed by an underlying conviction that it couldn’t last. And now the conviction is just the opposite. Recovery – and more than recovery, a kind of waking up about life – is an assumption I don’t even think about very much. A new belief is the dominant undercurrent of everyday life, just as depression used to be – all the time reminding me of its power. And even the doubt those uncertain memories sometimes raise has a strong bar of hope crossed through it.

The doubt now turns even more often in the opposite direction and centers on those depressive memories. They are steadily losing the credibility they once had. True, I can still feel a bit of the anguish I’ve felt before, but just as often I can look back at past problems with detachment. Well, I can say, that happened. It’s done, and I can’t change a thing. I may feel regret but no self-torture, no obsessive reliving of that past. Time to learn from it and move on.

I was once helping a friend and colleague manage a meeting. The first session hadn’t gone well for her, and I offered to take over the next one.

“No,” she said. “I feel like I’ve fallen off a horse, and I have to get on again.” So, she picked up where she’d left off in the next session and turned everything around. I always think back on that – and it’s one memory I never doubt.

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I’ve always had trouble talking honestly about depression, in therapy or out. Even though much of its influence is gone, this remnant of depression is still holding on. I was always able to report the latest news to a therapist – I’m down at level 2 instead of up at level 8 (or whatever other shorthand you might use). And talking about history was not the problem. I could summon up all the turbulence and pain I’d gone through long ago from the safe distance of time.

It was the here and now that stopped me. Telling anyone the full emotional truth of the present, as I was feeling it – especially the intense stuff – was next to impossible. The fear was that the words could not be formed without the emotions flowing with them, and it was the spontaneous rush of feeling that had to be prevented. Something in me always reacted faster than thought. It was more than a censor, it was a builder of strong barriers that walled the feelings in and me with them.

That autopilot response hard to stop, and it worked with cold efficiency most of the time, especially in therapy. That’s supposed to be a refuge for healing as old poisons are purged from my present life. How much emotional truth of the moment was I able to get out? Let’s put it this way. If there had been a buzzer going off at every half-truth, that would have been the loudest and most frequent sound of the hour.

It’s amazing that therapy has done me any good at all, but it has. I’ve always been able to talk about the past, even the worst moments, or about powerful dreams that force something into my awareness. These things provoked strong feeling, but however bad they’d been, they weren’t here and they weren’t now. If I did feel overwhelmed, about to cry – the door slammed shut at once.

It wasn’t just the talking, it was letting the feelings roll through and find whatever physical expression they were after. Emotions need the outlet of the body to be complete and serve their purpose. Not so hard to do in private, though I can have plenty of trouble with that too. (Remember that Real Depressed Men Don’t Cry!) But facing a live person – the resistance was like biting into splintered wood to shut my mouth and crush the feeling into manageable size. That hurts!

That wasn’t the end of it, for then I’d have this crowd of ticked-off feelings pounding in me to get out. There must be a law of physics about the conservation of emotional energy. It’s never destroyed but takes on different, more ghostly forms. I could never recognize them, but I’d always feel something strange happening. Each moment of denial put another to-do on the list of things I’d have to deal with later – that is, talk through. In the meantime, I had no clue when or how the stunted feeling would finally kick its way to the surface.

Emotions like to be sociable. They need to get out there and be seen and heard by the people I’m closest to, most of all, of course, my wife. Letting the feeling be itself can only deepen those essential bonds. Whenever they did get through the walls, as happened every now and then, my wife and I would feel the intimate connection all over again. How else, except by that emotional presence, could anyone get to know who I am and trust the relationship we’ve formed together? If I stomp out fear or grief, I’m also refusing to reach out for help, not to mention love, and refusing to accept it.

But all this holding back never had anything to do with common sense. It was about the deepest fear I’ve known, courtesy of severe depression. It was a soul-deep dread that intense feelings on the loose would release a terrifying force I’d been keeping in check. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but eventually I gave it a recognizable face. My own hideous and violent Mr. Hyde was waiting to spring free, and that I could not allow.

Of course, I knew that was a crazy thing to believe – especially after all sorts of therapy and self-probing – but on a depressed and primitive level it felt like truth for many years. He was everything half human and monstrous that my depressed mind told me I must be. Chains and shackles were all that held him, not to mention round-the-clock surveillance.

He’s not really there anymore, but the habit of holding him and every intense feeling in check hasn’t gone away completely.

So talking about depression, which bundled this dread together with all the other symptoms, has never been easy. Nevertheless, I was able very slowly to learn the skills that let me see clearly what I was doing and stop the weirdness, on most days.

So how’s your emotional truth level with a therapist or whoever you try to talk to about depression? On a scale of 1 to 10, you usually come in at … ?