Posted by JohnD
Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:44:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by ...Zeyneeep! at Flickr
Recently,
Melinda wrote a post about the role of forgiveness in her recovery and the difficulty she has had in forgiving her unrepentant father for abusing her in childhood. Reading this made me aware that I wasn't very clear in my own mind about the meaning of forgiveness. It is always mentioned as an obligatory part of recovery, and yet there has always been something elusive about the idea for me. How was it different from understanding past trauma, dealing thoroughly with its impact and letting go of the feelings of anger or hate? For I did learn to stop the constant blaming of present problems on those who harmed me when I was so young and unable to stand up for myself. Is that forgiveness, or is there something more.
I started thinking and reading to stop the confusion about the ideas and feelings I have about forgiveness. I quickly found that I was not the only one who had a hard time getting at the deeper meaning of this concept. It has different meanings in different religions and cultures, but there are a few major approaches I've found that helped me grasp more deeply the connection between what I had experienced and forgiveness.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags anger, blame, change, childhood, depression, forgiveness, harm, recovery, soul, spirituality, vengeance, victim, violence | 13 comments
Posted by JohnD
Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:15:00 GMT
Photo Credit: JesterArts at Stockxpert
As she often does, Stephany put a thought in my mind that I haven’t been able to shake. It was a three-word comment: “You have recovered.” Nice wish, I thought, if only – ! I’ve been working on recovery so long – it just isn’t happening consistently. But the problem with interpreting this as a wish was her strange use of past rather than future tense (You have recovered). So the words kept coming back to me, and I didn’t know what to do with them. Finally, I started thinking: Well, what if we suppose for a minute or an hour that the statement – all three words of it – were true, not so much for me, but for someone? After all, decades ago I did some acting. Couldn’t I just play this part for a while? And if I did, how exactly would I, as this someone, feel? And what would I say? This could take a lot of research, I thought, but I needed to start somewhere. And the first thing would be – kicking that idiot Depression out of my life – I mean his life – the life of the guy I would pretend to be.
After jotting down a few words for this character to say, I kind of caught the spirit of this recovered thing and started to feel something unusual stirring. I heard odd bursts of laughter and then realized with a shock – hey, that’s me – I mean, of course, he, the guy I was portraying. I – he – felt really good, giggly, smiley – bizarrely out of character – my character, that is. This character, however, was recovered and so could be expected to be happy, giddy even, at having pushed depression out of his life after decades of doom and gloom. Here’s the sort of thing he (well, I, acting in the role of recovered person) might well be saying:
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Fighting Depression | Tags acting, angels, depression, feeling, life, love, pain, recovery, song, Stephany, violence | 13 comments
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:48:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by The Wandering Angel at Flickr
I have a family in my memory that can’t be quite the family I grew up with. Each of us is more intense than we probably were, as lived moments collapse backwards into a few vivid scenes. Who knows if what I recall is what happened? That doesn’t matter so much compared to the lifelong impact of the almost mythic figures I made of my mother, father, older brother. They took on this psychic life while hidden just across the border on the other side of consciousness, and then emerged again, endowed with new power. I’m remembering now this inner Brother, a figure a bit magical, a bit scary, a bit bigger than life.
His daring filled me with awe and fear. If there was a hidden spot to explore, he would charge recklessly into it. If there was someone to fight, he would start swinging, if there was a cop to defy, he would stand up to him. And if Mom needed a champion, he would go after Dad.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Connecting | Tags brother, childhood, depression, family, Fear, feeling, growing, memory, mother, up, violence | 4 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:41:00 GMT
Jelena Popic – Fotolia.com
Some years back I took part in a series of group sessions that focused on helping people confront and deal with inner shame that had haunted them since childhood. It was the first group in my experience that got me to interact with other people not just through talk but through dramatic reenactments of past painful encounters. This experience was one of the first to wake me up to the ways other people might see me, free of the projection of shame I usually cast over the judgments of others. By working with the members of this group in recreating traumatic dramas and talking through each one afterward, I could finally begin to see the inner shame I carried as a depressed belief, not an objective reality. The people I knew only in this setting were tremendously supportive and gave me hard evidence to fight back against a heritage of shame built up in my boyhood.
There was one moment of frustration with that group, though, that opened before me all the emotional violence of my boyhood and teenage years. I had a choice to face it openly or keep clamping down and forcing the powerful emotions to break under the pressure of my refusal to let them out. There was no clear ending to that crisis.
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Posted in Explanations, Growing Up with Depression, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags aggression, anger, belief, depression, family, grief, group therapy, hidden feeling, home, love, rage, shame, trauma, violence | 13 comments
