Recover Life from Depression

Self-Acceptance and Depression

Depression grinds down many qualities of well-being, among them self-acceptance. Until recently, I hadn’t spent much time being comfortable with who I was. Self-rejection had been much more familiar. There have been many times when I felt fine with my life, but later I’d realize I had been overlooking everything too painful to face. When I added all that in, the revised versions didn’t feel good at all. Had I been accepting me or a […] Read more »

Learning How to Live Well Again

Written by John Folk-Williams

One of the strange things about recovering from depression is that the condition is so pervasive getting better can feel like learning how to live all over again. There’s a lot of disagreement about what recovery means and whether that is even the right word to capture the changes you undergo. Because there is so much variety in the ways of healing and the goals of wellness, I’m finding it harder than I had thought […] Read more »

Conversations with Myself: Accepting the Past

Written by John Folk-Williams

Accepting the past is hard work. Avoidance of any part of the past that makes me uncomfortable used to be my go-to strategy, even though it never worked for long. I guess it’s the opposite of the tendency to obsess about everything I ever did wrong. (For example, reliving that humiliating interview 43 years ago, or that meeting I mishandled in 1995, or a hundred others.) Whether I’m trying to forget or can’t stop reliving […] Read more »