Long before I began to recover from depression, I stumbled my way into moments when time seemed to disappear. My mind cleared itself out completely, and I found myself in a kind of stillness that I can only call spiritual. Those were hopeful experiences, the closest I’ve come to the sense of oneness that Jill […]
Archives for 2018
What Can Help Prevent Depression Relapse?
Depression has an especially cruel season called relapse. It always happens after the worst seems to be over; hope like sunlight is restored; life without depression is in full bloom. Then suddenly it’s winter again. The more often it happened to me, the more impossible the goal of recovery seemed to become. I was surprised […]
A Never-Ending Family Story Has to End
My never-ending family story has always been a hard scene in which I am very young and small and terrified. I’m staring at my parents and brother locked in combat. There may be no action, it usually flashes at me in tableau form, but there is plenty of rage, fear and hurt. There is a […]
How Do We Change in Psychotherapy?
The first session I ever had with a psychiatrist proved to me that I could achieve a real change through psychotherapy. While in college, I had been immobilized by panic attacks and was desperate to get help. I spent three hours with a psychiatrist deeply engaged in the confusing mass of experience I needed to […]
How Setting Boundaries Helped Me Heal
My getting depressed after a cancer operation almost ended our marriage. It was the blow that forced my wife to remind me of the boundaries I couldn’t afford to ignore. I had been in high spirits for the operation and right through the recovery period. My wife and I had been especially close during that […]
Fear of Change in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
One of the interesting things about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is that you can’t think about it too much. You have to do it. Hence the acronym ACT, to be spoken as the word. If you try to understand it with your mind alone, you’ll get stuck because the mind has too many blinders. I […]