Why I try to understand depression, I find too few words with too many meanings. This isn’t quibbling over semantics. It’s about what you feel when living with depression and what you feel when you can finally live without it. It’s about the experience behind the words. Take the word, control. To control and to […]
Anger
Depression and Anger: A Destructive Partnership
It took me a long time to understand the connection between depression and anger. One psychiatrist I visited would often ask a simple question toward the end of a session: How’s your anger? I couldn’t understand why he asked. I hadn’t been talking about anger. Depression was my problem. I’d usually respond with a puzzled, […]
Psychological Abuse and Depression
There have been many times in the past when I’ve run into someone at work who could twist my words to suit his own purpose. If I’d challenged him in some way, he would launch a subtle verbal assault that built gradually to convince me he’d been the victim and I’d been the one who […]
Family Fury in a Small Space
This is a story I had to get out of my head onto paper purely for healing. It’s still hard, though, and I may not be getting it right – best I can do for now. A name has been changed, but otherwise this is the way I can remember it. This seemed to happen […]
Healing Waters in the Grand Canyon
Some Rights Reserved by efleming on Flickr This is another of the first posts on this blog that I’ve revised. It describes an incident from many years ago, but the experience gave me an image of healing that has never left. I come back to it again and again whenever I need to push off […]
Meditating through Depression
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 […]
