I remember years ago talking with a friend about his recent divorce and remarriage and mentioning the stressful time my wife and I had been having at that time. He bluntly suggested: Well, why don’t you leave? I told him I wouldn’t do that since I thought the problems were as much on my side […]
Revisiting: Acting the Roles of Depression
This revised post from the early days of Storied Mind seems especially relevant to the work I’m doing with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Sometimes I’ve interpreted certain life and career choices of the past as avoiding depression. At other times, I’ve seen them as accepting the need to deal with it rather than play a […]
Inner Beliefs and Outer Action
A few months ago, I found a picture of myself from college years that gave no hint of the turmoil of inner beliefs I held at the time. There I was, a lean young guy, sporting a cigarette for a role I was acting. The strange thing about this is that at the time I […]
On Writing a Recovery Ebook
Even though I’ve written a great deal about recovery from depression, when I decided to pull my experiences together in A Mind for Life ebook, I ran into a lot of problems. It’s so much easier to write about the miseries of the condition when it’s controlling your life than about the slow, stumbling process […]
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 […]
Learning How to Live Well Again
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 […]
