It may seem strange to pose this question: is it loneliness or is it depression? After all, many people feel loneliness at the loss or weakening of close relationships because of depression, and most of us who’ve lived with the condition over a lifetime experience those broken connections as some of its worst effects. On […]

Accepting the risk of change has been a big step in recovery: risks are hard to take because of the fear they trigger. I’m still stumbling around with the acceptance of risk – one minute eager for anything new, the next minute fearful of every change. I mentioned the analogy of prison when describing my […]

Carl Rogers summarized what he had learned about his own process of becoming a person in an essay entitled “This is Me,” found in On Becoming a Person. This discussion helps illuminate the beliefs he gained from experience about effective change and acceptance of one’s self. He concluded that paper with a brief statement on […]

catatonickid recently published a post about facing your double, reaching a place where nothing can be explained, a place where no choice could possibly be right. She calls that the “ideal argument for healing,” or, in the quoted words of Marie-Louise von Franz: “the beginning of the process of individuation” – the joining of the […]

There is a lot to explore in the idea of changing the mindset of recovery to that of finding purpose for the future. Just as I could undo the belief in my perpetual illness, I could also undo the belief that there had been little meaning or value in what I had done in the […]

It occurs to me that recovery is past, well-being is now and purpose is the future. Let me explain. Recently, I wrote about recovery as a concept I no longer wanted to apply to what I’ve been going through. The word carried a set of assumptions that kept me within an illness frame of mind. […]