For some time I have been working with the idea of accepting depression rather than trying to fight it. That’s an approach to therapy based on mindfulness and an attempt to broaden the range of experience you can live with comfortably. Although I haven’t worked with a therapist trained in any of the acceptance and […]
Self-Help
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 […]
Finding Self-Compassion through Focusing
Focusing is one of the few methods that has helped me understand depression as I experience it, well beyond the scope of clinical descriptions. It has also given me an approach to self-compassion that is more effective than the various meditations I have tried. As Eugene Gendlin acknowledges in Focusing, his self-help version of the […]
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 […]
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 […]
