The boy took careful aim with his lever-action BB gun and fired off the first shot. The tiny pellet pierced one of the windows of the tall tree-house, and jagged cracks radiated from the pinhole it made. The house was nestled securely in the giant crook of an oak tree that stood right next to […]
acceptance
Starting on a Path toward Acceptance
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 […]
The Limits of Care-Giving for Depression
A family member’s care-giving for depression can shift from hope to frustration if the initial expectations are unrealistically high. The film Phoebe in Wonderland is about a young girl with a compulsive disorder and also about the mother who tries to cure her with love. The mother, brilliantly played by Felicity Huffman, blames herself as […]
Fighting Back to Recover from Depression
Stories about the struggle to recover from depression tell of repeated efforts to find a way to live well despite the recurring burden of illness. For me the key lesson is that each person in these stories keeps trying, despite repeated setbacks. I recently came across a research study that says the same thing in […]
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 […]
Conversations with Myself: Accepting the Past
Accepting the past is hard work. Avoidance of any part of the past that makes me uncomfortable used to be my go-to strategy, even though it never worked for long. I guess it’s the opposite of the tendency to obsess about everything I ever did wrong. (For example, reliving that humiliating interview 43 years ago, […]
Fighting Self-Compassion
Strange as it may seem, I find myself fighting therapeutic approaches based on self-compassion. The reasons run deep and reveal a lot about the difficulty of trying to get depression completely out of my life. In a recent post, I summarized Kristin Neff’s idea of self-compassion as a way of relating to ourselves that is […]
Self-Compassion and Depression
As one who has had a lot of problems with self-esteem and self-worth as a result of depression, I’ve been interested to find out about the work of Kristin Neff. She is a psychologist who has presented self-compassion as an alternate way of thinking about the self. The idea of self-esteem has been pretty basic […]
