A reader asked me recently about how his depression might affect his children. He knew he had put his wife through hell and didn’t want to have the same thing happen to their kids. He was even wondering if there were parents who had thought about not getting married and not having children because of […]
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The Love Hidden in Family Depression
I’ve written about emotional abuse in my boyhood and a family history of depression as big contributors to my own illness, but recently I’ve spent more time reconnecting with the things that went right all those years ago rather than dwelling only on what went wrong. The positive side is simply the love that has […]
Peter’s Recovery Story – Part 1
Peter told his recovery story as an extended comment recently, and I wanted to give it a more prominent place as another in our ongoing series of personal stories. Because of its length, it will be posted in two parts. During the last ten years or so, whenever the emotional roller coaster of my life […]
Reflections in Mind: Sherwin Nuland’s Recovery from Depression
An important part of my recovery has been exploring emotional memory when I respond so deeply to a story or song or even just a moment in a film that somehow reaches right inside. A feeling long held back flows out freely, even though broken away from the memory that stirred it. So I have […]
Looking Out for Life
Some Rights Reserved by macropoulos at Flickr When I was growing up, no one ever talked about depression. I didn’t know what it was, and the moods I went through didn’t get much reaction from my parents. Yet I spent a lot of time isolating myself, not feeling like playing with my friends or going […]
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 […]
Family, Forgiveness & Peace
I always had a hard time linking forgiveness and peace with my early family life. In fact, it was hard for me to understand what forgiveness itself was all about. I thought of it as a remote dream, a utopian feeling. There were many people I had struggled with, and I often let go the […]
Connecting – 1: What Do You See?
A long time ago, I came home from work one day and found my five-year old son carefully studying a pile of metal debris he must have just lugged into our yard from a neighboring hillside lot. We lived on the edge of a small city in the foothills, and there were frequent illegal dumpings […]
