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 […]
home
Healing & the Need for Roots
Some Rights Reserved by pictoscribe at Flickr I’m finding that healing the effects of depression has a lot to do with understanding the need for roots and what the experience of being uprooted is all about. The metaphor of roots growing into a nourishing soil kept me focused for a long time on just one […]
The Inner Peace of Garden Art
My partner in life is an artist who works in many media. She fills the space around us, inside and outside our home, with beautiful things. Her gardens crowd with daily works-in-progress as she adds one more spot of life to a year-round creation. It unfolds in time as the season and color for one […]
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 […]
Growing Up Blue: Picturing Depression
Some Rights Reserved by ssh at Flickr Have you ever wondered what a very young boy sees when his mother is staring at him through a camera lens? I don’t mean the digital cameras that do the looking for you, leaving your face fully visible as you press a button. I’m thinking of cameras that […]
Shame and Family Violence
Some years back I took part in a series of group sessions that focused on helping people confront and deal with inner shame that had haunted them since childhood. It was the first group in my experience that got me to interact with other people not just through talk but through dramatic reenactments of past […]
Hope, Love, Depression and House Repair
A four-word comment from Stephany has set my mind going. “Hope is not love.” she writes in reference to my last post on the difficulty of sustaining a marriage in the midst of major depression. At the end of that brief story I used a house-building image in talking about hope, and I think that’s […]
