Psychotherapists can help us make breakthroughs in dealing with depression, but often the insights gained during a session don’t lead to permanent change. Why is it that we can’t always put the new insight into daily use and sometimes forget it as soon as we’re out of the room? That’s the problem that a new […]
memory
Why Therapy Can Work: Ideas from Brain Research
Brain research is one of those many scientific fields that I’ll never know much about, but I find it important to get even a limited understanding of the direction of recent findings. It helps me to know, for example, that emotions are generated unconsciously through multiple brain systems before anything gets to awareness. As I […]
Writing to Get Through Today’s Depression
Some Rights Reserved by Thomas Hawk at Flickr This is a revision of the first post I wrote for this blog. It came from a journal that I worked at daily for a time, and that experience convinced me that writing about depression was one way I could fight it more actively. I will be […]
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 […]
Growing Up Blue – Is Mom Dead?
I have a family in my memory that can’t be quite the family I grew up with. Each of us is more intense than we probably were, as lived moments collapse backwards into a few vivid scenes. Who knows if what I recall is what happened? That doesn’t matter so much compared to the lifelong […]
Stopping Time, Stopping Depression
Are you ever able to get away from time in the sense of measuring what you do, day in, day out? I can’t seem to escape it very often, but I’m convinced that doing so is one of the ways I get myself out of depression. Of course, the clock is omnipresent, and almost all […]