I started learning about patterns of recovery when my mother survived two heart attacks but died twice before her death. That’s the way she saw it. Her heart stopped both times, but she fought her way back. The second heart-stopping attack occurred during an operation for a different problem. She was 94. I only learned […]
trust
Depression Is a Free Fall in Slow Motion
Once my kids pulled me with them up to a water slide. I don’t like sliding through winding tubes and hadn’t done it before. But I couldn’t back out of it once I was standing in a dense line at the top of a 50-foot high platform. Nowhere to go but down. So off I […]
Finding Safe Haven from Childhood Fear
A psychiatrist friend once summarized a basic tendency he saw in children from their earliest years. He said that a child could grow up either trusting the people and world he lived in or feeling insecure and uncertain about them. A child would either feel safe or unsafe, and a lot depended on this basic […]
When Holding Hands Is Hard to Do
The first time our two oldest sons, at ages 3 and 4.5, went for a walk without their parents, I learned something about love and trust. My wife and I had decided to let them walk a short distance up the hill from our house to a play area. They had insisted this was no […]
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 […]
Restoring Trust After a Depressed Partner Returns
I’ve written a lot on this blog (here and here, among many others) about the mindset of depressed partners who are pulling away from their closest relationships. It’s important to look at the other side too – the desire to return. Hopefully, they’ll come back from the illness, whether they’ve remained at home while they’ve […]
Is It Loneliness or Is It Depression?
It may seem strange to pose this question: is it loneliness or is it depression? After all, many people feel loneliness at the loss or weakening of close relationships because of depression, and most of us who’ve lived with the condition over a lifetime experience those broken connections as some of its worst effects. On […]
Carl Rogers: The Flow of Becoming a Person
Carl Rogers summarized what he had learned about his own process of becoming a person in an essay entitled “This is Me,” found in On Becoming a Person. This discussion helps illuminate the beliefs he gained from experience about effective change and acceptance of one’s self. He concluded that paper with a brief statement on […]
