M. writes:

> I am looking for someone to tell me what I did to deserve feeling the way I do. I am a lost soul who is looking to be found. I tried

Depression is not punishment. It just happens to some of us.

> committing suicide to deal with my feelings, but I didn't succeed, now I am more lost than ever.

Recovery from a failed suicide attempt has to be so hard. I watched my father try (or more often, not try) for seven years.

> Everytime I feel things are starting to look up, something happens to throw me back down the hole. What can I do? How can I get out of this mess? Any answers would be appreciated.

> I did go for counseling about three years ago, but I was scared to talk about my real feelings. I have a real fear of being locked in a room with nothing else. Is this real?

The combination of meds and therapy is the route that many of us take. It does work, but it also takes time--a few weeks for the meds if you get one that works right the first time, and months or years for talk therapy--but it really can work.

As long as you are not currently attempting suicide, there's not much chance that they would lock you away. Sometimes a brief hospitalization is required when close monitoring of meds is necessary for establishing a doseage, but this is not routine. And I've only heard of that for bipolars; for someone with unipolar depression, I would not expect this to happen.

Talking to a therapist about your feelings is necessary, but yes, it is also hard to learn. But if you don't talk about your feelings, there is no way that a therapist can help you learn to deal with them. I can almost guarantee to you that anything you say to a therapist will be something that sie has heard before. You are not alone.

A therapist cannot cure you; what sie does is teach you how to care for yourself. Depression is like any other long-term medical condition; each of us must become knowledgeable about our own treatment, and we must actively do the things that we need to do in order to take care of ourselves.

May I share a few things that my own therapists have said over the years?

"If you don't ask for what you want, you're not likely to get it."

If you want to heal, you must ask to learn how it is done. If people hurt you, you must tell them that they are hurting you, and ask them to stop; otherwise, they will continue to hurt you, without knowing that they are hurting you. (If the continue when they do know, it is time to ask yourself for what you want.)

"Intimacy is being open, honest, and direct about what you think and feel, as it's happening."

There are six elements in this: three about the way that you communicate, two about the things that you talk about, and the one crucial item of immediacy. All six of these must be happening at once, or intimacy is lost. Recovery requires the ability to talk intimately about who you are.

"There are only four feelings: mad, sad, glad, and scared."

It's easy to think too much about our feelings. Feelings are feelings; one can only feel them. When you can express your feelings in direct and simple language--"I'm scared"--then you are talking intimately about your feelings. (Open, honest, direct, feelings, now.)

"Mental health is when your symptoms don't bother you any more."

The underlying message is that our symptoms are part of who we are. Sometimes they will be worse than others, but they are always there. It is up to us to learn to recognize when our symptoms are getting worse, and to do whatever is necessary to take care of ourselves. Sometimes it is something we can do on our own, and sometimes we need help. The point is to do it, and to work towards that place where our symptoms do not interfere with our lives.

"Embrace your pain."
"The only way out is through."

These come not from my therapists, but from companions on my journey, people who are also struggling for a better life. This is one of the hardest lessons I've ever had to learn: That my Pain is also my Guide. Where I hurt, there is an issue that I need to understand, and to resolve if possible, and to soothe, always. The way to ease my pain is to accept it, to feel it, to become one with it. To paraphrase Thich Naht Hanh, I must reach the point where I can look calmly on my pain, and say, "Hello, pain, how are you today?"

What others can share of their journeys, and the things they have learned along the way, is also therapy. When I was in group therapy, the therapist who ran the group called the rest of us co-therapists.

May I tell you a story about myself?

I have been depressed for as long as I can remember. There are many reasons; this story is one of them.

My first big crash happened when I was 13. I had been a nearly straight-A student, but in the last quarter of the eighth grade, I was unable to study, to read, or even to pay attention in class. I got a "D" in math and an "F" in history, and the rest of my grades were mostly "C".

The school gave its academic awards based on performance from mid-year to mid-year, so I received an academic excellence award only a few days before the report card with the "D" and the "F".

My mother's response was to drive me to the school, and to sit in the car while I went inside and returned the academic award. I was instructed to tell the principal that I did not deserve the award.

I did it.

When I walked into the school, the thing I wanted more than anything else was to keep walking, to go out the door at the far end of the hallway, to leave and never come back. But I did not do that; I had no place to go. Instead I returned the award to the principal, who stood speechless as I put the plaque in his hands. I do not know if he even understood when I said that I did not deserve it, because I was crying so hard.

I hated my mother for making me do this, and the core of that hatred will be part of me for as long as I live. I hated her for having so much control over me that she trusted me to humiliate myself in front of my teachers, while she sat outside, waiting. I hate her now because she was too much of a coward to go in with me, to face the possibility that the principal might not take the award back. On that day, I wanted to rip her heart out. I wanted to rip my own heart out. I did neither of these things. I was a good, obedient child.

The pain and the shame of that humiliation were so great that it was 25 years before I could tell another person what happened that day. When I finally could talk about it, to a therapist, I wept. I raged. I wanted to die.

And I healed, a little. The next time I told this story, it hurt less than the first time. It has hurt less each time I have told it, to the point that I can sit and type these words, and remember the pain, but I no longer cry (well, not so much, and not every time).

This has not been enough to heal; my journey continues.

I have forgiven my mother, not for doing this thing, but for being unable to do anything else. I have released her from any expectation that she could have been a better parent. But this forgiveness has not been enough to heal, either, because I still need a loving, compassionate mother.

So I have become my own parent; my journey continues.

About a year ago, I went back to this story in therapy. I did this in trance; self-hypnosis has been a wonderful aid in my healing. As my adult self, I went back to that day, outside my school, and stood waiting for my mother to drive up and park in front of the steps. When my young self got out of the car and walked toward the door, I caught myself in my arms, and held me close. I looked at my mother and said to her, "By your actions, you have forfeited your right to be part of this child's life. I will take this child, and I give him the love that you cannot." (Yes, "him." Another story, another time.) I held my young self in my arms until my mother gave up and drove away. Then I led my young self away, to give him a new home, to give him the love that he needed, and that I still need.

The journey is not over. A week from tomorrow, I have a special therapy session scheduled. I will go back into trance, and do what I can to help this deeply depressed boy with his healing, to heal the child that was me, 30 years ago, this child who still lives within me.

This is one of the ways that therapy works. It requires hard work. It requires love. It requires honesty. And above all it requires time, because sometimes it asks more of us than we are ready to give, more than we know how to give. So we wait, we grow and we heal, and we try again.

M., you did nothing to deserve your pain. Pain seeks us out, because to live is to be hurt. But there are ways to fight back, ways to conquer the pain. I have shared part of my journey, but your own journey awaits you. It will be hard, but you need not travel alone.

More Thoughts on Therapy and Healing

N. writes:

> What am I missing? Why can't I just let go of the crap that keeps dragging me back toward depression? I know what my issues are, but I don't know how to get past them. I know there is a real Zen answer to this but I'm just not seeing it.

For one thing, time. You mentioned six months; for a lot of psychic wounds, I'd consider that to be still in the "raw and bleeding" stage, unless you've worked as hard on "how to heal" as you have on healing. That's something we usually get to later, if at all. It's important, though.

Learning to detach is another very useful skill if you're going to reach out to others. It's damned hard to do, and at the moment I'm suffering from not doing it well enough or often enough. At some point you have to let go, and acknowledge that the other person is responsible for her own life. You can make help available, but you can't make someone take advantage of it.

Now, for those Zen answers.....

What do you expect to happen when you let go of those old wounds? This is a serious question, and it demands to be answered. My old crap is still with me, and always will be. It is part of me; it shaped me and made me who I am. By acknowledging this, I have become the owner of these issues, or the master if you want to use a Zen term. As master I cannot make them go away, I cannot change them, I cannot ignore them. What I can do is to let them be. I can choose not to connect to them, unless it is my choice, not theirs; unless it is by my means, not theirs.

In the words of the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, I can look calmly on my anger and say, "Hello, anger, how are you today?"

What are the things that connect us to our wounds? Anger, certainly. Fear. Shame. Guilt. It is important to understand that these are separate from the wounds themselves. It is important to own our anger, our shame, and our guilt, just as it is important to own our wounds. These feelings are entirely ours; they originate inside us, and they live inside us. If we are not careful, they will also feed on us, and thereby consume us. Among other things, detaching is breaking that cycle.

To look at this differently, perhaps it would be useful to say that it is not our wounds that destroy us; it is our reactions to those wounds. Certainly when we were young, when the abuse happened to us, our reactions were immediate, automatic, and quite understandable. The rage and shame and guilt all began with those events. The problem is that they continue, they take on a life of their own. They grow, they multiply, they interact, they surround and insulate the pain that created them.

When we are ready to heal, the pain of healing is the pain of cutting this cancerous growth apart. The actual physical and emotional pain of abuse has long since passed. What remains is our memory, and our feelings about those memories, and our feelings about those feelings. Each of these must be healed, but each must be healed in a different way.

I can offer two views of healing. One is the book A Whole New Life by Reynolds Price. The other is a description of part of my healing; it simply does, and does not talk about how. That companion piece is yet to be written, but soon, I hope, soon....

There is another aspect of Zen masters that is relevant here. A master is one who knows how to begin at the beginning. A master is one who can set aside all knowledge and concepts, and look anew on an old issue. A master understands that looking with new and innocent eyes may be the only way to see the truth.

This is the way it is when healing from abuse, because we must heal, and heal, and heal again. Each time, we learn more. Each time, we heal some new aspect of ourselves. But each time, we must be ready to go back to the beginning.

How do we know when it is time to do this? One way is when we cannot detach. Perhaps it is a trigger. Perhaps it is reaching out to someone whose pain is so much like our own.

Healing is a brutal act. It is being mercilessly honest with ourselves, cutting through the terror of our pain to find our own truth. Sometimes we cannot cut all the way through, and there is nothing wrong with that. At the same time, we must remember where we stopped, and why, and be ready to start again from that point, when we are ready to endure more of our own pain. And of course we must also be ready to begin at the beginning again, so that we may find a new and truer path.

Our pain is our guide, our friend, our companion on the healing journey. To heal, we must seek out our pain, because where there is pain, there is a wound to heal.

"Hello, pain, how are you today?"

We must truly be prepared to start over each and every time. In the first part of this page, I wrote about some lessons learned in therapy. In this piece, I describe briefly one of the defining moments of my childhood. I describe my journey towards healing that wound. Although I did not know it when I wrote that piece, I also describe a crucial mistake in my healing.

For comparison, refer to the earlier healing piece that I mentioned. In that piece, I took an inward journey, and let my young self re-experience the event that defined his existence at the age of three. The mistake in healing my older inner child is that I did not let my teen-age self re-experience his trauma. I protected him from that experience, and in this way I protected him from healing. Because I protected him from healing, his pain remained, and his pain is my pain; his depression is my depression.

The master is one who can begin from the beginning. The master is one who can become a novice again. But there is a difference between the master and the novice; the master knows that he will never be a master.

Human beings define themselves by their contradictions, and there is indeed a contradiction between cherishing our pain, and healing. There is a contradiction between detaching from our pain, and feeling empathy for the pain of others. There is a contradiction between leaving depression behind, and accepting depression as part of ourselves. The resolution of these contradictions is to accept that both parts are true.

I have wrestled with these contradictions before, and I will do so again and again and again.

Healing and recovery are lifetime processes.

For additional thoughts on therapy, please see Can You Trust Your Therapist?