Relapse into depression

Healing from depression does not happen over night. In my experience it is a gradual process, a bumpy road, and very often that road goes downhill, right back into depression. I have fallen back into depression many times and I still do. That has been very frustrating for me because I know what it is like on the other side. I know what it is like to be self-confident, optimistic, full of joy and energy and creativity. But then, all of a sudden for no apparent reason, my mood changes drastically and I feel insecure, have no hope, feel like a total failure unfit to be in this world. When it gets to this point I am totally paralyzed, can't work and just sit in front of the TV all day long.


I keep asking myself why this happens. Why these relapses? For one I think that my body is trying to tell me something. I think that it is his way of reminding me to allow myself to feel the pain the little boy has suffered. As a child I had to care for my parents while they never cared for me. This is outrageous, and I need to allow myself to feel this rage, this anger, this injustice that had been done to me. I have a very good intellectual understanding of what has been done to me and of the consequences these experiences had on my development, but allowing myself to access these FEELINGS and to express them is something else. I will try to be more mindful of those feelings to see if it makes a difference.

The other reason why I believe that it is easy to fall back into depression is because certain connections in my brain do not exist, or are not strong enough yet. It's like a river that has carved its way through the landscape for thousands of years. Trying to re-route that river into a new river bed is not easy, and will take a lot of time and work. Similarly I believe, certain neurons in my brain are not used to shooting in new and different directions. They much rather follow the old paths that they are used to. I know this is a very unscientific explanation, but I hope to have conveyed my point.

What do you think?

Can medication heal depression?

I have never used medication to treat my depression. At the beginning of my psychotherapy, my therapist referred me to a psychiatrist who was willing to prescribe antidepressants to me, but for some reason I chose not to. But I think I had some kind of intuition telling me that if I wanted to get at the true source of my depression, medication was not the way to go.

I am not against medication per se, because low serotonin levels in our brains have been associated with depression, and antidepressants have been shown to raise the serotonin level. I also want to stress that I am not advising anyone to stay away from medication, because in severe cases I believe that it can save lives. However, in the long run I think that it prevents you from being able to be cured. I think so because for me it was essential to feel some of my most painful childhood and adolescence events and memories, and medication prevents you from doing exactly that. It contributes to the cover-up, and it helps you further repress childhood trauma.

Like I alluded to in my previous posting, I can say from my experience that this journey into my past was absolutely necessary in the healing process. This was however not just an intellectual understanding of what had happened to me. I had to learn how to communicate and empathize with the child in me that was deeply hurt. This child was "trained" by his abusive parents to always put their needs ahead of his own. This child was never taken seriously or listened to by his parents because they were always caught up with their fights. This child was told by his parents that he is the reason that they can't divorce, and he took all the blame on him. This child constantly comforted his mother because he saw how much she suffered in her marriage, and this child was afraid to loose his mother for his survival dependent on her. This adolescent's father threatened him with suicide if he was going to tell his mother that he had caught his father in one of his many extra-marital affairs. This adolescent comforted his parents during his brother's fight with cancer and after his brother's death, while he was not comforted by anyone. And when this young man finally had the courage to confront his parents with these and many other stories, his parents showed him the cold shoulder, and again only saw their own suffering, and not their son's, who had become a young man. This child, this adolescent, this young man, had never received any empathy from his parents, and he never will. I had to learn to treat him with understanding, empathy, respect. I had to learn to nurture him for he was never nurtured by his biological parents.

My therapist was instrumental in helping me achieve this. At the very beginning of our therapy sessions he suggested that I keep a picture of my child self close to me and that I communicate with this young little boy. I found this suggestion very strange at the beginning, and I only realized much later how important this was for me in my healing process.

Depression is NOT the result of our present life's circumstances

Very frequently you will hear people say that they are depressed because they just broke up with their partner, lost their job, are stressed out, failed an exam, lost a loved one, don't have enough money, and the list goes on. I was no exception to that. When I was around 25 years old, I started having marital problems, I had problems in grad school, and I started feeling very lonely, lost, hopeless, afraid of the future, simply not fit for life. I started with group therapy, but soon my despair was growing even more. At that time, and many times later, I contemplated ending my life, or simply getting away from it all, on some remote island, free from the pressures of "modern" life, which I thought had caused my misery.

Yes, the current events have most likely triggered my feeling depressed, but the roots of my depression were much deeper. It took years of therapy and reading for me to realize that, and this realization was the key to my freedom from depression. My depression was rooted in my childhood experiences, a childhood during which I had been severely emotionally abused by my parents. The abuse was however not the sole cause of my depression. The deeper reason for my depression was my denial (as an adult) of the abuse I had suffered. I will expand on this in future postings. For now I am going to leave it at that, and will add that I didn't come up with that incredible insight on my own. I am deeply indebted to Alice Miller, a swiss psychologist, who wrote an article entitled "Depression - Compulsive Self Deception", which opened my eyes in this regard.