about up from the ashes and depression

When I started my blog, I wanted to write about making money on the web, but, seeing the current balance of my bank account, that is something about which I clearly know very little. Any of the most successful bloggers will tell you to blog about what you are passionate about, and what you know about. For the last seven or eight months, heck, maybe the past year, I haven’t really kept track, I guess I didn’t really know what I know about, even though tonight it seems so clear and obvious.

The subject of this blog, like the subject of my life, will be my own journey on the path to wholeness, much of which I have spent in the darkness of depression. Emerging from the dark night of the soul, transformed, and the slipping back into an unconscious way of being, more dark nights, and more breakthroughs. This is what I know, that it IS a journey, that moves through me, like the high and low tides, and I cannot ever expect a final outcome, one way or another, because it is always changing. I am always changing.

I suppose this post is also my disclaimer. I am not offering any of this as any kind of psychological advice or instruction, this is simply a public journal of my own journey, what has worked for me and what hasn’t, as a part of my own healing. As I see it, a blog is a form of creative expression that so many of us lack, and it is my belief that creative expression through writing, art, or music are essential for any depressed person to help them on their journey to rise ‘up from the ashes’ in their search for wholeness, or, at the least, feeling. I’m an old veteran of the numbness, the emptiness, and hopelessness of not being able to feel anything. Yet, in the bleakest of times, I have always been aware of a tiny light glimmering in my heart, and I’ve let it guide me through some of the darkest times in my life, even though I did not know where it would lead me, and I can say, that if one can hold on to that light in the clenches of the worst times, there is a greater joy and knowing than they have ever felt or known waiting for them once the darkness lifts. And it will lift, we just need to give the process time.

As I wrote in the opening lines, my interest was in making a living blogging. My interest has shifted. I now just want to write about my experiences, mostly the ones that occurred in my head, the ones no one knows about, partly for my own selfish reasons, if you will, of therapy through creative self-expression, and, partly to offer any reassurance to anyone else who may be going through the same thing. I know that when I was in my own little personal hell, I felt that no one else in the world knew, or cared, where I was psychologically, mentally, and spiritually.

I think it is important to say, even if it is only my own personal belief, that depression is a disease of the soul, a build-up over time of unfelt feelings, lies to the self, and simply not allowing ourselves to be who we are. The only way out is to sit in the pain of being who we are, to let that pain wash over us and burn away our past, to allow ourselves to ‘grieve’ the ‘death’ of that old self, to let go, and to emerge, from the ashes, as a new person. While some people who may be on the verge of suicide could benefit from antidepressants, I believe that to be lifted out of the clenches of depression, we must be drug free.

During my last visit to the doctor where i was diagnosed at the low end of severe depression, my doctor prescribed Prozac, which I took for several months before I simply could not take it any more. She recommended that I stay on antidepressants for the rest of my life, because depression is a disease just like diabetes or what have you. She also offered me reassurance that a depressed person cannot simply be expected to ‘buck-up’ or ’snap out of it’ because clinical depression resides in the brain, where the victim’s neuro-transmitters are not functioning properly, and antidepressants can fix these problems.

While her reassurances did boost my self-esteem a bit (I felt flawed and even guilty for being depressed!), the Prozac did not sit well with me. I was always gnashing my teeth and quite jittery. I was also aware of the artificialness of my feelings. While my mood DID lift, I could tell it was ‘fake’. It’s hard to explain the ‘unreal’ feeling I experienced under the influence of Prozac. Within a few months I was back at the doctor for something different. I told her how a few years back I was on Wellbutrin and had responded pretty well to it.

We tried a generic version and I was a bit surprised that I did not respond to it at all like I had before. I still felt like the ‘real me’ was obscured behind a veil, I was always quite cottonmouth and I couldn’t catch my breath. All of this finally culminated to the evening when I felt like my backbone was on fire. I had actually heard about a similar reaction from a friend of mine, and, while I do not recommend this course of action, I simply stopped taking the pills and never went back to her. At the time I was reading a book called ‘the seat of the soul’ by gary zukav and something was already awakening deep inside of me. I began returning to myself a more holistic approach to medicine that I had for some reason completely abandoned when I started to see my current partner some 7 years before (but that’s another post). I started taking St. John’s wort and I am still taking it, with very promising results and virtually NO side effects.

I believe if a person is severely depressed, antidepressants are an effective way of protecting the victim from doing anything drastic (like committing suicide or shooting people). But I also believe it is irresponsible for a doctor to simply prescribe pharmaceuticals and send them on their way. I think it is important for the therapist to recognize the depth of their patient’s depression in order to prescribe the correct medication in addition to the correct course of therapy. I also think it is crucial for the therapist to consider the condition of the patient’s soul. If they are treading into uncharted territory as far as soul issues go, there are some very helpful books available in this field of study. In some patients medication alone simply covers the pain of depression and does not address the sometimes complex courses of events in the person’s life that got them to this point to begin with. And ultimately, a drugged person cannot be healed because depression deals with emotional and soul issues, and the meds obscure the emotions.

In this blog I want to explore what has worked in my journey, and who knows, maybe it will work in someone elses. I also want to put emphasis on the importance of the soul in this subject. It seems to me that therapists have been, for the most part, ignoring a critical piece of the puzzle by not addressing soul issues in conjunction with depression. However, recently things have started to shift to an awareness of soul issues and mental health, so I believe there is hope.