(Written in December 2005)
Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m really feeling as bad as I’ve ever felt about myself and my life. Please help me.
Dear Jenny, this is clinical depression. It’s not who you really are. Hang on. You’ve raised the medication and it will work, it just takes time. The person you really are is the one you were last fall when you felt good about yourself and your life, you had enthusiasm for daily living and you enjoyed it. This is possible again. Remember how your friend Rose Marie flew from New York and rented a car to come do healing work with you — she thought you were worth that much effort. And your friend Kathi who came and sat with you in the hospital because she needed your presence in her life. There are many people who love you, you just can’t take it in right now. Don’t make yourself wrong for this. Just keep on going: doing the daily chores, getting out with the dog on snowshoes, dancing when you can. You WILL come out of this.
Observation without evaluation. Here’s this woman, born with a highly sensitive nervous system and traumatized in infancy. There is also, probably, an inherited predisposition to depression. The combination of high sensitivity and trauma means that her internal state is variable, vulnerable, volatile. She is easily thrown off balance by small happenings, she can be triggered into extreme anxiety or profound depression by relatively normal events (people getting upset, something breaking, people leaving, dog being sick). She is not robust and stable but knocked about by every little wind that blows. Every day is a struggle to just keep going, managing food and other chores, keeping up her commitments.