These journal entries from 1996 are part of my long ongoing struggle against depression. At this time I was still married to Dana.<\/p>\n
February 13<\/p>\n
Helpful talk with Dana this afternoon.\u00a0 <\/span>I was feeling so bad I just needed to tell him.\u00a0 <\/span>I said the parts of my life that meant something were just drifting away, that I wanted to live but felt like I wasn\u2019t alive.\u00a0 <\/span>He responded by telling me about the \u201cpiscean\u201d time in his life, when all his ideas for what he would do with his life fell apart.\u00a0 <\/span>He spent about a year and a half in the void zone, being something of a hermit, feeling very lonely, but just waiting for answers which did, finally, begin \u201cto drift in.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>The answers had to do with seeing an activity in terms of what he got out of it, or how it transformed him, instead of how he would fit into society, or make a contribution.\u00a0 <\/span>He talked about exploring the emptiness to see its shape, that the shape of the emptiness is an answer to the question.\u00a0 <\/span>I said I felt that there wasn\u2019t any emptiness, that it was all clogged with \u201cclum,\u201d that there wasn\u2019t room for anything new to come in.\u00a0 <\/span>He said that sounded like old things, projects, structures, that used to work for me but don\u2019t any more.\u00a0 <\/span>He talked about letting go.\u00a0 <\/span>I said I try to let go, but the stuff is still around.\u00a0 <\/span>He said it sounds like you\u2019re trying to get rid of it, and I saw that I was assuming that if I had really let go, the stuff would be gone.\u00a0 <\/span>But no, I can let go and it may still be here.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s like my assumption that if I could really \u201cbe with\u201d a negative feeling it would dissolve or change.\u00a0 <\/span>Not necessarily.\u00a0 <\/span>So it looks like I\u2019m doing fine, trying different things, distracting myself occasionally, but mostly trying to just be with myself, practicing not abandoning myself in the face of discomfort and boredom.\u00a0 <\/span>Sigh.<\/p>\n
Breathe, relax, you\u2019re doing fine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“Piscean” refers to Pisces, the Fish, the last sign of the zodiac.<\/p>\n
What Dana says about wanting to find an activity that feeds him or transforms him, instead of one that has to do with fitting into society or make a contribution, was something I didn’t begin to understand until I saw the difference<\/a> between my motivation for “Written in Blood” and my motivation for Neskaya.<\/p>\n
“Breathe, relax, you’re doing fine” is a mantra they gave us at Kripalu.<\/p>\n
February 14<\/p>\n
I think the talk with Dana helped a lot.\u00a0 <\/span>I feel more patient and gentle toward my depression.\u00a0 <\/span>The idea of it\u2019s being part of a 28-year cycle, which seems like a kind of biorhythm, makes it appear to be something I have to live through, rather than something I have to do something about, a natural process that I have to manage as best I can.\u00a0 <\/span>Dana\u2019s description of his experience, how everything fell apart, how he stayed in \u201cneutral\u201d for a while, how answers finally began to drift in, how his life had changed in major ways \u2014 this gives me hope that I\u2019m doing something similar, and will emerge similarly transformed.<\/p>\n
Dana also reminded me about structural tension, how I don\u2019t have to know the process in order to heal.\u00a0 <\/span>I see that I\u2019ve been trying to discover\/figure out what is causing the depression in order to know what to do about it.\u00a0 <\/span>It was comforting to discover yesterday that I did in fact want to live.\u00a0 <\/span>That was obscured by the fact that I felt that I wasn\u2019t living and didn\u2019t know what to do about it, as though \u201cIf you really wanted to live you\u2019d know what to do.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>That unhelpful and invalidating attitude infuriates me, and I use it against myself all the time, introjected from parents who didn\u2019t want to take the time and trouble to explain things to their child.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“Structural Tension” is a term from a course in how to create what you want in your life. The idea is to hold current reality \u2014 what’s really going on right now \u2014 together with your vision of what you want to see instead. Just holding them together, without thinking about the process to get from one to the other, is what works. If you think of a process, you immediately limit the possibilities.<\/p>\n
Well, that\u2019s one source for the depression, my parents\u2019 repressed material that they never worked through.\u00a0 S<\/span>o I have to work through it to free myself, and I do this in therapy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I find it fascinating that, back in 1996, before I ever heard the evidence that emotional stuff that isn’t worked through gets handed down the generations, I somehow knew it. This is my intuition, that I think I don’t have, because if I said something out of intuition, Mother told me I was wrong.<\/p>\n
Another source is if trauma alters brain chemistry.\u00a0 <\/span>Well, there are too many questions in that one.\u00a0 <\/span>It hasn\u2019t been proved yet that trauma alters the brain, nor that it does it permanently.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019m still not convinced that I was traumatized \u2014 o but I do fear that trauma has permanently altered my brain which is why I\u2019m considering taking an anti-depressant.\u00a0 <\/span>And, even if trauma alters the brain \u201cpermanently\u201d there are still possibilities of healing, through \u201cmiracle,\u201d through spiritual practice, through continuum.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
My mixed response to the idea that I was traumatized is because I was under the illusion that the violence of the event caused the trauma, but in fact it’s the inability of the organism to process the event that results in trauma.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m still feeling quiet and patient with myself, no longer pushing to get out of the depression.\u00a0 <\/span>That feels a little better, easier, the misery doesn\u2019t feel so heavy.\u00a0 <\/span>More like a soft, quiet, cloudy day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I see that Dana, who wasn’t dealing with alcoholic parents and early trauma, was able to use this process that didn’t work for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These journal entries from 1996 are part of my long ongoing struggle against depression. At this time I was still married to Dana. February 13 Helpful talk with Dana this afternoon.\u00a0 I was feeling so bad I just needed to … Continue reading