Parker Palmer Archives - Lawyers With Depression

Putting Pen to Paper: Writers on Depression

That terrible mood of depression, whether it’s any good or not, is what is known as The Artist’s Reward. Ernest Hemmingway

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know, and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding, and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re “not at all like yourself but will be soon,” but you know you won’t. Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast

That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America

In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come – – not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

They flank me-Depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show their badges. I know these guys very well. …then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Depression is nourished by a lifetime of ungrieved and unforgiven hurts. Penelope Sweet

Continue Reading Article

Down is the Way to Well-being: The Dangers of Living at Altitude

Parker Palmer, Ph.D., writes, “When you’re depressed, it seems insulting, even insane for someone to suggest that the soul-sucking spawn of Satan that has sunk its claws into you is your BFF. And yet, as time went by, the image of depression as a befriending force began to work on me, slowly reframing my misery and helping me find a way through. Something in me knew what my therapist knew: down is the way to well-being.” Read the Blog

North of 50 – Depression at Midlife

When first diagnosed with depression fifteen years ago at the age of 40, I thought I would recuperate and, more or less, go back to my busy life as a lawyer and husband with a young family. It didn’t work out that way. I soon found out it was going to be a long haul. And I’m still truckin’.

What’s changed in my experience of depression over the past decade and a half? A lot.

I know much, much more about the illness; it’s contours, triggers, and wily ways. I know what will help when I’m in the thick of it, more often than not. I also accept there will be times when there’s little I can do to make a dent in depression’s cold armor.

My depression doesn’t last as long as it used to. Nor is it typically as deep. In the early days, it seemed like it went on forever. I couldn’t remember a time before it when I’d been happy. And couldn’t envision a future of being anything other than depressed. I felt I was barely living. Nothing gave me pleasure. Even eating good food, one of my favorite things. Everything tasted like ashes in my mouth. Death felt preferable, at times.

I didn’t feel much compassion for my depressed, younger self. I’d slap myself in the head and say, “What the hell’s wrong with you?” I had my own inner medieval-like inquisitor ready to burn my soul at the stake for some unknown sins depression’s twisted thinking had convinced me I’d committed.

The verdict: my depression was my fault.

I don’t believe that anymore. I now understand it’s a bunch of hooey cooked up by my depressed head. After all, depression’s a terrible liar. There’s a cruel irony to all of this. We need our minds to recover – but sometimes it’s this very organ that’s turned against us. Depression isn’t who we really are, but we can feel that way. As Parker Palmer once wrote about his experiences with this affliction, “I wasn’t walking in the darkness, I had become darkness.”

I have the upper hand on depression now. It isn’t the giant that once pummeled me. It isn’t as scary. Because I know know that depression will, yes, always be a part of my life, but it isn’t my life.

I am more than that.

And I have a good and full life that I’m determined to live.

A New Year to Kick the Depression habit

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning – T.S. Eliot

With the New Year comes new choices; we can choose to leave behind ways of being in the world that cause and maintain our depression and embrace healthier and saner approaches to our days. Or we can simply do nothing.

Why do lawyers with depression keep repeating behaviors that prevent them from feeling good about themselves? Why do they relentlessly drive, isolate and unmercifully think of themselves as the biggest piece of crap this side of the Mississippi?

In his revised and updated book Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn’t Teach You and Medication Can’t Give You, Dr. Richard O’Connor offers this insight: “People persist in self-destructive behavior because they don’t know how to do anything else. I’m convinced that the major reason why people with depression stay depressed despite therapy, medication, and support from loved ones is that we are simply unable to imagine an alternative. We know how to ‘do’ depression. We are experts at it.”

Lawyers can’t envision healthier alternatives because depression shuts down their capacity to creatively imagine themselves productively engaged in the world. We simply have no reference point for that. So we stay in our offices with the doors closed looking out the window as the birds fly by and one season changes into another.

Our brains love habits — even when they stink and hurt us. It’s a more predictable way to go through life because we don’t have to rethink everything and change. We become used to depressive habits as we cruise through life on auto-pilot. Many lawyers with depression usually view their jobs as the sole source of their depression; surviving “it” becomes the focus of their lives. They use depression habits at their jobs that might work for awhile, but at a very high cost to their physical and emotional well-being. These aren’t stupid people; they just can’t imagine doing their jobs any differently. As educatior Parker Palmer once wrote about his depression, “It wasn’t so much that I was in the darkness as I became the darkness.”

Dr. O’Connor writes:

“We depressives become shaped by our disease as well; the skills that we develop with depression in a vain effort to save ourselves pain – skills like swallowing our anger, isolating ourselves, putting others first, being over-responsible – prevent our recovery. We have to give up the depressed habits that keep us down and make us vulnerable to relapse.”

Deepak Chopra wrote: “A habit is a frozen interpretation from the past that is applied to the present.” I think that’s why depression can have such a deadening sensation associated with it. In a sense, depression warps our perceptions about events happening in real time and pulls us under the frozen river of our past. People and events happening in real time trigger old interpretations of how life works. Since most people with depression come from dysfunctional or abusive childhoods, a current conflict with others becomes a ride back to their traumatic past.

For me, this distortion has often revolved around anger. I not alone on this one; how we handle anger is a big issue for most lawyers. As lawyer and psychologist Andy Benjamin wrote and studies have concluded, there is a strong connection between hostility and depression. Anger seems to be situational, while hostility is an overarching and aggressive approach to life. Anger that is repeatedly stuffed or inappropriately expressed becomes hostility. Many lawyers don’t want to be assholes, but feel they have to do so to survive in the shark tank of the law. Most lawyers I’ve known feel deeply conflicted about this and if they’ve had problems with depression, it just compounds it all.

In my childhood home, my alcoholic father had a volcanic temper – you knew to scram when you saw lava cresting at the rim. I learned that anger was painful, “bad” and always unjustified. As such, I used to avoid conflict and stuff my own anger because it was dangerous. Instead, I became a people pleaser. I developed exquisite antennae to read clients, colleagues, opposing counsel and judges’ reactions for any signs of aggression, anger or conflict. I molded my behavior to their behavior rather than living out of a core of my own reality. This distortion gave others too much power and myself too little. It is, as psychologist James Hollis once wrote, an emotional conclusion in which we tell ourselves “the world is big and I am small.” Most depressives think this way and feel overpowered by the events of their world and lapse into a state of helplessness.

As we enter a new year, let’s start leaving some depressive habits behind and embrace some new ones. This will take work on your part. No one is going to save you from your depression. While you are not to blame for your depression, you are responsible for getting better. Dr. O’Connor writes:

“Overcoming depression requires a new set of skills from us. But now we are recognizing happiness is a skill, willpower is a skill, health is a skill, successful relationships require skills, emotional intelligence is a skill. We know this because practice not only leads to improvement but also to changes in the brain. This is a much more empowering and adaptive way of understanding life than assuming that these qualities are doled out form birth in fixed quantities and that there’s nothing we can do to change our fate. The skills required to undo depression will permeate your entire life, and if you keep practicing, you can go far beyond mere recovery.”

Happy New Year!

Spiritual Hope – A Postscript

I have been listening to a wonderful audio interview with author/educator, Parker Palmer produced by a company called, Sounds True. Check out their website. Its catalog of authors address wellness, meditation, spirituality and personal growth is simply amazing.

Parker is currently 70 years old and a Quaker. In the interview, he recounts the three major episodes of clinical depression he went through during his life. He said some insightful things to say about those experiences. He doesn’t believe in “formulas” or “How-to-Lists” to cope with depression. He speaks about depression in the context of his spirituality:

“Perhaps, the answer is that my ravaged mind rails against even the idea of God, but something deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. ‘There are no foxholes,’ I guess, and depression is the deepest and deadliest foxhole I’ve been in. It may be the ‘dark night of the soul’ that the mystics talk about but in depression it is not so much that one becomes lost in the dark as that one becomes the dark. I have never been able to ‘do theology’ when I am in this state; the best I’ve been able to do is hang on. Only later, in the light of day, am I able to understand that God walked with me in the darkness even though I could not feel God’s presence at the time.”

Later, he talks about how he survived his depression: he “slogged through it.” And maybe, sometimes, that’s all we can do. While we may feel that a depression will never end, it’s important to remember that it always does and we can use that knowledge to slog through it.

The Ladder of Success

Many lawyers are consumed with the goal of becoming successful. Often, traditional success means money, status and power. According to veteran lawyer George W. Kaufman, author of the book, The Lawyers’ Guide to Balancing Life and Work, “For too many lawyers, the goal of success becomes the primary driver. But surveys of working lawyers tell us that a great many of them are unhappy even when their planned goals are realized . . .” This view was echoed by therapist, Alden Cass in an article on burnout in New York Magazine titled, Can’t Get No Satisfaction. Cass, who treats Wall Street lawyers in New York City, says, “I can’t tell you how many people come into my office and ask, “How come I have this money and I can’t find happiness?”

Most lawyers are never taught about the problems and pitfalls of pursuing success without also combining it with the pursuit of meaning and purpose. My parent’s only imperatives were that I go to college, get a good job and “be happy.” I worked long hours, endured constant stress and moved up my old firm’s pecking order. But somewhere along the way, I realized that something was terribly wrong with my life. I wasn’t just unhappy; I was full of sorrow. The great mythologist, professor and author, Joseph Campbell captured the irony of our common struggle for success: “You climb the ladder of success and when you get to the top you find it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”

I fell off that ladder and into a well of depression.

I was never taught how to navigate the waters of difficult emotions. When I looked around at my fellow lawyers, they all seemed so together — like a show room car that never got dented and was always polished.

Through my depression, I learned a lot about the darkness. That it isn’t exactly an illness, but part of the human journey for all of us. Educator and author, Parker Palmer, who went through and struggled with depression, wrote:

“Many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race”. Listen to a great podcast where Parker is interviewed for a show called, The Soul of Depression.

So much of the literature out there about success focuses on “work-life” balance. The formula in many of these tomes is the same: set limits, exercise and make time for family. All of these are well and good, but seem to so often fail us. There’s simply not enough gravity in them to keep us in orbit. What’s lacking is a basic truth: Life is made up of struggles and losses and how we deal with them. Such struggles can reach a crisis pitch in which we enter a sort of darkness.

In his book, Dark Night of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals, psychologist, Thomas Moore says:

“A dark night may not feel like depression. In a long illness or a troubled marriage you may be anxious, but not depressed. On the other hand, a clinical depression might well qualify as a dark night. Whatever you call it, the experience involves you as a person, someone with a history, a temperament, memories, emotions, and ideas. Depression is a label and a syndrome, while the dark night is a meaningful event. Depression is a psychological sickness; a dark night is a spiritual trial.

Many people think that the point of life is to solve their problems and be happy. But happiness is usually a fleeting sensation, and you never get rid of the problems. Your purpose in life may be to become more who you are and more engaged with the people and the life around you, to really live your life. That may sound obvious, yet many people spend their time avoiding life. They are afraid to let it flow through them, and so their vitality gets channeled into ambitions, addictions, and preoccupations that don’t give them anything worth having. A dark night may appear, paradoxically, as a way to return to the living. It pares life down to its essentials and helps you to get a new start”.

And maybe that’s what we all need – a new start. To wake up to a new vision about what success really means to us and how we need to act in our lives as lawyers to meet that meaning.

I remember the words of Mother Teresa on the topic of success. It’s worth mentioning that a book published in 2007, Come Be My Light – The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, says that Mother Teresa felt deep sorrow, despair and one could argue “depression” for the last fifty years of her life. Yet, in the most profound sense –whether you are religious or not — wasn’t she a success? She once said, “We are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful.” In other words, we can’t control the outcomes. But, we can live a life that is directed by our spirits. And THAT is a life of success.

Tag: Parker Palmer