Hope Archives - Lawyers With Depression

Christmas

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together

A Christmas Curmudgeon

Driving home yesterday, I spilled my large cup of Starbucks all over my lap causing me to swerve slightly, it seemed like inches, into the lane of a grouchy driver to my right: an eighty year old guy with a face like a overdone waffle wearing thick glasses who rolled down his window and let out a shrill scream, “Merry Christmas to you too, buddy!!” Wow, I guess he had a tough day at the Mall! I had a good laugh telling my friends about it later.

Mark Twain, who must have crashed into a few horse-drawn buggies in a dirt Yuletide parking lot, once wrote:

“The approach of Christmas brings harassment and dread to many excellent people. They have to buy a cart-load of presents, and they never know what to buy to hit the various tastes; they put in three weeks of hard and anxious work, and when Christmas morning comes they are so dissatisfied with the result, and so disappointed that they want to sit down and cry. Then they give thanks that Christmas comes but once a year.”

The Holidays are tough for many people.

While Christmas and the New Year come but once a year, it’s really a month long reverie of parties, music, eating and spending time with friends and family. During this stretch of time, Christmas isn’t so great for lots of people and there are good reasons for it.

Despondency is common during the holidays for many. The most famous example of this is none other than George Bailey in the timeless classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. I believe so many people relate to George because he’s the archetype of a good man who is befallen by undeserved tragedy – the prospect of financial ruin – and learns through an angel what his life would have been for others if he’d never been born. George develops a new found appreciation for what’s really important, the love of family and friends. He leaves his guardian angel, returns home only to find his family heartily welcoming his return and, because George has helped so many in his lifetime, they come through by helping him with enough money to solve his financial crisis.

Maybe most of us aren’t on a precipice of financial ruin, but there are many parties, celebrations and gatherings that require the spending for food and drink. This creates the need to put the hands deep in the pocket, both for gifts and to pay for the restaurants and bars. The temptations such as food, the cocktails, purchases and gifts is high and leads many people to feel stress for the consequences of their actions (gain more weight, headache, depression, overdrafts). These effects remain after the end of the holidays and cause even more stress and depression.

Everyone who struggles in today’s economy is George Bailey; stressed and wondering if they can support their families and provide a happy Christmas. This can take a toll on many.

They may be lonely, whether surrounded by loved ones or not. For those struggling with depression or just profound loneliness, Christmas can be so tough. They’re expected by others to be Merry and when they’re not, they are prodded to “Cheer up.” That’s one of the confounding things for those who have never experienced depression: that you could possibly feel so down when surrounded by circumstances that appear, to those with no reference point to understand, so great. But, there it is. Even when not told by others to snap out of their funk, folks who are lonely and depressed feel this way because the holidays trigger some memory of loss, of loved ones not there that should be there or their inability to pull themselves out of a down mood.

There can also be family turmoil during the holidays. Usually people want to gather the whole family together for Christmas, but everyone has plans and sometimes there is conflict because people prefer to spend the holidays in their own home. There is also the possibility that people have high expectations these days from other people. People might expect perfect conditions with expensive gifts and positive response by all. This is not usually the case and this increases the chances to feel disappointed and the risk of sadness and depression are increased.

People are too pooped to party. One of the main reasons that the holidays bring with them intense stress is that suddenly there are many requirements and people have to do many things in a short period of time. Even when the activities are basically pleasant and enjoyable, they are a change from the daily routine that people are used to, and this situation is pushing the person to do more things than it can normally do. Shopping, the need for finding gifts, participation in various social events and obligations, the preparation of Christmas dishes and other sweets all create stress and fatigue.

The Spiritual Dimension of Christmas

While there are a lot of things that can bring us down this time a year, we all need to remember that, just like an elevator, there are plenty of things to bring us up: small kindnesses that fall on us like snow throughout a day: children with wool caps on running across the street with mittens while a volunteer crossing guard swooshes them along, someone says “Thanks” or “You’re welcome” and really meaning it, a Christmas song plays and takes you back to a sweet childhood memory of the holidays or you just plain old feel the ineffaceable lift of your spirits being part of the a time during the year where there’s some sort of fellowship, a sense that we all are part of God’s family, and wish each other well.

Because I am Catholic (a very liberal one, mind you), the holidays offer another gift to me – a sense of Joy. I have always found the month leading up to Christmas enjoyable, what my church calls Advent, in some sense a salve on the short days and chapped skin from too much cold wind that hurdle through Buffalo salt covered streets.

I am never preachy about my faith (I don’t care for it when others do so about theirs’) because I feel there are many paths to God. But I do feel it’s important to seep yourself in whatever your spiritual tradition leads you to be a better, more kind and decent human being.

In my faith, Christmas is a month of anticipation culminating in the birth of Jesus; the seminal event in human history where God intervenes in human time to send his only Son to save a broken and lost humanity from itself. This belief is expressed so beautifully in the Old Testament by the prophet Isaiah who writes:

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace.”

My parish priest, captured some of the mysterious dimension of Jesus’ birth when he wrote:

“Contemplate, with me, the mystery that is Christmas. Like all mysteries, it bears innumerable levels of meaning and of presence. The core truth is that God, in person of Jesus, takes a specific place, Mary’s womb, and time (c. 4 B.C.E.), and becomes one with humanity. It stretches the imagination to think that God would so choose to be identified with us that a transcendent/immanent communion issues forth through a simple woman, Mary, as “the Christ,” the anointed one. Nothing in the story of human creation before this event/birth, a recorded history of c. 6,000 years and an unrecorded history of probably 500,000 years, prepares us for this wonder.”

Thousands of years have passed since Isaiah’s psalm, we all still walk in darkness and all are in need of a “great light” to illuminate our steps as we walk through life. There’s a yearning in all beings to be guided by something or Someone bigger than their limited self.

For me, the birth of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, brings a profound sense of hope into the world; hope that we all can grow as a people and know what it is like to feel the light of God’s love.

Coping with the Holidays

Be Generous and Mindful of those less fortunate to you. It is funny how years later particular events stick in your mind. One Christmas Season, a homeless man well-known to hang out in front of a coffee shop I used to go to, came inside. He would do this on occasion and ask for money in tattered clothes and mangled hair. His name was Wesley.

I later learned that he was a Vietnam veteran who suffered from PTSD. I had given him change on occasion, but didn’t feel like it that morning. He asked, “Do you have any money?” I said, somewhat brusquely, “No, I do not.” He then paused for a moment, a look of kind concern in his eyes, and said softly, “Do you need some.” This man with so little offered me what little he had and in doing so taught me the true heart of Christmas.

Remember the holiday season does not banish reasons for feeling sad or lonely. There is room for these feelings to be present, even if the person chooses not to express them. But like all feelings, they pass. It might just be that the holidays, with all its high expectations of happiness, intensify these feelings. Just hang in there.

Have a little faith in the goodness of life. We can all get weary from the drubbing we get at Christmas in our too materialistic, too focused on stuff society. But let that not dampen your spirit too much because beneath it all, there’s simply too much goodness in this world to appreciate all around you.

The humorist Garrison Keillor wrote:

“To know and to serve God, of course, is why we’re here, a clear truth, that, like the nose on your face, is near at hand and easily discernible but can make you dizzy if you try to focus on it hard. But a little faith will see you through. What else will do except faith in such a cynical, corrupt time? When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to be circumspect, walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word. What is the last word, then? Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids — all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.”

God bless you all and have a Merry Christmas.

The Triumph of the Human Spirit – Folks Dealing with Depression

A hero is an ordinary person who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles – Christopher Reeve.

I want to tell others about all the remarkable people I’ve known who’ve struggled with depression. While they’re not paladins that ride into medieval battle swinging swords atop snorting mares, they fight a different kind of battle. And one no less heroic.

Many of the best people I’ve been privileged to know struggle with depression every day. While they don’t have shiny medals pinned on their lapels, there is an unmistakable strength in them – even if they don’t see it. I know it’s real because I see and feel it – just like when I am in a grove of giant and majestic pines during a walk in the forest that must withstand the fury of a winter’s storm in January.

A Hero Steps Forward

Take Bob Antonioni. Bob’s story appeared in Esperanza magazine’s regular column, “Everyday Heroes”. He had a budding political career in the Massachusetts State Senate and a law practice. Despite holding such a public position, Bob took the courageous step to disclose that he suffered from clinical depression in the hope of letting others know it was okay – there wasn’t anything to be ashamed of:

“Telling his story has become another tool to chip away at stigma. Yet he remembers his trepidation when he disclosed the truth in a November 2003 interview with a local newspaper.
‘I had misgivings,’ he admits, ‘but I guess I didn’t give people enough credit. All I heard were thank yous —the complete opposite of what I expected.’ In fact, Antonioni was re-elected twice after that. He retired from public office in 2009 to have more time for himself and his family, but continues to practice law and pursue his advocacy work.”

To me, it says something wonderful about the human spirit that against such a formidable foe as depression, people keep fighting to get better. And many triumph. Just like Bob.

The Black Dog

A few weeks ago in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, there was a great piece, Ill to Power. The article was about Winston Churchill’s life-long battle with depression written by the author of the new book, A First-rate Madness. Here, he describes Churchill’s struggles:

“There is no doubt that he had severe periods of depression; he was open about it – calling it, following Samuel Johnson, his ‘Black Dog.’ Apparently his most severe bout of depression came in 1910, when he was, at about age 35, Home Secretary. Later in his life, he told his doctor, ‘For two or three years the light faded from the picture. I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me.’ He had thoughts of killing himself. ‘I don’t like standing near the edge of the platform when an express train is passing through’.”

Like Churchill, Abraham Lincoln struggled with major bouts of depression. In the book Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Fueled a President to Greatness, Lincoln writes about a cloud over him that every bit matches Churchill’s darkness:

“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were felt by the whole human race, there would not be one cheerful face left on earth”.

Lincoln, who many say was one of this country’s greatest heroes, apparently did not feel like one all the time.

Hard to Feel Like a Hero

Most people depression — in some fundamental sense –feel broken. This conclusion is fueled by the depression itself – both biological (sleep, appetite, energy levels) and psychological (e.g. “Nobody really cares about me”, “I stink at my job” or “My depression will never end”). But this brokenness isn’t just an “inside job” – crummy stuff they tell themselves about themselves. Other people or events in a depressive’s daily orbit serve-up damaging assessments and innuendos about a depressed person’s behavior or personhood.

Others may tell them that they are letting them down at the office or not contributing enough to family responsibilities – yes, loved ones can get fed up with the depressed person’s withdrawal from the family, the inability to do chores he/she used to do and the depressed person’s sourpuss. Or, they deny the immensity of the suffering of the depressive by minimizing it: “Don’t worry, things will get better. You’re just in a slump.”

We sense that their agenda isn’t so much about helping us get better, as it is about them their needs. Why else would we feel so much crappier and lonely after such exchanges? It isn’t as if their needs aren’t important, but shouldn’t our mental health be at least as important?

Then there is the cultural stigma – a cloud of ignorance, fear and misunderstanding – surrounding depression. American culture tends to see depression as a moral or personal weakness; the “just-get-over-it” rants of a society that likes simplistic answers to complicated problems. Dr. Richard O’Connor, in his book Undoing Depression, captures some the irony of how our society sees depression as different from – or maybe not as real as — other forms of illness:

“Where’s the big national foundation leading the battle against depression? Where is the Jerry Lewis Telethon and the Annual Run for Depression? Little black ribbons for everyone to wear? The obvious answer is the stigma associated with the disease. Too much of the public still views depression as a weakness or character flaw, and thinks we should pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

And all the hype about new antidepressant medications has only made things worse by suggesting that recovery is simply a matter of taking a pill. Too many people with depression take the same attitude; we are ashamed of and embarrassed by having depression. This is the cruelest part of the disease: we blame ourselves for being weak or lacking character instead of accepting that we have an illness, instead of realizing that our self-blame is a symptom of the disease. And feeling that way, we don’t step forward and challenge unthinking people who reinforce those negative stereotypes. So we stay hidden away, feeling miserable and yourselves for ourselves for our own misery”.

Renaming One’s Walk through Depression as Heroic

Why can’t we re-imagine our self-image in relationship to our depression in a more positive light? Why can’t we think of our battles with depression as, in fact, heroic? Instead of counting all of times that depression has gotten the better of us and knocked us to our knees, how about giving ourselves credit for all of the times that we have triumphed over depression (perhaps even in the simplest ways); the times that we have risen to the occasion in spite of our melancholy and the moments that we have looked depression in the eye and said, “no more.” Make no mistake about it that takes gumption – lots of it! And I’ve witnessed scores of people say “that’s enough.” While talking back to depression isn’t a panacea, it may be a healtier way for us to cope rather than succumb to it.

Viewing yourself as a hero is a constructive and healing experience for people with depression. It doesn’t deny that we struggle with it sometimes, but it more importantly doesn’t deny the power we actually do have over it and the courage it takes to deal with it to the best of our ability each day.

In his article “The Continuing Stigma of Depression” psychologist Jonathan Rottenberg writes about the stigma for those who have recovered from depression:

“My hunch is that the disease/defect model of depression, is unwittingly contributing to the ongoing stigma of depression. Through the lens of the disease model, the legions of the formerly depressed are a “broken” people who need lifelong assistance. I would like to see a more revolutionary public education approach, with campaigns that emphasize the unique strengths that are required to endure depression. Even if a person is helped by drugs or therapy, grappling with a severe depression requires enormous courage. In many ways, a person who has emerged from the grip of depression has just passed the most severe of trials in the human experience. If we acknowledge that surviving depression requires a special toughness, we will not see formerly depressed people as a broken legion, but as a resource who can teach us all something about overcoming adversity”.

Things to Consider

– Maybe we fall down 30 times a day, or maybe it’s just a stumble, but we have to regain our balance and get up. As the old Zen saying goes, “fall down seven times — get up eight.” That, my friends, is heroic. Just remember that when you fall and get up – YOU are that hero.

– We must remember that when we are in a depression, it isn’t easy to feel like a hero — just think of Honest Abe. But the depression will pass. So don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t feel heroic all the time.

– We should not condemn ourselves when we are down, but pick ourselves up and remember that we are, truly, remarkable people.

As writer Andrew Berstein once wrote: “A hero has faced it all: he/she need not be undefeated, but he/she must be undaunted.”

Grinding in the Wheels of Depression

Every time a person gets depressed, the connections in the brain between mood, thoughts, the body, and behavior get stronger, making it easier for depression to be triggered again. At the earliest stages in which mood starts spiraling downward, it is not the mood that does the damage, but how we react to it. – The Mindful Way through Depression.

It has been estimated that the human brain kicks out about 50,000 thoughts per day. A majority of them for lawyers with depression are negative and pessimistic; they spin in our minds like gears in a machine. They lack an essential truth and vitality – – they’re almost parasitic – – and can suck the life right out of us. Unmoored from the shore of everyday reality, depressive ruminations calcify and harden us to our own humanity, to the beauty of others and the joy of living one’s life.

Your thoughts are rooted in your personal beliefs, morals, and principles. They are your opinions of your inner self and the outside world. Every thought you have is personal. Each one is reflective of your curiosity, experiences, and the random actions of your brain cells. Everybody has times when they get caught up in some negativity. But depression allows these thoughts and feelings to grow out of control. They can paralyze a person’s life, pulling them downward into despair.

The thoughts of a depressive mind are often boring and lethargic. When in a depressive trough, such thoughts drone on about why other people, our job and our lives stink. After years of repetition, such thoughts have worn neurochemical and structural grooves in our brains. This is why many depressives suffer from a formless ennui; doldrums that numb them to the creative engagement with the world they yearn for.

Depressive thinking ignores evidence to the contrary (e.g. that people love and care about us – – and we about them — or that our work product isn’t that bad and often times pretty good), and snubs its nose at suggestions that life can be otherwise. Folks with depression are often closed minded: the world sucks and if you try to disagree with them, they may conclude that – -well – – you suck.

Lord knows, my observations aren’t meant to be depression downers, judgmental or condemnatory. They’re meant to underscore the enormous role that habitual, unconscious ways of constructing the world with our negative thinking can lead to depression. Mind you, we don’t want Pollyannaish thoughts – happy go lucky gibberish to replace depressive thinking. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t jettison ourselves into such a Dairy Queen-like state full of vanilla, optimistic musings about the world we live in. What we do seek to achieve is balance, a life that works and the normal rhythms of emotions that everyone deserves.

Lawyers lose sight of the fact that WE are the ones actually thinking these depressive thoughts. To heal, we must take responsibility that we are – – on some level – – choosing to think and believe in such thoughts. To get to the point where we can see this usually involves a great deal of effort and a fair amount of pain. It is often the pain of depression, and a lawyer’s desperation to stop it, that make him or her, hopefully, seek out help and question their melancholic assumptions.

Abraham Lincoln, who many forget was a trial lawyer for decades before becoming president, struggled with depression his whole life. His battles with depression, which included two suicide watches, is powerfully told in Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled Him to Greatress. Once, when he felt the searing pain of depression, he wrote: “I’ve been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for the day.”

Mood and Thoughts

Depression begins with a low mood – for many when they first get out of bed in the morning. Like animals that sense bad weather approaching, we can sense the fog of depression beginning to descend on us as the barometric pressure in our minds begins to fall.

In The Mindful Way through Depression, author, Mark Williams, writes:

“Negative thoughts can trigger or feed depression once a low mood is upon us. We might sink into a glum mood by thinking nothing ever goes right for me. That mood may then trigger self-criticism like why am I such a loser? As we try to unravel the cause of our unhappy state, our mood plunges. As we investigate questions about our worthlessness, we form a whole scheme of other negative thoughts, ready to be recruited at a moment’s notice in the future”.

There is, in a sense, a senselessness about depression. Or, alternatively, there may be a real reason to be upset (e.g. “I have a big trial next week and I’ve not prepared enough”), but we’ve catastrophized our circumstances to such an extent (e.g. “they’ll fire me if I lose this case) that our predicament bears little resemblance to the facts before us.

A friend of mine, who is now a judge, screwed up on a big case while working for a large corporate firm some years ago. He went home, wrote a suicide note and drove himself to a rural motel. There he downed a number of sleeping pills, drank some whiskey and lay down in bed to die. He was found, unconscious, by colleagues of his who had been searching for him all night. He didn’t lose his job – and he didn’t lose his life. But he had let his thinking take him from the fact that he had made a mistake a work to the conclusion that HE was the mistake and that such a life was not deserving of life.

Here are some examples of depressive thoughts. Reflect on how often you have thought them in the course of a day:

I feel like I’m up against the world — I’m no good –Why can’t I ever succeed? — No one understands me — I’ve let people down — I don’t think I can go on — I wish I were a better person — I’m so weak — My life’s not going the way I want it to — I’m so disappointed in myself — Nothing feels good anymore — I can’t stand this anymore – I can’t get started — I wish I were somewhere else — I can’t get things together — I hate myself — I’m worthless — I wish I could just disappear.

With this flotilla of thoughts, we filter our experiences in a consistently negative way. We cull from the raw material of daily life proof that things are as bad as we think them to be. Such cynicism corrodes a person’s soul as surely as Coke rots away the enamel on our teeth.

There has been much commentary and studies which suggest that lawyers are pessimistic thinkers and that such pessimism helps us to become better, more successful lawyers, but not very happy human beings. Read the article “Why Lawyers Are So Unhappy?” by happiness researcher Martin Seligman. We examine all of the possible dangers, pitfalls and troubles that may befall us and our clients in a case. Such thinking becomes problematic – which it does for many, many lawyers – when we turn this mode of thinking on ourselves. We can from judging facts to judging ourselves. The habit of judging ourselves severely disguises itself as an attempt to help us to live better lives and to be better people, but in actuality the habit of judging ourselves winds us functioning as an irrational tyrant that can never be satisfied.

Trying to Think our Way out of Depression

With our negative thoughts, we get perpetually stuck in a tar pit of our own making. We struggle to extricate ourselves from this gooey mess and just keep falling backwards.

“When depression starts to pull us down, we often react, for understandable reasons, by trying to get rid of our feelings by suppressing them or by trying to think our way out of them. In the process we dredge up past regrets and conjure up future worries. In our heads, we try out this solution and that solution, and it doesn’t take long for us to start feeling bad for failing to come up with a way to alleviate the painful emotions we’re feeling. We get lost in comparisons of where we are versus where we want to be, soon living almost entirely in our heads.” – The Mindful Way through Depression

We get caught up in thinking about life, rather than living life. We become obsessed with doing rather than being. The problem is our overcritical mind’s determination to solve the problem of our depression with its analytic arsenal. When we do this, our depressive mind tries to hunt down what’s wrong with us – as if we were defective people for God sake!

This way of problem-solving our depression doesn’t help us out of our distress – – it just perpetuates our downward spiral.

Be Patient with Yourself

How will I ever be able to confront all the slings and arrows of so many thoughts? It seems unachievable and impossible, we may say. We can become despondent and hopeless. Here is where patience comes in, a big deal for lawyers with depression who have a lot of trouble being patient in a loving way with themselves. They likely never learned it in childhood and our results-now driven society doesn’t teach or promote it. Without patience, we drop out of therapy, stop taking medication or generally flop around on our office’s carpet like some sort of fleshy carp.

It took awhile for us to fall into the pickle barrel of depression and it will take effort, time and patience to crawl out of it.

For once, just once, try being kind and patient with yourself today as you struggle to heal from your depression. We need to move from being hopeless to being . . . just human.

My Friend’s Shot at Redemption

There’s a complexity to language; words color what we think, say and do. With our locutions, we praise and condemn, stumble upon transitory meanings and conniptions and try to make sense of things both ordinary and profound. What words we use to describe ourselves and others says a lot about the world we live in.

“I’m a loser, a failure,” my buddy said through sad eyes as he looked across at me.

Tom’s 50 years old and been struggling with anxiety and depression for the past fifteen years. I have witnessed the arc of his demise, his struggle to keep depression’s wolves at bay. There had been red flags along the way – a bad temper, divorce, drinking too much and a lot of self-condemnation. But my friend had long felt that these were justified by what the adversarial nature of the law had saddled him with. He didn’t see – until now – his role in creating the mess that his life was now in. Only pain, unrelenting pain, had broken him open. It had humbled him and given him the opportunity to honestly examine his life.

As my friend spoke on, it seemed to me that he wasn’t only seeking better mental health – that seemed to be unattainable for him during this low tide – but a sort of redemption; not in any great religious sense, though he certainly would’ve welcomed any help of the divine variety.

The redemption he was hoping for and seeking was a second chance at life. He wasn’t sure whether he deserved it; but he was hopeful that he would be given one. A second chance to make better choices in his life; to stop going down mental and emotional dead ends that only strengthened depression’s vise-like grip on his life. Ultimately, the restoration of a fundamental goodness and harmony that had been so long absent.

Tom’s brokenness seemed not just about his depression, but cracks in his soul. In his misguided efforts to squelch his bottoming-out, he often did self-destructive and self-defeating things – anything to soothe those acerbic rants of depression. But the rants inside his head didn’t stop – they only got louder.

Perhaps they were trying to tell him something, I suggested. “No they’re not”, his psychiatrist had assured him. “It’s just part of the disease of depression, pure and simple”. Yet I believe that such advice did more harm than good. No doubt Tom, given his incapacitated state, could probably benefit from some medication. But he could also benefit from trying to discern the signposts contained inside the depression that might lead him out of the swamplands.

Author Lee Stringer, in the book Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, writes:

“One grows older and more knowing over time; life’s more facile charms grow dim; the soul yearns, seeking more than could ever be had on this earth, more than could ever be wrought out of three dimensions and five senses. We, all of us, suffer some from the limits of living within the flesh. Our walk through the world is never entirely without that pain. It lurks in the still, quiet hours which we, in our constant busyness, steadfastly avoid. And it has occurred to me since that perhaps what we call depression isn’t really a disorder at all but, like physical pain, an alarm of sorts, alerting us that something is undoubtedly wrong; that perhaps it is time to stop, take a time-out, take as long as it takes, and attend to the unfinished business of filling our souls.

The aridity of our soul calls out to be watered by a greater relationship to the Universe, called by many God. This Mystery is concerned not only with the building up of better mental health, but also our engagement with the larger questions of life: Why was I born? Who am I? What is my life’s purpose? What is the meaning of life? Why have these Job-like tragedies befallen me? The ancient Greek’s talked about Fate and Destiny, modern-day philosophy calls it existentialism. But, they’re all ultimately concerned with the same thing – a jettisoning of friviloius, superficial and hedonistic pursuits and the journeying towards wisdom and a wider vision of what this life is truly about.

In some sense, we can be worn out by such intense probing. But the questions won’t go away, as if demanding our response. When we give up engaging with these larger questions in life, we are inevitably diminished in some fundamental way. We “settle” for a more predictable and smaller life that we often regret later on – the roads not taken. But when we meet these questions, when we finally stop running away from life, we can begin to respond to our soul’s deepest yearnings.

Thomas Moore, in his best-selling book, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, writes:

“The soul presents itself in a variety of colors, including all the shades of gray, blue, and black. To care for the soul, we must observe the full range of all its colorings, and resist the temptation to approve only of white, red, and orange – the brilliant colors. The “bright” idea of colorizing old black and white movies is consistent with our culture’s general rejection of the dark and the gray. In a society that is defended against the tragic sense of life, depression will appear as an enemy, an unredeemable malady; yet in such a society, devoted to light, depression, in compensation, will be unusually strong.”

Looking into my friend’s weary eyes, I don’t tell him he’s mentally ill or that he deserves his pain for all the bad mistakes he’s made – he’s already been told this by others. I don’t tell him to get help, because he already knows that and is getting help. I don’t even tell him that it’s terrible that he’s experiencing depression

What I do tell him is that something or someone essential –something beyond just recovering from depression – is missing from his life. I don’t pretend to know what or who that is; we each have a unique relationship with life. But I tell him that he will have to search for that essential thing or person – and it might not come easy. But it’s in living the big questions that we are somehow healed, perhaps slowly, and recover a sense of meaning to our lives which is, after all, what our souls truly want.

My friend needs a renewal, a change of course, another chance – a real shot at redemption.

A Christmas Blessing

The people who walk in darkness will see a great light. For those who live in a land of deep darkness, a light will shine – Isaiah 9:2

Christmas is, for most of us, a mixed experience. There are celebrations, music, a sense of holiness and community. However, there is also the loneliness, the unresolved grievances and a gnawing sense that we should be happier than we are at this time of the year. God knows this about His people who “walk in darkness” and He sends a “great light” who, for those that believe, is Jesus.

In the mix and mud of our depression, we still need to find a way to give thanks to God for who He is. Giving thanks encourages a feeling of contentment; a sense that we’re appreciative of what we’ve been given in our lives and that we don’t need more to be at peace. At this time of year, we give thanks for God’s greatest gift – Jesus.

In the book “The Breath of the Soul” by Sister Joan Chittister, she writes:

“Gratitude is not only the posture of praise but it is also the basic element of real belief in God. When we bow our heads in gratitude, we acknowledge that the works of God are good. We recognize that we cannot, of ourselves, save ourselves. We proclaim that our existence and all its goods come not from our own devices but are part of the works of God. Gratitude is the alleluia to existence, the praise that thunders through the universe as tribute to the ongoing presence of God with us even now. Without doubt, unstinting gratitude saves us from the sense of self-sufficiency that leads to forgetfulness of God. Praise is not an idle virtue in life. It says to us, ‘Remember to whom you are indebted. If you never know need, you will come to know neither who God is nor who you yourself are.’ Need is what tests our trust. It gives us the opportunity to allow others to hold us up in our weakness, to realize that only God in the end is the measure of our success.”

The other aspect of gratefulness is an appreciation of the goodness within us that God has placed there. For those who suffer from depression, it’s sometimes hard to experience this if at all. But just as the sun has not expired when it’s behind the clouds, we as children of God can’t extinguish this essential goodness in us. As the great contemplative monk Thomas Keating wrote, “The fundamental goodness of human nature . . . is an essential element of Christian faith. Our basic core of goodness is our true Self. Its center of gravity is God.” He goes onto say, “The acceptance of our basic goodness is a quantum leap in the spiritual journey.”

Beyond the crowded malls, the smoke coming off our credit cards and the mindless consumerism that can overtake us all at this time of year, it’s the basic love of God and the goodness always within us that we can be most thankful for. Take a “quantum leap”, if only for a short while, and experience the profound holiness which is really what Christmas is all about.

As the author Taylor Caldwell once wrote, “I am not alone at all, I thought. I was never alone at all. And that, of course, is the message of Christmas. We are never alone. Not when the night is darkest, the wind coldest, the world seemingly most indifferent. For this is still the time God chooses.”

God bless you all.

Climbing Out of the Well of Depression

Depression feels like falling into a well. We’re trapped at the bottom with no way out. We look up and see light at the well’s entrance, but it’s so far away. It turns the soupy darkness surrounding us into a sluggish grey.

We long to feel the sun’s vitality again, a sense of motion in the rhythm of life. It becomes clear that we won’t get out of the well by our own efforts. We’ll need help – serious help.

Out of the darkness above, a ladder appears. Others might not see it, but we do. It’s a ladder meant only for us, as if it were crafted with knowing hands. Its railings and steps bring hope, a passage to another place above us. Yet, we must climb each step ourselves, one at a time.

God drops ladders into our wells all the time, but we’re often not aware of them. Sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re small. Sometimes they’re a new medication that brings solace to our pained bodies; sometimes they’re in moments of mercy like when we share the shy smile of a stranger on the street.

We often can’t see these ladders because we’re on our hands and knees looking for a key to get us out. But a key won’t work. We don’t need to turn a lock so much as to rise from our knees. We can surrender our sadness, our weight as we go aloft. “Come to me all you who are burdened and I will give you rest” said Jesus. And in the depths of our depressed souls, that’s what we deeply thirst for – rest.

People with depression feel like it’s their constant companion. In such a relationship, and it’s a relationship of sorts, we need not destroy depression. We need to transcend it. We do so by letting go of our relationship with depression and embracing another sort of relationship.

Yesterday, I went to Mass. Often, I feel like such a dullard in those worn wooden pews. I understand some of the readings, but much of it I don’t. But, I often feel a quality of peace. Maybe, on occasion, even a peace that “passeth understanding.” I can’t explain this experience, but I appreciate it. It’s a Mystery which calls to all of us by name. It seeks to give us a new identity and loosen our grip on an old one. It asks us to let go of all the ways we limit our daily lives because of depression.

Jesus once asked Peter, as he asks each one of us, “Who do you say I am?” I always understood this question one way: it doesn’t matter what others say about “who” Jesus is; it only matters who we say he is to us.

I now see another way of understanding this passage.

It’s just as important for us to ask Jesus, “Who do you say I am?”

For those suffering from depression, the illness usually responds to this question. It tries to tell us who we are: worthless, weak and undeserving.

Are we willing to turn away from depression’s voice? Can we surrender it to find our true value as seen through the eyes of God? He sees us as worthy and precious beyond measure.

Are we willing to trade the noxious tirades of depression for the soothing and life offering voice of God?

As we climb the ladder, let’s leave the voice of depression at the bottom of the well. It’s voice becomes faint as we leave it behind. As we near the light, it infuses us with a true sense of our true value. We are precious in His sight. We can finally rest.

When we leave the well of depression behind, perhaps we find a different sort of well and a different kind of falling. Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun and author of the little book, “The Breath of the Soul: Reflections on Prayer”, writes:

“The purpose of prayer is the process of falling into God. As the mystics say, we are beginning to learn that God alone is enough. The truth is that none of us really knows where we are going and must never take it for granted that we do. We can plan our lives but we cannot guarantee them.

When our prayers are not answered, we know one thing for sure: The challenge of life now is to live it differently. And it will be through prayer that we discover how to do that. Seeing Jesus being driven out of town, we come to understand that we cannot expect more. Seeing Jesus depressed is not the loss of faith, it is the moment of faith. Seeing Jesus lose favor with the authorities, we learn that authorities are not the final measure of our lives.

Then we come to prayer free of the desires that bind us, free to live life in God, free to choose trust over certainty — which really means free to choose God over self.

Chipping Away at The Iceberg of Depression

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James Hollis, Ph.D., the noted psychologist, once said that we spend the first half of our lives accumulating accolades for our resumes. These same achievements, he opines, then become the biggest impediments to our making real and healthy changes in our lives. It’s as if we are at an existential crossroad: we look back –north for the sake of this analogy – and see what we have accomplished. We then look forward – south – and see an unknown and scary future as yet undefined. “The past is who I am”, we think. It offers us a sense of stability, a history and a comfortable life. Nothing bad in and of itself. Yet, we may be deeply unhappy and unhealthy. We may even be suffering from depression because of the stress involved in accumulating these accomplishments.

The prospect of real change is frightening. We worry: “What if I make these changes in my life and things don’t get better. Maybe they’ll even make my depression worse!” Yet, depression is a terrible liar; its voice drips with a corrosive inner directed sarcasm that seeks to undermine any meaningful recovery from it. It disempowers us from seeking a way out of its meaningless labyrinth. Its sole agenda is to keep perpetuating itself.

In some real sense, we must stand up to our depression. We must disassemble it piece by piece and try to understand what we are dealing with. We must know its ways and how it manifests in our daily lives. There are things that we do that propagate it; other things that let it wither on the vine.

I used to unwittingly feed my depression with my pensive nature. In some dreamy sense, I thought I had some dramatic and sad existential take on the human condition. Sort of like a modern day Tolstoy. The problem, as I see it now, is that this propensity was not constructive and helpful. It could, when fueled by the various conniptions of life, be overly dramatic.

As I’ve previously blogged, pessimistic or distorted thinking is a hallmark of depression. While I don’t think existential musings make one depressed, I do believe that when we take such thoughts too far or too seriously, we fuel depression.

I often think of depression as an iceberg. We envision these monoliths as permanent, imposing and unshakable. Yet, we know that they really aren’t. An increase in temperature (e.g. think global warming) causes chunks of ice to start falling away from the iceberg’s hefty girth. By standing up to depression, parts of it too begin to fall away.

We don’t have to take our depression on all at one time, but take it on we must. I like to think of it as a kind of vow we make to ourselves . Mahatma Gandhi once wrote: “A vow is fixed and unalterable determination to do a thing, when such a determination is related to something noble which can only uplift the person who makes the resolve.”

Standing up to our depression is ennobling and courageous. Rather than being a victim of depression – and there are sure to be times we feel that way – we can take a vow to stand up to it.

Please try to be one of the thousands of people who stand up to depression everyday. I have been privledged to know some of these everyday heroes and it always reaffirms my faith in humanity.

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.

A Spiritual Sense of Hope

In my previous Blog, I looked at hope from a psychological perspective. This writing will focus on the spiritual dimension of hope and the experience of depression.

Hopelessness is a common feature of depression. During the depths of my episodes, it was my constant companion. I believe that hopelessness is strongly connected to a sense of helplessness: no matter how sincere or noble our efforts to overcome depression, we don’t. We hit a wall; a wall of spiritual darkness. In this space, there is the sense that God doesn’t care about us, that he has abandoned us, or that he doesn’t even exist. If he does exist, why would he allow me and others to suffer so? It is the pointlessness of our suffering which seems so hard a cross to bear.

Barbara Crafton, minister and author of the book, “Jesus Wept,” captures this sense of sorrow:

“Religious people want there to be meaning in everything. Randomness is hard on us: that things just happen for no reason sometimes brings us closer than we want to be to the possibility that we’re not central to much of anything . . . . And so we hope and expect the universe to have a message for us. Let there be something just for me, we pray and expect, something that will make it all make sense. A plan.

And yet, the crushing weight of depression lies precisely in the meaninglessness that characterizes it. A flat voice within contradicts every hopeful thought: live with it long enough, and the hopeful thoughts don’t even bother surfacing. Muffled and parched, bereft of any vision that might ratify your journey or give it a reasonable goal, you trudge on and on for no particular reason other than that you know you’re supposed to.”

What is our spiritual response to this state of affairs? As we drift out to sea, we long for a voice that will show us a way home. We may go long periods of our lives with no such beacon. And then, it happens. We have a sense of God’s presence in the midst of our pain. Jesus certainly understood such pain. Contrary to the movement in some Christian circles to paint Him as a salesman of happiness, he was a man “well acquainted with sorrow.” His life suggests that in a spiritual life we are not changed from some sad state into, necessarily, a happy one. That’s not the point. God doesn’t want some happy, well-adjusted and self-satisfied person per se. He wants a real and authentic person. Such authenticity often comes at a very high price. We must walk through suffering.

The Twenty Third Psalm says:

Even though I walk

through the valley of the shadow of death,

I shall fear no evil,

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff,

they comfort me.

In one form or another, all humans most walk through “the valley of the shadow of death.” There is simply no escaping the profound experience of suffering. Depression is one such form of suffering. It is a valley; a trench from which we so often feel there is viable exit. During depression we stop walking through that valley. We are immobilized by our pain and can’t step forward. The “rod and staff” of God, however, tells us that depression is a “shadow”. It doesn’t have the final say. God does. We must not stay stuck in the valley, but keep walking.

As we walk through our days, what are rods and the staffs that comfort us? If they are the false sirens of success – of money, status symbols and power – they may temporarily satisfy us. But they won’t sustain us. At some point – it is hoped – we will recognize them for the phantoms that they are.

Whatever our spiritual orientation, chose a spiritual sustenance that isn’t borne of your small sense of self with its limited plans and agendas. But rather a grander hope and vision of which we are intimately connected to. A view of ourselves not distorted by depression, but by how God views us. We are indeed precious in his sight, His children. We can hope in his vision and plans for us.

In closing, sustenance for the day from Saint Ignatius Loyola:

O Christ Jesus,

when all is darkness

and we feel our weakness and helplessness,

give us the sense of Your presence,

Your love, and Your strength.

Help us to have perfect trust

in Your protecting love

and strengthening power,

so that nothing may frighten

or worry us,

for, living close to You,

we shall see Your hand,

Your purpose, Your will through all things.

Amen.

A Place Called Hope

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope – Martin Luther King

As renowned pessimists, lawyers struggle to be hopeful. One veteran litigator told me yesterday his definition of hope: getting up the next morning and, “hopefully,” having the energy to survive the day. But this type of hope is more about avoidance; the draining sense of dread people feel when they are working at maximum capacity and just barely staying on top of all of it. As lawyers, we need a more expansive sense of hope; of what hope is and how it can positively affect our lives as lawyers.

Hope, in its best sense, is a positive motivator in our lives. Psychologist, C.S. Snyder, in his 1990’s book “The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here,’ defined hope as a “motivational construct that let one believe in positive outcomes, conceive goals, develop strategies, and muster the motivation to implement them”. He actually invented a measuring tool and test called the “Hope Scale.” He discovered that “low hope” people have ambiguous goals and work towards them one at a time while “high hope” people often worked on five or six clear goals simultaneously. Hopeful people had definite routes to their goals and alternate pathways in case of obstacles. Low scorers did not.

More recently, psychologist Anthony Scioli expanded Snyder’s definition of hope and created his own “Hope Index.” According to Scioli, hope has a powerful spiritual (and transpersonal) dimension. From this perspective, hope includes patience, gratitude, charity, and faith. In a previous article from Martin Seligman, Ph.D. posted on the Lawyers with Depression website, the issue of lawyer optimism/pessimism was discussed. Scioli makes an interesting distinction between hope and optimism. In an article from the magazine Spirituality & Health, he put it this way:

“Faith is the building block of hope. Above all, it is based on relationships, on a collaborative connection with people as well as their higher power, as distinct form optimism, which is connected to self-confidence. True hope also differs from denial, which is really false hope, an avoidance of reality.”

Scioli’s newest book, “Hope in the Age of Anxiety,” coming out in September of 2009, takes square aim at how hope helps us deal with anxiety on both a psychological and physiological level:

“Hope represents an adaptive ‘middle ground’ between the over-activated ‘stress response’ [also implicated in depression] and the disengaged ‘giving-up complex’. At a physiological level, hopefulness can help to impart a balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity while assuring appropriate levels of neurotransmitters, hormones, lymphocytes, and other critical health-related substances. Equally important, a hopeful attitude may permit an individual to sustain this healthy internal environment in the presence of enormous adversity.”

While Scioli’s research and writing is focused on the broader themes and benefits of hope, other psychologists have addressed how “hope therapy” can help those who suffer with depression. In an article from MSN, psychologist, Jenniefer Cheavens said:

“We’re finding that hope is consistently associated with fewer symptoms of depression. And the good news is that hope is something that can be taught, and can be developed in many of the people who need it.” Hope has two components according to Cheaven – a map or pathway to get what you want, and the motivation and strength to follow that path.

In another article fromWebMD, Cheaver notes how hope therapy is different from other more traditional forms of therapy: “. . . hope therapy seeks to build on strengths people have, or teach them how to develop those strengths. We focus not on what is wrong, but on ways to help people live up to their potential.” According to other researchers associated with the hope studies, people with high hope possess these “components of hope”:

Goals: They have long-and short-term meaningful goals.
Ways to reach those goals: A plan or pathway to get there and the ability to seek alternative routes, if needed.
Positive self-talk, similar to the little red engine from the children’s book, telling themselves things like “I think I can.”

I have often thought of hope as something that just happens. But this research suggests otherwise. As lawyers who deal with adversity, stress and, all too often suffer from depression, it’s wise to ponder the role that hope plays in our days. Consider where you fall on the “hope index.” Learn more about how you can develop the skills of being a hopeful person. For further reading, check out this great article by lawyer, Dave Shearon called, “Hope about Lawyer Happiness” and another article by Leland Beaumont called, “Hope: This Can All Turn Out for the Best.”

My next blog will look at the spiritual dimension of hope.

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