James Hollis Archives - Lawyers With Depression

Living Life at Midlife

“You know, we’re both in the autumn of our lives,” a friend said recently on his 52^nd birthday.

I nodded at this bittersweet truth.

I turned 54 this month – not old, but not so young anymore.

After my morning coffee, I took a detour on my way to work. There’s a beautiful forest with walking trails nearby. It was early and only a few other strollers were on the path. I walked most of it in peace and solitude with the sun shining through the still green leaves above me.

I thought more about what my friend had said. The story of my life has now come into greater focus at midlife. I am a bit wiser, and a bit bigger around the midsection, truth be told. I know in my bones that I’m mortal and the importance of making my days count.

We all look backwards at 50 through the rearview mirror. We take stock of our climb from diapers to degrees, backpacks to briefcases, and from youthful meanderings to mid-life muddling.

Called to Live Everything We Are

In his book, Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life, Robert Johnson points out that the first half of our lives is spent addressing matters in the outside world – learning a trade, marrying and raising children and finding our way in this difficult world. Then, “in the second half of life, the hunger of our missing pieces often becomes acute. It dawns on us that time is running out. So we often set about rearranging things on the outside. Such changes distract us for a time, but what is really called for is a change of consciousness.”

Johnson extrapolates further on the unlived life:

“In the second half of life we are called to live everything that we truly are, to achieve greater wholeness. We initially respond to the call for change by rearranging outer circumstances, though our split is actually an inner problem. The transition from morning to afternoon that occurs at midlife calls for a revaluation of earlier values. During the first half of life we are so busy building up the structure of the personality that we forget that its footings are in shifting sands.”

James Hollis, Ph.D.,, frames the developmental task before us in his book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:

“The task implicit in this particular swampland is to become conscious enough to discern the difference between what has happened to us in the past and who we are in the present. No one can move forward, psychologically, who cannot say, “I am not what happened to me: I am what I choose to become.” Such a person can come to recognize that the early deficit was not inherent in the child, but the result of circumstances beyond the child’s control. One can then begin to tap the energy for life that was previously walled off.”

I have written before about my parents; an alcoholic father and long-suffering mother. Coming out of that traumatic mess, I learned that if I was going to survive in the world I had to become “successful”. For me, that took the form of a long legal career. I didn’t have a passion to become a lawyer as a young man. After earning a liberal arts degree in college, I sort of drifted into law school.

I wasn’t ever a money-grubbing attorney. I tried to work with honesty, integrity and compassion for my clients. And looking back, I did a lot of good for others. But there was always a nagging feeling inside of me that being a lawyer wasn’t “it”. Somehow, I felt, I had missed a turn further back on the road behind me.

And so, I’ve started to walk backwards to take a hard look at what “success” really means to me now at midlife. I have noticed this shift: I am not interested so much drawn in the question of “what makes a successful life?” as “what does it mean to lead a good life?”

To embrace our true self hat yearns for expression seems critical. While many parts of this authentic self have been expressed in our lives, other essential aspects were chopped off when we were younger by misguided or troubled parents and elders. And maybe that’s what depression is about for some of us: painful symptoms that leak out because of un-reconciled parts of us demanding to be heard and lived. These voices seem to demand our attention at midlife.

And we would be wise to listen to them.

While it’s true that we cannot change the past and the people that tamped down on our early life yearnings, we can view these people and experiences through different and wiser eyes. We can learn to leave the pain behind and learn from it.

Leaving Resumes Behind

If the central concern of the first half of our lives is building up our resumes of success, maybe the second half of life is a deeper search for meaning and purpose.

Therese Borchard writes:

“’It is when we begin to pay attention, and seek integrity precisely in the task within the task, that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our lives,’ writes Fr. Rohr. Yes, that usually coincides with gray wisps and colonoscopies and readers hanging on your neck. But that’s only because the older we get, the better perspective we have on what really matters. Ironically, as our eyes fail, we begin to see life with much better vision.”

Grace and Grit

There is a grace that comes after 50 that I didn’t have in my 30s and 40s; a sense of being at home in my own skin. My bones, like the roots of a mature tree in an old-growth forest, have sunk deep into the rich, brown soil of the earth I walk. Like all people, I’ve weathered many storms. While I know that there are sure to be more, I have faith that I’ll still be standing after they’ve passed and be walking in the sun again.

I think there’s some grit that comes when we pass the half-century mark. We have less tolerance of others’ bullshit and, hopefully, our own. Having lived long enough, we know the truth even if we can’t articulate it. I admire people who can speak truth with wit, irony, humility and a sense of decency. They don’t belittle others, nor are they arrogant or closed-minded about contrarian views. I always walk away from such people enlightened and marvel that in speaking their own truth they give permission for others to speak theirs as well.

Our lives, if they are to have true meaning, must be used to love and serve others for when we pass from this world, we won’t be remembered in others’ hearts so much for our accomplishments, but for the love we have given and shared.

And that is a good life to me.

Embracing Mortality, Living Authentically

The subject of mortality may or may not come up overtly in my therapy sessions, but it is always implicit, always hovering about the conversation, always seeking to pull us back down into a special thoughtfulness. Today I was talking with a woman who lamented some of the roads not taken in her life, and, with a chagrined expression, said, “and this is where I will always be, always falling short.”

“What are you so afraid of,” I asked. “It used to be of what people would think, or who would be there to take care of me if I did what I really wanted to do with my life. And today, I guess I am afraid of dying.” “Well, you traded freedom for security and wound up with neither. Isn’t it time you decided it might be worse to relinquish your fearful grip than fear the end of your life?”

If, as is sometimes argued, anything that separates us from nature is pathological, a grand denial, a self-estrangement, or moral evasion, then surely our flight from our mortal nature falls into the “neurotic.” When Jung said “neurosis is the flight from authentic suffering,” he was asserting that we cannot evade suffering, only be captive to its neurotic evasion. Of all of our defenses, our most primitive is denial, greatly abetted by distraction, which is the chief “contribution” our popular culture makes to us. What other culture evolved complex systems to present extravaganzas of sport, exposed flesh, political circus, and programmed violence equal to ours? Well, perhaps ancient Rome, panum et circum, bread and circuses to distract, divert, and entertain the masses. Are we pleased by this comparison?

While it is natural for that slim wafer we call “ego,” namely, who we think we are at any given moment, to bob and wave, and hope the scythe of the Grim Reaper passes over, it is also the surest course to deeper levels of despair and anxiety as inevitability exerts its will. Underneath so many of our neuroses, our pathologies, both private and societal, is the elemental fear of death. This fear is not pathological; it is natural and normal. What becomes pathological is what it makes us do or what it keeps us from doing with our lives.

There are some strange paradoxes to be found here in this fear. Is it not a greater fear to arrive at the end of our journey, however long or short it may prove to be, and recognize that we were not really here, that we did not live our journey? I recall that as a young person I twice walked up to receive an advanced degree thinking, “if I had known they were going to graduate me, I could have enjoyed this whole thing.” I considered then, and even more now, those as rich periods of life lost to anxiety and compulsive coping behavior. I have learned a bit from those and other moments of clarity. At the end of our life would we be inclined to say, “if I knew it was going to end, I could have enjoyed it?”

By “enjoying” I do not mean frivolous wasting of time, or hang-dog obeisance to duty, but having risked investing our energy in whatever provides deep satisfaction to us. If that emotional reciprocity between investment and return is not present, then it is not right for us, however strong our social conditioning. Through our timidity we relinquish the gift of this journey. If there should prove to be an after-life, then it is another life than this one, with another agenda. This is the only one of which we are sure.

Another paradox lies in the fact that it is precisely because our journey is limited that our life has meaning. If we could simply do this or that for a century, and something else for another, then life would lose its bite. The emperor sitting on the veranda with nothing to do but munch grapes and seek diversion has a most miserable life. The slave who lights a fire of freedom in his mind’s eye, the gladiator who says yes to the combat that comes to his door, the woman who sacrifices for her child’s possibilities are infinitely richer. All of them will and do die, but how did they live while here?

So, in the presence of our symptoms: the troubled marriage, the persistent self-sabotage, the eroding addiction, we may all be brought to a larger place by a periodic consideration of mortality. What am I afraid of, really? What shabby excuses are holding me back? What does life ask of me as this point in the journey? Where will I find the most meaningful experiences of my life?

When we ask those questions with sincerity, and summon a measure of courage, we will find that we are too busy living a fuller life to be side-tracked into Angst-ridden swamplands or distracting way-stations. It is all right to be scared; it is not all right to live a scared life.

James Hollis, Ph. D. is a Jungian analyst in Houston, TX, author of 13 books, the most recent of which is What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life.

Best Depression Quotes

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

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

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’ can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling. David Foster Wallace

The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has the sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape. Leonard Cohen

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

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it. Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me. Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare. Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable. Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast

Depression is melancholy minus its charm. Susan Sontag

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn’t a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it’s a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different. J.K. Rowling

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. Pope John Paul II

The absolute worst part of being depressed is the food. A person’s relationship with food is one of their most important relationships. I don’t think your relationship with your parents is that important. Some people never know their parents. I don’t think your relationship with your friends are important. But your relationship with air-that’s key. You can’t break up with air. You’re kind of stuck together. Only slightly less crucial is water. And then food. You can’t be dropping food to hang with someone else. You need to strike up an agreement with it. Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito. Christopher Moore, Bite Me

So why am I depressed? That’s the million-dollar question, baby, the Tootsie Roll question; not even the owl knows the answer to that one. I don’t know either. All I know is the chronology. Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity. Oliver Sacks

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, “He fought so hard.” And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong. Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir Of Depression

It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint-it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.” Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story

A loss of focus can be the most debilitating of depressive symptoms, rendering a person unable to work effectively or plan for the future, which seems desolate, devoid of the possibility of redemption. John Nelson, M.D.

The depressed person is constantly chewing on himself. He needs to find something else to chew on. The form of diversion is not important, but the act of diversion is. Penelope Russianoff, When Am I Going to Be Happy?

Depression is not only an experience in the mind; it is also an affliction of the body. There is a lack of energy, a painful heaviness; sadness and a grief that permeate to our marrow. Philip Martin, The Zen Way through Depression

In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens.” In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space”. Peter Kreeft

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality – the ability to experience a full range of emotions, including happiness, excitement, sadness, and grief. Depression is not an emotion itself; it’s the loss of feelings, a big heavy blanket that insulates you from the world yet hurts at the same time. It’s not sadness or grief, it’s an illness. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., Undoing Depression

Depression can be set off by a variety of stressors: sexual abuse, housing problems, illness in one’s child, and the other common problems you might imagine. To suggest that depression arises from loss is to skew the argument in the direction of the metaphor . . . , the one that likens apparent depression to ordinary bereavement. Likewise, “sadness” does not capture the essence of depression, which is a marked disruption of brain and mind characterized by painful apathy. Not only in degree but also in quality, sadness and depression are different. Peter Kramer, M.D., Against Depression

One of the features of depression is pessimistic thinking. The negative thinking is actually the depression speaking. It’s what depression sounds like. Depression in fact manifests in negative thinking before it creates negative affect. Most depressed people are not aware that the despair and hopelessness they feel are flowing from their negative thoughts. Thoughts are mistakenly seen as privileged, occupying a rarefied territory, immune to being affected by mood and feelings, and therefore representing some immutable truth. Hara Estroff Marano

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. Abraham Lincoln

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. Jonathan Rottenberg, Ph.D.

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. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., Undoing Depression

Depression is not a disease, the end point of a pathological process. It is a sign that our lives are out of balance, that we’re stuck. It’s a wake-up call and the start of a journey that can help us become whole and happy, a journey that can change and transform our lives. Healing depression and overcoming unhappiness mean dealing more effectively with stress; recovering physical and psychological balance; reclaiming parts of ourselves that we’ve ignored or suppressed: and appreciating the wholeness that has somehow slipped away from us, or that we have never really known. James Gordon, M.D., Unstuck

Scientists know that traumatic experiences such as child abuse and neglect change the chemistry and even the structure of the brain. They sensitize the stress response system so that those who are abused become overly responsive to environmental pressures. They shape wiring patterns in the brain and reset the sensitivity level of the machinery. Eventually, even small degrees of stress provoke an outpouring of stress hormones, and these hormones in turn act directly on multiple sites to produce the behavioral symptoms of depression. They push the brain’s fear center into overdrive, churning out negative emotions that steer the depression’s severity and add a twist of anxiety. Ellen McGrath, Ph.D.

Depression can be seen as a break-down in the service of offering the person an opportunity for a break-through. In this way, depression can be a corrective feedback to a life with little reflection. We only reflect on those things that break down in life. For example, if life is going along smoothly you won’t spend time thinking about the meaning of life. We tend to think deeply about life when something is not working. When we identify a problem, we begin to reflect on what caused the problem and how to fix the problem. If you are disconnected from your deepest feelings and impulses you may still manage to get through life without realizing it. Lara Honos-Webb, Listening to Depression

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality – the ability to experience a full range of emotions, including happiness, excitement, sadness, and grief. Depression is not an emotion itself; it’s the loss of feelings, a big heaving blanket that insulates you from the world yet hurts at the same time. It’s not sadness or grief, it’s an illness. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., Undoing Depression

When we ruminate, we become fruitlessly preoccupied with the fact that we are unhappy and with the causes, meanings, and consequences of our unhappiness. Research has repeatedly shown that if we have tended to react to our sadness or depressed moods in these ways in the past, then we are likely to find the same strategy volunteering to ‘help’ again and again when our moods start to slide. And it will have the same effect: we’ll get stuck in the very mood from which we are trying to escape. As a consequence, we are at even higher risk of experiencing repeated bouts of unhappiness. Mark Williams, The Mindful Way through Depression

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives we fear are princes and princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants us to help. Rainer Maria Rilke

We only reflect on those things that break down in our life. For example, if life is going along smoothly you won’t spend time thinking about the meaning of your life. We tend to think deeply about life when something is not working. When we identify a problem, we begin to reflect on what caused the problem and how to fix the problem. If you are disconnected from your deepest feelings and impulses you may still manage to get through life without realizing it.But if you begin to open to the possibility that there was something fundamentally wrong with your level of functioning before your depression, only then does the idea of depression as a gift begin to make sense. A breakdown can become a gift when it is in the service of increasing reflection on your life which will lead you to ask the fundamentally important questions: What is wrong with my life? What can I do to correct the problem? When you listen to your depression, you can heal your life. Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D., Listening to Depression

Depression has a mind of its own. When you are depressed, you think in generalizations (nothing works out), you don’t give yourself credit (I can’t do anything right), and you label yourself in the most negative terms (loser, ashamed, humiliated). You set demanding standards that you will never live up to. You may think you need to get everyone’s approval, or excel at everything you do, or know for sure something will work out before you try it. Your thinking keeps you trapped in self-criticism, indecisiveness, and inertia. Robert Leahy, Ph.D., How to Beat the Blues

Depression is the inability to construct a future. Rollo May, Ph.D.

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. Mark Williams, The Mindful Way through Depression

The Failure of Will theory is popular with people who are not depressed. Get out and take your mind off yourself, they say. You’re too self-absorbed. This is just the stupidest thing you can say to a depressed person, and it is said every day to depressed people all over this country. And if it isn’t that, it’s, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ These attitudes are contradictory. Conquer Your Depression and Everything Can Be Fixed by the Miracle of Science presuppose opposite explanations of the problem. One blames character, the other neurotransmitters. They are often thrown at the sufferer in sequence: ‘Get out and do something, and if that doesn’t work, take pills.’ Sometimes they’re used simultaneously: ‘You won’t take those pills because you don’t WANT to do anything about your depression, i.e. Failure of Will. Susanna Kaysen, Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression

Perhaps, the answer is that my ravaged mind rails against the idea of God, but something deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. ‘There are not 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 one becomes the dark. Parker Palmer

Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem. David D. Burns, Ph.D.

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

One description of depression is that it is like the shapeless sagging of a rubber band that has been kept too taunt for too long. When feelings have been strong, stressed, unprocessed, or held captive over a period of time, we just stop feeling altogether. Persons and events no longer have the power to enliven us; we operate on a low level cruise control. Usually we keep functioning, but there is no positive or creative affect toward persons and things, and even less toward ourselves. We basically stop living our only life. Ron Rohr

All of us feel shamed by life. All of us consider ourselves failures of some kind, screw ups in something really important to us. Notice how shame, consciously or unconsciously pulls us away from risk, ratifies our negative sense of worth through self-sabotage or compels us into frenetic efforts of overcompensation or yearning for the validation from others that never comes; how much each of us needs to remember one definition of grace as accepting the fact that we are accepted despite the fact that we are unacceptable James Hollis, Ph.D., What Matters Most

Everyone knows what depression feels like. Everyone feels the blues at times. Sadness, disappointment, fatigue are normal parts of life. There is a connection between the blues and clinical depression, but the difference is like the difference between the sniffles and pneumonia. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., Undoing Depression

While direct-to-consumer advertising has likely fostered an easier acceptance of these pills, most of the people I interviewed who suffer from major depression embark on a psychiatric career with great reluctance. Typically my respondents turn to medications only when desperation leaves them without alternatives. This is understandable in terms of the identity line that one crosses by seeing a doctor, or seeing a diagnosis of depression and filling the prescription for anti-depressants. One person poignantly expressed her identity dilemma by saying that, ‘When I swallowed that first pill I swallowed my will.’ Beginning a regimen of psychiatric medications is part of the traumatic transformation from person to patient; from being merely a troubled person to someone who has mental illness. Daniel Karp, Speaking of Sadness

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the grey drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. William Styron, Darkness Visible

Depression’s Negative Thinking

Years ago, when I had just been told I had something called “depression,” I was having a tough time accepting it – after all, I was a litigator, a good-slinger extraordinaire. The only thing that I thought could bring me down was a lucky pistol shot at High Noon.

During a talk with my therapist in the beginning of my recovery a decade ago, I told him all the negative thoughts I was having about my life. My counselor, a large, white -bearded older man with an Obi Wan Kenobi-like aura, gently told me, “Dan that is depression talking.” Somehow that got through to me; somehow I knew it was true.

My counselor, pillar of Jedi knowledge that he was, had helped me look through a sort of psychic telescope into the constellation that was my patterns of depressive thinking. All people who have struggled with depression must do combat with their negative thoughts. They must – usually with a therapist’s help – begin to see that THEY are thinking these thoughts and they’re not just HAPPENING to them.

Negative Thoughts – and Lots of Them

It has been estimated that we have anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 thoughts a day. If your ideas about life are predominantly downbeat, imagine how many negative thoughts you are generating daily—thousands upon thousands.

In the magazine Psychology Today, Hara Estroff Marano writes:

“One of the features of depression is pessimistic thinking. The negative thinking is actually the depression speaking. It’s what depression sounds like. Depression in fact manifests in negative thinking before it creates negative affect. Most depressed people are not aware that the despair and hopelessness they feel are flowing from their negative thoughts. Thoughts are mistakenly seen as privileged, occupying a rarefied territory, immune to being affected by mood and feelings, and therefore representing some immutable truth.

Compounding the matter is that negative thinking slips into the brain under the radar of conscious awareness and becomes one of the strongest of habit patterns. People generate negative thoughts so automatically they are unaware that it is happening; that it is actually a choice they are making.”

Lawyers are particularly prone to this type of pessimistic thinking which helps explain why their rates of depression are about twice that – twenty percent – of the general population.

In recent article in The Wall Street Journal wrote about this very topic:

“Martin E. P. Seligman, a psychologist and proponent of ‘positive psychology,’ observes that lawyers experience depression at rates that are 3.6 times as high as that of other employed people. They also abuse alcohol and illegal drugs at rates above what’s seen in non-lawyers. Why is this? In part, he says, the law selects people with a glass-half-empty attitude. His research has found that people who score low on an optimism test do better in law school. ‘Pessimism, he writes, ‘is seen as a plus among lawyers, because seeing troubles as pervasive and permanent is a component of what the law profession deems prudence.

A prudent perspective enables a good lawyer to see every conceivable snare and catastrophe that might occur in any transaction. The ability to anticipate the whole range of problems and betrayals that non-lawyers are blind to is highly adaptive for the practicing lawyer who can, by so doing, help his clients defend against these far-fetched eventualities. If you don’t have this prudence to begin with, law school will seek to teach it to you. Unfortunately, though, a trait that makes you good at your profession does not always make you a happy human being’’.

The Big Ten

For us to start making different choices about what kind of thoughts we think, it’s important to see the patterns, the way these false thought patters take place over and over again. Here are some examples of depressive thinking:

1. False extremes – “the tendency to evaluate [one’s own] personal qualities in extreme, black-and-white categories; shades of gray do not exist.”

2. False generalization – “after experiencing one unpleasant event, we conclude that the same thing will happen to us again and again.”

3. False filter – “we tend to pick out the negative in every situation and think about it alone, to the exclusion of everything else.”

4. False transformation – “we transform neutral or positive experiences into negative ones.”

5. False mind-reading – “we may think we can tell what someone is thinking about us, that the person hates us or views us as stupid. But such negative conclusions usually are not supported by the facts.”

6. False fortune-telling – “we expect catastrophe and the expectation itself produces hopelessness and helplessness.”

7. False lens – “we view our fears, errors, or mistakes through a magnifying glass and deduce catastrophic consequences. Everything then is out of proportion.”

8. False feelings-based reasoning – depressed persons “tend to take their emotions as the truth. They let their feelings determine the facts.”

9. False “shoulds” – “Our lives may be dominated by ‘shoulds’ or ‘oughts,’ applied to ourselves or others. This heaps pressure on us and others to reach unattainable standards.”

10. False responsibility – “when we assume responsibility and blame ourselves for a negative outcome, even when there is no basis for this.”

A common theme running through much of this type of thinking is a self-judgment of inadequacy and, as a result, the depressed person notices negative, misfortunate circumstances but ignores positive, fortunate circumstances.

Overachievers and perfectionist that they are, depressed lawyers may frequently receive positive feedback concerning his or her performance at work. For example, a depressed lawyer may have a caseload of one hundred cases. He might have the upper hand on 90%, but struggles with the 10%. This lawyer sees his struggle with the handful of cases as confirming what a loser he or she is, incompetent and unable to keep up “like everyone else.” The many positive comments made by colleagues or staff are not even remembered.

Because of the belief that he or she is inadequate, and his or her tendency to only notice negative experiences, the future is viewed as certain to be gloomy, dismal, and painful: “I’ll never make partner,” “I suck as a lawyer.”

Negative thinking sounds, to the outside observer, to be obviously false or negatively skewed. If so, just why do depressives repeatedly think like this over and over again? Are they idiots?

No, it’s because depressive thinking is “automatic.” It is not the result of thinking the situation through objectively – ironically enough, something lawyers are trained to do.

It just happens rapidly without any reflection.

So it’s the event itself that is sad, not life in general. And even if this thought or feeling arises, it is only temporary.

Depressive thinking leads to depression, leads to depressive thinking, leads to. . .

As we explain these thinking styles you will see how each helps to maintain depression, by altering how we perceive reality.

It’s these thinking styles that make it so hard to see an end to the depression, as they limit our possibilities of thought. Once these patterns take hold, the emotional arousal they cause begins to affect us physically.

If you are thinking now “Yeah, but you don’t know my life” – remember: there is nothing so awful that you can imagine that someone somewhere hasn’t survived without becoming depressed.

It is not your fault if you are depressed, but there are concrete, effective things you can do about it.

How to Kick Negative Thinking’s Butt

Again, Estroff Marrano offers some ways to combat negative thoughts:

Distract yourself. Engaging, pleasant activities, such as exercise or hanging out with friends, are best. Once you are feeling more positive, you will be better able to solve problems.
Stop that train of thought. Think or even tell yourself “Stop!” or “No!” when you start to ruminate.
Write it down. Tracking your ruminative thoughts in a journal can help you overcome depression by organizing those thoughts and relieving yourself of their burden.
Solve a problem. Even taking a small step toward solving one problem that is weighing you down will help with overcoming depression. Data show a strong link between goals you cannot achieve and depression-inducing ruminative thinking, so start problem solving.
Identify triggers. Figure out which places, times, situations, or people are most likely to cause a bout of rumination, and find ways to avoid those triggers or manage them better. Mornings and evenings are the times when ruminative thinking is most likely.
Meditate. Mindfulness techniques can help you get some distance from the thoughts that trouble you, while at the same time reducing stress.
Stop linking small goals to big goals. For example, you may need to challenge a belief that achieving big goals (such as happiness) completely depends on succeeding at smaller goals (such as losing five pounds).
Get therapy. Seek cognitive therapy techniques to help you question your thoughts and find alternative ways of viewing your situation.

Try, day by day, to chip away at the conclusion that depression just happens to you, or that it’s just a disease. Try to remember, that whatever it’s causes, negative thinking is a powerful fuel to help it arise and keep it going. Think about it.

Three Skills for Overcoming Depression

“Courage is fear that has said its prayers.” Author, Regina Brett

The legal profession and those who shape it devote plenty of time to the practical side of being a lawyer; the nuts-and-bolts of how to do, for example, a Will and Estate. Precious little time, however, is spent on teaching lawyers how to maneuver skillfully through their lives not just as professionals, but as people.

Three years ago, when I first went public with my depression, I suggested to a Bar Association director that we put on a half-day Continuing Legal Education Seminar on Depression. She looked at me oddly — as if her face were about to crumble — and said “Who in the world is going to show up for that.” With some trepidation, I went forward expecting twenty people – over 125 showed up. Lawyers are hungry for meaning in their lives and want direction from other people in the business.

Ideally, every young lawyer should be paired with a mentor, a wise elder of the law. Lacking that, few lawyers have examples of how to deal with the profession in a healthy and meaningful manner. Is it any wonder then that lawyers suffer from depression at twice the rate of the average citizen?

We live in a profession where people endure a real pain, trauma and meaninglessness in the hope that it will get better “someday” in the indeterminate future. That someday may come sooner than later in the form of early retirement forced by burnout, unforeseen illness or some sort of divine intervention. I don’t see this as pessimistic, but as realistic. My goal is to wake lawyers up to the real costs of approaching their vocation with only nut-and-bolts in their tool chest. We are not crude machines in need of tune-ups. We are living beings in need of emotional and spiritual sustenance.

Depression is a type of half-living; we go to work, raise our children, sip lattes, do wheelies on our mountain bikes or grill steaks on the grill. But there is something vital within us always yearning just below the surface, something that seeks expression in our lives. Perhaps the situation wouldn’t be so dire for the legal profession if our time as lawyers were just okay – a manageable amount of stress, decent interactions with people and fair wages. But it isn’t okay; it’s completely out of balance: too much stress, combative interactions and wages, albeit much higher than the average American worker, that exacts a tremendous toll on our brains and bodies.

Is there any hope, any way out of this legal conundrum? I think there is because I have seen it happen in my own life, and in the lives of scores of other lawyers. For most – including me—the pain decibels have to be jacked up pretty high for us to conclude that change is better than living one’s life this way.

Carl Jung, a former protégé of Sigmund Freud, offers us a great deal of wisdom for dealing with our modern day psyche. He never preached a “top ten” ways to overcome depression, but some of his essential wisdom can be summarized for the modern reader. In dealing with melancholy, he said that there were three essential steps that we need to take – and no one else can take them for us.

In his book “Why Good People Do Bad Things,” James Hollis, a student of Jung, writes:

“To gain the positive values arising from the “landfill” we call the Shadow [i.e. to learn the painful lessons that depression is trying to teach us], we have to wrestle with Jung’s suggestion that to be a full , we have to know what we want, and do it. Knowing what we want, really, takes a lot of sorting. And living what we find, really, takes a lot of courage and endurance. In reflecting on the task of therapy, Jung once noted that it can only bring us insight. Then, he said, come the moral qualities of our character – courage to face what must be faced, and then to take the leap, and the endurance to stick it out until we arrive at the place intended for us from the beginning. So much of our lives have been lived through reflexive adaptations [unexamined emotional habits grounded in our past], so knowing what we really want is difficult, and then scary, but it feels right when we live it, as were meant to do.”

Here’s a great presentation by Dr. Hollis about finding a meaningful path in life.

Insight

Most of us are, at best, barely aware of things we do and why we do them. Many stuck in the muck of depression are doing things that actually encourage their distress without knowing they are doing so. As Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., points out, “Depressives keep doing the things they’ve always done because they don’t know how to do anything else.” They’ve become experts at “depressing.”

Insight means that we begin to see the causes of our distress and our role in perpetuating it. As Dr. O’Connor has said: “We aren’t to blame for depression, but we are responsible for getting better.” To fulfill that responsibility, we need to develop ideas of what and how to do things differently in our lives and we can only do that when we have some insight into why things are going so wrong. Absent this, we will continue to drift; to be a sort of unhappy ghost in the world.

We can become educated, in a dialogue with our therapist, about the origins of our depression and the old wounds that we will need to revisit in order to heal. It’s in the safety of a therapist’s office where we learn to stop blaming others and – perhaps a bigger problem for depressives – ourselves. Blaming ourselves is replaced by the recognition that bad things did happen to us as children that were not our fault. In fact, much of our negative thinking and painful emotions were learned and endured here. They don’t go away – we carry them into hood. Numerous studies have concluded that one of the major indicators for onset depression is trauma, neglect or abuse during childhood. Blaming others is replaced by the recognition that this just keeps us stuck and resentful.

We shouldn’t give ourselves license to remain stuck in our childhoods and abdicate our responsibility in the here and now to create a healthy life. Our responsibility is to find a way to empower ourselves so that we can get on with living a fulfilling –instead of futile—life.

Courage

Once we get insight, we need to then act on it. Jung suggests that this isn’t something a therapist can give you. It’s your job to leave that one hour session and go out into the world and experiment with your newly found knowledge. In short, you will need courage.

Too often, people achieve hard-fought insight, but then their recovery doesn’t go very far because they don’t put their wisdom into action. In my experience, action can be stressful because it involves stepping out of depression’s cave (a dark cave, yes, but also cozy in its own destructive sort of way) and risking new behaviors or feeling emotions long suppressed. We can even feel great shame – a sense of cowardice—if we don’t change because in some sense, we feel we now “know better.”

Pilot Amelia Earhart once wrote: “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.” We are never at peace until we act in congruity with our inner truth.

I’ve have talked to hundreds of lawyers across the country who say that they “have to” stay a lawyer, as if it is a form of servitude that was somehow imposed on them. This seems to me a variation of depression’s theme that they are helpless. This is not to suggest and I’m unsympathetic or unrealistic about the very real impediments to change. What I am saying is that such impediments are given way too much power over our lives. They become heinous bogeymen that we’re afraid to confront. We give them so much power, that we remain stuck and depressed in our relationship to them. We think of our fears as “reality” and our dreams for a different life as flat-out .

The fact is it may not be your law job that is depressing; you may be bringing your depressive way of being into the job. It might be true that you’d be just as depressed if you were a librarian or sang in a country western band.

I am not suggesting any answers on this score. I am suggesting the living of questions to untangle this Gordian knot: Why am I choosing to remain in the job I am in? What behaviors support my depression while at work? Am I willing to take some chances, even small ones, to move my life in a different direction?

You will need courage, my friend, to act on the insights you’ve gained and not let these precious seeds die in the ground.

Sometimes music can get themes across when words aren’t enough. The other day, my ear inclined towards this powerful piece of bluesy jazz music by artist Lizz Wright. Watch this video of her belting out her song “You Can Fly”.

Endurance

Once we have got it together, it has to stay together. Episodic starts and stops just won’t do in the long run. We need to be determined for our recovery and personal growth to continue. We can get lazy or reckless about this. We just don’t want to put in the time to exercise, or think that it really doesn’t matter if we don’t go to therapy. It does my friend. I’ve learned the hard way. Everything counts.

We will all have peaks in valleys in this journey. The important part is not to stop. It took us a while to fall into depression, and it will take us a while to get out of it. By pressing on, we grow in stature because it is a courageous journey. Novelist William Faulkner once wrote: I believe that men and women will not merely endure. They will prevail. They are immortal, not because they alone among creatures have an inexhaustible voice, but because they have a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

Listening to Our Depression

Any dialogue about the warp and woof of depression should include something about its value in our lives. That sounds like a bugged out thing for me to say; all the more so when you consider that much of the national dialogue has been dominated by main stream medicine that tells us that depression is an illness – just like diabetes or heart disease. I have, in fact, been part of this choir at different times.

Leading this charge is psychiatrist, Peter Kramer. He’s the author the best-seller, Listening to Prozac and followed up recently with, Against Depression. His conclusion is that we need an all out war, a full fledged armada, against depression which he maintains is “brain damage” which we must stop from occurring in the first place or progressing once it has gotten a foot-hold.

I think Kramer’s arguments oversimplify the complex malady that is depression. More than just a biological illness, depression is also a dying of one’s soul. Indeed, one’s inner self – that which is most vital and true about us – is a casualty of depression.

What if by medicating our depression, or replacing its jagged thoughts with “clearer” or “more constructive thinking habits” (As defined by whom?), we are moved in the wrong direction? What if medication doesn’t so much result in full remission (i.e. the goal of psychiatry) of depression as a “draw” with the gun-slinging opponent that our melancholy can seem like?

What if we’re not supposed to mute our depression with medication or straighten out our uneven thoughts with a flat iron? What if we are killing the messenger?

In his book, The Swampland of the Soul, psychologist, James Hollis, sees depression less as a biological phenomenon, than as a psychological one. Here’s his description of its causes:

“Depression can feel like a well with no bottom, but is a well with a bottom, though we may have to dive very deeply to find it. Think of what the word means literally, to de-press, to press down. What is “pressed down”? Life’s energy, life’s intentionality, life’s teleology is pressed down, thwarted, denied, violated. While the etiology of such pressing down may or may not be discernible, something in us colludes with it. We might even say that the quantity and quality of the depression is a function of the quantity and quality of the life force which is being pressed down. Life is warring against life, and we are the unwilling host.”

What is pushing down our life force as attorneys with depression? Is it just the long hours, stress and adversarial nature of our craft? No doubt such factors play a role, just like our biology and genetics. But clearly much of the foundation of adult onset depression has been layered, brick by brick, in our childhood experiences for it is here where we learn how much to value ourselves and others. If we learn to value ourselves in a healthy way early on in life’s journey, there are fewer impediments in the future to de-press our life’s energy which is trying to express itself.

If we have grown up in a dysfunctional home, as the majority of adults with depression have, it will be much harder to feel good about ourselves and build a healthy life without depression. This is so because we have learned to devalue our inner experiences and give too much weight to what others expect and think about our life’s value and future course. After all, all parents are giants to small children. In a child’s world of magical thinking, there is no way of filtering out parents’ toxic messages about a child; no way of seeing these voices as a reflection of the parent and not a child’s fledging sense of identity.

This was certainly the case with me. My alcoholic father, who had gaping holes in his psyche and soul, couldn’t nurture himself let alone his five children. The eldest of five children himself in an era of WWII veterans, his feelings were alien to him. As time went by, he crumbled under the weight of his disease and growing awareness, on some level, that he was a failure at work and home. My mother, an equally damaged person who grew up with an alcoholic father, never learned the basic law of reciprocity in love and nurturance.

No wonder I ended up as a young man after a successful undergraduate career; without an internal sense of who I was or what I wanted to be. Like many others without a deep relationship to self and my feelings, I “chose” the law because of one thing I could be sure of – it was a chance to serve others, be a professional and make money. This is, to be sure, why many young people go into this strange business we call the legal profession.

I was estranged from something essential in me for many years, so powerful was the pushing down of my own inner instincts and life force. I felt defined and limited by who I had been in my rocky childhood, whether I was aware of it or not. I always felt a gnawing sense that something was missing – that piece turned out to be nothing less than my essential self.

Dr. Hollis frames the developmental task before us after we have come to sense this elemental truth:

And so begins the journey out of the well of depression for all of us. We must learn to regain our inner authority – regardless of our biology. This doesn’t mean one needs to quit the law – though some may need to do so to follow their true path. It may be a more modest shift in perspective or a reshuffling of our life’s deck.

Hollis has a great analogy that captures the value of modest changes. He writes that steering our lives is like a pilot using his navigation instruments while flying. A one degree shift here or there will determine where he ends up landing; in Africa or in Europe.

In Listening to Depression, psychologist, Lara Honos-Webb writes that depression is trying to tell us something: that we are on the wrong track in life. In this sense, depression can be a teacher if we would only listen to it. In one interview, she summarizes the five greatest gifts as follows:

– It propels you on a search for the meaning of life

– It’s nature way of pushing you out of your comfort zone. Depression reminds you that you are losing your life while not risking

– It’s a breakdown in the service of offering you an opportunity for a breakthrough

– It means it’s time to reclaim your power to author your own life

– It alerts you when you have gotten off course and guides you towards self-healing.

How do we come to see these truths? Honos-Webb says:

“Depression can be seen as a break-down in the service of offering the person an opportunity for a break-through. In this way, depression can be a corrective feedback to a life with little reflection. We only reflect on those things that break down in life. For example, if life is going along smoothly you won’t spend time thinking about the meaning of life. We tend to think deeply about life when something is not working. When we identify a problem, we begin to reflect on what caused the problem and how to fix the problem. If you are disconnected from your deepest feelings and impulses you may still manage to get through life without realizing it.”

I admit that it’s hard to see depression’s value when in the thick of it, the swamp through which we slog without relief. But there’s much to be said for seeing depression not just as a disease, but as a diminishment of self which makes our world too small. We don’t have to keep colluding in our own victimization. And remember this:

You are not what happened to you – You are what you choose to become.

Walking in Bigger Shoes

Lawyers are an earnest, disciplined bunch. They love evidence – the “show me the money” approach to life. They’re hard-bitten pessimist, yet love the latest self-improvement projects pitched to them by the legal establishment. You know — graphs, charts and the Oprah-like cattle call to “Change Your Life in Five Easy Steps!” The goal of all these books and slogans is Happiness, as if it were a commodity for sale. There was a snappy piece yesterday in the New York Times Review of Books entitled, “The Rap on Happiness.” It’s a great take on this country’s obsession with finding the veritable Oz of bliss.

“The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; its happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in transience. It is deep but often brief (as the poet Robert Frost would have it), and much great prose and poetry make note of this. Frank Kermode wrote, ‘It seems there is sort of a calamity built into the texture of life.’ To hold happiness is to hold understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.”

Lawyers walk in shoes that are too small for them, living lives that are too confining, unimaginative and which fail to challenge them to be their best. They need to switch from pinching wing-tips to cushy loafers. This switch gives a vital bounce to their steps rather than a lugubrious gait. The opposite of depression isn’t happiness; it’s vitality. It’s like a Swordfish bounding out of the ocean’s waves in defiance of gravity or B.B. King playing a blues riff on his guitar. They have a vibrancy that can’t be contained; they express themselves in a space where great stuff happens.

Part of the equation involves not so much pills or therapy, as the lifting up of our individual imaginations. Putting aside what’s possible in a concrete sense ( you know, the mortgage or student loans), have you ever looked out your office window and imagined the life you’d like to have? This is not the same as rumination; a constant churning of negative thoughts in our cranium which a depressive is prone to.

Rather, it’s an exercise in lively engagement with our Self. To engage in this effort, we have to pop our life’s stick shift out of “Neutral”, the frozen state that depression and/or anxiety can keep us stuck again. Locate the “Drive” on your shift and engage.

In this exercise, it might be helpful to think about the choices we make in a different way. Not in a self-recriminating way, but in a fashion that moves us in a constructive direction. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff in our lives; to decide what reduces or enlarges our spirits. Quality questions can help in regard. Not the common lament of depressives, “What the hell is wrong with me?” That’s a dreary question that goes nowhere because the answer we give ourselves is – – “Everything!” James Hollis, Ph.D., in his wonderful book, “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life” offers us a keen approach ourselves to view ourselves:

“Ask yourself of every dilemma, every choice, every relationship, every commitment, or every failure to commit, ‘Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?’ Do not ask this question if you are afraid of the answer. You might be afraid of what your soul will require of you, but at least you then know your marching orders.”

Incline your inner ear. Listen to your response to this challenging question. Enlargement of one’s self isn’t so much about happiness, as meaning. Deep down, we all want a life of purpose; where we feel our lives have a point, or many points of light for that matter. You don’t have to look far. It’s right beneath your bouncing feet.

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!

Our Relationship With Our Therapist

If you have ever suffered from clinical depression, chances are that you have undergone psychotherapy. Today, my musings will focus on the mysterious, intimate relationship between therapists and their clients in dealing with depression.

I guess you could say that I’m a veteran of therapy. I first started going during my last year of law school. This fledging attempt at “getting better” didn’t go so well. At the time, my therapist was focused on helping me to recover from being raised by an alcoholic father. Depression wasn’t even part of the conversation. I was high achieving, but broken in some fundamental sense. I really didn’t know who I was or how to be myself in the real world. So, I pretended a lot.

I pretended by learning how to please others. Certainly, getting good grades was part of this basic formula. My mother and professors were certainly pleased. I loved learning, but getting good grades was more than that. I began to envision myself as a “success” and needed high grades to build on that identity. Good grades would take me places, I thought. They eventually took me to law school and my new identity, after passing the Bar Exam, as a member of the legal profession. I wasn’t just Dan, I was a “LAWYER”; an Esq. par excellence.

After becoming an attorney, I saw a therapist off and on. They helped, but not in any enduring way. Years went by and I still felt that same sense of brokenness that I had when I first began therapy over twenty years ago. I would bash myself with these critical questions: “Why can’t I get myself together after all these years of therapy? Why can’t I figure all this out?” These questions would haunt me for a long time. Little did I know that most people with depression struggled with the same misguided ruminations.

Psychologist James Hollis once said that the quality of our lives is driven by the quality of questions we ask ourselves. Depression warps this questioning process. The questions our melancholy ask of us are dead ends even though we don’t see them as such while we are engaged in such self-assessments. A common lament: “What’s wrong with me?” What good comes of this question for someone with depression? Its focus is actually part of the illness and not a legitimate route out of it. It often compels us to make up a list of “Things to Do to Fix Myself” never realizing that we don’t need to fix ourselves so much as compassionately face ourselves.

I’ve had the same psychologist for the past three years. His name is Jerry and he bears some resemblance to Freud with his grey beard, don’t you think?

He’s an Italian guy from the Bronx and a professor of psychology at one of our local universities. I often waffle about how much can be accomplished from seeing a psychologist once every week or two. But I am often surprised by the sustenance that I draw from Jerry, often in unexpected ways.

In my own depression, I found that I would often try to run away from the suffering of it all. Alternatively, I would perpetuate it with negative thinking and unskillful behavior; I would literally step on the melancholy gas pedal.

The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung once wrote: “The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport one to an impossible state of happiness, but to help the client acquire steadfastness and patience in the face of suffering.” We need to face our depression and perhaps learn that it won’t destroy us; we need to learn (yes, it is a skill you can learn) not to run from it or keep feeding it. Jung’s wisdom was echoed by another renowned analyst, Helen Luke: “The only valid cure for depression is the acceptance of real suffering. To climb out of it any other way is simply laying the foundation for the next depression.”

Recently, I went through a painful episode in my life. I was telling Jerry about my best friend, Steve, and said, “He told me that he will always be by my side 24-7.” Jerry sat across from me with his wise eyes and paused. He then said, with a sense of weighted authenticity, “Dan, I too will stand beside you and be with you at all times.” The intimacy between us during that 10 second exchange was profound and stayed with me for a long time. Can someone you see for 1 hour truly care about you in such an intimate way? Yes.

It can’t be faked, however. Maybe that’s part of the chemistry of having the right therapist and it’s a different equation for everyone. I believe that it’s critical to have a therapist as our ally in our recovery from and management of depression on a consistent basis. I believe consistency is important because people with depression often come from families where consistency was sorely lacking; they may not even have much it in their present lives. Even if they do, it most likely needs shoring up.

In a loving way, let go of the questions that only lead you down depression’s dead ends. Therapy is not only a questioning of negative habits that fuel depression, but a replacement with questions worthy of you. In short, they are nothing short of the Great Questions: “How can I bring more meaning in my life? What are my greatest passions in life?” It is only by facing and being present to the pain of our depression that we can learn to let it go and live out the great questions of our lives.

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.