Meaning Archives - Page 7 of 8 - Lawyers With Depression

11 Years

From the blog Depression Marathon, a writer takes stock of her 11 year journey with depression. Read the Blog.

Make Your Work More Meaningful

From Penelope Trunk’s Blog, a great piece that starts out from the premise that all work is meaningful. Read the Blog

Spirituality and Depression: A Talk with Dr. Hamdy El-Rayes

I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Hamdy El-Rayes about his new book, Mental Wellness: A Spiritual Journey. In his book, he explores the connection between spirituality and depression and how the lack of spirituality can be a cause of depression. Dr. Hamdy grew up in Egypt in the Muslim faith and experienced depression as a young man. He found a spiritual healer in the Sufi Muslim tradition who helped him recover, but found that his depression returned when he came to North America.

Dan: Can you tell us about your background?

Hamdy: I have a MBA and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and currently live in British Columbia in Canada. I also teach at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and work in upper management there. I became interested in the subject of depression because I have suffered from depression and anxiety. I found that there was no help out there that could help me heal with spirituality and that’s when I decided to take my own future in my hands and decided to use my skills and research background to find a way out. That is what led me into this work. That is what led me to write a book, Mental Wellness: A Spiritual Journey, on depression and found the H.R. Mental Wellness Center here.

Dan: How old were you when you first experienced depression?

Hamdy: It started at a very young age. My first time was when I was 14 years old. I then recovered and managed to find my own way through a spiritual teacher and I kind of brought spirituality into my life. I didn’t struggle with any depression again until I came here to Canada. I found that the North American lifestyle takes you away from yourself and you lose your sense in the process of living a life here. That’s what happened to me.

Dan: Can you elaborate on that? What is it about our culture that creates and sustains depression?

Hamdy: We live in a very fast-paced culture. We are driven from the time we wake up until the time we go to bed. We don’t have time to interact with ourselves. We don’t have time to reflect on our life with all the technology around us to keep us moving at a fast pace – cell phones, computers, IPAD’s and you-name-it devices. Today we are distant from a sense of spirituality in our lives. This drift really began about a century ago with the theories of Sigmund Freud. He had an enormous influence on the university culture in Europe, the United States and the educated people of his time. His influence and those of his protégés continue to this day. He considered religion, the more formal and institutional practice of religion, as a kind of mental disorder.

Dan: That is a very interesting. I think when we talk about depression in contemporary culture in the west, we often talk about treating depression with medication and psychotherapy because that is what the psychiatric and psychological establishment tells us to do. But there is not much discussion about spirituality and how spirituality can help somebody recover from depression, let alone suggest that its absence in our lives can be a cause of depression.

Hamdy: Yes, it became like a taboo. For most of the psychiatrists in the U.S., spirituality is not thought of as a solution to depression because it is not based on science and biology about how the brain work

Dan: I agree that many in the west think of depression solely as a medical issue, as a disease, and when people think of it as a disease, they say, “ Well it’s like heart disease or diabetes.” If it is just a medical disease, people probably don’t think that spirituality, and the lack of it, has to do with their depression. You have a new book out, Mental Wellness: A Spiritual Journey. In it, you say that spirituality has a lot to do with depression and healing from it.

Hamdy: It is not really my personal opinion. It is based on work done in past 20-25 years where doctors started recognizing that there is a powerful relationship between health and religion. There are about 95 articles and research reports about the impact of spirituality on various physical and mental illnesses. As we know, spirituality helps people with addiction, healing from various physical illnesses like diabetes, arthritis, heart problems. It even helps cope with cancer.

Dan: Can you talk more about how a lack of spirituality contributes to depression?

Hamdy: In developing our character, there are some qualities we develop when we bring spirituality into our lives. This character development changes our way of thinking and when you change your way of thinking you change your perception of the world. How we perceive the world plays an important role in depression.

Dan: Can you give us an example of one character quality that you are talking about in terms of development in your spiritual tradition and it may relate to depression?

Hamdy: Well I’ll give you something very close to us all: love. The capacity to love is something we can develop in ourselves and grow by practicing our spirituality. One of the main things people struggle with is the lack of love in their life. So often, they didn’t learn how to love themselves. And if you don’t know how to love yourself, it is tough to know how to love other people. Most of the people who suffer from depression have something from their childhood that set the stage for depression in adult life, whether they were abused or didn’t learn to love themselves or others at home.

Dan: Was that the case for you?

Hamdy: I wasn’t very healthy as a child. I was given the leeway of doing things that maybe other kids in the family were not allowed to in my culture. I was given a little bit of freedom to be me and that may be the best thing that I got from my family although it was for a reason.

Dan: What country were you born in Hamdy?

Hamdy: Egypt.

Dan: When you spoke earlier about spirituality and your childhood spirituality, were you raised in the Muslim faith?

Hamdy: Yes. I was raised as a Muslim in a conservative family where religion was very important. I was kind of rebel and was given the freedom not to go to the Mosque because I really didn’t like it. I didn’t like it because I found that many people who went to Mosque were not as my mother told me: all good people, very kind, very caring and all those things. I didn’t see it in the people who went there. So I said no, I don’t want to be there. So I was allowed not to go. Although my father, I remember, he was kind of ashamed. He was embarrassed that his son was the only kid that didn’t go to the Mosque. Everyone else went to the Friday prayers. My friends would meet in the morning before prayers and then go to the Mosque. I was the only kid who went home. My father got to the point where he would say “Hamdy, I will give you something. I will give you money every time you go to Mosque”. The sum of money he offered would be like the equivalent of $50.00 today. To a child, $50.00 is a huge amount of money! I told him no, I don’t want money. That’s why I got depressed and started talking to this spiritual teacher. He was a wonderful man.

Dan: Was he a Muslim as well?

Hamdy: Yes, he was a Sufi. He was a very spiritual man and every discussion you had with him was very deep.

Dan: How is a Sufi Muslim different than just a regular Muslim? What is it about Sufism that’s different?

Hamdy: Sufism is the mystical part of the Muslim religion. A Sufi is a person who is focused on the depths of developing themselves. They don’t attach to the rituals as much as in being. Religions are wonderful. I have studied Judaism and Christianity and you know they have the same foundations. When it comes to practice, we most of us tend to focus on the rituals and forget where the rituals where supposed to lead us, how they were supposed to transform us in our daily life experiences.

Dan: I am a very liberal Catholic, a religion that has many rituals. We can also get caught up in the rituals to such an extent that we go through the motions with rituals and neglect the practice of our spirituality. It doesn’t transform us in some positive way. I read a book by Brother David Steindl-Rast who wrote that there is the belief in God and the trust in God. There are many beliefs, but only one trust in God. Belief comes from the mind and trust from the heart. In my tradition, I trust in Jesus as a “Person”. I have a personal relationship with Him and I try to practice and nurture that every day. In doing so, I feel more aligned with my true self.

Hamdy: In my book, the most important part of spirituality is to come to know yourself and develop your character. Developing your spiritual skills becomes easy as you practice and becomes like second nature to you. Rituals when not combined with true spirituality will not help us to know ourselves.

Dan: Can you tell me, why did you write this book?

Hamdy: I wrote it because I had developed this program for myself to help me heal and I had outstanding results, I couldn’t even dream of getting the results I got. So I decided to offer this to people on my own. I set up a charity and I started offering this program to people in the community.

Dan: For those of our readers who are interested in your book and would like to know basically what it’s about, can you give us just a brief synopsis or an idea of what kind of things your book addresses?

Hamdy: I start with really trying to kind of correct the erroneous conclusions about life that we formed in childhood and carried into our adult lives. The past we are moving in today leads to depression and anxiety and other mental illnesses. That is the essence of the book. So we start with learning how to manage stress to get us to a place where we can function well in our daily lives. That is the most important step. Then I talk about, in the introduction, how the American community has distanced us from spirituality which is an integral part of our human experience. Our life is incomplete without incorporating spirituality in our life.

Dan: And I think that sense of spirituality, I think one of the key elements of it, at least in my own experience, is a sense of community and a sense of belonging. A lot of people find that experience absent in modern society. Do you feel that way too?

Hamdy: Absolutely, it is part of the process because if you look into how we develop ourselves, when we develop our spiritual skills, in every skill, it has as a part of it community and how we relate to our community. So that is an important thing.

Dan: When there is an absence of that relationship to community, I guess we could think of it as a form of stress; we don’t feel the support, we don’t feel the positive energy of other people and we are kind of left alone to battle in the world. We become estranged from humanity and alienated.

Hamdy: You know we are social beings and if we don’t have the community that we are a part of, we are lacking something and that can be a kind of contributing factor to our depression.

Dan: Did you find that in your own experiences of depression that you had difficulty managing stress?

Hamdy: Yes. You know, the problem with stress is that there are smaller stresses along the way and stress is cumulative. So we have small stresses and we don’t manage this stress which is cumulative and affects us in a very significant way whether physically or mentally without us noticing because we kind of become numb to the impact of stress and we don’t see its cumulative effect, unfortunately, until we are burned out or we are suffering from a major mental or physical illness.

Dan: In your book, do you have some recommendations for how we should approach healing from depression. Can you share with our readers’ one or two?

Hamdy: Number one is learning how to manage your daily life, how to relax with meditation and living mindfully. It not just to practice meditation, it is to bring it into your life in every activity you do in your life right now. Living mindfully is a very important thing and if you live mindfully, you are not distracted with things that happened in the past or concerns about things that may happen in the future.

Dan: I agree with you and I think meditation is important. I guess it might be fair to say, the opposite of mindfulness is mindlessness which I guess, while we are in depression, it is kind of a mindless state where we are confused, disorientated, disconnected. Was that your experience?

Hamdy: Absolutely, and in the process, we get more distant from ourselves. We are really unaware of how we feel physically or emotionally until we get a wake-up call that is depression or having a mental or physical illness.

Dan: The culture really contributes to that. You said earliest we are driven from the moment we get up and we override our symptoms or signs that we are in trouble; maybe we are suffering from depression or heart disease or other problems.

Hamdy: One other thing is when you start practicing your spiritual skills, you kind of are more oriented to become yourself. One of the main reasons for our depression is conditioning from our families and fast-paced culture that allows us to become distant from our essential self. It is important for us to recover this true self. In recovering our true self, you live in harmony with the world around you; you are not in conflict anymore.

Dan: Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for your time Hamdy. It was a great talking to you.

The Key To Happiness After 50

Joseph Nowinksi Ph.D. writes that after 50, we need to focus more on the question “Why Am I Here?” versus “What Do I Want?” Read the Story.

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.

Our Parents – Our Depression

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in the moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people – Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk

Like all parents, my mom and dad were flawed people – as I am. Yet, they were something more than that.

I’ve struggled to understand them much of my adult life; maybe more so now that they’re both gone. The nineteenth century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote: “The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary.” Maybe it isn’t till midlife that we really work hard to interpret the stories of our past. I believe there’s a strong urge in all of us to make a comprehensible story of one’s life at this juncture. And our parents are a large part of that tale.

The author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, a WWII veteran like my dad, wrote:

“The most important thing I learned was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. It’s just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

Now that I’m 50, I still wonder what role mom and dad played in my depression. Looking at the facts, I guess it’s all too obvious: drinking and mental health issues on both sides of the fence. In my most self-absorbed moments, I blame them and feel justified in doing so. In brighter moments of lucidity, I see that they, like me, were somebody’s children once. They didn’t start out in life the way they ended up – nobody does. They were, in a real sense, victims. This fact doesn’t excuse what happened; the real pain they inflicted on their children. But it does help me to understand their plights in life. And with that understanding comes some measure of peace, a peace of heart.

Turning the pages to our Past

Jonathan Frazen, author of the best-selling book Freedom about a family that struggles with depression, writes:

“Depression, when it’s clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it’s known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there’s a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you’re depressed, you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don’t want to feel bad anymore.”

Here’s Jonathan Frazen talking about his novel on PBS:

How much of our life is determined by our familial past? How much of it is spun by choices we make apart from that past? Apart from what happened to us at the hands of parents, can we really change? I believe that shifting through our past helps us to become “unstuck.” And after all, depression is about being stuck. We can’t go forward, if we can’t go backwards and to see the truth of about past.

There are some things we can change and some we can’t. We can’t change our genetics and scientists now know that the genes we inherit play a significant role in our vulnerability to depression. There is a gene that regulates how much of a chemical called serotonin is produced. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter. The amount of serotonin that flows to your brain influences your mood, and emotional state. Those whose serotonin transporters included a gene that was shorter than would be typically expected at a certain point had a harder time bouncing back after experiencing a stress event. Chronic stress and anxiety, as I’ve written about before, have a strong correlation to a vulnerability to clinical depression.

This bit of news makes me want to know my ancestors, these ghosts of my past. These folks and I have something in common: irksome chromosomes that could flip off the happy switch in our brains from time to time.

I heard on National Public Radio that there have been 60 generations that have lived and died since the time of Jesus. Since the extent of my knowledge about my family only goes back, at best, 100 years to the time of the birth of my grandparents, that leaves me about fifty-eight generations or 1900 years of emotional and genetic history unaccounted for. I wish there was some kind of recorded history of their lives because I am a continuation of them even as my daughter is of me.

Dad’s Story

Dad was born in Buffalo in 1926, the oldest of five born to immigrants from Poland. I never met my grandparents, but from family lore I’ve learned that they were tough people who lived even tougher lives: brute physical labor for their daily staple of meat and potatoes, playing pinochle while plumes of cigarette smoke wafted up to the ceiling and crates of cheap booze on the weekends. If you looked crossways at them, they’d likely belt you in the mouth.

Alcohol played a big role my family’s drama through the generations. Sometimes they drank at home, but more often in what my grandma called “Gin mills.” Men would cash their checks in these Polish joints, throw their money on long wooden bars sip draught beer as they talked about all the scraps they’d been in that week just trying to get along in life.

My dad grew up in this world. At 17, he went off to fight in the Pacific theater against the Japanese. War must have deeply affected him, as it does all young men. Robert E. Lee, writing of his experiences in the Civil War, wrote his wife in 1864:

“What a cruel thing is war; to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors and to devastate the fair face of the earth.”

Last year, I read a New York Times review of a book out about J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye. The article notes that Salinger, who served in the infantry during WWII in Europe, witnessed a lot of death and mayhem and struggled with depression his whole life:

“Salinger’s experiences during WWII heightened his sense of alienation. The war left him with deep psychological scars, branding ‘every aspect’ of his personality and reverberating through his writings. Salinger had suffered from depression for years, perhaps throughout his entire life, and was at times afflicted by episodes so intense that he could not relate to others.”

Ultimately, he stopped publishing, moved into a cabin in rural Connecticut and practiced Yoga and Zen meditation.

Dad clearly suffered from undiagnosed depression and PTSD, something that would, like Salinger, haunt him for the rest of his life. But war can’t explain all misery, can’t explain the storms that would rage in his head. His younger brother Roman, also a war veteran, became an alcoholic. Dad’s younger sister suffered from depression and been treated for it with medication suggesting a possible genetic propensity in our family for the illness.

Mom’s Story

Mom, like dad, was also part of WWII generation. Her older brother Joe went off to war in the Pacific for three years. As fate would have it, he met my future Dad aboard a ship in the Philippines and said, “If we ever get the hell out of this shithole, I’ve got this cute, blonde sister back in Buffalo.” They survived, my parents met, fell in love and married.

Mom had an alcoholic father, also an immigrant from Poland. She recalled being asked by her mother to go find her dad on a regular basis when he didn’t return home after work. Often, during the harsh Buffalo winters, she would find him passed out in a snow bank. The only intimate moments she remembered sharing with him was when for her eighth birthday he took her to a Shirley Temple movie and bought her candy.

Mom and dad quickly had three kids. Things went well the first ten years of their marriage, but the wheels began to fall off from there on out: dad drank too much, became a gambler, womanized and had unpredictable outbursts of high octane rage. Mom collapsed back into herself and never really recovered. She began to eat a lot, added lots of pounds to her slender frame and watched T.V. all the time. Maybe the dopey sitcom narratives sliced through the quiet pain my mom carried – all the time – all of her life.

Dad died 32 years ago at the age of 56 (I was 19) from too much drinking and smoking. He died sort of unrepentant, never saying he was sorry for anything. But, in my own mind at least, I think he was sorry. I think he just couldn’t bring himself to say it because of the enormity of his sins. But I have learned to forgive him, this enemy of my childhood who I had wished as a boy that he would just die. The great poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote:

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

As for my mom, well, she died almost two years ago at the age of 82 of brain cancer. I devoted a blog to her passing, but didn’t say just how difficult it was to really know mom. She was always somehow distant, like a star in the sky. She never had any friends, her family was her circle. She loved us, but often did not connect with her children; maybe because she had never been cherished as a child. She did, after all was said and done, the best she could and, in this sense, was so much easier to forgive and let go of than dad.

Walter – Second Edition

Walter, my oldest brother at age 59 and dad’s namesake, and I were walking back the other night to the parking lot after our hometown hockey team, the Buffalo Sabres, had taken a real shellacking. I asked him in the frosty, hidden darkness where men – – if they do at all – – share a sliver of their true inner lives: “Do you ever think of dad and what did he meant to you?” He replied, after a few huffing breaths: “Not really, just what a real asshole he was.”

My brother has never been in therapy, never taken antidepressants. But he had heroically forged ahead “carving out a living” as he was prone to say. Yet, I couldn’t help think about the profound effect dad’s abuse had had on him and my other three siblings. I wonder if he sometimes thinks about it at night while lying in bed with the windows cracked open on a hot summer’s night. Does he wonder why he can’t stop feeling bad about himself? Why he doesn’t feel more confidence? And the toughest part of it all, the thing that keeps me up at night when I think of my burly, big-hearted brother, is that he probably blames himself for all of these feekings as adult children of alcoholics are prone to do.

My Coming Around

As for me, a real veteran of therapy and antidepressant medications, I know all too well that my parents are still tangled up with me long after their deaths. My therapist once said that I had to work out the long buried grief of never having had the parents I needed. Over the years, I have done a lot of grieving for the childhood I didn’t have. Yet, as I was to learn, it wasn’t only my grief about my childhood troubles that I was to deal with, but for my parents as well. For the loss of their innocence, their difficult childhoods and all that they could have been.

Despite the pain in my family, there was love; fractured though it may have been. As he aged, I sensed that my dad knew that too much had gone wrong that he couldn’t fix. But in small gestures here and there, he showed affection and love. As my mom’s wake last May, I was privileged to give the eulogy. What I said was my mom’s defining quality wasn’t success, intelligence or gardening, but kindness – that this is where she planted her flowers that continue to grow in the hearts of her children and grandchildren. And what a gift that is. One that’s always in bloom.

My parents were both hopeless in their own ways. They were dealt a crummy hand in life. They were born with certain genes, into a family and time in history that they didn’t choose. The difference between them and me, the blessing that came out of my depression that didn’t for them, was that my pain forced me to finally confront my wounds and work hard to heal them – an ongoing project for us all. It forced me to examine the long unexamined within me. It gave me a choice: I could continue to live out my parents damaged views of life or embark on my own journey and discover what was real and true for me.

While it is true that none of us can avoid the pains and difficulties that come from living on this planet, what modulates the pain is love — pure and simple. Andrew Solomon, who has suffered from depression for much of his adult life, captured this in his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression:

“Depression is a 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 despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself.”

In the end, love really is the only thing that saves anybody.

Turning 50

Because time itself is like a spiral, something special happens on your birthday each year: The same energy that God invested in you at birth is present once again – Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson

I just turned 50 a month ago.

My beautiful wife threw a birthday party for me at my in-laws beach house on the shores of Lake Erie, about fifteen miles from my fair city of Buffalo, New York, also known by locals as The City of No Illusions, the origins of which remain unknown to me.

You get a real sense of your age when all the tunes cranked out by the live band at your birthday gala are all from the sixties and seventies. No Lady GaGa tracks at this hoopla, but lots of gag gifts for the old geezer.

There’s Something About the Number

There is something momentous about turning 50. We all crunch numbers, don’t we. Those who have joined the 50 club seek a sort of mathematical revelation about its meaning: A half-century of 200 changes of the seasons, 600 full moons that have passed through the night skies from my boyhood until now.

It’s been two years since I’ve blogged about my 30^th High School Return. As I drove to that event, it was like a time tunnel back to my younger self as Bachman Turner Overdrive wailed “Taking Care of Business” as I barreled down Route 78, my thinning hair flying with the breeze kicking in through my car’s window.

My dad died at age fifty-six, about six year older than I am now. That was over 30 years ago. I wonder what he thought about turning 50. I will never know.

Obama, George Clooney, Boy George and Eddie Murphy all heard the fifty gun salute this year. Fame does not delay the passing of the years, though good makeup may.

The acclaimed poet, Billy Collins, on the occasion of his 50^th Birthday, wrote:

But I keep picturing the number, round and daunting:

I drop a fifty-dollar bill on a crowed street,

I carry a fifty-pound bag of wet sand on my shoulders.

I see fifty yearlings leaping a fence in the field.

I fan the five decades before me like a poker hand.

Taking Stock

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

We all remember our parents at this ripe age. They seemed so old, didn’t they? We look at ourselves in the mirror and, seemingly overnight, we have become . . . well . . . old.

My hair recedes like the waves going back out to sea, my joints crack and my energy flags around 9:30 at night. Warm milk? Not necessary as my AARP (I just got my unsolicited card in the mail) brain softly whispers to me, “Goodnight Dan”.

Life has brought plenty of trouble, pain and suffering to all of us by 50; curve balls, losses and betrayals of all types. In the balance, it’s also graced us with unadulterated joy, irony, whimsy, mischief and love. We are all challenged to learn from the negative and practice gratitude for the many blessing that have been bestowed on us and those we care about it.

I savor the words of Dag Hammarskjold, former Secretary General of the United Nations, from his book Markings, “For all that has been – Thanks. For all that shall be – Yes.”

There is a grace that comes at 50 that I didn’t have at 30 or 40; 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. Like all people, I’ve weathered many storms. While I know that there are sure to be more to come, I have faith that I’ll still be standing after they’ve pass, that the barometric pressure will rise and that I’ll be walking in the sun again.

We hope by age 50 that we’ve becoming wiser. That in taking stock of our lives at the three-quarter turn of the track, we are able to distill something essential about how to live a good life.

True Grit

I think there’s some grit that comes at 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 tell the 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 by such people and marvel that in speaking their own truth they give permission for others to speak theirs as well.

Maybe few of us tell the truth all the time. So don’t be so hard on yourself. But bites and pieces of it well chewed, like my grandmother’s sweet potato pie, make for good digestion.

Garrision Keillor, of A Prairie Home Companion fame, wrote in Things to Do When You Turn 50:

“Start telling the truth. In small doses at first and then gradually build up to one out of three, a decent batting average. When you’re young, you’re scared, you’re trying to wend your way through the trees and not get shot at, you’re trying to stay on the warm side of the various big cheeses in your life, you’re wanting to be the good guy who everybody loves, not the jerk with the big mouth. But when you hit 50, you’re entering a new passage of life in which you can say what you really think.”

The Speed of Time

We all look forward to events on the horizons of our lives. For a guy like me that just turned 50, it’s retirement sometime in the not so distant future and a day when I won’t be father to a 12 year old daughter, but to a twenty-something woman walking down the aisle with her sixty-something dad.

As you head into the fifty-something territory, others of the same age spontaneously lament and wax that time is moving more quickly the older you get. This conversation can take place with perfect strangers at Starbucks. I sense that it might be okay to have this middle-aged banter with someone because I can usually tell their approximate age by looking at them: thinning hair, a slightly craggy face and the look in their eyes that they’ve known just how tough life can be.

There is a recognition of our finitude, that time is precious, that we don’t have forever to take running leaps towards our dreams.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computers, spoke to a Stanford graduating class as their commencement speaker in 2005.

Shortly before then, he has been diagnosed, treated and recovered from pancreatic cancer, a cancer that would take his life some six years later. Not mincing words, he told the class that we will all die. This wasn’t meant to be morbid, he told them. But a recognition that time is precious and not to be squandered. Our mortality gives us the motivation to find out what we love to do and do it.

Americans often associate this with finding a job they love. No doubt a noble endeavor. Yet most people do not find a job they love and often toil at average paying jobs that bring only a modicum of happiness, if any at all. But they labor on supporting themselves and their families seeking refuge in the solace of forests, a great book, a ball game and in making their spouse and children happy.

Much wisdom can be culled from our years of living to 50. We learn to see what’s really important and what is, by comparison, trivial at best. More than anything, I know this much is true: the decency and dignity with which we carry ourselves everyday trumps everything else that happens to us.

We All Have Choices

We all have choices and we need to be reminded of this over and over. Life will spare no one suffering. Some of us by mid-life will have suffered grievously: the loss of a spouse or loved one to cancer, the undeserved loss of a job and means to support oneself or, as I’ve written at some length before, episodes of depression.

But in my life time, I’ve learned that suffering does not have the final say. That we do have a large say about what suffering means to us and our relationship to it.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, writes in his book, Deeper than Words:

“Our human dignity hinges on the right use of freedom. The converse is the abuse of freedom. Fearing that, should we then want freedom to be eliminated so as to get rid of suffering? No freedom, no love; no love, no meaning; the worst possible suffering: meaningless. The only way off this dead-end road lies in the opposite direction love can give meaning even to suffering – and so overcome it.”

Yes, our life, if it is to have true meaning, is finally to be used to love and serve others. For when we pass, we will not be remembered in others’ hearts so much for our accomplishments, but for the love we have given and shared with others. You can bet on that.

The Trouble With Walter

Like all parents, my mom and dad were flawed people – as I am. Yet, they were something more than that.

The author of “Slaughterhouse-Five“, Kurt Vonnegut, a WWII veteran like my dad, wrote:

Now on the doorsteps of 50, I still wonder what role mom and dad played in my depression. Looking at the facts, I guess it’s all too obvious: drinking and mental health issues on both sides of the fence. In my most self-absorbed moments, I blame them and feel justified in doing so. In brighter moments of lucidity, I see that they, like me, were somebody’s children once. They didn’t start out in life the way they ended up – nobody does. They were, in a real sense, victims. This fact doesn’t excuse what happened; the real pain they inflicted on their children. But it does help me to understand their plights in life. And with that understanding comes some measure of peace, a peace of heart.

Turning the pages to our Past

Jonathan Frazen, author of the best-selling book “Freedom” about a family that struggles with depression, writes:

Here’s Jonathan Frazen talking about his novel on PBS:

Dad’s Story

In today’s New York Times, there’s a review of a new book out about J.D. Salinger author of “The Catcher in the Rye.” The article notes that Salinger, who served in the infantry during WWII in Europe, witnessed a lot of death and mayhem and struggled with depression his whole life:

Ultimately, he stopped publishing, moved into a cabin in rural Connecticut and practiced Yoga and Zen meditation.

Mom’s Story

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

As for my mom, well, she died last May at the age of 82 of brain cancer. I wrote about her death in a recent blog, but I didn’t say just how difficult it was to really know mom. She was always somehow distant, like a star in the sky. She never had any friends, her family was her circle. She loved us, but often did not connect with her children; maybe because she had never been cherished as a child. She did, after all was said and done, the best she could and, in this sense, was so much easier to forgive and let go of than dad.

Walter – Second Edition

My Coming Around

In the end, love really is the only thing that saves anybody.

Hangin’ With Depression

I’ve been living with depression for the past ten years or so – longer than I’ve known a lot of people! I’ve come to think of depression as a sort of troublesome companion; one I need to keep some distance from and yet, at some other level, recognize as a voice I need to care about and even listen to.

Not Letting Depression Define Who We Are

It’s helpful sometimes to think of depression as not “me,” but an “it.”

It’s so easy to get lost in depression; to wander into a compass-less night with no way home. During these times we just don’t experience depression, we are depression. We can’t get any traction or relief from its withering pain. It rants and never raves; it’s negative thinking on steroids.

Dr. Richard O’Connor writes:

“Most tragically, this depressive thinking is likely to be turned on yourself. You remember all the times you failed, and all the times the other guy succeeded; you literally can’t remember your successes. You probably think of yourself as different from others: weaker, damaged, shameful, and inadequate. You don’t consider that you can’t get inside another person’s skin: the confidence you envy may be just a front; the skill you wish for is just practice and hard work; the success you covet may be bought at a high price.”

During the peaks and valleys of my depression over the years, I have learned to say to myself “that’s my depression talking.” I’ve learned to put a little space between me and this formidable foe.

But I know, deep in my bones, that this companion will travel all of life’s pathways with me – it’s here for the long haul. While it may not define me anymore, it wields a pointy pencil and shades in various features of my character, reality and moods. There will be days when I’m better at seeing this, at cutting through the clutter of depression as I navigate my day. And then there are still days when it bogs me done a bit, cuts into my productivity and colors my face a deeper shade of grey.

For some, like me, it may not be a question of ultimately curing depression, but containing it; of keeping it at the periphery of my life. When it tries to wander into the center, the wise sentinels – my psychologist, psychiatrist and chums – remind me that it’s time to refocus and employ my self-care stuff to keep depression at bay.

You are not your depression. It may be a part of your life, but it isn’t your life.

Listening a Little More Closely

Sometimes we fight our depression too hard. In our attempts to extricate ourselves from its pain, we sometimes chew off a limb like an animal stuck in a steel trap. Sometimes, we need not squelch the pain of depression, but listen to it because it’s trying to tell us something. It can be a messenger from somewhere deep inside of us, not just an illness or a psychological malady.

I’ve often thought that part of depression is a lack of love for one’s self, whatever the reason. This pain, through years of neglect can pathologize into real illness, like depression; it can grow into a giant monster that we’re just too scared to face. So we hide in our work, our addictions and in all the many fronts we show to the world. We kick the can down the road, hoping that things will get better, hoping that depression will just leave us alone.

We need to incline our ears to our pain. As the poet and author Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote:

“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.”

Somewhere in all us is that depression dragon, that part of us long neglected, abandoned and helpless. We need our hearts to turn and love this part of ourselves that wants help from us, wants to be heard, wants to tell us that for us to heal and have a shot at happiness, we must listen – maybe as we never have before – to all that is truly in us and needs our attention.

Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D., in her book Listening to Depression, writes:

“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.”

Depression feels different on different days. Sometimes, try treating it as an “it.” And during other times, perhaps when you’re feeling a little better, try listening to what it is trying to tell you.

Is Lack of Life Meaning Your Depression Trigger?

As a new year approaches or gets under way, many people ponder the meaning of their lives, and whether they are where they want to be. Depressed people, though, often avoid this pondering, because it brings up some really uncomfortable issues they are frankly not sure they can deal with.

For depressed lawyers, the stakes can seem very high indeed, if they suspect (or know) that their daily work and life has little meaning for them. The idea of a career change or life change can be deeply frightening, and act like a trigger or a multiplier to an existing depression.

Meaning is one of those things that depressed people usually feel they lack in their lives. “Feelings of worthlessness” is always on those checklists of depression symptoms. A life that feels meaningless, feels worthless. And while that feeling of a meaningless, worthless life is often the illusion that depression projects, with many lawyers, there’s some hard, cold reality behind it. The objective, logical, detached thinking that law demands often silences that need many of us have for meaning in our work and lives. Meaning lives in our emotions, not our logic.

What Meaningful Looks Like

Exactly what is meaningful differs for each person. Some of my clients find work more meaningful when they are out in the field working directly with clients or witnesses, rather than in the office enduring conference calls. Others find meaning by communicating an important message well in a brief. Many lawyers enjoy and find meaning in helping a client achieve a goal that feels worthy to them—keeping a client out of jail, helping an entrepreneur avoid a regulatory quagmire that would have doomed a really super business idea, or vindicating a client whose intellectual property was stolen by a competitor.

If your work doesn’t carry some inherent meaning for you, that lack can be the trigger for depression, rather than the symptom of it. If your work actually violates your values—those things that have the most meaning for you—it’s almost sure to send you into a funk eventually. I see that with my clients consistently. They are unhappy, or depressed, because their work lacks meaning for them.

If there exist pieces of a depressed lawyer’s life that hold meaning for them, that’s a relatively easy fix—find ways to increase the size of those pieces in their work or life. A lawyer who finds meaning in helping the underdog can add some pro bono work. Someone who values interacting and collaborating with people can volunteer to do training or mentoring. (The list of people who need mentoring is endless—less experienced lawyers, homeless or economically disadvantaged people who need basic job searching skills, at-risk youth, and college students trying to find their niche are just a few ideas.) Sometimes simply cutting back on hours and spending time with family and friends will add meaning.

Many times, though, it’s the work itself that lacks meaning, no matter how the unhappy lawyer slices it or tries to re-arrange his or her work life. Particularly when that lawyer is ignoring her or his creative side, routine legal work will never have enough meaning to combat unhappiness or depression.

Ignore Those Creative Urges at Your Peril

All humans are born with a great capacity for some type of creative work, whether that be problem-solving, developing innovative products or approaches to business, or some type of self-expression such as writing, painting or performance. We tend to see creativity as the making of art, but it’s much more than that. It’s seeing old problems with a new set of eyes, of wondering “what if we tried doing it this different way . . .? What could make this better . . . ?”

Law, in contrast, values applying the same old solutions to new problems. That’s the DNA of law. For those with a creative bent, that DNA can feel like a death knell to meaning in their lives.

Lawyers whose creative gifts are centered around problem-solving will find it easier to add meaning to their work life in law, but lawyers whose creative gifts revolves around self-expression or making new things will have a hard slog of it. The greater your creative gifts, the harder it is to endure work without creative meaning. Your soul protests vehemently and doesn’t really care about what society thinks about stable, large paychecks.

What does that vehement protest look like? Often, depression. I don’t for a moment think that every depressed lawyer is a blocked creative—but many are, if my clients are any indication. Once they start getting in touch with that creativity, their lives go from stuck to moving. When they start adding that thing that has deep meaning for them—creating in some form—their depression often lifts or lessens markedly.

The hardest thing, as anyone who suffers from depression knows, is getting started. So start small. Add meaning in tablespoons, and suddenly you will find it in your life by the gallon.

Here are a few ways you could start to add meaning to your life:

If you find meaning in problem-solving, get some Legos and figure out how to build a tree, a piano or whatever appeals to you. (Legos, incidentally, are now way cool. There are Harry Potter and Star War Legos sets, among many other brilliant ones. You could start with a kit and go from there.)

If you find meaning in beauty, add some to your life. Put some art on the walls, or find a lovely object you can put on your desk or a bookshelf you look at daily. You could even get some pretty paper and craft some origami. A pretty scarf or unusual tie could add a big lift to your life. Even colorful or unusual office supplies can boost to your creative spirit.

If making something new holds meaning for you, get some polymer clay, sold as Sculpey or Fimo, and comes in a cacophony of colors plus metallic and glittery version, and make a coaster. Or make some worry beads; or whatever else appeals. If you can’t seem to create something for yourself, then do it for a child. Children love presents, period, and they’ll love that you made something just for them.

If kindness and compassion top the meaning scale for you, start slipping a few dollars to a homeless person regularly. Or volunteer monthly at a soup kitchen. Or make it a practice to smile and greet people who look like they’re having a bad day.

Adding meaning to your life can be a lot cheaper than therapy and medication, and have some profound effects. Living a meaningful life can be a powerful part of your arsenal in fighting depression. And the downside? I can’t think of one.

This is a guest blog by Jennifer Alvey. Jennifer is a recovering lawyer and a professional life and career coach, as well as a published writer. She graduated from Duke Law School, where she served on the Duke Law Journal as Articles Editor. Following law school, Jennifer clerked for a federal appeals court and then moved into private practice with a large Washington, D.C. law firm. While at law firm #3, Jennifer began developing her creative talents, and left law to pursue one of her passions, writing. In 2007 she started a blog Leaving the Law.