Love in a mist.
Listening to
Depression: Your Pain Can Be a Guide to Change and Healing
Joseph Castelli
“These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.”
~Rumi
My first diagnosis of depression came at the age of
fifteen.
Depression runs in my family; it wasn’t a case of
overmedicating.
It was genuine, and the black dog has followed me all my
life.
I’ve been on eight different antidepressants and a
handful of anti-anxiety drugs.
I’ve been in and out of therapist offices (and hospitals)
most of my life,
and I expect that I’ll continue to do so.
My mindset (and that of my family and doctors) was that
depression is an adversary to be defeated.
If only we found the right
medication or the right therapy, we could solve the problem.
But that mindset ignores a positive effect of such a
negative condition:
depression’s ability to induce change.
Depression lies to you, but it also tells you the truth.
And that truth leads to change.
Silencing
As I began my career as a lawyer in New York City, my
depression worsened.
Law is a perfect profession for depression to get worse.
I was taught to look for mistakes,
to be cynical. A pessimistic mindset is an advantage for
a lawyer.
Lawyers have high rates of depression, anxiety, and
substance abuse.
I don’t know whether depressed people become lawyers or
becoming a lawyer makes people depressed. It’s probably a combination, though
ultimately it’s irrelevant.
My depression found expression physically and
emotionally. I had chronic tension headaches;
when I woke up feeling like head was squeezed into a
vice, I knew the pain would last all day.
My back and neck were steel cables of tension.
I gained weight from a combination of lack of exercise
and poor diet.
On the weekends, I would order huge amounts of food,
seeking solace and finding only regret.
Emotionally, I was ashamed. Ashamed for being depressed
and ashamed for hating my job.
It was the prize so many of my law school classmates had
competed for. Why didn’t I want it?
More than the shame was an overarching sense of sadness,
like a gray filter applied across the screen of my life.
It felt like other people were seeing in color, but for
some reason I was seeing in black and white.
I remember discussing a medical leave with my therapist
(she was supportive, and I owe her much). But I was crushed as I realized that
a leave was only that—I’d have to return to the office.
Late one night, unable to sleep, I found myself
scrutinizing my apartment’s lease agreement,
looking for a way out. My apartment was bathed in
darkness.
In the pale glow of my laptop’s screen, I broke down,
shoulders heaving with sobs.
I had been trying to kill the messenger. I wanted to
silence my depression,
as if I could put my hands over my ears and make the
noise stop.
But instead, I needed to listen to what my depression was
telling me.
Listening
In those times, depression felt intractable. It was a
heavy stone that I wasn’t strong enough to move. But I think, more subtly,
depression can signal change. Pain is a messenger.
Just like physical pain, emotional pain is a signal. Your
body is telling you to change
what you’re doing. And those changes can’t take place if
you don’t stop and listen.
And how to listen?
Sit in stillness, observing what thoughts and emotions arise in the silence.
No control; only observation.
I learned to focus on my breath, observing its rising and
falling, without focusing on a specific object or mantra. I learned this
meditation technique at a vipassana retreat near Kathmandu, Nepal,
and it still serves me well.
Meditation clarifies the difference between genuine pain
and temporary discomfort.
Genuine pain is a messenger of change.
Temporary discomfort is a passing phenomenon we all
experience at one time or another.
It’s like exercise at the gym: it can be unpleasant and
uncomfortable, even though you know
it’s good for you.
In contrast, some pain is like breaking an ankle. You have to take time to
heal.
In this sense, meditation is a guide to distinguishing
between depression’s truth and lies.
Depression tries to trick you: it lies to you (in the
form of cognitive distortions like catastrophizing) while sometimes telling you
the truth (the genuine pain that you’re in).
Meditation separates the truth from the lies.
Recognizing
I relied on meditation to help me recognize the pain I
was in.
Not only had I run away from my depression, I had
chastised myself for even feeling it
(“you shouldn’t feel this bad”) then felt guilty for
being depressed.
Meditation cleared this fog of avoidance and guilt.
It also taught me to stop trying to figure out my
depression. Attempting to intellectualize
how I felt was a fool’s errand. I had to recognize my
depression in a visceral, bodily way.
When a stove is hot, you pull your hand away so you don’t
get burned. It doesn’t matter if the stove
is gas or electric, or who turned it
on. None of that information will prevent you from getting burned. It’s
happening; the exact causes don’t need to be figured out to act accordingly.
And this is exactly what meditation taught me:
to focus on the sensations (breath, bodily discomfort, thoughts) instead of
attempting to rationalize those sensations.
That’s why vipassana retreats require you to surrender
your books and journals.
Experience the phenomena, don’t intellectualize them.
Acting
In the end, my thoughts were just excuses.
When my lease was up, I told myself, I’ll quit in
six months after I get my bonus.
When I got my bonus, I told myself, I’ll quit in six
months when my lease is up.
Once I stopped attempting to reason with myself, it
became clear that I had to quit.
My depression had lied to me before, but it wasn’t lying
this time.
I’m not recommending recklessly quitting a job without a
plan. I had to sublet my apartment
and figure out my finances before I left. But my
depression had led me, finally, to make a decision.
Then I had to take the leap. As I told my boss I was
quitting, I felt a strange combination of anxiety and exhilaration. I shook.
I left New York City. I remember sitting at the airport
and deleting my work’s email app
from my phone. It sounds like a millennial’s cliche
version of catharsis,
but deleting that app felt immensely freeing.
I’m still in the process of letting myself be sad sometimes,
and I doubt that process
will ever truly end. I’m still on medication. But the
gray filter over my life has lifted.
*Disclaimer: Depression can have many different causes,
and everyone’s experience is different.
For some people, life changes can decrease feelings of
depression.
Others may require a combination of treatment modalities,
including professional help.
http://tinybuddha.com/blog/listening-depression-pain-can-guide-change-healing/
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