I just put a couple of posts to Facebooks, and since someone sent me a message thanking me for them, I thought it would be an idea to expand on them here...
I can see now a disparity between the aim and the final
target of meditating, or taking pills, or using anything else outside of yourself in the fight
against depression, anxiety and panic attacks. To hit the final target of being
without them, using measures outside of yourself, requires an acceptance of
something being wrong. It is accepting that you are weak, ill, needy, crying
for help, being a baby. I see now that maybe the real route out is to grow a
pair. You must start out by telling yourself no, nothing wrong with me. I am
damned fine! It is to look at a malady that is simply in the mind and tell it
to fuck off.
I will, however, continue with my 8 week mindfulness course
because maybe it, as well as some other recent events, has helped me to gain
this clarity. Maybe for others it takes the pills to lift them far enough out
of the pit that they can start fighting for themselves. But in the end the
battle is their own, and internal.
The sources I mentioned above in order... The meditations
started with Headspace, led on to various apps I downloaded to my Ipad and a
free one from Paul McKenna, this last led me on to his various self-help books along
with their hypnotic meditation CDs. By this time I had heard of mindfulness and
bought a book on that containing an eight-week course. A hypnotherapist I went
to see put me onto the 'Thrive' program by Rob Kelly – a book you work through
doing various exercises, some of which produce painful revelations.
In Thrive I learned that it is not even about your past. It
is about the you now: unhelpful thinking styles leading to catastrophising,
hypervigilance, low self-esteem and other crap. I started by blaming my problems on the death of my wife. Yes, this put me on that road, but it was me that kept walking. I have also blamed pressures of a new relationship, inability to assimilate a different culture, stopping smoking, drinking, also stopping drinking ... but do you see the pattern: all external shit. If you have a problem with the way you think then it is the way you think that you must change. It's difficult, but it is not rocket science.
It has to be corrected at its roots. And this brings me back round to the start of this post. You have to do it yourself. You don’t say ‘I’m depressed’ and wait for pills, you say ‘I am allowing myself to have depression today, but I will stop it’. Like I said, at the roots of the very way you think. ‘I’m depressed’ are the words of a victim.
And that too is a point. I now believe one has to decide,
firmly and finally: fuck off, I am not going to be this person any more. No more being
weak, no more whimpering and telling myself I'm not well. It can all get the
fucking hell out of my head. In the end getting angry helps, too.
Stop being a victim.
6 comments:
Speaking as someone with depression, I think the first thing is to admit that there's something wrong and that you might need help. There's nothing wrong with this.
Then one happy day there comes a time where you realise you're coming out the other side and that you don't need any more external help and you can manage to improve on your own.
I tried mindfulness and found it a load of hippy bullshit to be honest, Buddhism with the religion taken out, but it did lead me to a couple of philosophical quotations which really hit home. One, I think attributed to Buddha (I know, I know) is "A man who wants nothing has everything." The other is by Epicurus, "Don't fear death, don't fear the gods, good things are easy to find, bad things are easy to endure." I found this inner calm then, where I chose to accept things as they were and not to be dissatisfied with life but celebrate it. I.e., I don't have a steak but I do have a cheese sandwich. Yay! I have a cheese sandwich. And the same in all walks of life. I gave myself a metaphorical shake by the neck and now I don't wake up in the morning looking for something to be depressed about anymore.
Well done Neal, it looks like you're at the end of this journey and have found your own personal solution which is all there is at the end of the day. I envy those people who can just hand it all over to the magic imaginary man in the sky to deal with, but not much.
Having read your posts over the months, I refrained from commenting and giving my opinions as it wouldn't have helped. However, now that you've finished searching I'll throw in a couple of things that came to my mind as I read.
I was an active alcoholic for 20-25 years, finally reaching the point where there was no where further to fall in about 2008. I sought help and eventually found myself in farmhouse with 15 others in recovery and with excellent staff to support us. For six months I did all the self analysis and learnt how to live another way, mostly based around the AA & NA 12 step programmes and I haven't drunk since. :)
The most enduring thing I learnt in that time was 'The Serenity Prayer', which if you don't know it is:
I still utter that to myself when I get stressed, I'm amazed how it works.
Secondly, I recently started using this app out of interest and it seems pretty good. I just forget to use it every day or two. https://www.superbetter.com/
and this ted talk tells you all, TED talk by Jane McGonigal
Hope they are of some interest.
Finally, Haven't read your FB posts so won't say thank you, however I do owe you a big thanks for inspiring me to stop smoking. This week is two years now since I got my first kit after we followed you're progress and it's the best thing I've achieved in years.
WOW, thanks again. That was perfect.
Letting go of anger is even more helpful.
All very insightful. I'm still in the phase of retraining my negative thoughts of 'anger'or 'entitlement' into healthy thoughts of 'disappointment'. It's certainly wonderful having someone vocalize their process so publicly like this :) Thank you so much, as always.
One thing to realise is that a human mind is a relatively new thing, evolutionarily speaking, and hasn't really had all the kinks worked out of it yet. Similarly human culture also hasn't had all the kinks worked out of it quite yet. The net result is that there are a hell of a lot of failure modes out there, into which a human mind can fall.
Our minds are pattern-spotting systems par excellence. Most of the time, that works just fine; we learn to associate when a very low tide is coming, letting us get at those normally out-of-reach shellfish, for instance. Problem is, we tell each other and ourselves stories, and spot patterns in random shit, weave these into stories and worry ourselves unnecessarily (see also religions, all of 'em).
A useful example of weird-ass pattern spotting leading to failure modes is the story of the music group the KLF. They ended up literally burning a million pounds of bank notes; they cannot really explain why, save that they had embarked on a project which failed, so they wanted to destroy everything associated with the failure.
The lesson is, there are a lot of failure modes, and there are lots and lots of toolkits meant to get people out of these modes. Most of the toolkits start with a phase of getting a person to a set point to begin fixing a set, known series of problems.
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