The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom
Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist whose article in The Guardian does a great job of describing depression. I’ve described most of what I’ve gone through recently as ‘anxiety’ but the truth is that the SNRIs I’ve started work for depression, too. They tend to go hand-in-hand.
Sarner starts the article by talking about her own emotions about a cancelled holiday, and finishes by talking about motherhood. But this middle section about not being able to “press CTRL-Z” on life really resonated with me. We can’t go back to be the people we were before, and we shouldn’t expect others too, either.
What we can do, though, is to use the tools available to us to move forward. That’s what I’m doing through medication and therapy, with the aim to break through to the “truth emotional spontaneity and freedom” described here.
This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.
We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Wolfgang Vrede