How People Get Better from Depression
An abridged version "Patterns in Stories of Lasting Healing from Depression"
Credit: Photo by Clint McKoy on Unsplash
Previously, I published an extended, 120-page analysis of narratives demonstrating deep and lasting healing from depression. Here is a more condensed, 65-page version—with an even shorter version coming soon in a book with Clay Olsen set to be published later this spring.
We all know too well what the experience of serious depression is like—an emotional desolation and agony that is exquisite and often enduring. What’s far less familiar to most of us is what it looks like when depression heals over time, for real.
The stories you are about to hear were all gathered for two reasons: First, the 80+ individuals featured clearly struggle with depression—saying things like: “I never imagined that there could be emotional and psychological pain so overwhelming. Some days I was gasping for breath”... “I can hardly eat, sleep, or think straight. I would cry unending tears”...“I struggled to stay alive in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair”…“Grief and sadness clung to me, like it was part of my own flesh”...“It robbed me of my life”...“I just want the pain to stop”…“God, please help me make my mind stop torturing me.”
Contributors to this agony vary widely, from brutal past trauma related in accounts to current circumstances that were physically straining. A number of people suffered for many years, even “decades of unrelenting depression.”
Clear emotional suffering was not enough to be included in this study, however—since we were also watching for evidence of healing that went beyond temporary relief to something demonstrably deeper. For example, people said: “For the first time in my life I felt settled, calm and peaceful”...I’ve learned how to actually be profoundly happy, content and at peace deep in my soul”...“Life has never been this good before—I enjoy my life, and feel peace”... “My life is now full of purpose, I appreciate things more, and I am much happier than I ever was.”
“Today is my birthday, and it’s the first birthday in a long time that I truly felt like celebrating,” said one woman. “I now have a life that I love and wake up grateful for it every day,” adding:
I never knew that life could be like this! Life is easy and enjoyable; it’s not a daily struggle to convince myself to get out of bed and get myself motivated to do simple tasks. I will catch myself smiling or singing for no reason. I am so excited to be alive. I didn’t even know that it was possible to feel this much joy and contentment.
After sharing his healing story, Mark said, “I had no idea I could ever be that happy.” Sarah described reaching a point in her healing that “I would not have thought possible, considering where my long journey started.”
The transformation in these stories has been at times shocking to witness. Mendek, who earlier described his life as a “seemingly endless sea of pain, fear, rage, guilt, grief and loneliness,” went on to describe coming to “live a life of deep peace and boundless joy.”
Something special has clearly happened in these accounts. What we wanted to know is how exactly these changes had taken place, and why these people reported deeper and more lasting emotional healing.
While none of these folks had arrived in some surreal place without pain, where they found themselves was qualitatively different than before. One individual who described herself as “totally healed” from depression after struggling for two decades, acknowledged, “I’ve gone through some hard times since then, some really difficult times. I’ve felt sadness and anger at times.” But then she emphasized, “Those are temporary emotions so very different from soul-killing depression.” Marsha said, “I’m a very happy person now…I still have ups and downs, of course, but … no more than anyone else.”
“I still have bad days,” says Johann, “But I no longer feel pain leaking out of my uncontrollably. That’s gone.” Jim likewise said, “now, when the rain comes, it rains, but it doesn’t stay. It doesn’t stay long enough to immerse me and drown me anymore.”
If signs of less fundamental healing and more chronic disorder were spotted in an account, they were excluded from the analysis. Elsewhere, we’ve shared in-depth reports as long as 120-pages of what we’ve found so far across twelve themes - as well as a more abridged 23-page version of these same findings, detailed across 56 pages below:
1. Holding onto hope in the possibility of deeper healing
2. New learning that helps rethink and see life with fresh eyes
3. The big three – nutrition, physical activity & sleep
4. The other big three—mental diet, mental exercise, and mental rest
5. Designing supportive physical settings and schedules
6. Working with thoughts in a gentle, mindful way
7. Working with emotions in a creative, mindful way
8. Pursuing forgiveness and healing from past trauma
9. Deepening relationships & emotional support
10. Expanding a sense of meaning, purpose, and identity
11. Discovering a new source of confidence, comfort and connection
12. Increasing emotional freedom, reducing mental dependence
Here, we simply touch on themes identified with a few illustrative examples.
1. Holding onto hope in the possibility of deeper healing
The first theme across narratives of healing is that of hope—hope that healing is possible and that personal choices do matter. As Mark put it, “I didn't want to just cope. I needed to hope that tomorrow could somehow be different, and clinging to that hope was what had kept me alive so long.” Nyla remarked, “Healing is a process less about a destination than it is about maintaining hope,” with another woman describing “the promise of healing” as what “urged her forward.”
This contrasted with the despondency people experienced at certain points along the path of healing. As Josh said, “Hopelessness was a huge part of my life for a very long time.” This was connected to the continuing pain, and how people were encouraged to think about the pain. “My first therapist told me in one of our sessions, ‘Juanita, you will have to live with this for the rest of your life,” one woman said. “Pat, your clinical depression is a life-long condition,” another remembers, “your brain chemistry is permanently out of balance.”
Noting that “extremely depressed people have become disconnected from a sense of the future,” Johann described from his own experience, “a sense of a positive future protects you. If life is bad today, you can think—this hurts, but it won’t hurt forever.”
Mendek recounted, “I am grateful that even through such dense, stifling darkness, I was able to perceive the bare whisper of my inner voice telling me, “Life is worth fighting for, no matter the price.” Otherwise, I would have perished.” That gave him confidence to release the old and “build a new life—one based on trust, beauty and peace.”
As many of us know well, hope can't just be conjured out of thin air or manufactured artificially. Someone can't just walk up to you and say, poof, you have hope now. You can't really even just arbitrarily decide to be hopeful, either. Even so, many participants in our review included pleas to others reading their story, to not give up on their own hope—especially those on the edge of giving up on life itself:
Jonathan said, “If you ever find yourself in a position where ending your life seems the only option, remember you will never know what could have been, never know how your life could have changed for the better. How could you? You won’t be around to see it.”
When another person who was ready to give up asked Joanne for support, she responded, "The world is full of wonderful things you haven't seen yet. Don't ever give up on the chance of seeing them."
Crystal summarized her encouragement: “You have to believe me when I tell you that you can find healing, and then desire it. Even if that’s just a tiny flicker of hope or desire at first…that’s all you need! Even if you feel as though you’ve exhausted your options, just try again—please. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
2. New learning that helps rethink and see life with fresh eyes
Many described some kind of learning and insight that made a significant difference—picking up a book, watching a video, hearing a story, or meeting someone that left an indelible mark on them and influenced a change in their healing trajectory.
One person was described by a loved one as having a “deep desire to learn and grow, even in the midst of depression he would get out of bed, read books, learn.” Mike described how he “journeyed into an obscure bookstore and found books that taught him about how to look inwards for more answers.”
Diana describes the impact of “gaining a fresh view about myself, others, and the world” in her healing. Ashley described profound levels of self-examination: “I looked at everything else in my life under a microscope.” Mark said, “Along the way, there have been many meaningful self-discoveries—about my biological, psychological, relational, spiritual, and ecological being and well-being.”
Watching for clues, listening to symptoms. The value of “recognizing the scope of true causes” is another theme of healing. This includes big and little things, as William said, “the determining factors of depression are oftentimes the little things that we are not even aware of”—with Johann adding “We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source—and only there, when we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it.”
Lori described how “listening to pain signals instead of trying to muffle them” was a “big” contributor on her personal journey of healing. Johann continued: “No…your distress is not a malfunction. It is a signal—a necessary signal…this pain isn’t your enemy, however much it hurts….It’s your ally…let it guide you—away from the things that are hurting and draining you, and toward the things that will meet your true needs. So instead of seeing your depression and anxiety as a form of madness…you need to see the sanity in this sadness. You need to see that it makes sense. Of course, it is excruciating…But that doesn’t mean the pain is insane or irrational…Depression and anxiety might, in one sense, be the sanest reaction you have. It’s a signal saying—you shouldn’t have to live this way, and if you aren’t helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human.”
Seeing the truth about your life. As long as we’re running to and fro, with hardly any time to breathe— let alone think—it’s hardly surprising that we aren’t very attentive to deeper realities, let alone even the basic realities of our life. It’s equally unsurprising, then, to appreciate the value of deeper stopping to set the stage for spiritual discoveries. As Thomas recounted:
I remember the first time that I really decided to just sit still and take a look at what was going on in my life. I think we all come to those moments where we just say, “I'm exhausted, it’s not working, I need to be still, throw on the brakes and take account of what’s going on.” When I did that for the first time, I was a freshman in college, and I didn’t know what I was doing in terms of someone had taught me to do this. I just threw on the brakes, just looked, and I was just really stunned by what I saw.
He described this as a “turning point”—prompted in that “moment where I just stopped, I calmed, and I just looked at what was going on.” And that’s when “I realized that my house—the house that is me—was in total shambles.”
And that was hard to look at. I couldn't believe how profound and extensive the damage was. And yet, I was seeing it. For the first time, I was actually seeing it without censoring it, without trying to avoid it, or distract myself, because I knew deep down how bad things were. I just looked at it.
Joanne reflected on a similar earlier admission, “Everything was stripped away. I’d made such a mess of things.” Such evaluations needn’t be made with harshness, of course, and can be done with compassion, as Vicki emphasized:
Part of this work really has to be the work of self-compassion. We may not be in the place that we want to be, but can we take a step back and thoroughly understand where we are? With compassion. ‘Here’s what I’m feeling. Here’s what happens to me during the day or during the night. Here’s how I act out. Here’s the maladaptive coping habits that I have now, that I know are not doing me any good, but I don’t know where to turn.’ That kind of self-informed picture can help me seek out the help that I need, that’s appropriate for me as a person.
Similar to the processing of trauma and abuse described earlier, this kind of deeper look at the full scope of life is often part of working through regret and allowing yourself to grieve. As Joanne said:
I’d had a short and quite catastrophic marriage. I had to…re-build us a life and adrenaline kept me going. It was only when I came to rest it hit me what a complete mess I had made of my life. That hit me quite hard. We were as skinny as you can be without being homeless and at that point, I was definitely clinically depressed.
This same woman described finally allowing herself to grieve something difficult in her life, “I had an enormous explosion of emotion, and I cried and cried and cried." Looking, of course, is the opposite of not looking—avoiding, running away. As one woman said, “I had to stop running away from myself and the broken parts that were left unhealed. This was my body…and if I wanted to find happiness, I had to learn how to mend her.”
Re-narrating the problem. A number of people described a burst of new hope as they began to reconceptualize the problem they faced.
“Then I read this book. And everything changed. His 6 steps gave me something to focus on, other than ‘being sick.’"
Another person described the “beautiful, powerful a-ha moment” after reading journalist Bob Whitaker’s book on the mental health epidemic, in which they “saw my life in an entirely different way.”
“None of the realizations I’ve come to,” another said, “would have happened had I not been at least slightly open to thinking about things in a different way.” Re-thinking illness itself perhaps requires the most openness. As Johann said, “We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are”—recounting the story that depression was “some kind of malfunction in the brain, caused by serotonin deficiency or some other glitch in your mental hardware”—one that could be repaired chemically.
“I liked this story. It made sense to me. It guided me through life,” so much so that he felt hesitant to meddle with it. “Once you settle into a story about your pain, you are extremely reluctant to challenge it….I feared that if I messed with the story I had lived with for so long, the pain would be like an unchained animal, and would savage me.”
That fear didn’t stop him from eventually embracing another story. Citing two professionals who described depression as “an understandable response to adversity” and a “normal response to abnormal life experiences,” Johann wondered if mental illness “wasn’t just a problem caused by the brain going wrong” but rather, something “caused by life going wrong.”
He then cited Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teaching, “it’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society” before asking: “What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?”
“The old story says our distress is fundamentally irrational, caused by faulty apparatus in our head. The new story says our distress is—however painful—in fact rational, and sane.”
That new possibility felt disruptive: “If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don’t have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts.”
“If we’re told the wrong story, ‘You will become sealed off in a serotonin story. You will try to get rid of the depressed feelings in your head. But that won’t work unless you get rid of the causes of the depressed feelings in your life.’”
“You aren’t a machine with broken parts,” he said—you are someone “whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values…You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things.”
“Every human being has these needs. You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you’ve been told up to now, it’s not serotonin; it’s society. It’s not your brain; it’s your pain.”
3. The big three – nutrition, physical activity & sleep
Nutrition, physical activity, and sleep are widely embraced as crucial for physical health without controversy. Yet some people still scratch their heads at why it matters for emotional health. “I asked the psychiatrist I was seeing at the time whether he thought there was any link between nutrition and mental health,” Michael reflected. “He looked at me as though I had just asked whether there was any link between mental health and UFO rectal probes. ‘There is absolutely no evidence of any link whatsoever between dietary choices and mental health,’ he said curtly, and changed the subject.”
More and more people realize this isn’t true. Juanita admitted in retrospect about being among those who were “sleep deprived, ate too many fast-food meals, and dependent on caffeinated drinks to give us a boost to keep going”—reflecting a “failure to recognize the necessity of rest, proper nutrition and exercise” and “the many ways that I abused my body, mind and spirit.”
Professionals are also growing in their appreciation of the impact of lifestyle and nutrition. “I was somewhat nervous about trying [this] approach,” one individual said. “But Dr. Lee quickly eased those fears during my first visit. She thoroughly explained … how nutrition and the use of nutritional supplements worked together to promote healing.”
Good mood food. Some of the individuals spoke of adding new foods in their diet—sometimes supplements, vitamins or a certain “nutritional regimen.” David reported how he had “increased the amount of green vegetables” he was eating. And William reported, “On the recommendation of my psychiatrist, I take a set of B vitamins.” Another found she was “severely deficient in vitamin D, so I’m taking mega-doses now”—with another finding fish oil capsules helpful.
Others found benefits from paring back on certain kinds of food, and other commonly used substances. “Once I started mainly eat fruits, vegetables, and healthy fats, eliminated white flour, and most meat,” Diana said, “I noticed a difference in how I felt.” Although they “didn't completely limit sugar and dairy,” one whole family prioritized “organic, grass-fed beef and purged the house of most of our processed food.” Within a week or two, they began seeing glimpses of their “formerly happy, joyful child.” Two months after making these changes, they said “our daughter is generally happy and at peace.”
Caleb found that reducing soybean content made a huge difference after some experimentation. “Every time he eats something from the bean family,” his wife said, “depression symptoms come back like clockwork. When he doesn't eat legumes, the brain fog is not there, no suicidal thoughts, he can handle stressful situations better, and is even able to feel joy.” This family came to believe beans “causes inflammation in his body and brain”—a solution they felt was an answer to prayers, even while admitting "God helped me figure out that beans are bad" for me might sound like an Onion story (it’s not, of course, it’s a bean story!).
The pattern is experimenting with things until finding something that made a difference. It was surprising to Thomas “how intuitively I could assess what was happening—’I’m going to really focus on nutrition now; I just know that's really out of whack.” Michael described what he “already knew about my mental condition intuitively” that sugar influenced his mood swings, and a healthy diet “buoyed my mood and helped me feel stable.”
As William explained: “I found that after a few hours, I would experience a hard emotional landing once the caffeine effect wore off. I would be much more susceptible to negative mood swings….While too much caffeine derails me for a day, effects and reverberations of alcohol on the state of my mind and mood could last for up to three days. I completely abstain from drinking now. I figured that my mental health was far more important.”
After being severely suicidal, Michael was challenged by a doctor to stop consuming refined sugar, alcohol and coffee. “In the back of my mind, I knew what he was saying was right. I knew intuitively that I didn’t feel well when I consumed these things. But it just seemed so onerous, so unlikely, such a killjoy way to go through life.”
“Forget it,” he thought, telling the doctor, “What else do you have for me, because that’s not going to happen.” The practitioner looked at the man compassionately, and said, “Your life is your life. But if you want to feel better and stop feeling these mood swings, I recommend you try what I suggested.”
After a period of ignoring the advice, Michael decided to go for it and accept the yearlong personal challenge. “All I could think about was coffee and sugar” those first two weeks, he said. “Coffee sugar coffee sugar …on instant replay in my mind 24/7, even in my dreams.” With regular “headaches, fatigue, depression, haze,” he almost gave up.
But one morning, two weeks into the challenge, “the haze in my mind had lifted. It was a clear, crisp, brilliant sunny day in my mind—the first such day of sunny internal weather for years.” Looking back, he said, “I experienced drastic differences in how I felt, based on how much (or how little) refined sugar and refined carbs I was eating.”
“What came out of my year without sugar, coffee, or alcohol?” Michael reflected, “I got my life back. Whereas before I was a mess, with moods all over the place and energy levels in the gutter, for the past four years since I initiated that challenge, I have felt energized, and in control of my life.”
“I’ve been staying away from caffeine and other stimulants that can play havoc with moods and energy levels, which has been helpful.” Jim said, “I rarely drink coffee. I'm very serious about no alcohol, no drugs. Life is too beautiful.”
Upping physical activity. Some restarted a prior habit, others exercised for the first time. Some described benefits of more gentle physical activity. Vicki added, “For my body, movement is very important”—describing hiking with her dogs, and practicing yoga.”
Others tried a “vigorous exercise regimen” —with one saying, “Man, that thing kicks my butt, but it feels great.” William described running 3-4 times a week in the evenings for 20 minutes, “I have found that running works the best for me …to get the strongest anti-depressant effects.”
“Anyone who has struggled with depression knows the ways the mind can defeat you,” said one woman—describing how running with her dog became “therapy” during a “chronically depressed” period, teaching her she could “endure more than you think, and that there’s no other depression therapy quite like pavement beneath your feet.” (39)
More light and nature. In a variety of ways, from light therapy boxes to adjusting schedules, people describe boosting “vitamin N.” William said, “I simply stand in the window of my apartment for a few minutes in the morning, letting sunlight fall on my retina. You can do this with either eyes open or closed. During fall or winter, when sunlight is sparse, however, I use a light box. I usually set it at the breakfast table or my desk at work and let it fall on my retina for 30 minutes.
Juanita said, “I started to garden and take in vitamin D.” Vicki said, “Being in nature is for me is like an elixir. It's like drinking in health. I need it. All seasons—I'll bundle up in the winter and go out in the mountains.”
Mendek said, “Going for a walk on the beach, or looking closely at a tree or a flower, always helps me return to peace. Nature attunes my senses to the divine. Everything I hear, see and sense is beauty.”
“I depended on nature to rescue my heavy head from endless worrying, ruminating and overthinking,” Melissa said—explaining that “being simply an observer in the center of this boundless ecosystem, aware of just how much was occurring without my involvement, put my overblown sense of importance into perspective” and allowed “the clamor” in her head to “subside.”
Better sleep. “I’m very sensitive to sleep deprivation,” Vicki said, “it makes me anxious…. So, I always try to get as much sleep as I can, or get the sleep that I need.”
“If I go without sleep and start partying a lot and get overextended and stressed,” Kyle said, “I’ll hit depression…. that’s the recipe for madness for me.”
Thomas described years of insomnia, “I remember staying up into the early hours of the morning listening to a Dire Straits album just for something to distract my thinking mind. I think about—you hear about Chinese torture of dripping water—it’s not so bad the first day. But after 5 years of that, someone can start to go crazy.”
Diana described the impact of “resting quietly even if I can’t sleep,” which helped provide “adequate rejuvenation” for the day. “From now on, phone is off at 10 and I'm going to be in bed, reserving time for the practice of sleeping in my life,” said Thomas—reflecting, “It was in hindsight that I realized how significant sleep was in holding all my physical and mental health together.”
“You’ve gotta kinda watch this and not think that you can go without sleep just because it feels like you could,” Kyle said. “You can’t do that to your brain for years on end. You also can’t not feed yourself...You’ve got to take care of your body because your body takes care of your brain.”
4. The other big three—mental diet, mental exercise, and mental rest
Compared with growing attention to physical diet, exercise, and rest for mental health, less attention has gone to mental diet, exercise and rest—which shows up in these stories as well. “We're all pretty sensitive to the way we eat food and how we feel after a meal,” Thomas said. “If you have a big meal of, say, fried fast food, you’re probably going to feel a bit of a slump in energy and kind of a listless quality about you. I don't think we have the same sensitivity for what goes on with the mind.”
Refining mental content. Mendek reflected, “Not that long ago, people weren’t flooded with information about the world or bombarded with advice …Now, even when I turn off the news, I still feel distress in the air.”
“I feel less anxiety and depression since I stopped checking social media as often,” Diana said. “I stay informed with current events, but once I know what is going on, I avoid the news” along with “anything with depressing or anxious content,” such as “violence and anxiety-evoking music.” Mark said, “I’ve found that steering clear of the anger and acrimony so abundant on the internet helps avoid a negativity that can trigger a depressive mood.” While Johann “radically cut back on social media” Crystal explained her decision to cut out “all of the other stories of scandal, murder, theft, loss, politics, arguments and riots,” by saying “sometimes it is beneficial to know that there are good things going on in the world, despite the brokenness.”
Thomas described a growing awareness of “all the mental and emotional content that was like sludge in my body and mind” leading him to become “more choosy” about what he consumed. “My relationships changed, and my relationship with literature changed, and the way I interacted with media, internet, things like that changed a lot.”
One woman said, “I listened to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of books” which helped to “put me in a positive frame of mind.” Another described the importance of “surround[ing] yourself with positive people” and “cut[ting] off negative ties.”
Crystal described “a newfound awe and confidence” that came from reading every word of the Bible—admitting “it’s incredible to me that so few have read the book” where God “shows us His heart, plans, and instructions for how we are supposed to live.”
Enhancing mental activity. Julie said, “I’m quilting again regularly.” Another spoke of “forcing myself to keep busy hands/mind by coloring in coloring books (you can even get nicer ones for adults, which help), reading novels, listening to audiobooks”—all of which helped in “stopping my mind from racing and ruminating.” Another spoke of cultivating simple hobbies, journaling, and even spending time with a baby as making a difference.
Marsha spoke of the impact of expanding her mind by going to college—and another woman simply by taking a class. One man described his involvement in family history gradually eroding his despair and depression—offering, among other things, a healthy place to consistently focus one’s mind.
Prioritizing mental rest. Something more than more mental activity or intake seems to be needed for many. “I just stopped, and just sat still,” Thomas said, “and I just closed my eyes. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. My focus was not taking more stuff in, not seeking more stimulation—but to just really, be in my own experience.”
At the time, he felt like a “total disaster…I was as broken and beat up as I felt, emotionally, mentally. Things were a wreck.” And yet, in that moment of resting in a place beneath thoughts and feelings, he described how he simultaneously “observed this deep stillness, this profound calm, this restful quality of being okay, being sustained and supported in the moment.”
This stillness can sometimes be found in small, everyday moments. As William recounted:
I found that a slow, warm, and quiet breakfast is the single most influential factor on how I will feel throughout the day. To this day, I get up early enough to not have to rush in the morning. I take in the sunlight by standing at the window for a few minutes, before sitting down to have breakfast. I don’t check my phone or emails during this time. I get into this mindful state where I’m just grateful for being able to have a roof over my head, warm and healthy food, and a cup of tea. I take the time to appreciate the food, the quietude…not allowing myself to think about any problems I have during this time. I will have time to deal with them later. I am simply present in the moment. This entire breakfast routine lasts for about 30-60 minutes.
Vicki also said, “I have a daily regime of meditation, a sitting practice of meditation, which is the absolute core foundation practice for me. It helps me relate to what arises in my mind, and in my heart and my body, with a healthy regard.”
“The beauty in meditation” Jonathan added, “lies for me in that, in its purest form, it creates breaks or gaps in your thought or feeling process. It creates a time out of your ever-persistent internal chatter; a break from yourself or a while.”
“Meditation opened a side of myself I had shut away. It was the side of me that could process my past on an emotionally mature level. It was in the moments I’d close my eyes, and tune out the noise to relax, that I’d finally sense something different about myself. I started to change; I started to grow. My level of emotional and mental well-being increased significantly.”
Meditation has taught me “how to mentally rest,” Diana said – “to notice but not engage in unhelpful thoughts but, instead, enjoy the still restorative calmness of silence.”
Juanita described her time with depression as “filled with deep silence,” yet discovering that “the silence too is a significant gift.” As she continued, “The extensive time in silence has revealed so much to me.” By “marinating in the silence,” she describes coming away “poignantly aware of the deep transformation that the silence is working in me.”
In addition to helping her “break down the tough issues in my heart,” she said of the stillness, “I know this may sound far-fetched, but I can sense myself beyond my body, my form; here I know that I am presence, energy, life, and light, and I am surrounded by love.”
Present to what is. This kind of presence was new and different for most. As Mendek recalled, “Constant engagement with my thoughts prevented me from experiencing full contact with life. I couldn’t enjoy the sweetness, security, and spontaneity that come with being truly united with the world around me. Instead of leading me toward peace, my mind continually led me away from the source of my being, toward loneliness and despair.”
Thomas described how “this process of thinking, thinking, thinking about our problems” can become “a form of resistance to the problem itself”—“We're afraid to engage with the actual problem, just open up to it and see what’s going on with it—so we put up this barrier, we build this wall of defense—and that thinking becomes a problem in and of itself. Whatever your primary problem was, that is now side-lined, and what’s taking up the majority of your moment to moment experience is a lot of thinking itself. We're primarily involved now in our thought process, and we’re not engaged with what was initially painful, what was initially causing the problem.”
As Crystal said: “At my lowest, the stench of hopelessness lingered in my soul. Much of the past years had been marked by an intense craving to escape. I didn’t really care where I would escape to, but figured anywhere would be better than where I was…As it turns out, you can’t get away from yourself, no matter how fast or far you run.”
Mendek suggested that “Presence is where peace lives,” explaining: “It doesn’t matter what I’m doing. Nothing is too small or unimportant. Making oatmeal is my meditation. Folding laundry is my meditation. Mending holes in my socks is my meditation.” He elaborated:
I try to do only one thing at a time and never rush. I live deliberately and appreciate everything—a child’s laughter, the texture of a rose petal, clouds floating across the moon in the night sky. I pay attention from the moment I open my eyes in the morning and gaze out of my window at the beautiful mountains. I stay present as I get up, put on my clothes, and walk downstairs to the kitchen to make hot cereal for breakfast. I put water in the pot, add oatmeal when it begins to boil, and stir it every so often as it cooks. When my breakfast is ready, I sit in a chair and eat slowly, right from the pot—and in that moment, I don’t do anything but eat. I look at my food and enjoy the smell, texture, and taste of it.
Small joys. Robert spoke of having “regained the experience of small pleasures.” Matt went on to reflect, “Success is finding packets of joy in experiences large and small, obvious and hidden, each day. Tucked away in every day are reasons to rejoice in being alive”—even if he sometimes has to “pull the blinders of depression off to see it.”
As a way to increase the salience of these positives, especially during hard moments, this man described storing up and treasuring “little notes, cards, letters, and photographs that come,” which he calls his “memorabilia against depression.”
Describing how he treasures “every moment” with his young grandson, Mendek says, “ I stay present as we crawl through his plastic toy tunnel, dig holes in the sand, and even when he cries inconsolably.”
When his own sorrow overwhelms again, he’s able to “access a deep trust and find happiness in the little, everyday moments of my life”—suggesting, “When I am fully present, there’s a shift in my frequency that enables me to access a new way of seeing the world. My old energy is washed away and replaced by a new energy…a state of grace in which barriers of thought melt away and peace becomes endless…I welcome each day as a glorious adventure, and I know simply being alive is magical.”
As Jonathan said, “this magical path to Utopia, the yellow brick road that we all seek,” well, maybe “you’re already on it.” Instead of appreciating this journey you’re on, he added, “you just stopped looking. You got lost on the way, overtaken by thoughts of the tiger that’s following you, the storm that’s brewing in the distance…Alas, you forgot the beauty in the flowers that already grow under your feet.” One woman said:
I also used to spend a lot of time fantasizing about things I wanted to be happening in the future…a fantasy romance, a dream job, getting a lot of money, becoming famous…. if we could only get this relationship, that job, or that thing. Spending all that time focusing on what I didn’t have was a huge source of my unhappiness. So yep, it all had to go too…I learned to live in the moment, how to really be present and enjoy each moment. I learned how to accept my life situation exactly as it was with peace and gratitude. I learned how to be thankful.
Slowing down, opening up. In many cases, it was clear that a pattern of immense stress and busyness was contributing to emotional wrestle and depletion. Matt described “working hard to surrender perfectionism, competitive striving—including competitive Christianity—and frenetic “busyness” as markers of a worthwhile life.” He continued:
I learned to be more dismissive of artificial markers and external benchmarks ‘imposed’ by institutions and other people. In place of these I focused on identifying and living congruent with my own values and in peace and joy with my wife and my Maker.
Describing her past, Juanita said, “I didn’t have time to ‘waste’ talking to friends about getting together. I had things to do and places to go. Though I valued my friendships, my to-do list took priority over my to-be list.” Yet she went on to say, “God was instructing me to stop doing and just be” or rather to pursue a doing that “spring out of our deep and exhaustible well of being.”
In practice, instead of being “so driven to achieve,” Juanita spoke of beginning “to practice being more present to myself, Rudy and the girls” as well as to other things around her. She referenced the Danish practice of hygge, which is taking the time to slow down and enjoy the simplicity of friends, family, and the things of our lives in a cozy sort of way: “Instead of being preoccupied with all the ‘important things’ I had to say, I began to value what others thought and said, and I am learning to listen,” she said. And “instead of feeling like I had to perform to win the approval of every human being who ever lived, I began to relax and give myself breathing space to enjoy my encounters, and to focus on things that really matter, like memorable moments.” Juanita added:
I feel no compulsion to do anything or any need to have work or affirmations to validate me; I just am. God is in this, allowing the flow of God’s love along with this profound awareness that I am. Nothing to earn, nothing to accomplish, nothing to justify or to validate. I am because God is.
As reflected here, a connection with God was closely connected to deepening stillness for some people. As one man said:
Like Elijah, I found God in meditation and quietness, in a “still small voice” that had previously been drowned out by our noisy culture, and my own incessant thoughts. Meditation allowed me to just come to God for the first time in my life completely open, with no filters or expectations. Meditation allowed me to quiet down my brain and emotions so that God could really communicate with my soul.
And this process takes time. Spirituality isn’t, like other things in America, an on-demand product, as Marsha emphasized: “I eventually learned that when it comes to spirituality, the more you actively want it,” sometimes “the less likely it is to happen.”
She reflected on what this looked like in her life: My practice was to lie on the floor of my apartment, palms turned up at my sides, saying the prayer “Thy will be done” at the start, and then the silent acceptance. A prayer without any expectation of a response from God. It was this practice that ultimately led to transformation, because it helped me form a relationship with God that led to a spiritual experience. Nicole described sensing that God was “telling me to be patient” and that healing “needs to be done slowly, not to rush it”—contrary to her desperation to “be free of this mental illness,” and her tendency to “steam-roll ahead.”
Being with hard things. Jonathan describes the futility of approaching his own emotional discomfort aggressively, and “chas[ing] it back down the path, grabbing hold of its coat and asking, ‘hey mister why me? When am I going to be ok? When am I going to be normal again?’”
Instead, as he put it “Accept you feel this way. Accept you don’t feel like you once did. Accept you may feel nothing good for a while. Accept your life is not what you thought it would be. Acceptance sets you free; breaks the chains of what you think you deserve or what you think you need.”
Matt said, “Life is hard. I came to accept that, and to experience, validate, and find joy in the nobility of striving, even when it didn’t seem to make the difference I deeply wanted.” Another said:
Pain and difficulty are going to happen to you. Trying to fight this truth is pointless. You can’t win this fight and it will only fill you with despair. I’m not suggesting a pessimistic, fatalistic attitude. You can passionately work hard to improve your life and still accept that your life will inevitably include difficulties. That doesn’t mean that you want to have hardships; nobody wants that…but when they come, you don’t feel that your life is over. You only have to bear the difficulties for a season. Accept them. Learn from them. There is much to be gained from our hardships.
This kind of acceptance can feel liberating—especially when the constant resistance stops. Thomas described “a kind of courage, and a kind of sincerity, where you look at your life and you’re willing to just see what’s there. And you realize in doing so, that where you are really losing your energy, what was really causing your suffering—what you didn’t realize was causing you to suffer—was all the energy you were spending on avoiding, all the energy you were spending on resisting.” He continued:
When you stop resisting, when you stop avoiding, and you look—you open your closet and look at that bogeyman, and you realize that you’re equal to that task, and that you can look at it and it won’t destroy you. It’s a willingness to hold your life—all of your life in awareness. It empowers you to take account and to start moving in a direction that feels right.
5. Designing supportive physical settings and schedules
Creating uplifting and beautiful settings. Across stories, we saw people coming to appreciate beauty more around them—in relationships, in the natural world, and in the sometimes messy course of living. In addition to going out and seeking beautiful settings, people also did little things to bring greater beauty to their own normal places. For instance, Marsha said, “I learned the value of beauty, and that the effort to bring beauty into any setting is worth the work it entails.”
“Always a generally neat and tidy person,” Wendy was shocked by how her home “fell into disarray” after suffering through several episodes of depression. While acknowledging, “I knew I needed to take charge of my life and my home” she went on to admit how impossible that felt:
I also knew that thinking about everything that needed to be organized in my home was totally overwhelming, which made the task feel even more impossible. Looking at my massive to-do list made me want to give up right away. And, when I looked at my entire house and saw all of that disorganization, I didn’t even want to start because I never thought I’d be able to finish.
What ended up helping her make transformations in her home was taking one small step at a time—“I needed to break things down into smaller chunks. So, I did just that.” As Wendy continued:
I started to organize one space, one room at a time. I actually began in my kitchen.” As a place she always loved in her home, she said “getting my kitchen organized was one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself and my family. I was happier, and I just felt lighter after we finished going through our kitchen. We got rid of everything we didn’t need, which meant we didn’t have all of that junk weighing us down.
This experience gave this woman empathy to others “who struggle with cluttered and disorganized homes” due to the chaos of their inner emotional struggles. That prompted her to become a professional organizer—and dedicate herself to helping others “identify what has created disorder in their lives” and then “helping them create systems” so they can get their life back in order, outside as a support to the internal work.
Wendy encourages people to just pick one room in your house. Then “close your eyes, and ask yourself: if you could snap your fingers and organize any space in your home [in a better state], which space would you take on? If you could have just one room in your house organized, which one would make you feel happiest or the most relieved? Is there one particular room that’s stressing you out more than the others?” If those questions don’t lead to an obvious answer, she adds, “you might ask yourself where you and your family spend most of your time.”
As part of improving her environment, Carrie described cutting back on “chemical cleaners and commercial beauty supplies” to make her lived experience more free of toxins. In large and small ways, these kinds of environmental adjustments appear to make a measurable difference.
Habitual patterns. When combined with the appreciation of a need to “keep moving,” even when not feeling well, we can appreciate why set patterns, habits and routines can be helpful—bringing together, as they often do, various components of recovery. William highlighted the value in his experience of building a daily routine to achieve more healing—writing about what a “physiologically healthy schedule looks like.” Reflecting on how “depression can wreak havoc on our bodies and biology,” Matt continued:
In response, physical self-care is like an athlete’s pre-season conditioning, giving the patient a fighting chance against depression on game day. For me, regular physical exercise, good nutrition, healthy weight, adequate downtime, rest, recreation, and sleep all contribute to general physical, mental, and emotional well-being, helping immunize me against depression. Maintaining a daily routine also helps stabilize my mood. Like persons in recovery, these are my “dailies.”
Sarah described a “wise activity list” they adopted “to practice as a routine.” This started after coming across a story of another woman who found a healing boon from some basic repetitions in her routine: “To keep herself together, she resolved to do six things per day: to do something for herself, do something for someone else, do something you don’t want to do but that needed doing, do a physical exercise, do a mental exercise, and say an original prayer that always includes counting her blessings.” She recollected:
This modest list seemed realistic to me and I resolved to follow it. I was not always faithful…sometimes doing something for myself could be an activity as simple as having a cup of tea or reading a book, or maybe taking a walk, which would double as a physical exercise.
One person described a certain prayer she would also invoke “whenever I started feeling a panic attack coming on.” Others described the impact from ongoing “prayer, meditation.” Nicole described “daily spiritual” practices including “worship, singing praises, the psalms, reading the Bible…doing this on a daily basis, I started receiving peace.”
This kind of routine helps take advantage of the power of habit. As Jonathan described them, “Habits are sly old creatures that like to hide in the background, subtly persuading you to do the same thing in the same way, day after day, year after year, while all the time letting you think you’re making all the decisions.”
All this, once again, helps reinforce forward momentum behaviorally which sustains and advances emotional healing. Keeping up momentum can be difficult—and there are some Jedi mind tricks that people describe using to help convince their body to keep doing what their mind is wrestling to accept. As Jonathan admitted, “When I used to feel depression coming on, I used to say to myself, “oh no, the curtains are drawing.” I was literally telling myself to batten down the hatches, to keep my head down for a while. I can now see how wrong that was.”
He continued, “Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go! Because this is what we now need to do. We need to work at changing the way your life is at the moment.”
Stress-busting the life around you. In the intentional design of an antidepressant life, a number of people described realizing and responding to the negative impact of stress on their emotional health. Jada spoke of recognizing the tangible impact of “the amount of stress I allow”—with Danny emphasizing the impact of “living an unbalanced life.” As Juanita recounted, “Every person or organization I was associated with wanted something from me.” Seeking to be available with “no limits, no holds barred,” she acknowledged, “I had not developed the ability to set boundaries or have realistic expectations for myself.”
This stress can combine with other unaddressed issues to cause serious problems. In the case of this woman, a “complex mix of stress, disappointment, grief, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and discouragement had been building up for weeks, months, and years, but I discounted the warning signs.”
Reducing financial stress. Some individuals assessed spoke about navigating financial issues better as a way to reduce stress and mitigate the impact of stress on their mental health. “Other practical elements” of his healing journey, according to Matt, “included finding contentment and calm as we avoided debt and learned to live well within our means.” Wendy admitted:
Growing up, my parents never discussed finances with me. The closest they got was reminding us that “money doesn’t grow on trees” whenever we asked for something. So, as I got older, I had no idea what a healthy relationship with money should be. I didn’t know how to create a budget or how to manage debt. And, like most American young adults, I was being bombarded with advertisements from lenders asking me to open up credit cards or personal loans.
Understandably, then, this woman admitted, “I made some mistakes with money when I was younger because I was never taught how I should be managing it. I want to break that cycle with my children.” She continued, “Taking charge of our finances was one of the best things that my husband and I did. It gave us so much freedom, including the freedom to make choices based on our desires and happiness because we weren’t overburdened by crippling debt.”
Being okay with a certain level of stress. Even while reducing the amount of sheer stress, it’s clear that some amount of stress will always remain (some acute and some mild). When it comes to the inescapable stress in our lives, Marsha underscored the huge value of growing in “distress tolerance” and “emotion regulation.” Compared with the typical “focus is on changing distressing events and circumstances” within the mental health system, Marsha said “learning to tolerate distress can be just as effective, and more readily achieved.”
Learning to sit with and channel existing stress seemed like an important part of healing in different stories. As Mark noted, “I was feeling overwhelmed but had developed a certain comfort with that feeling over the years. Stress seemed to encourage my creative impulsivity now, rather than the destructive impulsivity it triggered before. I had learned to tap into my stress, to redirect it toward something more helpful.”
6. Working with thoughts in a gentle, mindful way
People who found deeper healing reported new ways to work with the dark and difficult thoughts—ways that decreased their power and influence. One man compared his earlier mental experience to a “defective radio” with “static and other stations intruding on my frequency.” Yet “since I’d been listening to these unpleasant sounds my whole life, I accepted these constant interruptions as the natural state of affairs.”
Mendek spoke of “the constant chatter” of thoughts in his head, with a “buzzing noise in the background that never stopped.” Jonathan described being “subjected to disturbing and random images” for many years.
“Thoughts in and of themselves are fine—they’re innocuous, they’re just thoughts,” Thomas said. But when all you have is thoughts, when your whole experience is characterized by this unbroken stream of thoughts, they just start to beat in on you”—to the point that the analysis and reanalysis and overanalysis, he said, “becomes pathological.”
“Whatever the content was, whatever got us thinking in the first place, whatever problem we were responding to, that's...still there. But what's really problematic is the fact that we cannot see past our negative thoughts, and these negative thoughts are starting to trigger emotion in our body like battery acid, wearing through us.”
“You can’t think your way out of a think-hole,” Thomas said. Jonathan agreed, “Thinking about how you feel….will not help you feel better.” About his “constantly churning thoughts—the ones that ran in circles all day long,” Mendek spoke of coming to realize that these thoughts “couldn’t possibly solve the problems that stood in the way of my happiness”—adding, “I grew to understand the depth and strength … of my slavish devotion to my thoughts.”
“My head was nothing more than a prison,” Melissa said—“a direct channel to despair” as “I exhausted and depressed myself with crazy anticipations.”
Getting out of our heads. One woman said of her husband, “What worked well to engage his mind was strategy video games. He's not a gamer, but we found that when he was ruminating, an hour session of games that occupied his mind 100% would do wonders for stopping rumination.”
“Time moved a lot faster when I spent more of my days outside myself rather than confined inside my own mind,” Mark said. Melissa added, “Whenever I stopped thinking and turned angst into spontaneous action and positive creation, I felt exhilarated and at peace.”
Stephanie described how being around people helped her get out of her head “for the most part,” but admitted when they are alone, it’s much harder: “when I'm alone... I am never without my thoughts.”
Re-narrating one’s life. Mark described “identify[ing] limiting beliefs,” with Kristian speaking of work to “eliminate negative thought patterns.” "I had to uproot some false beliefs,” another woman said. “I had to just let go. I had to come to terms with what life is."
“It is our thinking that betrays us,” George said. Juanita described the emotional “weight of wrong thinking” and “delusion,” admitting, “I had never imagined that my beliefs could weigh my life down that way.” Robert described “speaking the truth to depression's lies,” and Matt spoke of practicing “Or, on the other hand” challenges to depressive thinking.
Mark describes feeling grateful for becoming “able to recognize it wasn’t life I wanted to be finished, but this painful distortion of life.”
Training the mind. “Healing from depression starts in your mind,” one woman said—before clarifying that the battle centered less on fighting, and more on learning to “train your mind.”
She would ask herself, “Does this thought benefit my soul?” “If the answer was NO,” she continued, “I immediately dropped that thought. Immediately. No sitting around and thinking about it … No wallowing in self-pity for a few minutes. No revisiting how someone said something that hurt my feelings. … If the thought wasn’t good for my soul then I dropped it immediately.”
“This became my mantra” she said—something she asked herself over and over. “I used to spend a lot of time reliving painful memories and wallowing in my hurt. I played hours of mental what if movies…what if I had done this instead? What if that had happened instead? I fantasized about things I wished I had done or said differently. All these thoughts had to go.”
Directing the mind. “We tend to identify with the mess; we tend to become absorbed by the mess,” Thomas says, so that “by the time we’re ready to go to bed we had 50,000 thoughts, and 45,000 of those thoughts were flowing in the direction of, ‘I just feel depressed, I can hardly breathe I’m so depressed, it feels like I’m suffocating, I don't like my job, I don’t really have any close friends who understand me.’”
No wonder good thoughts get missed in such a place. “Thoughts are like a group of puppies, all clamoring for attention, all wagging their tails ready to be stroked and fussed,” another person reflected. “If your focus has been on the naughty ones that have been ripping up the sofa and doing their number twos on your nice new carpet, then it’s hardly a surprise that the good ones in the corner hardly get a look in.”
Jonathan spoke of learning to “agree with any good thoughts and bask in any good feelings that come your way, for however short a period.” When a good thought drifts in, saying “with all your heart and soul—I agree! I want that life!”This can include reflecting on past times that are “beautiful and filled with laughs and joy; these are the ones that deserve our attention, not memories that fill us with darkness and fear.”
Pushing back on thoughts. Most people “believe you are your feelings and thoughts,” Jonathan noted. “I began to realize how dysfunctional it was to consider my beliefs to be facts,” Mendek said. “My thoughts were not my own, and often they told me lies, but still I did their bidding”—realizing that often, “I was trapped by my beliefs like an animal in a cage.”
Juanita learned about “being a witness, without judgment,” to her mind—“just noticing our thoughts.” Thomas likewise described a “lot of practice learning to just push back from the thought process, and really see them for what they were, rather than getting absorbed in the content of the thought” and assuming it was important and needing interpretation, “which, of course, only leads to more thinking.”
As he learned to “push back a little bit, and start to observe the flow of thought, the movement of thought,” he worked with the natural currents that would pull him back in, “we always get pulled into the drama of our lives.”
“We're so interested in our thoughts, we’re so interested in the content, we’re so convinced that the content is what’s important—and we might wake up 5 seconds later, 5 minutes later, 5 years later, and realize ' That was just a thought, and I’ve been acting it out, assuming that was my life and it was the only way.’
“I would just learn to push back a little bit and just observe the flow of thought, the movement of thought, and as I did so I realized there was an awareness deeper than the thought process itself. And that was probably one of the most shocking discoveries I ever made, to really connect with that first-hand.”
As one person remarked, “Day becomes night, months become years and so on, but feelings also follow this pattern. They come and go, like the passing of clouds”—comparing that to what happens inside, adding, “these fleeting moments in time are coming and going all your life. When did you start making them so important?”
“Becoming aware of awareness itself, and that gave me a lot of freedom. What was previously experienced as this kind of torture, being enslaved by the thought process, I was able to push back from that and just notice it as something a lot more innocuous, kind of like lying down on the bank of a river, just watching the stream float by.”
Watching thoughts as a practice. “It seems challenging, maybe even impossible to some people, to become aware of the thought process. After all, we’re so identified with our thoughts, many of us have a deep belief that we are our thoughts, we are what we think.”
“It takes a little doing, takes a little practice, and it takes a willingness to experiment, but I find that any adult, or even reasonably mature child, can take up the practice of backing off from the thought process a little bit, rather than following every single thought and wondering what every thought means, and interpreting that thought, which leads to more thoughts, which are interpretations, and we all know where that road leads.”
He spoke of noticing, “just how calming it is to be aware of thought, as opposed to being thought. Being thought can be like being on a bucking bronco, right? And we’re getting tossed all over the place…It’s a lot nicer to be in the bullpen, behind those cages where the bull is bucking that poor cowboy around and say, ‘Wow, I’d hate to be that guy right now.’
“What’s amazing about it is, it doesn’t take much, just a simple willingness to watch your thoughts, and you certainly get better at it over time, practicing it, but there’s an incentive built into the process, it feels so good to be able to take a break, take a little vacation from thought. I find that a lot of adults, when I talk with them about this concept, they’re intrinsically motivated to do it because they know just how helpful it is for their mental health, their physical health, sometimes for their sanity. (11)
“Don’t try and stop both feelings and thinking; just let them be; don’t engage,” Jonathan said—describing how he learned to “sit on the sidelines” of his feelings and thoughts. “Not so simple,” he admitted, “because over the years, you have trained yourself to listen to your inner [monologue] and propel it to God-like status.”
But he explained, “by no longer believing in them. I am no longer a slave to their whims, like black clouds that pass by in the sky. I no longer believe in their doom and gloom. I’m no longer involved.”
“Every thought and every feeling that comes our way…let them pass. Once they have passed, we are not going to chase them back like a dog bringing you a stick. New motto—once it’s gone, it’s gone! We are not going to analyze any new feelings we have, and we are not going to battle our thoughts.”
Jonathan reiterated, “you are not your thoughts; you are not your feelings. …see them for what they are and then decide what is best for your mental health, by not being in agreement with thoughts that are doing you harm. Let bad feelings drift by, even if it’s slowly, like leaves on the river.”
“It took a lot of practice to train my mind to work this way,” one woman admitted, describing how she had to be “extremely intentional about my thought life.”
“It was easy to slip back into old thought patterns,” but suggested the hard work was worth it. “After many months of this, it became my habitual way of thinking and eventually completely rewired my brain for happiness rather than depression.”
“This was the huge key to my healing”…learning “how to observe my thoughts, to rise up out of my mental soup of emotions and take the reins of what was happening in my brain …. Our culture does not teach us how to do this or even that it can be done.”
Yet referring to “the thought chatter that fills up our minds every minute of every day,” she said, “our thought life can be either life or death to our souls.”
Externalizing certain thoughts as an enemy. Approaching depression as a “separate entity” to his own mind, William spoke of experimenting with “earmark[ing] certain thoughts” as coming his true self (e.g., ‘I want to get better’) or as those coming from depression (e.g., ‘I’m worthless’). When he recognized, “it’s the depression talking” he was able to “consciously and purposefully ignore and sideline.”
One man described a moment where “a strange,” new and unfamiliar voice rang out crystal clear,” saying in a calm tone, “Why don’t you commit suicide.” Before that morning at school, the thought of ending his life prematurely, he said, had “never crossed my mind.”
Aaron concluded that toxic thoughts like this were “not coming from me,” describing how they left him for good when he commanded them to depart: “rebuking the suicidal thoughts…In the name of Jesus Christ.”
“Depression is not some nebulous, wispy thing best left unmentioned,” Patrick said, “He’s a real enemy, intent on destroying his victims, men and women, boys and girls. He won’t go away by just ignoring him.”
“I still deal with very small intrusive thoughts,” another person admitted, “the kind that used to paralyze me for days.” The difference now, he explained, is that “I still hear those things, but I remember that God speaks as well. So, I’ve learned not to listen to my voice, or others’ voices—but rather, to seek the voice of God. And when God speaks, he brings light into the situation.”
7. Working with emotions in a creative, mindful way
Pushing discomfort away. Like painful thoughts, difficult emotions are often something we push away, avoid and numb out from. Juanita described “Years of anger stuffed and turned inward, ignored, or swept under the rug for the sake of politeness. …my anger went underground.”
“A judging and critical attitude blocks our flow of goodness,” she said, sharing her conclusion that “I didn’t take the time to process the pain. In fact, I had never allowed myself to grieve any of the losses I’d experienced, whether deaths, business setbacks, failures, broken relationships, or other disappointments. My way of coping with pain was to stuff it and keep moving.”
She went on to speak about learning “how to be with my feelings”—which “seemed so foreign” to her at first. “Marinating in silence for all those many months was exposing emotions I had stuffed away for far too long” thinking, ‘ain’t nobody got time for all that!’”
Ashley reflected, “I spent my entire life telling everyone I was ‘OK, damn it.’ “Talking about emotions wasn't really in our family culture,” another said, describing how she had learned “I needed to keep my issues to myself.”
Getting it out. Melissa reflected, “I had no empowering means of expression, with countless feelings imprisoned and no idea what they meant or how to set them free. Hence my heart became so rife with sadness I was certain it would explode through my chest.”
“Ultimately, this tangled mass of emotion had nowhere to go but into more darkness, pushing me even further within myself. When the burden of those feelings grew too great my hands would shake, my head pound, my heart race and I'd become weak with exhaustion-paralyzed by the futility of life.”
Mendek described how uncovering and releasing negative emotions helped him to then be “sailing on calmer waters—no longer tossed and turned by the stormy ocean” of unexamined emotions.
“In order to stay healthy, I have to feel all my feelings instead of numbing myself to them,” another said. Ashley said, “When you stop lying to yourself and feel what you try to deny or forget, you have a chance to recover."
“Once I stopped fighting to repress darkness, here was a never-ending torrent of expression waiting to be freed and transformed into palpable content,” Melissa said—remarking how “from that very same despair was when my life began to change.”
Jonathan likewise said “with no outlet for emotion, he had learnt, as so many people do, to bottle up and suppress his feelings.” “When you hold everything inside,” Crystal said, “it’s like closing the Ziplock bag on your feelings and letting the bad things grow. Sooner or later you’ll have to open the bag. The longer it sits, the worse it will smell, the grosser it will be, and the harder it will be to clean. So, we need to “open” our hearts and get some airflow.”
Jim describes how painting helped him—reflecting the “therapeutic release of art.” Marsha reflected on “playing piano to express emotions.” Ashley described acting as providing an “opportunity to sort through some chaos in a creative way.”
“Creating had become my pathway out of despair in connecting to the freedom of my imagination” and helping teach her that “darkness could transform into light.”
Melissa described being able to imagine and create something “absolutely intoxicating”—especially the recognition that “I actually controlled the creation process …. I could choose to create darkness out of darkness, or light out of darkness. Likewise, that meant I could decide whether to remain miserable from churning out dark, despairing content, or live in peace by funneling anguish into positivity and vibrant designs.”
Creativity, of course, is often spoken of as associated with depression, with a long list of artists who have grappled with profound sorrow (Wolfgang Mozart, Vincent Van Gogh, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, Michelangelo, Sir Isaac Newton, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Hans Christian Anderson, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf) But this suggests that creativity may not only be a way to navigate and channel this profound sorrow—but to move towards healing from it
Resisting the depressive pull. “I was quite surprised to recognize and learn that I had to resist a certain psychological seductiveness to depression,” Matt said. “Who would have thought depression could be seductive?! Like a drug, it promised escape from life and all its struggle. All I needed to do was surrender to it, let it take over, and indulge in its permission to retreat and disappear from life.”
Ashley spoke of learning to stop “romanticizing the effects of depression.” As someone who loves art, she admitted, “There’s a propensity for artists to indulge in sadness because it has creative dimensions.”
Mendek recounted, “Breaking the habit of living in perpetual dissatisfaction was extremely difficult. At first, I didn’t realize that I had docilely submitted myself to a legacy of pain I wasn’t able to see, much less admit, that a substantial part of me had become addicted to misery.”
He continued, “Suffering added drama to my life, filled my conversations and keep me occupied day and night. My mind even invented problems where none existed.”
Learning to skillfully respond to emotion. “Our culture tells us instead to indulge our whims and emotions,” another said, “Most people are completely at the mercy of their emotions”—which are “fickle and cannot be trusted.”
“Emotions are unstable and can swing drastically from moment to moment. A life based on emotion is a life built on shifting sands. Stable happiness and real healing is not possible in a life built on emotions. The next unhappy situation or hardship will cause it all to come crashing down.”
“You may not be able to keep from feeling the bad emotions.” But “you can control how you choose to respond to your feelings,” one woman said. “Our culture doesn’t teach us how to do this. Our culture doesn’t even acknowledge that is possible. Our culture tells us to worship our feelings and that we should be the center of our own universe. Both of these ideas lead directly to depression and misery.”
Thomas reflected that, “emotions feel like really solid things. Some emotions, perhaps, have been with us for a long time and they tend to characterize our experience in life. We find that when we look really closely at them, they are changing all the time. What seemed really solid and opaque, it’s actually maybe misty, but in constant change. The awareness, the willingness to be present with an emotion, it actually softens it, gives it a kind of permission to activate and do whatever it wants to do—whether it's anger showing up in the body, whether it’s sadness showing up in the body.” He then asked:
How often do we take a close look at the activity of emotion in the body and give it permission to just do what it’s doing? After all, our only other option is to deny it permission and push it down into the cellar where we keep all those unwanted emotions, only to manifest in our dream world, or in an inopportune time, and inappropriate place, with a certain person we wish we hadn't said that to. I mean, if we don't face these things, if we don't make room for them, do we really think it goes away?
Thomas went on to describe how he has learned to work with challenging emotion:
I've just found this practice of letting emotional activity well up, and expand, and grow, and just show up in me in whatever way it wants to, to be so empowering. Because every time, if I'm willing to stick with it, if I’m willing to stick with the movement quality of the emotion, then eventually, at some point, like all things, it exhausts itself, it burns out, it uses up its life force. However you want to describe it. It was there one moment ago, getting bigger and bigger, and now it’s getting smaller. Now it's—where did it go? And I started to spot the crests and troughs, the depressive crests and the happy troughs. And we can ride those waves. We can come into a relation with our emotions in a way that we're not making problems of the negative emotions, and we’re not clinging onto the positive emotions and wanting more—but we’re just vitalized, again and again continually by the emotional activity of the body. And that’s some satisfying emotional wave riding.
He continued to reflect:
In my experience, it's been the willingness to just be really open and honest about what's coming up, and to allow them to come up—it doesn't mean to act on them, doesn’t mean to act the anger out, but just acknowledging that this is happening in our body. That is our experience here in this moment. There is such a power in welcoming that. If we can just let that activate, let it well up, get really big, and listen to what they are saying. We find over time that these emotions after welling up they just kind of dissipate. They die down. And before we know it, we're back to this calm.
Welcoming the full spectrum of emotion. Thomas went on to reflect on the narrowness of our common experience with emotion, “As individuals, we usually have preferences in terms of what emotions are okay, or what’s welcome. And it's often negative emotion that we have such a problem with, like we're judgmental with ourselves for being angry, or we’re judgmental with ourselves for being judgmental. Or there are feelings coming up in the body we can't make room for.”
Rather than insisting on a “rosy view of reality, where we just ‘buck up’ and have an optimistic view,” he instead said, this is about “realism, it’s about really training awareness to look at All of Life—everything that's happening moment to moment.”
Sarah described “beginning to integrate all of my emotions, accepting all of what I’d experienced as an expression of what it meant to be alive.”
8. Pursuing forgiveness and healing from past trauma
“I didn’t talk at all about the violence and abuse I survived as a child until I was in my mid-twenties,” Johann said. When Sarah eventually felt able to share with others the details of her father’s abuse, she admitted, “I was close to a panic attack. It surprised me how hard it was to talk about my experiences to these people, even though they had told me about their own abuses.”
Even then, the memories can be fuzzy. Marilyn recounted:
As a child, teenager and adult, the first ten years of my life had been mostly erased. There were no memories of sexual abuse, but my body never forgot and replayed the disgusting events every night in the form of nightmares and night terrors. Upon awakening every morning, tears stained my face and remembrances of the nighttime dreams played over and over again.
“Feeling deeply heard and learning to fully express life experiences” has helped Diana “unpack decades of trauma. Along with art therapy and EMDR, she emphasizes the impact of having “spoken and written my way out of anxiety and depression through the power of words and artistic symbols.”
Joanne described finally allowing herself to grieve something difficult in her life, “I had an enormous explosion of emotion, and I cried and cried and cried." Another woman said, “I had to stop running away from myself and the broken parts that were left unhealed.” Jane recollects:
My father had a violent temper—we lived in constant fear when he was around. I suffered a lot of physical and emotional abuse disguised as punishment for things that were really just mistakes or fumbles. I remember when I was four, I was told to set the table. For some reason, my father was already seated at the table and was watching me carefully to make sure I did it right. I was so scared and self-conscious that I dropped the last plate in my hand which would have been the plate at his place. He beat me severely about the head and torso, called me names, accused me of deliberately breaking the plate, declared me unfit to be in his presence, and sent me to my room without food or water or bathroom privileges for a day. Scenes like that were common occurrences in our house. No one was safe.
Emotional freedom from the effects of abuse. Sarah described learning to stand back from her life and see how she could “extricate” herself from the “wreckage”—allowing her to “stand beside it” so she “could view it more objectively.”
This helped her see clearly “I hadn’t made my father do anything. He was the abuser; I was the child.” With the help of these insights, “The abuse no longer controlled me as much,” she said. “I learned to respond more and react less.”
“I would probably never be able to consider my childhood dispassionately, I could now at least feel the emotions without crumbling.” William described working to “not be so controlled by my pain.”
Moni described becoming able to “forgive my abusive father, who had died 19 years earlier, for all the pain he had caused me as a child.” As a result, “It was as if a heavy curtain was drawn back from the window of my soul.”
As Mendek said, “Holding on to my fury for so many decades was draining and painful. It created darkness within me that was physically and spiritually depleting. I had to find a way to let it go.”
Removing the burden of toxic anger. “One day I will die,” this man said. And “before my last breath leaves my body …I don’t want to carry my bitterness and venom to the grave.”
Juanita described coming to realize how she had over-blamed parents, adding, “In all honesty, my parents… only did what they knew [how] to do, and I totally get it, because that’s what I’m doing now as a parent. We work with the tools we have.”
Another individual who had experienced deep pain from a hostile childhood, reflected, “I was finally able to see my father in his true light, and feelings of compassion and understanding flowed out of me toward him.”
Sarah described a profound moment where she felt God’s love while reflecting on her parents who had caused her so much emotional pain. “Their impact on my life was clear … yet this moment with Jesus seemed so much more important. I heard myself saying, ‘Forgive them, Father; they did not know what they were doing.’”
“The person who wounded you is not hurt by your unforgiveness, but you are,” she added. “I had to learn how to really dismiss and let go of all the hurt and unforgiveness. Nothing that hindered my healing process could remain.”
Melissa reflected, “I wasn't going to change others through bitterness and wishing they were different,” but rather “totally poison myself with hostility.” Another person said: “I was tired of hating the world. I was tired of seeing it in fogged lenses that only magnified the world’s bleakness and darkness.”
She concluded, “the world was full of beautiful people—[including so many] that had endured their own version of suffering.”
When “forgiveness” is not enough. “Because I’d wanted to be a good Christian, I had ‘forgiven’ my father back in my bedroom that day [as a child] when he asked for forgiveness for having been ‘a little fresh,’” said Sarah. Later in her healing process this woman learned that forgiveness “has to be accompanied by an appreciation and understanding of what has happened and the impact of it on your life.”
“I forgave my parents because … hating them was hurting me,” said one woman. “I am slowly building a relationship with my father based on mutual honesty and respect….Sadly, my mother remains unapproachable … I will leave that relationship in God's hands for now.”
While reconciliation can help, sometimes separation is needed for healing. Helen described divorce from her abusive husband as crucial to healing, after years of “living in an abusive marriage filled with sorrow and pain.”
One woman who had been “horribly abused” described how some of “these deep hurts can take years, decades, to work through.” She added her belief that “some wounds will never completely go away in this life.” Instead, she suggested, you “can learn to embrace them in forgiveness.”
Jane spoke of making “amends to all the people who had suffered because of my illness.” Juanita spoke of realizing how her suffering had impacted others, since she’d been in such a dark place for so long—“Depression had taken my smile away.” She added, “My girls bring me such joy. I want to be their safe space, a place where they can gently, compassionately, and wisely be loved, nurtured, and supported.”
Re-seeing the world. “The story we tell ourselves about our past experiences dictates how we feel about them,” Alexi said, with Mark adding, “it's not the things we remember that define us, but the stories we tell ourselves about the things we think we remember.”
As Brooke explained, “We experience pain when we encounter trauma, hurt, or loss in our lives. But we perpetuate suffering by the stories we tell ourselves about what happened. When pain meets healing truth and tender awareness, grief can be released, and we are free to create new meaning.”
“Often it is the stories we tell about our initial pain that keep us stuck and feed the cycle of suffering,” she said - describing a process where painful events can “become integrated into our greater life narrative” bringing freedom and “cleansing.”
This ultimately means living in a place where the abuse isn’t your life—and where your life becomes something much more. Sarah described how her therapist helped her “discover who I really was. I was worthy of better…I was protected now from the past. I was safe now. …I could have dreams.…I could move forward. I could live. Really live.”
Diana speaks of coming to see meaning in even the agonizing pain associated with the poor treatment of others, especially as she has gained “gaining understanding of the purpose of life on a deep and spiritual level.” In particular, she describes a “sure witness of the plan of salvation and my part in it” as having “more than anything, facilitated deep and lasting healing.”
Alongside her conviction in “the power of the atonement of Jesus Christ to comfort, heal, and right all wrongs—through the gifts of God’s pure love,” she now sees that “I have learned great good from great evil” – adding, “I now possess the love, compassion, and courage needed to help others likewise come unto Christ for help, comfort, and healing.”
9. Deepening relationships & emotional support
On their own, most people don’t seem to be able to find what they need to heal. “Using willpower alone, I was unable to change these patterns,” said Mendek. “Battling my thoughts made me their prisoner, and resisting my emotions energized them.” Many realized the importance of connection and all that flows from vibrant, ennobling, supportive relationships of different kinds.
Opening up to receive others’ support. Crystal, who had been feeling awful and isolated, spoke of deciding that she couldn’t leave her church meeting “without someone knowing what was going on.” She described the rippling effects of opening up:
From that night on, I was [there each week] and the people there kept including me…inviting me to events…these people didn’t just put on events as some church gimmick or marketing promotion—they actually cared about one another. They wanted to spend time together, and it was a joy and mission to bring in new people. They also served together…[People] I barely knew helped me move all my things up to my apartment.
For some, this unique level of support was found in a faith community. Nicole spoke of the impact of being “part of a healthy church family”—remarking that “after a painful childhood and the turmoil of the world, I felt loved—it was a place of belonging. I found an open, friendly, shoulder to cry on—and was able to talk with people about my desperate feelings.”
Even so, Jennifer said, “It takes incredible courage to reach out for help when the tools and resources you have are no longer working.” Jane recounted going to an Emotions Anonymous (EA) meeting as a “last ditch effort to find some measure of relief”:
This bunch talked about feelings of jealousy, hatred, anger, frustration, anxiety, and depression as if these were normal topics of conversation! They made it look so easy….It was quite a revelation. For the first time in my life, I felt real hope. I was not alone!
“The members of EA are now my new family,” she said. “They care for me in times of illness. They comfort me in times of trouble. They lend me their strength when I haven't enough of my own.”
Professionals can, of course, also provide some wonderful emotional support. As one woman reflected, “One of the things that I appreciated most about Dr. Lee’s style of treatment is that she treated me as an equal partner. Instead of talking down to me … she listened to my experiences and ideas and incorporated them into the treatment plan. I felt respected and listened to, and that helped keep me motivated.”
Not as easy as it looks. As one woman described her husband’s experience: “Because he was good at hiding it, people didn't believe us when we talked about it. Most of our family members didn't believe us. There was a lot of judgment and I remember, in the darkest days, almost wishing my husband had cancer rather than depression. At least with a visible illness everybody would want to be there for us, instead of running from us and talking behind our backs. I felt betrayed on many levels.”
Opening up on its own, though, doesn’t guarantee a positive result. Julie described being at her “wits end” with depression one spring, recalling that her friends were “incredibly supportive,” but “didn’t know what to do” when she told them how she was feeling—with her family left “in a state of complete fear” upon hearing how she was doing, “they were so afraid that I may try and hurt myself.”
How to support someone in need is a beautiful skill. At the same time, one man spoke from his own experience about the importance of letting relationships (and people) breathe sometimes:
There is a real power in reserving some time, day by day, for not doing anything. Not fixing anything. Not fixating on these problems coming up. We fall into these ruts so quickly, where 'This person is depressed, we need to make them not depressed.’...Can we defer the impulse to judge it, and to need it to be something else? Can we just make space for it, to allow it to be as it is?
“In my experience, when people came into my life and were able to just let me show up as I was, all of a sudden I was resisting my own experience less and less, I was more and more okay with that.”
Clearly, there is a healthy form of solitude which differs from piercing isolation. As Joanne said, “I used to isolate myself; I would go to L.A. and my friends wouldn't even know I'd come through town.”
This can take on a life of its own as people shut down socially, and start to experience suspicion, fear and hypervigilance about strangers. As Johann put it, “You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most…as disconnection spirals into more disconnection.”
This man went on to share his feeling that depression is “itself a form of grief—for all the connections we need, but don’t have.” To counter this trend in his own life, he described proactively “spend[ing] much more time face-to-face with the people I love” and reported, “I am more deeply connected to other people….than I ever have been before.”
Matt described how he “determined to make relationships the most important consideration in every context”—elaborating: “I chose to be liberal in enjoying the pleasure of deeply and authentically connecting with people, everyone my life came in contact with.”
Receiving love. Marsha remarked on how “Ted was always there for me, always ready to listen, again and again and again, always giving comfort. He loved me in the purest sense. And I loved him. This is how Ted kept me alive.” Speaking of an even deeper relationship with her husband, Marsha said his love was “pure and strong” and “transformed me”—”I was no longer without family, no longer homesick, no longer alone and lonely.”
She reflected, “Kind words can be short and sweet, but their echoes are truly endless.” All these decisions—in all these various relationships—arose from this woman’s “active decision to find a community where I would feel supported emotionally and spiritually.” Reflecting on these connections, she said, “life is all about love….I was happier living with people.”
“You need a good support system,” Ashley said. “I’m lucky I have a lot of love in my life.” The impact of such loving support is especially apparent in times when someone is desperate. In one dire moment when Mark admitted standing on a bridge ready to take his life, he described how a “stranger in the light-brown jacket talked to me.”
I don't remember about what. … I didn't talk back much, but I listened, at least a little…. He wasn't particularly comforting, or deep, or intentional. He was just there. I didn't want another person telling me about all the things I should do, could do, but probably wouldn't do. I just wanted someone who was there.
“He didn't try to tell me that everything would be okay. How would you know? He didn't give me any of the empty motivational platitudes. ‘Tomorrow's another day!’”
“Instead,” he said, “the stranger in the light-brown jacket asked me about my life. He asked about my interests, my passions, the people and places and things that I cared about … It didn't seem to bother him that I didn't answer much ... It was comforting to have someone stand with me. The little I said, he heard. He saw me. He didn't leave. Maybe it's because he stayed for those few minutes, I did too.”
Johann said, “if we return to seeing our distress and our joy as something we share with a network of people all around us, we will feel different.”
Sometimes the general love of anyone around is all we need. Other times, it’s powerful to receive love from people who have been through similar things. As Melissa said, “I wasn't alone in my anguish, and there were others like me in the world!” Johann went on to reflect on what he wished he could have told his “younger self”:
You’re not going to be able to deal with this problem alone. It’s not a flaw in you….if you stay broken up and isolated, you will likely stay depressed and anxious. But if you band together, you can change your environment….You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them, and build a home with these people–a place where you are bonded to one another and find meaning in your lives together.
He also summarized, “We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It’s time for us all to come home.” Yet like everything described in this review, this isn’t a panacea, as Crystal noted: “Even with new friends and church activities, the darkness was still very much present and trying to lure me back into the deafening silence of isolation.” But what of those who struggle to find someone?
Creative ways to connect. One man, Grant, found a reassuring sense of connection to deceased family members by immersing himself in the history of his family. He said that he “gradually” started noticing how he began to “feel lighter” as these connections deepened—to the point that “after two years,” he “didn’t even notice the depression at all.”
For others, animals provide valuable connection. As one woman said, “I leaned on my relationships with my family, friends and dog.” Julie detailed, “Psychiatrists, therapists, and family tried to intervene, but nothing reached her until the day she decided to do one hopeful thing: adopt a Golden Retriever puppy she named Bunker.”
Yet what could “one small puppy” do in the face of so much pain? This woman went on to describe her connection to a pet as “a place without ridicule, doubt, sorrow, or anger” where “the true healing” began for her as she found “the power of love.” As Julie summarized, “There are times when another creature can hold our love until we can hold it for ourselves. And then, in perfect symbiosis, the beloved can become the lover, until they are one force.”
Another described how the love of a dog stands out for the fact that it involves “no judgment or criticism, just unconditional love on a continuous level.” Reflecting on 17 years of companionship and sweet support from her dog, Julie reflected how he had arrived “about 3 months old and looked at me with old and wise eyes...gentle and loving. He never left my side and was a Godsend at a time when we both needed love.”
10. Expanding a sense of meaning, purpose, and identity
One of the strongest predictors of depression is how much meaning and purpose people feel, along with their sense of self. In addition to taking love in, people also spoke at length at what it meant to be able to give and share love with other people.
Getting outside of your head. “One of the most counter-intuitive pieces of my recovery was volunteering [to serve others].” Crystal said, “this was pivotal in learning how to get my eyes off of myself and start considering others.”
“I never would have been able to hear this in the middle of my struggle,” she went on to acknowledge, “but my obsessive focus on my own feelings could be described as ‘selfish,’” she she defined as “focusing on oneself… I was doing that constantly.”
As one individual put it, “in my isolation I was stuck inside of my head, focusing on myself most of the time.” Johann acknowledged the self-absorbed quality often common in depression: “you become trapped in your own story and your own thoughts, and they rattle around in your head with a dull, bitter insistence.”
In the middle of depression, he added, people have often “forgotten who they are, what they’re capable of, have gotten stuck” and “can only see their pains, and their hurts, and their resentments, and their failures. They can’t see the blue sky and the yellow leaves, you know?” Speaking from his experience, Johann then says:
If you want to stop being depressed … don’t fixate on how you’re worth it. It’s thinking about you, you, you that’s helped to make you feel so lousy. Don’t be you. Be us. Be we. Be part of the group. Make the group worth it. The real path to happiness…comes from … letting yourself flow into other people’s stories and letting their stories flow into yours.
Linda reflected, “I chased silly romances…and it didn’t fulfill me. I chased money and fame, hoping the sense of accomplishment would take care of it, but none of that worked. My healing came through connection, it came through motivating and encouraging others, and it came through making an impact in people’s lives.”
Healing through newfound purpose. Juanita “found a special place to volunteer” that felt right to her—“enough interaction without any real conversation to speak of.” [Notice how often people are speaking of just the right amount of connection—e.g., some talking, but not too much…. some chance to interact as a volunteer, but not too much].
One woman described the profound impact of “playing happily” with her two children and seeing “this peace and comfort and love in their life—how different from [my life]!”
Melissa said, “creating, giving, sharing and connecting gave me reasons to get out of bed each morning and defined why I was here.” Matt remarked on his chances to teach and counsel people “time and again took me outside myself and proved to be a miraculously transformative and healing influence.”
“Paradoxically, losing myself in love is my best self-care and healing prescription …. Pouring myself into … others lifts my spirits, turns my mind and heart, and brings relief and sustaining packets of joy.”
Johann emphasized, “Everybody wants to feel useful, and have purpose…[people] want to feel like they’ve had an impact on other humans—that they’ve improved the world in some way.” He even suggested that “Happiness is really feeling like you’ve impacted another human positively,” recounting from his experience, “Even if you are in pain, you can almost always make someone else feel a little bit better”—which he said “worked much more effectively than trying to build myself up alone.”
Matt said “Pouring myself into marriage and family life, and letting my wife and children pull me in, too, is a lifeline—drawing me out of that inward-focused spiral that seems to be part of the etiology of depression, at least for me.” He remarked on how this relied on his own choice and capacity to pour his “caring into them,” rather than “relying on others’ choices to make me happy.”
One individual described how she “stopped obsessing about me so much” once she started community gardening. “I had other people to worry about”:
There’s something about engaging in the natural environment, even if it’s a little scrubby patch in a really urban area…It wasn’t just me. There’s the sky. Out there’s the sun…It isn’t all about me right? … There’s a wider picture here, and I need to be part of that again. That’s how I felt sitting in this garden with my hands in the flowerbed.
Jane said, “I became of service to others and, eventually, spreading the message of the Twelve Steps became more important to me than reviewing my own miseries.” Johann reflected: “If you can be happy for others, there’s always going to be a supply of happiness available to you. Vicarious joy is going to be available millions of ways every single day.
The relationship nudge to keep going. Sarah admitted feeling at a low moment, “I wasn’t interested in staying alive for myself. I wasn’t important to myself.” But at that time, she said, “I was important to my daughter.” She continued:
I loved doing all of the things with Grace that my mother had never done with me. Starting when she was a baby, we read together, which became a part of her nighttime ritual. We said prayers before bed and then I would kiss her on the forehead goodnight…. I always tried to listen to Grace, who would tell me about her day…All of this … was immensely healing. Knowing I was important to Grace gave me strength.”
“The thing that made me go for help was probably my daughter,” Joanne said. “This isn't right; this can't be right. She cannot grow up with me in this state.”
Jane described the impact of mentoring others in Emotions Anonymous groups, “The thirty or so people whom I have sponsored over the years have also inspired me, with their honest and courageous actions, to grow along with them.”
Recentering your life. Johann suggested, “the more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be.” He said, “I learned to spend less time puffing up my ego, seeking material possessions, seeking a superior status—they were all, I see now, drugs that left me feeling worse in the end.”
“People who are the center of their own universe are the most wretched beings alive,” another shared, with Jim remarking, “it’s totally pointless to spend our whole lives creating and curating some specific identity…desiring to be important, to be someone, to matter.”
“The emptiness I had spent a lifetime trying to fill,” Linda said, “could no longer be filled by other people or objects” - adding, “The escape from depression starts when you see the world as larger than yourself.” Another person reflected:
As you shift your focus away from your physical and emotional self, you are no longer obsessed with meeting your own needs. As you practice focusing on your eternal soul and on God, your life perspective inevitably begins to change.
“Hitting my own bottom of depression has enabled me to come to an amazing awareness. I had been sourcing my life from an illusion,” one woman said. “For all my life to this point I had presumed that my effort sustained me,” she admitted. “But through the depression, I was being freed from those notions of self-sustainability.” She elaborated:
The dark night of the soul is the place where one is invited into a deeper, more transformative relationship with the divine. It is the place that, when all that had been our life no longer serves us, lures us, or compels us, we find ourselves void of any identity that matters, with an emptiness in us that longs to be filled. Yet the reality is that none of the old filling will suffice any longer.
Rather than being discouraged and overwhelmed by these realizations, one woman described feeling “pure gratitude” and relief in this discovery– “now I knew where my sustenance was coming from, and I was being fueled and filled.” Aaron expressed appreciation at the failure of the drugs. As he put it, “I’m so grateful drugs didn’t work—Thank God for that. Because if they had I would have depended on them, rather than finding healing through Christ.” After being “parched by life, sucked dry,” Juanita said:
I was humbled, grateful beyond words, thrilled speechless in the presence of God who was quenching in me a thirst that only God could satisfy. I was being energized and charged to live and move and to know what it meant to be fully alive. God met me at the level of my thirst. There was no effort on my part, no scheduling, no doing, no talking, just being, and being fully aware that that was all I needed. My aliveness was God’s doing.
“At the bottom of the well,” she added, “I had been found by God and I had found God, and indeed I had found a new center, a place of communion with the Creator.”
Healing others, and finding more yourself. We’ve explored how different kinds of relationships and connections—being heard, being loved and having chances to serve—can help encourage and support healing. It’s also the obvious case that healing itself reinforces the health of relationships. Ashley said that as she has found more healing, “my friendships have only gotten stronger” and “all of my relationships have improved.”
Mark described feeling like he had “finally escaped, for real this time and not only in my head.” Now that he had “finally become unstuck” he felt like he was “now making up for lost time.”
Reflecting on the positive efforts he got involved in, he said, “As happy as I was to believe I was making a difference in something bigger than myself, my new initiatives were making a difference in me too. …I liked the sense of being useful.”
Nothing excited him more than the possibility that “I might really be able to help people.” Mark admitted: “I didn't know how to do that at first, but now … maybe I could take all my mistakes, all the moments in which I had tried to tear myself down and use that as material to build others up and do good. Maybe my struggle could be my strength.”
Marsha described her deep motive in healing, to “get out of hell and get others out.” From her own healing, Melissa reflected, “I knew my mission was to now help others unearth what gave their lives meaning and find the outlet to express it to the world, making light from dark and connection from isolation.”
11. Discovering a new source of confidence, comfort and connection
People have very different experiences of spirituality, with some finding religion and faith emotionally challenging. In most stories, people reported being helped in their emotional healing by engaging on a deeper level with spiritually transcendent practices.
Admitting you are stuck. Aaron recollected the moment when he said, “I acknowledge I don’t have the strength, these mental illnesses they’re so heavy, they’re crushing me, I can’t handle it.” Juanita admitted, “My life was taken down to the bones,” feeling that “I had come to the end of myself. … it all crumbled.”
Following a long period of seeking answers, Nicole ultimately began to “cry out to God” for her to save him from the pain, “because I didn’t know what else to do.”
A new encounter. “In the darkness of the crash,” Juanita described coming to a “deep, loving union with God” involving “incredible peace”—”the kind of peace I’ve heard spoken of by those who have experienced a near-death episode.”
“I was surrounded by love I had never experienced, love that was dense and filled the space all around me,” she said, and “that fed the deepest part of my starved soul.”
That stayed with Juanita from that point on, “accompanying me just as consistently as my cat Angel … lying on my bed with me during the crash.”
One woman who had experienced brutal abuse as a child in her home—and many subsequent mental health problems including depression—said, “On a cold February day in 1985, fully prepared to kill myself, I desperately prayed once more, asking God what He wanted of me. I was in my daughter’s room as she napped in her crib. What do you want me to know today, God? Because I am going to do it. Then I closed my eyes.”
Sarah continued, “That’s when the vision began…I am tied to a cross. No nails are used. There is an eerie darkness everywhere. I am outside in a barren landscape. There are no buildings; there are no trees, no vegetation of any sort. There is no sun, no moon, no stars, no clouds, no color of any kind.”
“Through the darkness, I can make out others being crucified. Hundreds of people on crosses, a virtual killing field of unknown souls, but all seemingly in the distance. There is no noise—no crying, no moaning. Everyone is suffering in silence, each of us alone in our dying, too far from each other to communicate. No one is there to grieve for us.”
“I am naked. I am dirty and filthy, and I feel disgusting. I have a sense that I am two to three hours from death and I just want to be over with. I am past anger, past fear, past caring. Whatever it is I have done, I know I am deserving of this fate.”
“In the distance, I notice a man dressed in a clean white tunic walking among the crucified.”
“I know instinctively that this man is Jesus. Soon he is coming toward me, an ethereal light surrounding him, and I am suddenly filled with dread and self-loathing before the most holy of persons. I feel shame in every fiber of my being. I am tortured in my nakedness and vulnerability, and, as he comes toward me, looking right at me, I am terrified. What will he do? Will he rebuke me? Take me? Abuse me? He nears me, speaking not a word. The time has finally come. The judgment is upon me.”
“And then Jesus placed a step stool in front of my cross and raised himself up to where he could reach my arms. With scissors, he cut the ropes from around my wrists and body and I fell into his arms, onto his body, even more ashamed now of my filthy condition.”
“Then he carried me a short distance from the cross and laid me down on a pure white blanket, where he began bathing my naked body, lovingly and tenderly, as if every part of me was precious, just as I had washed my daughter when she’d been ill as a baby. The water he bathed me in glowed with light.”
“All the while, Jesus looked into my eyes with a deep knowing and an incredible depth of love and compassion. When he was finished, he cradled my head and offered me food for strength, and something to drink in a crystal chalice. I ate the food…then he dressed me in a clean, white robe with a gold sash. All the while, he never said a word.”
Concluding her recollection, Sarah reflects, “I embraced Jesus, grateful not only for being alive, but for being deeply understood and loved.” Sarah subsequently felt nudged and strengthened by this experience in extending more grace and forgiveness to the people who had caused so much of the pain in her life.
“I found God,” said Ashley—who quipped, “I believe there is a god, and it’s not me.” She pointed to one part of the 12-step process, “step two is believing in a power greater than yourself. Understanding, and really feeling, that you aren’t alone is a big part of feeling better because you don’t have to carry so much … and you don’t feel so heavy.”
Juanita reflected, “I can honestly say that I am grateful that my mind and body did for me what I could not do for myself: they shut me down, stopped me dead in my tracks.” It’s precisely this paralysis which she felt gratitude for later:
I had to fall past the depth of my willpower to stop believing that I was strong enough to pull myself out. I had to fall past the depth of my knowledge to stop believing that my intellect would get me through this. I had to fall past the depth of my determination and even my physical stamina to a place where only God could provide security.
Aaron likewise described the excruciating experience of depression and anxiety itself as a tool to bring him to this kind of deeper awareness, “God uses this trial in a Christian’s life to bring him to the end of himself so that person can die to himself, deny yourself, carry your cross so you can follow him”—adding, that he brings you to the dissolving one oneself “so you can recognize your rightful identify in Christ.”
Glimpsing a bigger grandeur. Not everyone had a detailed vision. But many others spoke of poignant glimpses that left them feeling like they were walking on new ground. For example: “My eyes were opened to creation itself—“rocks, clouds…oh, God swirled those clouds! Engaged in my heart for a moment. Oh, my goodness, this is created! A euphoric joy came upon me.”
“Gradually, my personal experience expanded to become a universal understanding that God is in everyone and everything, loves everyone and everything. It was a recognition of a universal unity, a great oneness, and…a universal goodness. Everywhere….God had never been gone after all. God had been here the whole time.”
Mendek spoke of an “awakening”—a “joyous outpouring…of grace” where he felt that ‘everything was in harmony with the One who created it—a God of pure love and serenity.” This experience, he said, “awakened my spiritual sensitivity to the sublime and the profound. Never before had I perceived God to be an all-encompassing energy of pure love and beauty—not the judgmental, omnipotent dictator of my childhood….For the first time in my life, he said he “believed that the world was a kind and magnificent place.”
This last individual added, “My growing awareness of the strength of love and goodness in the universe was revolutionary to me. Just the possibility that I could, in fact, be living in a safe and affectionate world was itself a partial liberation.” None of these were constant awareness, but even the short glimpses seemed to generate profound new healing momentum. As Mendek put it:
These happy, peaceful moments provided a respite from the dreariness that still lived within me. Intermittent experiences of a joyous cosmos— sporadic realizations that love is a powerful adhesive that holds the world together—gave me a taste of how wonderful it could feel to be alive. These experiences showed me that there was far more to this life than just what my analytical brain could perceive or explain…..At times when I least expected it, the gates of my internal fortress opened to green meadows and pastures of endless calm. I experienced moments of spontaneous joy and wonder over the freshness of a rainy day or the beauty of a flower. Ordinary things that had previously held only utilitarian value—houses on the street, cars on the road, people walking around—appeared vivid and dazzling.
Nicole described how the higher assurance he’s had about his future means she no longer fears for her life—“The thought of there being a God who was in control of everything was a comforting feeling for me—I then didn’t need to worry as much and do everything on my own.”
Looking up for healing. Despite the soul-stretching involved, many people who described profound healing in their lives likewise described a renewed or deepened spiritual connection. Sometimes this is a deepening of existing faith and other times discovering this possibility for the first time. As Jane said, “I will always be indebted to my first sponsor, who showed me God. I am a miracle of this program and living proof that the steps work.”
One woman recounted how she “began going to church” and “developed my faith and relationship with God, which I never had before.” Another described the “greatest day” as when they “received the Holy spirit” and came to “knowing God’s real.”
Another individual spoke about a sacred experience where his “eyes were opened” to the reality that “the son of God walked on this earth. I knew all these verses—I had learned about them before, but in those moments my eyes were opened…He walked on this earth!”
Even while still facing patterns of “panic attack in misery,” something about this realization shifted things for me—“the same Jesus who engaged in these miracles is alive right now. Oh my goodness, He’s alive! I remember going from anxiety and panic, to weeping and joy, because he’s alive.”
Crystal recounted, “My roommate and I read the Bible cover to cover for the first time. This was the most transforming year of my life, and the healing was so drastic that I consider it an emotional death to life miracle.” She added, “I have no doubt that God can do this for even the most flatlined heart—He did it for me, and He will do it for you if you are willing.” Matt, who had long experience with faith, described going deeper—“reaching heavenward and achieving an experienced connection with the Divine.”
Another woman described the fervor of her new pursuit: “I dove into God. I began reading the Bible again and praying.” Josh described previously picking up the bible and reading “a few words and feel[ing] bored.” But now, he said, “it’s coming alive. It was like I was hearing the gospel for the first time—I was just drinking it in.”
New hope in new possibilities. This reflects the value of what one person called “explor[ing] your spiritual side.” As Jonathan put it, “start to look at how you are going to move forward, and start to embrace your positive, creative, loving, caring and spiritual side; the real essence of what makes you, and takes you away from fear.”
This became a new place of possibility for many. Jim spoke of how “these days” he “relies on his spirituality to get him through the valleys” and “turned towards spirituality and art as refuge.” “I have found that my relationship with God and my practice of abiding with God, being joined with God, are what makes me solid inside and out,” said Juanita, adding, “The word love best describes what seemed to be flowing into me; yes, a deep knowing that I was loved.”
Aaron said, “as I did everything in faith, God started to give me more faith—the ability to rest in him.” Juanita compares it to coming home to “find all her prized possessions turned to ash—and shown to her for what they were: nothing.”
But rather than feeling sad or grieving, there is so much relief and gratitude. I’m thankful that there is now more space for what can be and the clear awareness that my life is distinctly simple, not the complex self I had known; this insight has been amazingly refreshing and life-giving.
This life felt exciting and vibrant to those finding it. As Linda said:
I was finding healing in the Bible. Getting to know God, talking to Him and asking Him repeatedly to help me, gave me hope. My connection to God…was intimate and personal. I know that everyone believes in Him…but I know Him, and He was all I had to lean on. Believing in Him was hope that escaping my pain was even a possibility.
She went on to express hope that others facing similar pain could find the “faith and courage to seek something bigger than our isolated suffering. A bigger meaning that says there is more to this world than what we see through our broken and teary eyes.”
Moment by moment guidance. Describing her period of grappling with depression, this same woman continued, “God took me to the ‘school of the Spirit’ during those months. Just Jesus and me….I didn’t talk to anyone except God. No one helped or guided me through this time. I prayed and read the Bible and God met me there.”
Rather than a general communion, this woman described receiving guidance about healing from her depression: “Over those next months, God showed me step by step how to heal from my depression [and] how to control my thoughts—to recognize and reject the negative thoughts that fed depression.”
This more conscious directing of her thoughts bore powerful fruit. “Our thoughts are real, they have power,” she said, “the more you focus your thoughts on God, the more healing you will receive from depression.” Rather than something instantaneous, another woman described her experience of God choosing to “partner with us to reach our healing.” As she summarized:
God accomplishes the divine healing work as we surrender to Him and follow His guidance. He sometimes will lead us through a series of steps, a pathway to reach and remain in that place of healing. Many times that pathway, those steps we take, are actually an integral part of healing itself. Whatever those steps are, whatever He teaches us along the way, are the skills that we need to be healed and continue to live out our healing.
“This is what God did for me. He taught me how not to be depressed.”
“I became increasingly aware that I was in a school of sorts,” Juanita said. “I was being homeschooled by God”—“learning to be still, to be calm, to be cared for, and to know God’s love. I was being taught that to live my life in the presence of God was to know total sufficiency. I was learning how to be present to God’s unconditional and limitless love…as a power flowing through me and it was giving me life.”
Surrendering your own will. After coming to believe that God had power to heal him, Aaron described what he prayed next, “So, I humble yourself before your mighty hand—and I cast it all unto you…everything”—adding, “God, I surrender.” This went well beyond a transactional relationship where he simply begged God for what he wanted. As he put it, this was “not about asking God to give me this or that, but to live in me…and align my will with His.” Josh described a question coming into his mind, “Do you want to be free of this?...Will you live for me?” He responded, “Yes, I will live for you.”
“I was being invited to surrender” Juanita similarly said—remarking, “In the Twelve Step program they [encourage] this turning your life over to the care of God.” As central to her own healing, Jane similarly remarked, “I turned my will and my life over to the care of God, as I understood God.”
This starts to feel like another kind of mindfulness skill. As Marsha put it:
I learned to focus. I had to be completely in the moment. It is the notion of not doing all the time what you want to do. It is letting go of having to know everything. Letting go of what you want. This was the road to freedom.
She later described this as a specific skill called STOP, which “help you not make a bad situation worse”:
Stop the urge to act immediately. Take a step back and detach from the situation. Observe, so you can gather information on what is happening. And proceed mindfully, by evaluating the most effective option to take, given the goals, and follow the option.
Alignment with higher truth. Josh described feeling guilt and shame after a time of sexual promiscuity, remarking, “After years of struggling, I decided to come back to the Lord, who knew he was waiting for me, and had something for me. I went through a lot of confession and repentance—which was something I hadn’t taken seriously.”
“Be genuine about repenting,” Josh said, reflecting that he had “opened a lot of doors” through past choices “that allowed the adversary to have lots of control” and which “began affecting behavior and emotions.”
Matt spoke of the critical importance of what he called “congruence,” or “living in harmony with core life values and aspirations” as an important part of what helped to “refresh peace, joy, and love in my life.”
Juanita said, “I feel the remorse of having squandered a lot of time and energy in the wasteland I was calling my life.”
In the stillness of depression required of her, Juanita said, “I feel regret, remorse, and a bit disoriented by my new awareness, but believe it or not I also feel a great deal of gratitude. I believe that when we see something, then we can say something, change something, make atonement.”
“The old life had its good moments—I will not discount those at all,” Juanita said. “But I see now that I had built my life on my own and only occasionally opened a window to God’s grace and transformative influence on me. I know God was seeking a deeper relationship with me. Now I am so very grateful that I know the robust fullness of the presence of God available to me in the vast hollowness that was the depression.”
Nicole described going to her hands and knees and crying out to Jesus, feeling the weight of emotional pain on her shoulders. Because she felt her own actions had played a real role, she recalled pleading for help to repent for her sin. She went on to describe “amazing encounters with the Lord.”
Down on hands and knees in a ball—I felt completely encompassed by this warm, tingly presence. It just completely cloaked my body—His comfort and spirit all around me—and took all the fear away that I had. I felt the most intense love and peace … I cried out…thank you!
“He was communicating with me,” she said, “letting me know I was clean, purified, all that sin was gone.” Lucie, in a moment of desperate pain, asked her brother to pray for her. She said, “I don’t remember what he said,” but she recounted, “I felt this warmth on my physical body as if someone was wrapping me in his love—as if I was being hugged. That’s the Lord’s way of telling me that He was still there for me, and He loved me.” Lucie continued:
After two and a half years of turmoil, pain, of grief, of feeling lost, I awoke the next morning feeling the same love—the same unconditional love, safety, comfort and direction the day I received Holy Spirit and was baptized—that love was again inside me, with the smile that started inside and didn’t stop with my mouth.
Reflecting on a moment when he felt “total defeat,” Josh described someone asking, “can I pray for you?” During and after the prayer, he described negative feelings coming out and feeling afterward a “total sense of peace, a peace I had never felt before”—the “peace that passeth understanding is exactly what I was feeling.” He remarked that there was “so much freedom after that,” and that the “voice of God was clearer.”
New changes, new promises. We often talk about heart and mind change with addiction. But when it comes to depression, there’s such a strong emphasis on factors both external (trauma, stress) and internal (body and mind) that we have less control over, that heart matters can seem irrelevant. But from her experience of healing, Crystal suggested that “People or groups in and of themselves do not have the power to change you. Your circumstances may change, but if you are struggling with real depression, it’s your heart and mind that must transform.”
As one individual confessed, “I’d become a different person. I had grown in those years, emotionally and spiritually. It had become time to say goodbye, in a sense, to the person I had been.”
From her place of lasting recovery, Marsha described a “deep spirituality and faith” as crucial to her healing—beginning with a “visceral longing to be with God and to please God” arising in her life—which prompted her to embrace new sacred commitments, “the usual vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience to the church.”
“I received the Holy Spirit—and felt changed, having a real inner peace and strength” Lucie said. “Shortly afterwards, I was baptized by immersion. Immediately out of the water I began to smile….My smile began within me and didn’t stop at my face.” Josh described “incredible peace” at their baptism—“I felt the holy spirit come into my body. I knew all the filth in my life had been left in that water.”
He added, it’s “like nothing’s been able to get on the inside,” he said—stating that he’s felt “protected, full of the holy spirit” and that he’s experiencing “real stillness where there was a storm before.” He added, “I knew my life had changed forever.” Even with profound changes, one person remarked on the patience required
Even after you start trading in your harmful decisions and habits for good ones…You will have a season of cleaning up the wreckage from past ones….Like ripples in water from a rock being thrown into it, even when you stop throwing rocks you must wait for the waters to calm.
Hanging on to the promises. Aaron recollected feeling like “even the whole world—and everything in it—can’t help me.” Then looking upward, he said, “But you can”—referring to a teaching in the Bible that “my grace is sufficient” implying that God’s “grace will always be enough.”
“What healed me was the word of God,” Aaron later said. “When the whole world couldn’t heal me—PhD’s, insomnia, CBT, hospitals… Instead, I was healed by the word of God. His word is true, living and can be trusted. And there was a new Bible verse I hung onto each day.”
At one point, Aaron faced a lot of sleeplessness. But he said, “whether I get any sleep today—however much sleep, it doesn’t matter—his grace will sustain me tonight. His grace will sustain me.” He added, “On top of that, God will use suffering to do me good—so what is there to be scared of?”
Aaron did admit to sometimes feeling “scared still,” before saying, “but then it will be easily snuffed out by those three promises—2 Co 12:9, Romans 8:28, Galatians 2:20; when you hold onto those truths, it really snuffs out all the lies. They just can’t stand in the face of God’s word and the truth.”
One person described a certain prayer she would also invoke “whenever I started feeling a panic attack coming on.” Another individual quoted the verse, “He who believes in me in his heart will flow living streams of water,” and said “I want that.”
This kind of encounter with God, he insisted, was not “like learning about math or history”—relating that as he heard and received from God more directly, “I began to experience overcoming—or defeating—these mental anxieties and illnesses that I dealt with.”
“I remember where I was when despair was gone, when God spoke to me ‘all things work together for those who love God and who are called according to His purposes.’”
Another man reflected on “days where I could not sleep” which was “a terror to me.” During those sleepless nights, “I had this chunk of cards, of Bible verses that I’d read over and over.”
After encountering a verse that says, “God gives sleep to the one that he loves,” he said “God spoke this verse to my heart” and “opened me” to a new “reality,” reporting that “I’ve slept like a baby ever since—not because of something I did.”
Seeking, even when you’re not feeling it. This spiritual growth is not simply a one-time occasion, with people speaking of “spiritual practice” and “spiritual nourishment.” Nicole remarked about having “ongoing heavenly encounters on a regular basis” through scripture and prayer. “Doing this on a daily basis, I started receiving peace.”
One said, “I find joy in going to meetings, socializing, praying.” And Matt described “spiritual dailies” that included “contemplative scripture study and truly personal prayer, including ‘listening up!’—an hour every morning that grows sweeter by the year”—along with “weeklies” involving group communion and worship retreats.
He added, “Spiritual self-care also came to mean learning [that] I had to accept sometimes feeling disconnected, without supposing it must mean something was wrong in my life.” That meant continuing to seek and practice even when you don’t feel like it—available for “communion” and “spiritual community” with others, “even if [he] can’t always feel either.” As Matt put it, “I maintain spiritual routines even though a present moment of depression can make them seem somewhat empty.”
This apparent lack of divine response can be hard. “I shouted at God in my head, ‘Where are you and why aren't you helping me?’ Marilyn recalled. Still another person described coming to doubt God’s existence and feeling “increasingly cynical, angry, and depressed” after struggling to “experience the divine firsthand.”
"Right now, you feel totally alone, but you are not alone, my child!” Marilyn said about the response she received. “God is walking by your side every day. He's with you in the dark hours of the night, when your mind is filled with nightmares. He's giving strength to you every moment and endurance for the long road ahead.”
Faith in community. One man, Douglas, describes receiving a phone call from the pastoral counselor at the spiritual center where he was attending services, who explained “When one of our congregants was dying of cancer, we decided to bring all of her support—her family, friends, minister, physicians, and social worker—together in one room. Their combined positive thoughts created a powerful healing energy that allowed Carol to live far longer than anyone expected. I think that the same principle might work for you.” He arrived at a meeting two weeks later with twelve different people there to support him. As Douglas recounted:
After I described the history of my illness and my feelings of hopelessness and despair, the group shifted the focus away from my symptoms and asked me to create a picture of what wellness would look like for me. Although I could not remember a time when I was not anxious or depressed, I described in as much detail as I could the thoughts, feelings and behaviors I might experience if I were healed of my affliction.
“The group then agreed to hold in consciousness my vision of wellness over the next thirty days, until we met again,” he continued, explaining how he “left the group feeling nurtured by the loving attention I had received, but without any sense that a healing had taken place.” Then Douglas reported:
Nonetheless, seventy-two hours after the members began to visualize my recovery, I awoke with a clarity and a peace that I had not experienced in five months. My normal feelings of agitation and hopelessness were absent. The black cloud of depression had begun to lift. Within ninety days, I was completely free of symptoms.
This man reflected, “If there is a moral to this story, it is that no matter how sophisticated our brain science and technology become, there is no substitute for human love and caring.”
“It takes a whole village to shepherd a person through a dark night of the soul. And every day I give thanks that a committed group of loving people took a few hours from their busy schedules to give of their love and support.”
Healed by God. As Aaron summarized, “Hanging on His promises, I was healed.” Today, he describes himself as “completely healed—totally free of all those things.”
One man described sweet spiritual experiences, followed by feeling “thrown immediately back into panic and darkness.” But over time, sometime deeper began to shift, “Since then, my experience has been one of overcoming anxiety, depression, OCD, intrusive thoughts, irrational thoughts…”
“I know what it’s like to be panicked” throughout the day, he said. “And in my encounters with Jesus, the living being, the person Jesus, I was healed. This isn’t about me—this is about Jesus.”
“Make no mistake, it was God alone who brought healing,” Crystal said. “I would be incredibly foolish to give credit to a recovery strategy rather than God Himself. In His mercy, he peeled me up off the rocky bottom of the pit and lifted me out when I had completely given up on finding freedom.” A woman likewise reflected, “The truth is that God healed me from my depression”—going on to share her conviction that this is how ultimate healing comes:
My relationship with God has been my strength and my victory. God has … instructed me, and walked with me to my healing every step of this journey. God is our ultimate healer. … Only through Jesus Christ can we attain true lasting peace and joy in this life.
“If you struggle with depression, please know that the God who created the universe knows you intimately and wants to heal you and give you a victorious life. Please search within your soul in stillness and find this wonderful Savior who loves you. Please join me [and all] the saints in this glorious adventure.”
Aaron shared this reassurance that “God is enough. Jesus will take care of you. He will take care of it…he’s going to use this for your good—so you can help others. Your testimony is in the making. To exalt his name and free others in bondage.”
12. Increasing emotional freedom, reducing mental dependence
Although there are benefits to different kinds of substances, drugs and medications, many people described reduced dependence as making a difference for their emotional healing.
Reducing long-term reliance on alcohol and illegal drugs. Over and over, people spoke of reducing or eliminating alcohol as part of their depression healing. “I realized the drinking was a slow suicide and I also realized the pain and misery it could bring to [my young kids] if I didn’t find a way to stop.”
Yet “the only time I didn’t care that I was miserable was when I was drinking,” this person said. “I had really become very reliant on it. So, when I put the drink down, I was faced with the reality of my life.”
“In a matter of weeks...my life just started to clear up a little bit. I was still really unhappy, but I no longer felt totally controlled by my emotions...all of a sudden, I felt this sense of hope.”
One individual described a wake-up moment after a near-fatal car accident involving alcohol. On that day, she heard a voice, “This is your last chance. If you don’t turn around, I will never save you again.”
“I was changed forever….I had to change or die. So, I changed … I threw away every single drop and never touched it again for many years.”
Other rippling effects. “I immediately noticed that I can’t tolerate dating the men in my life without drinking,” Brooke said. Previously, she said, “I am getting drunk, sleeping with men who desire me, but do not have the capacity to love me, and in the morning waking up and dragging myself to class.”
At first, Brooke said, “my daily drinking and revolving door of lovers feels like a legitimate pursuit of pleasure” and felt “liberating to rebel against …my religious past.” But soon, “it turns into an emotional dependency, a way to temporarily relieve my anxiety and depression”—noticing how much “relying on alcohol and casual sex to alter my mood only amplifies my struggle.”
“This is not the freedom I crave.” She begins to meditate and realizes: “I don’t want to settle for little moments of physical pleasure, distractions, and escapes. I want, as I had always wanted, to be free.”
After many years of drinking and being on medications, Angel described what happened when she began to taper, “I had been hopeless for so many years.... my world had become so small that I didn't see any light at the end of the tunnel—and all of a sudden, as I started getting sober from alcohol and getting off these medications, I just started to feel a little bit of emotional energy—and hope.”
To be very clear, the issues with illegal drugs and alcohol are different from those regarding legally prescribed medications. But there also remain some common themes of dependence emotionally on a substance to feel well.
The problem with chronic avoidance. More than simply drugs or alcohol alone, one man reflected on the deeper issue he had observed in his experience:
If avoidance is all we have, then we're setting ourselves up for great failure down the road. Because not only have we avoided this source of suffering, we haven’t looked at it, we haven’t addressed it, we haven’t done any work on it. Not only that, but we've also created a new addiction in our life—every time I feel this, every time I sense this suffering present, I go and do this. We go watch a movie with a friend, or maybe we have a drink, or maybe we have several drinks, or maybe we go out and look for a sexual partner that we have no business being with. But anything is better than being in this situation with this suffering.
“My addictions are another false narrative to protect me from feeling what I do not want to feel,” said Brooke. Thomas underscored the challenge:
What I'm talking about is a kind of courage, and a kind of sincerity, where you look at your life and you're willing to just see what's there. And you realize in doing so that where you're really losing your energy, what was really causing your suffering, when you didn't realize it was causing you to suffer, was all the energy you were spending on avoiding—all the energy you were spending on resisting.
Thomas then suggests:
When you stopped resisting, when you stopped avoiding, and you open your closet and look at that bogeyman. You realize, “Oh, the bogeyman was actually my avoiding the bogeyman.” It was being terrified to look under the bed or in the closet, and you look at it and you realize you're equal to that task. You can look at it and it won't destroy you. And it’s the willingness to just hold your life, all of your life, in awareness that empowers you to take account, and start moving in a direction that feels right.
To be very clear, the issues with illegal drugs and alcohol are very different from those regarding legally prescribed medications. But there also remain some common themes of dependence emotionally on a substance to feel well.
Reducing long-term reliance on prescription medications. By the time he was around 20, one man recounted, “I had been taking Ritalin 25 mg per day, Concerta 36 mg in the morning, and Saphris 5 mg twice per day.” Yet, he admits, “I felt crappy all the time. I couldn’t sleep well at night. I wasn’t hungry during the day….I felt suspicious of people, nervous, hopeless, and tired.” One woman described beginning to take antidepressants after developing postpartum depression, “which began a 14-year-long saga of medication usage and adjustment.” Another woman recounted:
Throughout the years, I tried talk therapy and almost every depression, mood stabilizer, and antidepressant on the market. They would work for a while, but the depression and anxiety always came back and increased.
At the time she decided to go a different direction, she was taking five psychiatric medications: Xanax (on and off for 20 years), Trazodone (15 years), Cymbalta (5 years), Wellbutrin (3 years), and Latuda (one month). This kind of cocktail is not unusual in narratives of depression. One parent, Carrie, recounted, “The anti-depressant that our daughter's psychiatrist prescribed wasn't working so she just kept upping the dose until our daughter self-harmed.” At that point an antipsychotic drug was additionally prescribed by a physician, “This med didn't do anything either, so the doc upped the dosage on it too. At that point, our daughter self-harmed again while becoming almost catatonic in her demeanor. What was going on!!”
Lucie spoke of how the medications “took away some of the feelings of wanting to kill myself in that moment,” but they also “made me feel like a robot.” Although the meds helped initially, one man spoke of realizing that “I didn’t care whether I was alive, didn’t care about my girlfriend or my brothers and sisters in my faith.”
Jada stopped Prozac after it “negatively affected” her sex drive. Jordan experienced “an akathisia side-effect from psych meds” that was excruciating. Douglas described how “an adverse reaction to an antidepressant medication plummeted me into a major depressive episode.” Moni reported, “Most of the medication either caused severe side effects or they made me feel dull, which I could not accept because I enjoy being an active person.”
New realizations. One individual said “I had always been extremely conscientious about taking my medication … for a long time, I believed that the meds would help me get better if only I could find the right one that matched my symptoms:
Finally, I realized that, despite the medications, I was getting sicker, had less energy and more anxiety every year. The medications were only helping a few symptoms but weren’t solving the problem, and later I realized that they were actually making things worse….They may help some symptoms and are very helpful in acute situations, but tend to make the disease worse in the long run.
Others retained gratitude for the impact of medical treatment. Stephanie said, “I'm thankful for meds and for my psychiatrist for helping me stay alive long enough to figure this all out.” Another person attested, “The Klonopin and Celexa brought me back into enough of a state of equilibrium that my soul could commence healing.”
About her medical treatment, Charlotte related, “It does not take away the despair, but it takes the edge off. There are whole days when I do not want to kill myself. I intuitively understand it is a temporary fix, a small net catching me from falling deeper into an endless cavern of memories.”
The state, she adds, “feels like a low level of despair that you’re in. You’re not getting any answers but you’re living okay and smiling at the office.” For some, the initial boost from the medication was so significant they don’t feel right about ever going off. As one woman said, “After it kicked in….it actually started working, and I feel normal again. And I’ve had no recurrence of symptoms for 2 years. And I plan to keep it that way. And, I have no plans to get off the medication any time soon. It’s working for me, and I don’t want to mess with what’s working.”
Resistance to the dominant path. After describing how “a doctor tried to put me on antidepressants," Gwen remembered thinking, “If I need them, then yes, I'll come back to it, but I wanna first try [other options].” One woman described her husband, Caleb, as never having gone “to a doctor to get meds, because we felt like we would find the answers elsewhere.”
Jim said, “I want supernatural healing,” explaining, “I believe the root of my despair is spiritual.”
In watching her daughter’s dwindling state, one mother expressed surprise that “not one” of her doctors seemed to be curious about the deeper root causes of what was happening. Rather, they continued to focus on what other medications could be added to the mix.
Other long-term concerns. It's not only physical and emotional side-effects that prompt a desire to taper. People also expressed concerns about lasting dependence. For instance, one woman said, “I was taking Paxil 40 mg a day. My mood was good, and I had few side effects. However, I did not want to remain on medication for the rest of my life.”
One woman suggested, “Pain can be beneficial. I know it’s not the happiest message, but sometimes we need to feel pain in order to get better..” She suggested discomfort may tell us “there is something wrong inside that needs some work. Pain guides us to the problem area so we know where the work needs to be done.”
Still, many expressed appreciation for the role medication played in their journey. As one woman said, “The medication I was prescribed was absolutely necessary and saved my life. It brought me through the darkest part of my journey.” She saw the medication as “a necessary stepping-stone” and now, she said, “I have stepped off.”
A decision that can feel scary. “Armed with a changed belief about myself and what I began to entertain as possible for me,” David said, “I started to take steps to get off the antidepressants that I had been stuck on for over thirteen years.”
“I decided these drugs were not for me,” said Michael. Another said, "I’m going to wean off psych meds and become more serious about God."
Part of the fear of tapering reflects an understandable social stigma of not taking medication. As Caleb put it, “When you choose to not take the meds, you get judged so bad.”
“I was afraid to drop the meds,” one woman also said. “I was literally told in the beginning that I would probably be on medication for the rest of my life.” She admitted, “even though I knew my brain was healing, what if I was wrong about it?” She describes her decision-making process:
I went to the Lord in prayer and told him what I thought, then I went to my husband and let him know—through lots of tears—because it was one of the scariest things I was about to do on purpose! I told him he needed to watch me carefully, that he would need to look for signs that I may be in trouble.
“It was so scary for me... I never want to feel that darkness and pain again, what if getting off my meds is just what would bring that on again?” Yet she said, “I knew how I felt as I brought it to the Lord.”
Navigating some turbulence. Michael, who was “under medical attention” when deciding to taper, said, “I definitely do not recommend stopping a medication without talking to a doctor first.”
Another person suggested, “it is a mistake to try to go off of [psychiatric] medications by yourself, especially if you have been on them for as long as I had! There is so much more to getting off a medication than just gradually reducing the dose.” This person went on to describe a holistic approach where her complementary practitioner encouraged “a regimen of supplements and herbs” to counteract side effects and depression itself.
More than simply helping her get off the medication, one woman described her practitioner working to “solve the original illness too.” She continued, “over time, each medication was safely tapered off….It’s been a year since I went off of Seroquel. I felt so much better immediately after being medication-free, but there were still challenges and healing that had to take place.” Another person recounted:
To help support my systems—especially through the tapering process—she added smoothies and supplements to my diet. And we incorporated meditations into my life. In the beginning, when we started tapering off the medication I was concerned. I had grown so used to the idea of having to be on medications. However, we slowly started reducing my medications while increasing the supplements to help support my systems…. Dr. Lee’s mind-body techniques also helped me to relax and keep my mind clear and able to focus.
It’s important to note that similar kinds of reductions in dependency can happen with alternative interventions too. For instance, after experiencing benefits from supplementation for a time, one person recounted, “I have gradually been able to decrease the amount of nutritional supplements necessary for maintaining my health.”
This kind of attentive taper involves ongoing watchfulness in how the body and mind is responding. As David summarized, “I have also adapted a daily tapering template…to monitor food and drink intake, exercise, sleep, mood, and anxiety, as well as any and all supplements being taken, to ensure that it is clear to me what is making the difference or what is going wrong if I am struggling with the taper for some reason.” While some have serious withdrawal effects, others do not. As one person said:
I cannot at this stage tell you exactly why I was able to successfully come off. Was it the Prozac’s longer half-life, or was it because I completely shattered the belief that I had a lack of serotonin in my brain? Whatever the factors may have been, after I stopped taking Prozac completely, none of the usual physical withdrawal symptoms appeared. Some emotional reactions occurred, but I believe these were actually a part of my brain’s process of returning to its natural state, and my own process of becoming acutely aware of how I felt about things.
Some of this does seem to depend on the tapering approach. David, who used a pill slicer to cut down dosages, writes “I had managed to get off the drugs again, this time with practically no withdrawal reactions at all other than some disturbances to my sleep which eventually settled down.” Another woman admitted, “In the past, when I would taper my antidepressant medication, I experienced unpleasant symptoms, during the withdrawal process, such as mood swings, suicidal thoughts, severe PMS, difficulty making decisions, and lack of confidence in myself.” However, this time when she withdrew from Paxil, “using an integrated approach of diet, nutritional supplements, and energy medicine (meditation and EFT),” she reported remarkably: “I did not experience any withdrawal symptoms, and I was able to continue to work full time.” The taper took five months and was successful: I am happy that I have been able to be off Paxil [for years]. I feel that I am now able to thrive as a mother, wife, and educator.”
Feeling myself again. Stephanie said “with my doctor's help I have now been off of the depression meds for almost 3 months! And I feel like I think we are supposed to feel as people! Not blissfully going through life, rather living a life that has turbulence and knowing how to navigate my way around it and sometimes through it... like we are here on earth to do.”
Another person said during the withdrawal process:
My mood, appetite, libido, and sleep continued to improve over this time. My attention and focus were similar. I could learn the material in class more quickly. I am much happier with my cognitive functioning and with life. I feel normal. I also feel that I am getting better each day. I feel like I’m not a prisoner any more to drugs, and I’m not dependent on them anymore. I am through with drugs, and I never want to get on them again. I would like to tell everyone about how integrative psychiatry can heal them of their own drug dependencies. I would recommend this approach, because it actually works, and it’s healthier.
After tapering off the SSRI antidepressants that he had been on for 14 years, Jordan described feeling “intellectually at my best.” David said, “Today, medication free, I feel better than ever before.”
Describing her tapering experience, one person said “I would get emotional about happy things as well as sad things. I also started to feel different in my body, almost like I was waking up. My physical senses seemed to be heightened. I just felt, well… like me again.” Carrie shares encouragement with “anyone who has that still, small, but persistent voice in their heads that is telling them drugs aren't the answer and there has to be a better way.” She answers, “there is, we are living it, amazed at the difference in our family and will never go back!”
Slow and steady wins the race. In most cases, going off medication too quickly can make matters worse. One person said, “I had tried to go off of my medication by myself [and too quickly] and realized that it wasn’t working. I was extremely depressed and burst into sobs in Dr. Lee’s office. I had never tried to go off of my medications before.”
Another person described negative consequences for “stop[ping] all at once. I had experienced running out of my sleeping pills before and the withdrawals were dreadful, cold shakes, panic attacks, the whole deal. My doctor had warned me that stopping the medication abruptly could be life threatening.” So, this person related, “I set up a plan to slowly wean myself off of all the prescription drugs…antidepressants, mood stabilizers and sleeping pills.” In this plan, he decided “to take smaller and smaller dosages until I would be completely clean of them by my 34th birthday. And that’s exactly what I did.”
This individual shared more detail, “The healing process wasn’t painless. My immune system was weakened as I gradually weaned myself of the drugs and I got very sick. …I needed time to heal and get strong. Time to learn how to get well. Time to learn how to stay well.”
Reflecting on the psychiatric medications they had been on, another person reflected, “Over time, my body and systems just became desensitized to them and they really weren’t working anymore. However, Dr. Lee stated that we still needed to come off the medications slowly because my body needed to detox from them and coming off of powerful medications like the ones I was on too quickly could be dangerous.” While gradual and mindful tapering is clearly the best practice, it’s important to note some exceptions—wherein the taper happened quickly and miraculously.
With or without you. With the support of professional support, one person said, “I was able to wean off all my medications” within four months.” This kind of supervision is ideal. Yet professionals aren’t always willing to provide such support.
Even after experiencing some painful side-effects, one woman recounted, “Every doctor I encountered dismissed my requests to get off of medication completely, and would just change my medication, causing me a new set of side effects and the inability to function in the real world.” So, she continued, “Once I got back on my feet, in 2014, I knew that I had to take my well-being into my own hands and find a doctor who could help me get off of medication safely and effectively; otherwise, I would be taking psychotropic drugs for the rest of my life.”
Carrie admitted, “Much to the doctors' stern objections, we pulled our daughter off her meds.” Since the psychiatrist “wouldn’t have approved” of even his gentle and gradual tapering plan, one man admitted, “I did it all without my psychiatrist.” Had he listened to his psychiatrist, “She told me I needed to be on medications for the rest of my life…. She was wrong.”
“So, I never went to see her again.” He said, “My former psychiatrist would be astonished to see how happy and healthy I am today.”
A good professional may still express concerns, while affirming the individual’s right to make a decision for themselves. As one person said, “When I told both my therapist and psychiatrist of my choice, they were concerned to say the least, but absolutely supportive. I remember my psychiatrist saying, if you’re going to do this, you will need two things, exercise and laughter.”
Life after. Sometimes tapering appears to be a part of the healing, while others seem to taper after getting better—with the discontinuation seemingly a result of recovery, rather than contributing to it. After a transformative period of learning, Moni admitted, “I felt that the medication was not needed anymore as all of the tensions and traumas had been washed out of my body. For the first time in my life I felt settled, calm and peaceful.” David described life changes that led them to a place of readiness:
My energy levels increased amazingly as I continued with my new diet and exercise regime, and I continued to meditate and work at finding peace with my situation. Within two short months, I found myself staring at the box of Prozac as I had a little “farewell” conversation with it—and threw it into the bin.
Life after medication isn’t simply easy and blissful. Having been medication free for almost two years, one person said, “Is it easy? No. It is a challenge every day. But I choose this challenge.”
Another person detailed how their life has changed post-taper:
My experience of life now is completely different, in so many ways that I can’t even begin to describe them all here. It is now nine months later, and although I have had some ups and downs trying to work through some of the issues that I had not really been able to do whilst on the drugs, on the whole, I have found that my experience of any down days or difficulties are infinitely more manageable now. This may be due to the fact that I now know that nothing is interfering with me.
Others have found positive places while staying on their medications. For instance, Juanita said: “I wasn’t turning cartwheels—I never knew how—but I felt as though a five-hundred-pound monkey had been taken off my back and I could finally breathe again.”
Recovering life. One woman admitted that the emotional turbulence “sometimes still hits.” Michael related, “of course, I have moods, just like everyone else, but they are normal moods, not the wild swings between suicidal despair and grandiose hypomania as before.”
Matt reflected, “My wife and I still know that my Eeyore self is there, but we try to keep that part of me at a ‘lovable and livable’ level.” He described keeping a list of 6 key lifestyle steps taped inside his kitchen cupboard so that if he’s feeling a little off, he can check the list and say "ah, I'm not sleeping well. Time to get outside and soak in some sunlight to set my body clock."
Beth describes her life now:
I pray. I take care of myself. I take deep breaths. I step away for those 10 seconds when things are getting a little crazy. I put down the pack of cookies when I realize I don’t need to engulf them as my medicine anymore. I pray. I look in the mirror and try to see what God sees. I look at my husband and my children and see the reflection of God in them. I pray. I laugh more. I go to Zumba classes. I take water aerobics classes. I love my body. I love my family. I love my home. I love my life. I appreciate every day. I celebrate that I am alive and I have chosen to be alive.
“Does this all mean I don’t get frustrated or sad or annoyed, or angry or have bad days?” she asks. “Absolutely not. But I choose how I respond. I am conscious of each moment and each thought. I choose healing.”
Theme of themes; Learning, Growing and Making Changes in Life
Across all ten themes, you can see several meta-themes, including how much learning and re-thinking about the world is taking place—and how much openness to adjustments in life, both big and small.
While acknowledging this can feel impossible, Ben said, “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly, you are doing the impossible.” He continued, “I know this is true. I know it because the fact that I am here now, writing this to you is proof to me that I am capable of the impossible. And do you know what? So are you! (91)
Learning more and looking more closely at your life is helpful, but especially if it prompts something else. In addition to the value of different kinds of learning and insights, people spoke of the value of “learning skills to navigate life” (43), coming to “learn new skills to fight back against depression” (72)—and even more than that, becoming “the best version of yourself.” (99) This kind of growth, changing and progressing has been established in many research studies (about “behavioral activation” for instance) to make an incremental difference for depression—and even to directly influence the state of the mind itself.
Behavioral change preceding the mental kind. As another individual said, “We don't need more ideas—we need to make things happen” (perhaps paraphrasing author Gita Luz). Ben said: The only way out of the hole is movement. The only way to get away from depression is movement. This takes plan and strategy. This takes attention. Otherwise, we find ourselves stuck in the hole again, digging ourselves in deeper, hoping to God or whomever else is listening that maybe we can at least dig ourselves to the other side. (91) This is different from “fake it till you make it”—reflecting a proactive, intentional movement with an eye to compounding healing effects over time. It also contrasts strongly with the usual way of thinking—which presumes we feel the way we feel until something outside of ourselves changes. Marsha said, "You can't think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only act yourself into new ways of thinking"—citing a behaviorist who seeks to “change what a person does…rather than change a disturbed person’s biology or change his thoughts.” This recovered individual, Marsha Linehan—now a respected therapist—calls this process “opposite action,” elaborating how adjustments to behavior can impact our feelings too: “change your behavior and you will change your emotion.” As a specific illustration of this, she summarized this technique she now uses with clients:
Half smiling is a way of accepting reality with your body. Here is how you do it. First, relax your face, from the top of your head down to your chin and jaw. Let go of each facial muscle. If you find it hard, try tensing your face and then letting up. Second, let both corners of your mouth go slightly up, just so you can feel them moving. A half-smile is slightly upturned lips with a relaxed face. Third, try to adopt a serene facial expression. The whole exercise is one of your face communicating with your brain. It works. (43)
The value of “keeping moving.” Many of the excerpts that follow reflect how emotional patterns can begin to yield to behavioral adjustments. However, there are many times in which healthy steps must be taken in the face of emotional turbulence. As one man emphasized:
My psychological self-care included resisting surrender to the symptoms, even if it wasn’t yet a complete cure of this brain illness. Get out of bed, get dressed, get out the door. Walk, run. Engage with life, do what I can. Each day’s efforts flow powerfully into the next. Sustaining momentum, no matter how small, is critical. Depression feeds on coming to a standstill, and things only get harder from there. I have learned to accept that I’m not entirely in control of this brain sickness, but I can choose to curtail its influence and the symptoms that flow from it.
Mark added, “For me, forcing myself to get out of bed and engage with life is my starting point. That is mostly important because it puts me where I can get outside myself and available to others.” (6) This kind of movement can really take courage and determination. Karen described “the profound and complicated experience of putting one foot in front of the other.” (53) As Lori put it:
When I was at my most depressed, doing one simple chore like laundry, vacuuming, or dishes became an anchor I could come back to. In times when my apartment was in absolute shambles, I could barely get up for work, and I hadn't washed my hair in days, I could say, "All right, I'm not going to worry about anything else today except for doing the dishes, and if I do that, I can call today a success. and curl up in a ball and do nothing for the rest of the day." Turns out, doing the dishes has some remarkable momentum to it. Once the sink was empty and the cupboards were full, it almost always turned into, "Well, maybe I have energy for a shower." And once I showered, sometimes I could pick up my clutter. And so on. It wasn't some drastic moment in my healing journey, but it was one small thing I leaned on to spark tiny upward spirals to get more on top of my day to day life. (37)
Laughter as an illustration of behavioral sparking emotion. Many assume that “if your mind is not well, then you can’t laugh anymore.” But Jonathan spoke about how “humor brings respite—little gaps in time that give you a break.” He named laughter the “cousin of joy” and observed that, in the face of depression, “I personally need to seek amusement and laughter” because in her experience, “energies that are the direct opposite to one another will cancel each other out.” (96)
He continued: “Having the ability to laugh and appreciate the humor in everyday life is doubtless such an underestimated therapy”—going on to challenge anyone to feel emotionally poor “whilst they are genuinely laughing or smiling…and not the nervous laugh or one that is forced, but something that makes you feel amusement to the point of making that strange noise we do when we laugh.” (96) Laughter, of course, can arise from healing—just as we see it can help contribute to the same. As Juanita reflected on a sign of healing finally happening, “I hadn’t laughed in months, nor had I been listening to the show since I was bed bound. But that morning Funky Larry said something hilarious that made me smile.” (47) Here, we’re talking about engaging certain behaviors—smiling, laughter, posture, physical activity—that move us in the direction we want to go. Once again, this is different than just “pretending” to be happy, which is another skill that many people with depression unfortunately lean upon. One woman described her husband, “He was really good at not showing his depression. He smiled a bunch. Even with our daughter who was born in 2011, he would be a joyful dad. Just tons of fun. But I could see through it. He was hurting deeply.” (108) Stephanie said, “I could mask it for the most part, but it became harder and harder to hide it….I am a funny person, I have a quick wit and was born without a filter, so people find it hard to believe that I struggle at all.” (109)
That kind of pretending gets so old. As this person continued, “I was getting more and more to the point where I realized I could no longer spend my time trying to please other people. That and pretending to be happy were two behaviors I could no longer engage in.” That fakeness is not what we’re talking about here. To slap a smile on your face just to throw off people around you is different than intentionally acting in a way that demonstrates your conviction of future hopes or the current joy life offers. Compared to the former, the latter is about engineering behavioral adjustments that move people in a direction of deeper healing—even sometimes behaviors that don’t initially feel genuine.
Resistance and sensitivity to change. Any mention of personal change, even small ones, can trigger concerns from people facing mental health problems. The same woman, Marsha, who championed finding laughter also admitted seeing others “extremely sensitive to anything that appeared to invalidate their pain” and “anything that suggested that they themselves needed to change.” (43) That could arise, in part, due to wrestles many have with past trauma or current self-worth. Mark spoke about how valuable it was that he “learned to carefully and critically examine and distinguish between my need for personal change and the self-condemning, self-harming self-talk depression brings.” (6) Even while describing a number of changes made in her life, Juanita acknowledged the ever-present desire to just “be normal” and “return to our old self”—thus “getting on with life.” She said, “the question I asked myself is, which life? The same life that got you here in the first place, Juanita? Or are you willing to take the long, slow road toward building a life that you can live with?” In retrospect, she reflected, “I was eager to get back to things as they had been. …unconsciously that meant a return to my old way of doing.” Juanita added, “My ego was all too eager to get me back into the ruts created in my mind over a lifetime, the same ruts that had landed me here. “ Even though she knew deeply that changes were needed, she admitted “my ego wanted life as it had been.” As she did so, “I began to move into my typical ways of going about my life—only to be hammered by relapses.” (47) This seems an incredibly important point—the way in which we can so often resist accepting that things might have to look different for us to move forward emotionally.
Acceptance as a counterbalance to striving. The same recovered therapist who promotes opposite action also underscored the central importance of a basic acceptance of reality in order to find positive emotional shifts. As Marsha put it, an “acceptance of life as it is, not as it is supposed to be.” That might feel antithetical to the notion of moving forward to change things—or they could perhaps be parallel truths, that each represent an important reality. Marsha contrasted that with “willfulness,” where “the focus is on controlling reality, it is ‘my way or the highway.’” By contrast, “willingness is about opening yourself to what is. It is about becoming one with the universe, participating in it, doing what is needed in the moment.” (43) In Robert’s account, he “eventually” recovered the ability to “accept reality.” (89) Marsha went on to highlight the necessary “balance between acceptance of oneself and one’s situation and embracing change towards a better life”—elaborating, “we should strive for important goals, but we must radically accept that we might not obtain them. It is letting go of having to have. And accepting what is.” (43)
Approaching healing as a quest. This is a whole lot of uncertainty and change to navigate. Yet Victoria encouraged others to “embrace the hard work of healing.” (31) Jennifer said, “Get crystal clear on where you are now and what steps you need to take to get your life back until you become happy and fulfilled.” (28) Alexi said, “don’t expect your depression to go away after one session with a therapist. Show up every day and commit to your healing just like an athlete would commit to their training.” (81) This certainly takes perseverance. One person’s account of healing was summarized as coming “to understand how a life is built.” Another individual recollected:
At the time of all this excess and darkness…I was working on was a book called The Man Who Swam the Amazon [about] Martin Strel—a Slovenian marathon swimmer—[who] became the first man to swim the entire Amazon river, from headwaters to mouth at Belém, 3,274 miles. He completed this in 66 days, with a team of about 20 following him in a support boat.” Afterwards, the swimmer told a reporter, “I’m either going to be the first man to swim the Amazon, or the first man to die trying.”
He continued:
This statement pierced through my haze of depression and struck me. Here was a man who wanted something so badly he was willing to die for it. He had a goal, and he would willingly give his life : to achieve it. The idea of a challenge—-a quest—-started percolating through my mind. Something to knock me out of my rut, rouse my from my funk. I’m not going to swim the Amazon, of course. But what could I do? What challenge could I undertake that would require focus, dedication, and sacrifice? What challenge would whip me into shape? (emphasis my own, 30)
A “quest” for healing was described by another as a “journey of healing” that led to an “ultimate victory over an unimaginable past through personal acceptance, inner peace, and self-discovery.” This kind of healing saga reads almost like a dramatic rescue on Mt. Everest—characterized in Newton’s memoir as “a testament of one man’s survival against unimaginable odds.” (87) Mendek said, “I welcome each day as a glorious adventure, and I know simply being alive is magical.” (44) More than simply overcoming depression, this is about “building a life worth living” and “creating a life you love.” (42) Nyla said, “Healing is a process less about a destination than it is about maintaining hope, finding acceptance, and the will to continue the journey (or to reach out for help when that will may feel too exhausted).” (61) Marsha described leveraging frustration for more forward movement—“The idea of proving everyone wrong kept me going…this kind of anger can be helpful.” (43)
Alignment with conscience. In some cases, these changes involved an awareness of having departed from higher principle or the dictates of conscious—prompting a process of soul-searching and repentance. As Josh said, “After years of struggling, I decided to come back to the Lord. I knew he was waiting for me, had something for me. I went through a lot of confession and repentance—which was something I hadn’t taken seriously.” (105) Another individual described how she had “worked through Step 4, Inventory,” of Emotions Anonymous and had been “humbled to see my contribution into things I listed.” She continued, “While some events were out of my control, such as my dad choosing to end his life, I had to address the sinful responses, which had led me further into isolation and misery.” (94)
Note: Although the language of “sin” and “sinful responses” does not resonate with everyone whose stories we’ve reviewed, the idea (and practice) of aligning oneself with conscience, deeper wisdom, or personal intuition does. Even after making a change, there is sometimes a residue of habit that remains.
As Crystal summarized:
Even after you start trading in your harmful decisions and habits for good ones, you will have a season of cleaning up the wreckage from past ones. It may feel like you’re not making progress, but in due time you will reap the good fruit of making changes like these in your life. Like ripples in water from a rock being thrown into it, even when you stop throwing rocks you must wait for the waters to calm.
Eventually, Crystal described a recovery of his “ability to choose” and to “set limits” as part of her healing process. (82) No matter the length of struggle, the opportunity to start again is something people expressed appreciation for. Ashley described coming across a proverb, "It is better to begin in the evening than not at all” which prompted her to say “It doesn't matter what you've done in the past—what matters are the choices you make right now. God gives you the chance to start over with every breath.” This woman’s story attested to that fact, with a surprisingly comprehensive change experience—“everything about me has changed except my name." (75)
One step at a time. In attempting to describe their gradual experience of healing, Kristian said:
Imagine being Administrator of NASA the day after John F. Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It must have seemed overwhelming. You cannot complete such complex projects in a single go; you need to divide them into many small and achievable tasks. Then, just take on the individual tasks one at a time.
Drawing on “eleven years of deep depression as a teenager and student,” this person said, “you can follow the same strategy to overcome depression.” He went on to detail deeper healing from depression that came by practicing techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy and positive psychology that led him to “become a thoroughly happy person.” (93) In another example of step-by-step progress, after finding a group called Emotions Anonymous, one woman recollected how she “began working the steps after attending meetings for about six months….I worked the steps continuously.” (2) Vicki suggested that we might ask about any particular health intervention, “Is this helping me understand what's going on with me? And if not, maybe I need to drop that and try something else.” Ultimately, she emphasized the importance of “really understanding that this process of wellness is a lifetime pursuit.” (12) “Sometimes” she admitted, “we go six steps backward, then we go four forward, and we have a chance to do things over, we have a chance to learn and then to keep moving, and the path is the goal.” Vicki added:
Because sometimes we can try as hard as we possibly can, and despite our efforts, things don’t seem to go our way. But in the background, as we do this work, progress is being made—even though it might not be obvious. And as we tune in a little more, the subtle progressions become more obvious.
Above all, she said, “We don't bite off the whole thing at once, we take it one step at a time, one moment at a time, one breath at a time.” (12) This involves seizing on what someone can control. “For moments when I would feel completely overwhelmed,” one woman’s mentor gave this advice, “Think about what you can do, Sarah. What can you do? Can you go for a walk? Can you put on some music? Do what you can do.” (36) Danny spoke of taking advantage of time between painful emotional episodes to grow, “so that your relapses gradually become fewer and farther between, and in the end, eventually peter out for good.” (98) This is about progressing one step at a time, reflecting what Julie called “a carefully measured appreciation of life, in which every step forward is a victory worth celebrating.” (66)
Feeling better little by little. Accompanying these steady, gradual shifts in behavior is, for many, a gradually dawning improvement in their emotional health. Thomas described his life shifting incrementally and more naturally:
Life conditions naturally changed for me, as I got out of high school, moved to college, moved away from home…life just naturally presented new conditions to me that didn’t seem to fit anywhere with my concept of what it means to be a depressed person, or an anxious person. I was starting to feel a lot of happiness come into my life, I was starting to feel a lot of freedom, and a lot of focus. It wasn't this kind of awakening to ‘I'm not depressed any more,’ and ‘my attention is fine,’ and ‘I’m not as anxious as I used to be’—it was more day by day, just incrementally changing, moving in the direction of my life that was calling to me, and waking up to more of who I was. (11)
This naturally involves patience. Crystal said, “You might have read through this in a few minutes or days, but this process took years”—referring to consistent movement and alignment in the same direction. She added, “Have you ever planted something and watched it grow to maturity in the same day? Probably not. It takes time to see the fruit of what has been planted long ago.” (82) That being said, there is also natural urgency, with Nicole describing how she “desperately wanted to be free of this mental illness” and admitting that “my nature was to steam-roll ahead and…I looked everywhere to look to receive healing.” Yet this woman sensed that God was “telling me to be patient” and that healing “needs to be done slowly, not to rush it.” (102) Mark reflected, “For me, the measure of healing I have experienced is no less miraculous for being incremental and developmental—iterative, ongoing, evolving—no less a witness of grace for it requiring all I can do, patiently and persistently.” (6)
One woman noted, “We’re a culture that loves the quick fixes—we want the quick diet, we want the couple of Advils, no more headache—and if we don't get it, we get really impatient. And we give up—sort of all or nothing.” Reflecting on her experience, she said, “It's important for us to sort of step back and ask…am I willing to work on this piece by piece and ask myself really critical questions along the way—is this helping me work toward a life of balance?” It's remarkable how seemingly effortless and dynamic his and others’ healing process appears to be—that is, how it didn’t happen linearly and based only on his constant exertion. As Marsha said, “I experienced a significant shift… a metamorphosis just happened unprompted by me.” (43) Sarah spoke of a similarly gradual progression of movement in her life, including:
Coming to grips with the revelation about my mother leaving me unattended as an infant; to my slow but steady acceptance of the loss of my family; to my further involvement in the Catholic Church, my continued journaling—it was all a process of discovery and, in a sense, renewal. I was living the questions and, little by little, I was growing in faith and strength. I spent more time in prayer and meditation and spiritual reading. I began to feel more confident, more alive. (36)
This same gradual healing shows up over and over in stories of lifestyle-oriented change. As another individual who experienced both depression and anxiety recounted:
After about three weeks of diet changes, weekly appointments, and taking the supplements, I felt as if a dark fog had been lifted from around me. It was as if I could see and feel sunshine again. I could sleep again. I was happy. The panic attacks were gone within another two weeks. I went to a party without any social anxiety for the first time in my life. It was amazing. (104)
After recounting their own series of small adjustments, another person summarized: I started to feel even better. I eventually made it through the rest of the book and started to record my depression symptoms according to the very helpful survey in the book. The first week I was in the 10-15 range (already a huge drop from where I estimated I was when first starting). The next week I was under 10. And this last week for the first time I can remember since I was in high school, I had ZERO symptoms of depression—this in spite of an extremely stressful week at work. (65) Similar improvements prompted another individual to ask, “What if we started to think about antidepressants as something very different? What if changing the way we live—in specific, targeted, evidence-based ways—could be seen as an antidepressant, too?” (43) In what follows, we review small adjustments made in some of the most essential categories of physical health—which, it turns out, are also essential areas for emotional healing too.
Owning your healing. All of this reflects a larger theme of people regaining their agency to act—and really “owning” the process of recovery. “If we believe we are ill because we have a problem that is beyond our own control,” said one man, “then you simply set yourself up to be at the mercy of a force that cannot be held accountable for our actions.” After sharing his story, Jonathan said she hopes her experience “will hopefully let you see for yourself the false impression that you are somehow trapped forever” in emotional struggles—adding, “you have just convinced yourself that all hope is gone but it’s not true. Hope does not end with some crap narrative in your head.” (96) Melissa admitted, “I had spent an entire lifetime believing I was at the whim of forces out of my control-namely mortality, relationships, circumstances and my choices…And I was drowning in futility over trying so desperately to control the uncontrollable, but no closer to doing so than I had ever been.” This person described a pattern of “wallowing in negativity, never turning despair into purpose-driven action and left exhausted and victimized, battered by the current with seemingly no way back to shore.”
This woman went on to describe realizing that “I was actually taking positive action each day in choosing to live rather than die. This meant I must somehow feel a sense of hope for the future!” even if it was sometimes based on a “small spark of possibility.” (38) Ashley highlighted the impact on her of the “idea of choice—not that having a disease is a choice, but the way you approach your disease is a matter of choice, and that gives you back some element of power in your life.” She added, “That’s incredibly important because the powerlessness pushes you under.” Ashley went on to say, “I set my own path.” (75) Another individual encouraged others to “be the queen/king of life and not the victim of life” and work towards “gaining control over your losing health” and reaching after “how to achieve happiness.” (99) In stark contrast with the way people often feel, this leaves people with a sense of being in control of their own healing. “Once I realized that my depression was an injury that I could heal like any other,” said one Alexi, “I suddenly felt empowered.” As she continued:
I felt like I could take action and attack the injury just like I’d attack any other injury. The hardest thing was before—when I saw my depression as a personal failure. The shift from feeling helpless to feeling in control was the greatest feeling ever.
Alexi (who had past experience in athletics) continued, "I think many people, especially athletes, make the same mistake of not taking a mental 'injury' as seriously as they would a physical injury”—adding, "This is probably because a mental injury is invisible and doesn't necessarily limit you from showing up to work or otherwise continuing your regular routine, however terrible it might feel inside. I want to shift that perspective." She concluded:
Depression is like when you fall and have a scrape on your knee—except instead of the cut being on your knee, it is on your brain. The point is, your brain is a body part that can get injured like any other, and it can also heal like any other. For example, a hamstring injury starts out as a sore leg that can be fixed with some rest and physical therapy. But eventually, the sore leg will turn into a torn tendon that needs medical intervention because it can no longer heal on its own. My brain was the same way. I had been depressed long enough and severely enough that I needed medical help. I needed therapy from a doctor. (81)
Admitting, “the depressions were strong,” Moni said, “but…my determination to heal this ‘disorder’ became stronger. Being a born competitor and former Karate world champion, I was never going to give up this fight.” (46) The power of individual choices to move our emotional health in the right direction left people feeling empowered. “You are responsible for your own happiness” William said, so “stop blaming others.” (100) Melissa similarly commented:
I could choose the actions, mindset and attitude with which I greeted each day. This meant I could either succumb to suffocating despair, or stop "hoping" circumstances would inevitably improve and fight to claw my way out of darkness. Although finding that light was horribly challenging most days and virtually impossible others, the choice to embrace life and endeavor to do so was entirely my own.
This same woman recounted, “I finally came to see that the only aspects of existence I could actually control were the attitude with which I greeted each day, the specific actions I took to live a meaningful life, and the manner by which I responded to and treated those around me.” Melissa continued:
My ultimate power came in striving to live my life authentically in doing what I believed was right, and treating others with compassion. I then needed to accept the ramifications, good or bad, from that sincere behavior.
Admitting her tendency towards blame and resentment, she said “It was therefore imperative to take ownership of my perceptions, my attitude, and my behavior”—continuing, “Additionally, I needed to make certain my inner circle exuded only positive energy lifting me up to live wholly in my heart.” Instead of waking up every morning certain "life wasn't fair," "why was this happening to me?" and "I can't take this anymore" as if powerless with nothing in my control, I started answering those statements with: "You do have control and a choice Melissa.” Melissa described this as a “change from a helpless victim to one taking responsibility for her life choices” as an attitude shift that “alleviated that deep sense of hopelessness in bringing order to chaos.” As simple as it sounds, she described her “major awakening lesson” as simply, “we can choose life and the attitude with which we greet each day. Or said differently, we can continue to drown in despair, or take concrete action and channel our pain into positive creation and connection.” (38)
Falling forward. In this part of the mural of deepening healing, we’ve described people making adjustments in diet, rest, physical activity, sunlight, the physical environment and schedule of their lives, and the basic amount of stress. Lest it’s not completely clear, none of this reflects—for any of these individuals—some kind of linear march upward. Rather, there are starts and stops, ebbs and flows, fits and turns, on people’s journeys of recovery. All this happens gradually, with “the positive reinforcement” of each change “contin[uing] to build and layer” as Mark pointed it, even as recovery “evolved and changed in unexpected ways.” This man went on to say, “With time, and mistakes, and beautiful, rare victories, you learn, you grow, you spiral up. I'm grateful to have learned that from my worst moments. Otherwise, my best moments might have passed me by uncherished.” (25) Struggle then, became viewed by many as an opportunity, not just a problem. As Mark added, “I was beginning to consider setbacks as pivots to something else,” which allowed him to even begin experiencing “a certain gratitude for my struggle.” (25)
The upward spiral. Clearly, these adjustments are not independent either, with one often impacting another. Jacob once visited with a family whose depressed teenager felt unable to commit to anything except getting a little more sunshine. After two weeks of getting outside more to play sports with his father, this young man felt enough energy to experiment with adjustments to his diet, which triggered other improvements and a new momentum of gradual healing. (15)
It doesn’t help, of course, that some professionals can minimize these contributors to our emotional well-being. Of course, there are many professionals that recognize this reality. And many others describe supportive professionals that guided and helped encourage their adjustments in this area:
“I was somewhat nervous about trying [this] approach, but Dr. Lee quickly eased those fears during my first visit. She thoroughly explained … how nutrition and the use of nutritional supplements worked together to promote healing.” (104)
Perhaps the most significant shift I made as I was addressing the insomnia was to just pay attention to my intake—what was my mental, psychic diet, and how much time was I dedicating to digesting that intake, what I was ingesting. Once I really tended to that, I might do some calming exercises before bedtime, maybe 20 minutes of breathing, working through that undigested material, so that my body was actually going into rest—a deeper rest than I had known before...that created this virtuous cycle of getting a good night’s sleep, I would wake up feeling not even good by a normal person’s standards, but good for me, moving in the right direction. I could feel it. That was significant to me. Over time...really paying attention to the content I was taking in in my life. That allowed me to sleep better, and that kind of cascaded into other fortunate turnarounds.
And that influenced my sleeping cycle. And I started to rest more; and I realized I felt really good when I exercised. And I realized that as I was more comfortable in my body...I noticed what foods made me feel good and what foods made me feel sick. And so I talk about my story in terms of this domino effect that started with this tiny bit of awareness, that started with being still and taking account of what was going on. This awareness then shone into different parts of my life, and I just knew what needed to be changed. (11)