PTSD Healing Thought of the Day: How To Use Depression
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 • PTSD Healing Thought of the Week •
Depression is an enormous issue for us PTSDers. It hangs huge, dark and luminous over our heads every day with such heaviness it seems like even Atlas would eventually feel his strength sapped.
There’s nothing good about that despondent feeling - it serves no purpose, renders us even more helpless and only adds to our already great suffering.
Or does it?
Maybe we need to change our perceptions of depression.
In his book Care of the Soul Thomas Moore writes,
Because of its painful emptiness, it is often tempting to look for a way out of depression. But entering into its mood and thought can be deeply satisfying. Depression is sometimes described as a condition in which there are no ideas – nothing to hang on to. But maybe we have to broaden our vision and see that feelings of emptiness, the loss of familiar understandings and structures in life, and the vanishing of enthusiasm, even though they seem negative, are elements that can be appropriated and used to give life fresh imagination.
I’ve often heard the saying, “The only way out is through.” Perhaps moving into and through PTSD depression is one way we work to integrate traumatic memories into our persona and worldview.
Maybe we should not give into depression but walk into it, heads held high, looking around for what we can learn, how we can assimilate new knowledge, and how we can use this murky feeling to ultimately help us heal.
Tags: heal, posttraumatic stress disorder, ptsd, symptoms, thomas moore, treat
great advice, I needed that today, thanks
@ Acorn — Ah! Don’t we all have those days? And isn’t it better to be able to see what we might proactively get out of it — how we might use it to our advantage — than only to experience it as happening to us instead of us happening to it?
I’ve often come to think of it as a way in which we mentally pause, take stock of some unpleasant things and then move on.
I know I used to cycle from down to up quite regularly.
Yes … “walk into it” … One of the ways that I do this is to constantly check in with what my posture is doing … Just this morning while I was driving in the car with my husband, we noticed an elderly lady shuffling along a sidewalk, her head bent forward at an unnatural angle … G. said, “God, she must be in so much pain…”
I instinctively “listened in” to what my own body was doing at that moment … and reminded myself of a wee trick I learned from the Alexander Technique –> to imagine that my head was held softly aligned and aloft by a balloon, my neck open and spacious … It’s little perceptions like that, made into postitive habits, that can make instant, small changes … Sometimes it’s as simple as directing our eyes upward rather than down … taking one deep, gentle breath … allowing a sigh … doing *anything* to bring some sensation and good feeling into the body. These small moments of sensory pleasure and space remind me that depression is not the “all” of my experience …
@ Mike – I like that idea of a mental pause — it combines both the concept of allowing it but not getting stuck there. Always a good thing.
@ Jaliya – Wow, great tip about being in the moment and the body. That does make a huge difference and in dealing with depression would work to ground us. In my own experience depression always lead to more and deeper dissociation. Using the Alexander Technique would have been really good for me! You’re so right: little perceptions, positive habits, instant changes. Such a simple recipe; easy to hold onto when the black days descend.