If could relieve my depression with a little pill, I would gladly swallow it. I have battled depression for as long as I can remember but it seemed to get worse when I started raising a family. During my thirties, I tried everything from Amitriptyline to Zoloft, more than a dozen anti-depressants in all. If I could only find the right medicine, I thought… I kept trying various medications for nearly a decade, desperately looking for a magic bullet to dissolve the heaviness and emptiness that sometimes colors my world.

Each pill numbed the emptiness in varying degrees, and each had its own special side-effects ⎯ from the merely annoying dry throat and foggy head, to horrendous jitters, nausea and loss of sexual desire. But, hey, better than depression ⎯ right? The side effects were socially acceptable. Even complaining about them was a bonding mechanism with PTA moms and co-workers alike. Admitting to overwhelming sadness and hopelessness, though, is about as socially acceptable as an open mouth sore. As a teenager, my dad would jokingly tell me to stop walking around like I had a rain cloud following me. I learned to keep my depression to myself.

Even so, when I was 38 I decided to clean out my medicine cabinet, cold turkey. The catalyst was an emotionally devastating hysterectomy. I went through a period of deep grieving over my loss. It’s not that I wanted more children; my pain, in a simple nutshell, was about losing an important piece of my identity as a mother. This pain was much worse than the gray fog I sometimes felt, and I knew it must be a key to something even deeper. Perhaps, I thought, this was a plea from my body and soul that I need to pay attention to some important information about myself that I had been ignoring.

There’s a Hawaiian saying that contends you are responsible to act on what you know. Sometimes, it’s just plain easier not to know. But after my hysterectomy I felt that I couldn’t go back to medicating my emptiness and being an emotional zombie. I had a resounding hunch that if I could feel this depth of pain, I could also feel a greater depth of contentment. There had to be something more to life than just keeping in-step with the status quo. I needed to find my own stride.

So, I decided to go off anti-depressants for good and truly listen to my overwhelming sadness ⎯ what it was telling me about my life ⎯ instead of dampening it. During the past decade, I’ve been on an empowering journey. I’ve discovered loving ways to gently confront and release my depression to make room for joy, hope and peace. The quest itself is a healing salve.

I started with small steps, like journaling first thing in the morning to converse with my soul. It helped. I found that when I wrote down the worries and fears that tend to run round and round in my mind like a caged gerbil on an exercise wheel, I could look at them more objectively. And insights would pour out on the page that I didn’t even realize were there. It’s still a comfort to realize that I’m much wiser than I think!

Slowly, I began to consciously focus on the positive ⎯ some hours or days more successfully than others. I got in the habit of taking a moment periodically throughout the day for a silent prayer of thanks for all of life’s little pleasures. I found that I have so much to be thankful for ⎯ from the warm sun on my scalp, to a favorite song on the radio, to sharing a laugh with my two sons.

Gratitude is a wonderful antidote for negativity, but sometimes it’s difficult to see the light of appreciation through the murky shadows of depression. Just during the past few years, I’ve started carrying a 5×7 gratitude notepad in my purse. On those days when my mind is having trouble hanging onto the small gifts that every day brings, I jot them down. It helps.

As I started using inner reflection to hook into the positive in the world, and myself, it became easier to gently push aside all of the negative debris that had built up over the years and fueled my depression. I liked how this new way of thinking and being felt, and I wanted more. I used both psychotherapy and meditation to reflect on what I really wanted from life. As the answers came, I discovered that my depression stemmed from not honoring my authentic desires and seeking approval from others at the expense of my soul.

Mine is a journey in progress ⎯ most often, it’s two steps forward and one step back. I’ve tried acupuncture, biofeedback, psychotherapy, meditation, energy work, neuro-feedback, more psychotherapy, homeopathy, various forms of emotion-release massage, and even more psychotherapy ⎯ with varying degrees of success and conviction. I adopted the view that whatever didn’t harm me just might help and sometimes, miraculously, it did.

The key to my success in coping with depression without medication is my trial-and-error approach to developing a toolbox of remedies that work for me. I don’t know why they all work, but my experience over time tells me that they do. I hesitate to make recommendations because this is such a personal journey. What works for me may very well not work for someone else. Again, I believe it’s the process of finding ways to really listen to what the sadness and pain are revealing ⎯ and then honoring that new information as it comes along ⎯ that is healing. This was my problem with taking medication: It merely masked my pain; it didn’t help me to better understand where it came from or how to honor it.

Did I make some investments that didn’t pay off? You bet. There’s the time I invested thousands of dollars and three days of my time on a self-improvement seminar that just didn’t resonate for me. Neuro-feedback was a frustrating experience for me because the results were unpredictable. Sometimes the electrodes that manipulated my alpha and beta brainwaves were calming and sometimes they gave me a migraine. I went through six psychotherapists before I found one who really “gets” me.

I don’t regret any of it, not even the mistakes. It’s all been a process of learning to trust my gut feelings about what really works for me. So, I’ve learned to be more selective. I keep what works and gently place everything else back in the toolbox for someone else to try.

I don’t profess to have all of the answers for everyone. I know people whose lives have improved ten-fold thanks to the right anti-depressant. I envy them. What I’ve learned is that, for me, there is no “cure.” There are only tools to help get over the rough spots and become more at-peace.

I can honestly say that I am no longer paralyzed by my depression. I still have rough days, more often hours, but I now have the means to keep moving. It’s the moving, one foot in front of the other, that’s the real remedy.
To me, that what everyday faith is all about.

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Tagged as: connections, depression, Finding my faith, inspiration, mindfulness

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