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Making good connections at DA meetings.

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“Those of us who cope with life have put up some barriers, have made some disconnections but maintained many connections.  Those people who became depressed have disconnected themselves completely, and the barriers they have built are the walls of the prison of depression.”

CLARIFICATION OF THOUGHT

One of the many good connections that arise in taking charge of my life again is the many fine people that I meet at meetings. When I am depressed, it is true I tend to disconnect and withdraw away from family and friends. But, my admiration is for those who come to the meetings of the fellowship and who successfully connect with other members who are there trying to get better.

Now, since I have groups that meet specifically with the needs of the depressed people in mind, I am hopeful that these new connections with others can provide me with diverse ways to escape depression.”

MEDITATION

We are all connected in the life force which  we call creation.  This life course we call God.  No matter what many cultures have called this force, we all know it is the source of all life. Right now, we want to ask God, as we understand God to help us start anew, connect with others who can help us grow, so we can begin to live with hope. (Personal comments).

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SOURCES:  Higher Thoughts for Down Days: 365 Daily Thoughts and Meditations for members of 12 Step fellowship  groups. Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville.

Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. (2011) Depressed  Anonymous Publications. Louisvlle

Depressed Anonymous

I started believing in me

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“It has been a year now since I gave up on those negative thoughts that I had over my lifetime. I gave them up one at a time. It wasn’t like I dumped them all at once. It was like the people needed to show me a new life and see that I can be happy again. In the beginning, I thought the old familiar tapes had begun playing again. The old tapes saying that I was “stupid” began to play.  But then I would attend Depressed Anonymous meetings every week and I would go and find that I could use things that other people said at the meetings which would help me. That is one place where you could go and be fully accepted for whatever you had to say, and someone else there said they knew exactly what I was feeling. I also began to trust in God as my Higher Power. More and more, I turned it over to the Higher Power and said I can’t do all these things all by myself.

I did pray as hard as I could. I prayed every night. I believed that this change  was going to happen. I started believing in me. But the wonderful thing was that I began to realize that  I was no longer alone. A Higher Power was going to be there for me.”

Source: Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. Page 146. Personal stories section.

Step 01, Step 02, The 12 Steps

…Change Always Involves Uncertainty

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   Dorothy Rowe wrote:

“Dangers, perhaps even greater dangers, threaten you if you if you leave your prison of depression for the ordinary world. There you might have to change, and change always involves uncertainty. The good thing about being depressed is that you can make every day be the same. You can be sure of what is going to happen. You can ward off all those people and events that expect a response from  you. Your prison life has a regular routine, and like any long term prisoner, you grow accustomed to the jail security and predictability. The prison of depression may not be comfortable, but at least it is safe.”

In Depressed Anonymous we read that:

“We believe that to be conscious is to have been able first of all to listen to someone or something that expresses God’s desire to free us from our misery as soon as we are willing to turn  our minds and our wills over to it. Somewhere along the way, we were convinced that the only safe way to make this life bearable and predictable was to continually sadden ourselves, withdraw into our little shell  (prison) and make sure that our own small world was completely under our control. It was a perfect little world, this world of ours. It was dark, gloomy and painful, but at least we knew what we had. It is this predictableness that makes life inescapably hell for all of us, even though we’d rather have this than the total surprise of living.”

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COMMENT:  One of the things about this life is that it is hard to predict. We call this the  surprise of living. And for us to really get into living we have to face the fact that it is unpredictable. We must give up trying to control other people in our lives.

I have found that the spirit of mutuality which permeates all mutual aid groups, such as our own Depressed Anonymous fellowship, promotes that feeling of security which enables us to live with all sorts of unpredictability. We look forward to living our life,  with whatever comes. “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Step Two of Depressed Anonymous.

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SOURCES: #11.19  in The Depressed Anonymous Workbook. (2002) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Page 84.

Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. (2011) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. Page 97. Step Eleven.

NOTE: These two books, The Depressed Anonymous Workbook and Depressed  Anonymous,3rd edition, can be purchased together as the HOME STUDY KIT. Please VISIT THE STORE on how to order.

DA Literature

Depressed Anonymous is a light to guide me!

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Dear All,

I have been very busy lately, out living light, and I wanted  you all to know that just being on this list and reading the shares and the “big book” (Depressed Anonymous) has helped me tremendously to not fall into depression in blind denial as was my custom. Two things are helping me most…

“do the next right thing”

“motivation follows action”

Thank you so much for being here!

Also for the first time I can handle flashbacks from PTSD more easily because I am not depressed. I even had more repressed memory come up…I was depressed for about a day and a half and then got sick of it, and got up and went back to my daily life…it is  a miracle!  Thank you, thank you, thank you…I believe I am on the path that leads to depression being something I used to struggle with so mightily. I don’t think I’m cured, just that Depressed Anonymous is a light to guide me, to keep me on the path to wellness.”

Trish

To read more stories  how members of the Depressed Anonymous Fellowship have found serenity and a pathway out of the prison of their own depression, see the personal stories in Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville.

Please VISIT THE STORE to find more literature which can help broaden your own vistas of how the Twelve Steps frees us from depression.

Fellowship, Shame, Spirituality

Shame, Shame, Shame

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On deciding what “go to guy” to help me, when setting up the 12 Step Depressed Anonymous mutual aid group, I went to Aaron Beck’s book, Cognitive Therapy of Depression.  It was there that I found out the why’s and how’s we shame ourselves.  Many times we feel shame to tell another that we are depressed.  I have felt this myself. So, when it came time to form a group for the depressed, it was there that at many of the group sessions the fact of shame came up in the fellowship. I saw that what  was   needed was a therapeutic way to deal with the fact of how to overcome the “shaming” of ourselves.

Beck advises the following to a person saddled with shame:

The patient can be told that if he adopts an “antishame”  philosophy, a great deal of pain and discomfort can be avoided. When, for example, the patient makes a mistake that he believes is shameful, he can turn this experience into an antishame exercise by openly acknowledging it instead of hiding it. If he pursues this open policy long enough, his proneness to experience counterproductive shame will diminish. Moreover, he will be less inhibited and more flexible and spontaneous in his range of responses..

One way a therapist can help a patient to resolve feelings of shame over being depressed is illustrated in the following excerpt.

Patient: If the people at work found out I was depressed they would think badly of me.

Therapist: Over 10% of the population is depressed at one time or another. Why is this shameful?

Patient: Other people think people who become depressed are inferior.

Therapist: You are confusing a psychological condition with a social problem. This is a version of blaming the victim. Even if they did think badly of  you –either out of their own ignorance or adolescent way of rating people –you do not have to accept their evaluation. You feel ashamed only if you apply their value system to yourself, that is, if you really believe it is shameful.

Beck then goes on to say that “Other standard procedures, such as having patients list  advantages and disadvantages of expressing shame, can be used to deal with this response.”

Sources: (c) Aaron Beck . Cognitive Therapy of Depression (1979). The Guilford Press, NY. Page 179.

(c) Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville.

(c) The Depressed Anonymous Workbook. (2002) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville.

12 Step Meeting, Choice, Fellowship

The price of recovery

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Many times in my past I would ask myself if I could possibly live without my addiction? I always said “yes”, I could–but not just yet. How often I repeated that phrase to myself over the years. Or I’d tell myself “I’ll do it when I feel better.” That was another favorite mantra of mine. Have you ever said those same words to yourself? It’s like if I just keep pushing it off maybe the problem will go away. But, we know that is not how it works. If you are presently reading this and in recovery you know how this recovery really works.

For me, it was told to me that really what recovery is all about is to accept the pain of withdrawal  for the short term or to choose to continually  abuse yourself for the long term. When I have a toothache I can see a dentist and have the tooth and the associated pain   neutralized or I can continue with the pain till it is unbearable and then I  must do something radical and drastic–like pulling the tooth.

I began this whole painful process of recovery with an admission. I admitted that my life was unmanageable and that my life was out of control. That was the first step. And then having admitted that, I  listened to other members of a 12 Step fellowship group and I learned how the  program worked for them.  In fact it worked so well that many of them have not fallen back into any of their old past addictive behaviors. But as you and I know, there is a price to be paid for this new way of living. We first had to admit that we had a problem. We needed help.  And we needed it now. We had hit bottom. We then came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to a life of sanity. Making a decision to turn my life over to a Power greater than myself really got the ball rolling. I now knew that there is a God, of my understanding–and  I wasn’t God. When drinking and drugging we had the feeling that we  could do anything–that we were immortal and God’s gift to humankind.

This is where we had to face all this garbage that was ours and we had carried around for years–we needed to take an inventory of where we had screwed up. This is   painful to have to look in the mirror and see that person who made our life so miserable. No blaming anyone else. As Pogo, the comic character tells us, “we looked for the enemy and it was us.” You don’t have to look very far do you?  We might also look in the mirror and ask, “mirror , mirror who is the craziest of us all?” I think you get it. Without a doubt it is necessary if we want to stand tall and face life past and present with hope. and a sense of peace. There is pain, lots of it –but let me tell you, there is a great sense of relief that we no longer have to live in the shadow of life but now live in the light and the good humor of freedom.   The shackles of bondage are thrown off. I am a person who is free now and able to tell my own story at a fellowship meeting  just like when I walked through the 12 Step fellowship doors and found what I really was looking for: freedom from the pain of my depression and addictions. Look for a freedom group in your area.

SOURCE: (c) Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. (2011) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville.

(c) The Depressed Anonymous Workbook. (2002) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville.

NOTE: These two books comprise The Home Study Kit. See VISIT THE STORE.

I'll Do It When I Feel Better

The road less traveled

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So to trust oneself can bring to one’s life a new dimension of hope that there might be a possibility for a positive change. But we need to take the road less traveled — not the road that is worn and rutted with the traveled path of hopeless journeys and adventures. The road less traveled is the one that joins with fellow travelers who are filled with hope and purpose.

Rowe says that by listening to our inner voice and so trusting that quiet inner voice is the beginning of getting hope for your self and serves as the key out of depression. Bill W., says that as time passes and we begin  to “get” the program of recovery that we are better suited now to follow those intuitive hunches which come with our renewed trust in self and the god  of our understanding.”

A comment. Most of the worn and rutted paths that are a big part of our sadness and isolation is due to the way we ruminate and fixate  about the way are life is spinning out of control. We  continuously try to think our way out of box which has us imprisoned in those rutted paths, dead ends.  This negative thinking is familiar–it’s like the train that travels on rails that are shiny with years of continual use.

Now, with our Twelve Step program of recovery our minds are taking the path that leads to peace and serenity.  We  have a way out of our isolation and pain.

Are you willing to take the road less traveled? Let us help you do just that. We can chart out a path for you that works and works for as long as you stay on the path. That’s a promise.

SOURCES: I’LL DO IT WHEN I FEEL BETTER.(2015) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. Page 78. (Chapter on TRUST).

Prayer

3rd Step prayer

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A member of the Depressed Anonymous fellowship shared this prayer.

“God I give  you my life and my will today…to do with me what you see fit.  I ask that you use me as your tool and instrument to Bless your children whom you want Blessed. I thank you for finding favor upon me to do your work and will. I am privileged to be chosen.”

Submitted by Debra S  / Her 3rd Step prayer

SERENITY PRAYER

“God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things that we can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Today, we “trust God to be God, and let this Power help you, as it has helped millions of other men and women before you.”

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SOURCE:  Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition (2011) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. Page 52.

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Something powerful is starting to blossom within me.

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Promise # 12 of Depressed Anonymous tells us that: We would suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Pages 51-53.

“Before we discovered  the program of Depressed Anonymous we were convinced that the only chance that we had to get better was to wait while the drugs kicked in and then everything would be alright. But now we are certain that our ability to get well is based on how much we develop the belief that we can choose how we feel and think.  Indeed, we are now convinced that we can either sad ourselves or choose not to sad ourselves. The community and common bonds of the Depressed Anonymous fellowship produce a feeling that as other members of the group are recovering so can I.

We must be willing to let go of all thoughts that tell us that we will never get  well. These are the same thoughts that have imprisoned us over the years. We now listen to the God of our understanding and proceed with the belief that what we hold about the world on the outside of us is determined and governed by the world that is lived within us.

We are in a brand new way, on a new path, and find ourselves committed to a fresh belief that something powerful is starting to blossom within me. A peace that surpasses all understanding is beginning to be born as we learn to relax and wait and listen for that still small voice.  We let go, we surrender, we relax and let it speak.  We pray that the God of our understanding make a way out of this desert of misery just as it has already created a way for those of us who live in the fellowship. Our thoughts move inside us with light and peace.”

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SOURCE:  I’ll do it when I feel better. (2015) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. Pages 51-53