The following testimony is  part of an ongoing look inside a person who is in recovery. The Anonymous author will continue to share with us her self and her personal struggles, as well as victories gained through her belief in a power greater  than herself.

“They say avoid emotional complexities in early days of recovery. I had come to the same conclusions on my own. The worst thing on earth for me was to be pushed back into the mood swings and terrible depression, but the fact that I didn’t have a “conventional”   type of relationships did not stand in my favor. After a year in recovery I came to believe true relationships don’t have to be a strain as long as people involved in that be straight and frank.

But my non-conventional type of relationships tied in a bit with the question of “Models” and coming to conclusions  of one’s own…I didn’t have “new models” myself earlier in life, so I was at the mercy of things in   society (or unworkable things from my family background), but wrongly enough again  I was believing in unconventional  type of my relationships without pressures.  It’s possible to work out “one who really is” and what one really wants from life…to see more fully what one wants to avoid and what to cultivate. The best way to become “Full person” while avoiding pitfalls.

With me, in my own life any sense at all of an alternative Model for living really arose when I found my Depressed Anonymous meeting. Before that looking back I was always searching but inevitably perhaps I usually met up with the wrong (unstable, rebel without a cause) sort of people, so there was no one helpful to talk to.

I had faced problems …like “who am I” and “what’s the best way to live.”  My inquiring spirit hasn’t been for books alone.  I was driven to books as one way of finding answers to these bigger questions of “how to live”, it’s an ethical question, so I tended to be “a moral”  person,  but not in the usual and social or religious rules sense.

My longer family trajectory, from rural surroundings to the “big city” added to my confusions for :finding  “true model.”  It was my parents who made this (very painful, disruptive journey (they had come from rural, peasant society to the big city).

So there is this big generational difference and I personally have  had to face the kind of problems that were around here in my country in the late 2oth century, the sort of thing one can see on the Lowry’s paintings: poverty, misery, oppression.

My family always had to try to “make ends meet”.  There is not much room for thinking through one’s values, working out “who am I” in such circumstances, but miraculously Hafez (Persian poet) smiled on me. I was allowed to make mistakes, to be unstable for a time. What matters is the basic human heart, the rest of my life will be an “upwards ascent.” That is why it is better to ‘hit rock bottom’ to have the severe problems early on, then things can get better.

Life after this ‘rock bottom’ is not a bowl of cherries as they say in meetings, but it’s a damned sight better that it ever was before and one could insure against non-recurrence of more severe problems by continuing with this search for ‘change of model’, by following some kind of ‘program for living’.  May God bless us for the courage we’ve had searching to be honest with ourselves. Not many people are in our league.”

–Anonymous

We are grateful for this testimony and pray that it may touch others as it has touched me.

We look forward  to more pieces in the story that make up her journey out of the prison of depression

“When you are depressed you know that nothing in your surroundings has changed, yet for you the color has drained out of the world and a barrier as impenetrable as it is invisible cuts you off from the rest of the world.

The experience of depression is the sense of being alone in a prison.

Someone who is depressed doesn’t say, “I feel as if I am in a prison’ but ‘ I am in a prison.’

If you want to find out if someone is depressed, ask that person, “if you could paint a picture of what you’re feeling what sort of picture would you paint?  ”

Each person will give you a different image.  Here are some images that have been described to me.

I’m  in swirling water and being slowly sucked down.

I’m walking endlessly in the dark.

A drooping, dying flower wrapped in a  blanket.

A child in a dark corner facing a wall.

I’m walking along an empty road that’s going nowhere.

I’m on a quay and the last boat is sailing away. I can’t leave the shore.

I’m in  a box without doors or windows.

I’m in the center of an empty, treeless plain. The plain goes on forever and I cannot move.”

All these images have the same meaning. The person is alone in a prison.

If you asked the same question of someone who is unhappy the answer given would describe a miserable  scene but there would be no sense of being trapped and alone.

It is this sense of isolation which makes depression so terrible. As all prison warders and torturers know, complete isolation for an indefinite period will break the strongest person.

Because the experience of depression is so exceedingly painful many people call it an illness and try to get rid of it. Yet, if ever you’ve tried to help someone who’s   depressed you’ll know the depressed person, while asking for help, manages to turn aside all your efforts.”

SOURCE: Dorothy Rowe’s Guide to life.1995. HarperCollins/Publishers . Pages 78-79.

Our  spirituality is derived from a belief that the God of our understanding, or  Power greater than ourselves can restore each of us to sanity. And once we have made a decision to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of God as we understood God, we will find that it is one of the most important  decisions we will ever make in our lives. I know this for a fact personally.

In the following paragraphs, Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous provides us with some of his lived out experiences with having discovered the God of his understanding.

“Mine was exactly the kind of deep-seated block we so often see today in new people who say they are atheistic or agnostic. Their will to disbelieve is so powerful that apparently they prefer a date with the undertaker to an open minded and experimental quest for God.

Happily for me, and for most of my kind who have since come along in AA., (and now Depressed Anonymous) the constructive forces brought to bear in our Fellowship have nearly always overcome the colossal obstinacy. Beaten into complete defeat by alcohol, (or depression) , confronted by the  living proof of release, and surrounded by those who can speak to us from the heart, we have finally surrendered.

And then, paradoxically, we have found ourselves in a new dimension, the real works of spirit and faith. Enough willingness, enough open-mindedness — and there it is!”

Bill W., makes this comment in Alcoholics Anonymous:

“We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired. All of us, whatever our race, creed, or color, are the children of a living Creator, with whom we may form a relationship upon simple, and understandable terms as soon  as we are willing and honest enough to try.”

SOURCE: As Bill Sees it. Pages 174-175.

“I believe that because so many sights, sounds and situations have been connected with sad feelings in my early years that today these same sights, smells and sounds trigger the same feeling in me today. It is automatic.  I have learned that over time and with  working one’s recovery program that one’s sad feelings become less and less and one’s more pleasant feelings begin to dominate.” Copyright. (c)  Higher Thoughts for down days. May 11.

Comment

I remember so well the painful feelings that accompanied my descent into that bottomless pit which we call depression. The frightening and unstoppable descent with all its pain and anxiety continued to work its paralyzing effect on my whole body. There seemed to be nothing that I could do to eradicate these feelings of “jitteriness” and anxiety. Even though there are no  such feelings as bad or good, these feelings have energy which  can produce  unpleasant or pleasant emotions. Feelings are produced by our thoughts, either conscious or unconscious, and these feelings  produce moods, which gradually effect our behaviors. So, in my own time of being depressed, what was once  my active life, suddenly turned sullen and static. I could no longer force myself to get out of bed a morning  and it was all I could do to force myself to get up and moving.

My thinking was totally barren of hope. It was gradually apparent to me that I had better do something soon, if I was to survive. It was then that I forced myself to get up, get out of bed and initiate  a walking program.  What once was no big deal in my life, namely walking, now served as the way out of my depression. In time my feelings changed from that persistent and  painful hollowness and jitteriness, to those of an inner calmness and serenity. And my thinking, now anchored by hope and a walking program that  was producing its’ positive effect with  pleasant feelings, once a normal part of my life now retuned.  I  have remained depression free ever since that time which now has reached more than thirty years. For that I am grateful to the program of Depressed Anonymous and my daily living out the  spiritual principles of 12 Step recovery.

SOURCES:    Believing is seeing: 15 ways to leave the prison of depression.

Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition.

I’ll do it when I feel better.

Higher Thoughts for down days.

    Depressed Once -Not twice. An autobiography of the  spiritual journey out of depression.

 VISIT THE STORE  here  at our website to order these and more publications    from Depressed Anonymous Publications.