“The idea of twenty-four living applies primarily to the  emotional life of the individual. Emotionally speaking, we must not live in yesterday, nor in tomorrow.

“But I have never been able to see this means the individual, the group, or A.A., (or Depressed Anonymous group) as a whole should give no thought whatever to how  to function tomorrow or even in the more distant future. Faith alone never constructed the house you live in. Faith had to be a blueprint and a lot of work to bring it into reality.

Bill W., in  As Bill Sees It. Page284.

The mind is a wonderful organ and more powerful and complex than the greatest computers made. In fact so many of us  who live to plan, organize and get things done, it is seemingly impossible to  produce anything without a blueprint. We have to have a plan, a business plan if we are business people, a  route to take, a personal vision that will make happen what we want to happen. Sometimes  one hears that we must just “let go and let God.” I  hope that what a person picks up here  is not that we just let God run our lives without input from us. That is not what is meant. Like Bill points out above, faith alone never built a house but combined with the energy/work of getting something done, that is where we must be. And so it goes with the Depressed  Anonymous mutual aid program of recovery. And this is true of all our 12 Step programs.

In DA we have a myriad of literature  offered to members where they can apply the Steps to their daily lives and gradually work their way out of the pit of depression. And if they stick to the plan as outlined in our Manual they will soon discover the truth of the Second Step, which tells us that we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. And of course this takes work, a belief that we too can feel better if we do all that is suggested in the program. I know it is true and so do the thousands of those other folks who have worked the program.

But first we must have a faith that something good can happen to me just as it has happened to all those other people who by following the Twelve Step blueprint, have found themselves in a better place in every way.

If this is your first visit to find out what we are about and who we are we believe  that if you give yourself the time and effort to read our literature at our website, plus our newsletters, that you will begin to grasp what is possible for you just as it was for me. You will have  a blueprint that will definitely give you all the resources and tools to build a better life–without depression. That is a Promise!

Hugh

To cast out the darkness, familiar to all of us, we do have an options. We can either allow the dark side of our thinking to ruin our day or we can light a fire in our mind and have light and hope.

There are daily  uplifting  thoughts  to be found in  Higher Thoughts for Down days:365 daily thoughts  and meditations  for members of  12 Step fellowship groups,  now available on KINDLE e readers. In fact you can take all these wonderful thoughts with you on your KINDLE and they are as available anywhere and everywhere.

Light the light in your mind today and get hopeful. Higher Thoughts will give you something positive to think about and reflect upon as you go about your day.

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.