Dorothy Rowe in her book  Depression: The way out of  your prison tells us that friends are wonderful people.

“I always regret that I do not devote more time to my friends –write them longer letters more frequently, visit them more often, invite them here more often  — but in  my mental map of my world my friends stand like giant statues of themselves.  My friends are the people with whom I have a continuous conversation.  There may be long gaps between exchanges, since many of them live in Australia or America, but the conversation is never interrupted or concluded.

To turn an acquaintance into a friend you have to give that person time and attention. If you have no friends it is because  you are so wrapped up in yourself that you do not give other people your time and attention. One part of not giving time and attention  to other people is fearing that if you do they will reject you.  The other part is feeling that other people are boring and you have better things to do than talk to them.  But if you want to find your way out of the prison of  depression, you need friends.  ”  Pages 201-202.

Sheldon Kopp said, “Who can love me if no one knows me.”

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Really to have friends and to connect authentically with others is to tell our story. To do so initiates a contact with another at a  deeper and visceral level. This is the “miracle of the Depressed Anonymous group.” And when we are depressed doesn’t it make sense that we find it less difficult to share with someone like ourselves than to that person who is clueless about what it feels like to be depressed.  When we  share our stories, we find our stories mirror groups of people who, because of their own sadness and feeling worthless–in other words, being vulnerable,  will be the cement that binds us together as  friends. We are no longer alone and adrift in this sea of humanity. And as persons get to know me they will in turn be able to love me and know me as a friend. It is a fact  that our friendships grow and blossom the longer we stay involved  with the  fellowship.

Want to have a friend?  —  then be a friend.

For more information read how friends are made in   Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. (2002) Depresed Anonymous Publications. Louisville.

Hugh

” Trapped in our traditional rugged individualism, we are an extraordinarily lonely people.  So lonely, in fact, that many cannot even acknowledge their loneliness  to themselves, much less to others. Look at the sad, frozen faces all around you and search in vain for the souls hidden behind masks of makeup, masks of pretense, masks of composure. It does not have to be that way.  Yet many  — most — know no other way. We are desperately in need of a new ethic of “soft individualism” an understanding of individualism which teaches that we cannot be truly ourselves until we are able to share freely the things we most have in common: our weakness, our incompleteness our imperfection, our inadequacy, our sins, our lack of wholeness and self sufficiency. It is the understanding expressed by those in the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous when they say ” I’m not OK and your not OK, but that’s OK.”  It is a kind of softness that allows those necessary barriers, our outlines of our individual selves to be permeable membranes, permitting ourselves to seep out and the selves of others to seep in. It is the kind of individualism that acknowledges our interdependence not merely in the intellectual catchwords of the day but in the very depths of our hearts. It is the kind of individualism that makes real community possible.”

Source: M. Scott Peck.The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace. Touchstone. Page 58.