Colour Supplement

Articles by Christians around the world

Sunday 25 February 2007

 

Thoughts on depression after two tears of medication

By Gordon Atkinson

 

 

It’s been just about a year since I’ve written about my ongoing struggle with depression.

So how are things, you ask?

Just fine. Good. Mostly good. I think good. I’ve been on Wellbutrin for over a year now. Three little white pills every morning. I don’t ask questions; I just take them.

I think this is the way I’m supposed to feel. I remember feeling like this before. I get happy and excited about things now. I get sad sometimes, but the sadness seems appropriate. It comes and it goes. I’m an introspective kind of guy, so a certain amount of ennui is in my makeup.

So, good I think. I’m feeling good.

But I have lost something over the last two years. What depression took from me was my simple way of thinking about the human psyche. Depression has made things messy for me, and it has made me much more forgiving and gentle when I meet people who are emotionally out of control.

I used to think that the human mind divided neatly into two spheres, a right and a left. It’s a metaphoric division, of course, but yeah, two sides that one imagines could be pulled apart like two halves of an orange. Left brain and right brain. Your basic dualism. That sort of thing.

We think and we feel. We have reason and we have emotion. Of the two kinds of human experience, the emotional part was not to be trusted, as far as I was concerned. Not in relationships; not in daily living; and most of all, not in the spiritual realm. I have always had a deep fear and loathing of overly emotional religion.

Emotion, it seemed to me, was very arbitrary. It often led you in the wrong directions. It made you do things that did not make sense. Whereas the rational part of the human mind was careful and reasoning and able to see truth, even through a fog of emotion.

I proudly labelled myself as a cerebral person. I spent a lot of time thinking and talking and arguing and reasoning. Not so much time feeling things. I thought I was in control of all that silly, emotional stuff. I felt numb, mostly. And I assumed that you weren’t feeling things unless you, well, FELT them.

Oh, you feel things. Here’s a shocker. No one feels things in more dangerous ways than the person who thinks he feels nothing. That’s the guy you have to watch out for.

Jung said it this way: If you do not come to terms with your shadow side, the opposite of your strengths, you will be ruled by that shadow side. I believe that now.  In my case, all of my unexplored feelings were sucked into a vortex of anger. Of course, I was too sophisticated to let my anger out in healthy ways. So I ate my anger. I ate it dry. It was like swallowing unshelled peanuts. It did not sit well in my gut.

That’s when depression exploded my simple ways of thinking. You can say whatever you want about the emotional side of human beings, but emotions rule the day. They dictate our actions FAR more than we think. People live right out of their guts. We are primitive in that way.

When my depression became critical, it rose from beneath me like a dark wave. It tossed me about, laughing at my feeble words of protest. It kicked my ass, but good. I was unable to act in ways that made sense. My feelings of sorrow and panic washed away my control like a tsunami washes away the hammocks hanging near the beach.

I hid my sorrow as long as I could, and then I began to pick compulsively at the skin on my right hand until it bled. It hurt so bad, and I would swear I would never do it again. But then my left hand would start creeping over to my right hand. I couldn’t stop it.

So much for Mr. Cerebral.

And then, just to make sure that my worldview was completely shattered, that one stone was not left standing on another, and that salt was sown in my fields, I began to think crazy thoughts. Depression made me think crazy things.

THINK them.

I
Thought
Crazy
Things

I had thoughts that were not based in reality. Do you know how frightening and horrifying that is to a person like me?

At one point I decided that my wife of twenty years no longer loved me. I thought that, baby. THOUGHT IT.

And I thought that the people in my church didn’t like me anymore and were probably talking about how to fire me without totally devastating our family. I figured they would be nice in the way they did it, but yes, people were talking about me and trying to find a way to get rid of me.

Um, that’s some crazy shit. I am many things, but unloved and unappreciated are not among them.

So I was wrong about all of it. The simple division between thought and emotion, the control I thought I had by denying things I felt, and my arrogant pride in thinking that I understood myself well enough to have clear thoughts.

That’s what depression took from me.

What’s left? Let’s see…

A lot of humility and grace. I feel sorrow when I see men whose faces are hard and whose anger is beyond their control. I wish I could make them little boys again and hold them in my lap.

A new respect for people who deal well with their emotions, trusting them and experiencing them and nurturing them.

Gratitude for how I feel. Feeling good is very nice. I like it. I like to see my daughters and feel happy about it. I like to look forward to doing things instead of just doing them because duty calls.

Silliness. I’m such a silly person. You can’t believe how silly I am. I’m the silliest person in our whole family. Just a silly, giddy, goofy, funny boy.

Spiritual joy. I feel a deep, wondrous joy about my spiritual journey. Paying ritual homage to the power/intelligence behind the cosmos is a rich and meaningful thing to me. It is closely tied to humility. In the absence of any hope of figuring things out all by myself, I join myself to pilgrims across the ages, singing songs, reciting poetry, and telling sacred stories under the stars. Depression stole the joy from my faith, and I'm glad to have it back.

And last, love. Love was left behind after the depression went away. I’ve rediscovered love, and it’s like finding a baby bunny hiding under a zucchini leaf. You may pick her up and hold her, but be very careful. She’s trembling. But isn’t she the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen in all your life?

Gordon Atkinson is pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas and has his own outstanding website www.reallivepreacher.com.  We are most grateful to Gordon for his permission to reproduce his essays here. 

Gordon is author of  RealLivePreacher.com (Eerdmans), a collection of essays from his Web log of the same name, which is available to borrow from the Parish Library, or to purchase from Amazon

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