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“Turning into our emotions can feel a bit foreign since most of us live in such a pain denying culture. Isn’t it time to begin acknowledging stress, anxiety or pain rather than suppressing, repressing, or all-too-quickly medicating it? Can we learn to view these challenges as a rite of passage instead of running away from them?”
I had to practice some mindfulness upon reading this as I found it initially offense and quite honestly still do. Some levels of pain and anxiety are not by choice but rather by accident of birth if you have been blessed with brain chemistry that produces debilitating depression and anxiety. For people like me, it is not a rite of passage but life’s entire passage. It cannot be controlled without medication and you can’t run from it.
Thank you, Bob, for giving me an opportunity to clarify myself. Because I wouldn’t want any of my readers to go away from my site thinking that I didn’t believe in medicine to treat mood disorders. On the contrary, I believe medication is a helping hand. A few weeks back, in my post “A Note to the Severely Depressed–Don’t Try So Hard,” I described this very struggle: knowing when to use mindful techniques to help me, and identifying the times when to should put them away. I wrote:
I don’t know about you, but when I’m severely depressed 90 percent of my negative thinking is based on the fact that I am a failure because all my cognitive-behavioral strategies and positive thinking and mindfulness attempts aren’t working. I discussed this with Dr. Smith yesterday and she reminded me, once more, that severe depression can’t be treated in a mind-over-matter way.
I am guilty of occasionally charging people who wholeheartedly recommend mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral work as anti-medication folks. But that isn’t always true. The following post by psychologist Elisha Golstein has helped me to reconcile mindfulness with the seasons in my depression cycle that I merely have to take the pills and distract myself.
I hope his post below, “The One Suffering You Could Avoid,” will help illuminate those that view any and all attempts of mindful meditation and cognitive-behavioral strategies to be lame ways of telling ourselves fruity affirmations. In my estimation, there is a big difference between these helpful strategies and dangerous Scientology. And if they aren’t helpful, toss them aside! Because depression is absolutely a mood disorder that one doesn’t will on oneself.
There is a tradition on the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog. Every Monday, I cite a quote or a poem that is related to mindfulness and psychotherapy in some way and then explore it a bit and how it is relevant to our lives. For me, quotes and poetry can often sink me into a state of greater understanding. So for today, here is a quote by Franz Kafka:
“You can hold back from suffering of the world,
you have permission to do so,
and it is in accordance with your nature,
but perhaps this very holding back
is the one suffering you could have avoided.”
In a recent blog, “Mindful Monday: A Note to the Severely Depressed-Don’t Try So Hard,” author Therese Borchard wrote about her first hand experience with trying to get out of a depressed state through her bag of mindfulness and CBT tricks. What she found was the harder she tried and was unable to succeed the more her judgments about being a “failure” grew.
What her doctor’s told her was when you are in the eye of a depressive episode, “distract, don’t think.”
When we’re really depressed, the mind is searching for things “to do” in order to get us out. However, this is a trap, especially when we’re really depressed. The harder we try, the more stuck we get.
Why?
Because it’s a set up.
The moment we’re reaching for mindfulness practices as a means to an end, as a means in that moment to feel better, get out of depression, or achieve calm, is the moment our minds develop the rule: “If I don’t see any relief come from this, then I am a failure, or there must be something wrong with me.”
From then on, the mind becomes vigilant in looking for relief and every moment it is not found, is a moment that is laced with self judgment which digs us deeper into depression.
Also, with a depressive episode, the stronghold of automatic negative thoughts (ANTS) is so powerful in that moment that it is almost as if we are wearing permanent shaded glasses so no matter what we “do” the outcome is tinted with self judgment.
In our Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) groups for depressive relapse, we make sure that people who are beginning the group are not currently in a depressive episode for this very reason. The trap is created and often what we need when we’re feeling depressed is physical movement, contact with people, and actions toward self kindness (even if our minds tell us we don’t deserve it).
So Kafka tells us that the very desperate striving to try and get away from our pain is the very suffering that may have been avoided.
In other words, Therese has it right. When we are already depressed and “trying too hard,” to use these techniques, we are likely using them in service of avoiding pain and therefore not having that initial opportunity to see it for what it is. In her case, a biological condition that is best treated with distraction in these moments.
When we don’t have that initial recognition and we use “try too hard” using mindfulness or CBT to avoid it, this creates a tension, a dissonance with the way things are which adds to cauldron of not feeling well.
However, the caveat here is that as long as we recognize and acknowledge that we are suffering in any particular moment, we are no longer ignoring it. With this initial awareness we can see the depressive episode for what it might be, perhaps a chemical imbalance in the moment.
Then we can make a choice to do as Therese mentions “distract” or shift our focus to things that are on our anti-depressant check list such as seeking connection, be around people, be kind to yourself, play with your animal, or get outside and take a walk.
More than anything, trust your experience. There is no one way for everyone, become intimate with what is supportive for you during difficult times.
* Click here to subscribe to Beyond Blue and click here to follow Therese on Twitter and click here to join Group Beyond Blue, a depression support group. Now stop clicking.
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