{"id":675,"date":"2007-11-30T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-30T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/beyondblue\/2007\/11\/larry-parker-how-do-you-move-b.html"},"modified":"2007-11-30T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-30T11:00:00","slug":"larry-parker-how-do-you-move-b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2007\/11\/larry-parker-how-do-you-move-b.html","title":{"rendered":"Larry Parker: How Do You Move Beyond Blue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nIf you\u2019ve been reading Beyond Blue<\/a> with any regularity, you know Larry Parker<\/a>, because Larry is my most, um, vocal and frequent, commenter. He is extremely intelligent. Philosophical and sophisticated brains like his are the reason I kept my mouth shut in theology class. I let boys and girls like him duke it out with the professor over original sin or the problem of evil or how God can be both compassionate and just as I sat back and doodled in my notebook\u2014or scribbled the different symbols of the Holy Trinity–saying to myself, “It\u2019s all a mystery anyway, guys.”
\nMinds like his remind me why I should have studied harder for the SAT.
\nIf you want to know more about Larry, you should check out his blog hosted on Beliefnet\u2019s Community at http:\/\/community.beliefnet.com\/doxieman122<\/a>. There he has written some fabulous posts that give Beyond Blue<\/a> readers a wider context with which to understand his comments here. I have included two of his journal entries or posts following this interview. i
\nSo, dear Beyond Blue<\/a> readers, here is our friend, Larry<\/a>!
\n1) Okay, Larry. You\u2019ve expressed your complicated relationship with God on many Beyond Blue posts, but it wasn\u2019t until I read your journal or blog entry called “Wrestling With G-d<\/a>” that I fully understood your perspective on faith. In that entry you write this:<\/p>\n

I guess you’d have to say I’m still a theist, and more of a lapsed Catholic\/Christian than an agnostic or atheist, simply because 1. I do care, badly, whether there is a G-d and 2. I believe there is a soul, whether it is destroyed on earth (if there is a h*ll, and people go there upon death, I don’t think Satan even has a soul to destroy by that point …) or preserved and elevated to heaven. And some theologians would say that the very fact that one doubts means that one admits there is a possibility of G-d; therefore, look at the positive — one actually has faith. . . . OK. Nevertheless, my faith is a weak one right now. Or — at most — one that is constantly wrestling with G-d, as Jacob did famously in Genesis 32.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You do wrestle with G-d so much in your writing. It\u2019s wonderful. I hate to point to you and say \u201cBeliever. Believer. Sticks and stones may break my faith but you\u2019re still a believer. . ., \u201d but isn\u2019t it the people who DON\u2019T wrestle with God who get into trouble? Isn\u2019t the wrestling itself a form of prayer? <\/strong><\/p>\n


\nFirst of all, Therese, with the number of books you have written about Catholicism, and the posts I read on BB, you sell yourself WAY short on your theology expertise ?
\nI want to preface the entire interview by saying I\u2019d like to focus on the event-based causes of depression. I strongly believe depression has a major biological component, but I think it would be interesting for BB readers to hear one man\u2019s life journey and the stresses that helped kindle the brain chemistry already lurking. (My late grandmother had bipolar disorder most of her life; and there is a history of mental illness on my mother\u2019s side of the family.)
\nIf you go to my Beliefnet page<\/a>, the first description you will find of me is \u201cI’m a Jesuit-educated ex-altar boy who was seduced (in a good way) by Catholic ritual \u2026\u201d To paraphrase Robert Duvall in \u201cApocalypse Now,\u201d I love the smell of incense in the morning. Even today.
\nBut I have always had trouble with male authority figures \u2013 and in Catholicism, isn\u2019t G-d the ultimate male authority figure? \u2013 because my own earthly father was more like Robert Duvall in \u201cThe Great Santini.\u201d A military man, alcoholic, constantly traveling, and a martinet when he was home. (And who, I later learned, never wanted kids because of his own horrific childhood \u2013 but went along with my mom\u2019s desires for a family.)
\nBeing an altar boy was kind of a refuge for me in pre-pubescent days. That\u2019s how G-d was to me then \u2013 a \u201chigher father,\u201d in President Bush\u2019s words, guarding me from my own father and his dysfunctions.
\nBut Catholic doctrine is, shall we say, not very friendly to the hormones raging in pubescent boys \u2013 or, for that matter, in post-pubescent \u201cboys\u201d and \u201cgirls\u201d of any age who are unmarried. (Particularly if they are not, as I am not since my depression diagnosis, interested in having children.) So \u2013 although I was an obedient Catholic on sexual matters through high school (and actually college as well) — I was having doubts about my religion by the time I went to Georgetown.
\nThere, I saw other people wrestling with G-d, who were themselves authority figures. Often the issues involved sexuality and gender \u2013 my Jesuit advisor who was gay and ended up having to leave the order (not because he did anything wrong \u2013 he wouldn\u2019t hurt a fly, let alone a child); the ex-seminarian who grappled daily with whether he made the right decision to leave the track to priesthood, even though he dearly loved his wife; the radical feminist bitterly opposed to Humanae Vitae who was an equally fervent member of her parish. And my own doubts deepened.
\nWhere the doubts extended from religion to spirituality itself, obviously, came with my depression. As you hinted in your introduction, what is the role of evil in the world? How much is free will and how much is fate? How do you balance compassion and justice? The Jesuits are wonderful educators, but their Socratic methods can lead to constant questioning and especially self-questioning \u2013 which is perhaps not the best mindset for someone with depression to have.
\nMany people, if they think of existential crisis in literary terms, go to Robert Frost\u2019s great poem \u201cThe Road Not Taken.\u201d But there is a short story by the magnificent Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges called \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths,\u201d that notes that life is really \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d over and over and over and over and over again \u2013 like a flow chart gone mad.
\nUntil life becomes a labyrinth, and you feel lost in it, and you want to find your way back out but don\u2019t know how.
\nThat labyrinth image, I think, sums up my relationship both with G-d and with my own brain. And, perhaps, that of many people with depression.
\n2) I also loved your journal or blog entry called “The Best Da*n Support Group in the World<\/a>.” It was very endearing, and by the way you\u2019ve described it in your comments on Beyond Blue\u2019s message boards, I know how important it was to your recovery from depression. You were the group leader (facilitator) for six months before moving. So you\u2019re basically combining two of my 12 steps of recovery: find buddies (or support), and helping others (or service). I realize your symptoms aren\u2019t going to go away with facilitating a group, but do you think having to be there as their leader helped distract you from feeling so lousy on nights you wished someone else had raised his hand and volunteered for your job?<\/strong>
\nYou\u2019re exactly right, Therese \u2013 being a group leader could be wonderfully therapeutic, sometimes especially on the nights I could barely stand to go.
\nI call it the George Bailey and Clarence factor. Remember the scene in \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life\u201d when George is on the bridge, his car crashed, at his lowest point and ready to end it all. Suddenly, he sees Clarence the angel drowning in the river. What does he do? He forgets his own troubles and saves Clarence \u2013 just as he had saved his brother from drowning so many years before.
\nAnd thus begins the story of how all the \u201clittle things\u201d George had done in life that he had forgotten about added up to a life that was literally priceless to the people of Bedford Falls. It\u2019s a lesson I tend to forget about myself that I need to constantly relearn (and in fact, the lessons of \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life\u201d in general, about how \u201csix degrees of separation\u201d are real and priceless, are ones that I also need to relearn). I\u2019m having transportation issues right now having moved further away, but I hope to be active again in the group in 2008.
\nOne sad irony of 2007 is that, thanks to my own work in support group, with a new medication and exercise regimen, and with my increasing activism in the consumer community \u2013 not just here on BB, but in New Jersey on a number of levels \u2013 I have been more stable mood-wise than at any time since my diagnosis of bipolar disorder in 2000, after my second suicide attempt. Yet I have needed every bit of that extra effort just to survive emotionally \u2013 let alone materially \u2013 since I have been unemployed much of the year. (All of your kidding aside ?)
\n3) One topic I hope to address more on Beyond Blue<\/a> and get more honest about in my own writing is the lack of confidence in the workplace and how you handle the professional rejection you encounter when severe depression begins to debilitate certain cognitive functions (like thinking, for example). I know you\u2019ve struggled with this. Any advice for the guy just now unable to perform professional tasks and fearing a lay off?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m lucky in that, other than the occasional aftereffects of a sleepless night, I\u2019ve never really lost cognitive function on the job. Even Topamax, a.k.a. \u201cDopamax\u201d which so many people complain about, did nothing to hurt my work skills.
\nEven so, I can only hope you have a boss or human resources department (preferably both) who respect the Americans with Disabilities Act not only in letter but in spirit. Otherwise, yes, you could be in big trouble.
\nLet me give you examples from two of my recent jobs. I was the spokesperson for a school district in Virginia. I told the H.R. department shortly after my hiring of my condition. They said they could certainly make an accommodation. The \u201caccommodation\u201d was allowing me to come in a \u00bd hour late the morning after a night event. Which, it turned out happened two to three nights a week in the district \u2013 not to mention the fact I lived an hour\u2019s drive away. It was literally punishing.
\nFor all that, I thought I was doing great work for them until my annual review came up, and I was told \u2013 you have a few too many absences on your record (we\u2019re talking 12, not 30) so we\u2019re going to have to let you go. I asked point blank if this had anything to do with my depression; they smiled sweetly and said no.
\nI was discharged on the very same day I won a major award for my public relations work on behalf of the school district. And the local newspaper wrote an editorial attacking the school district for their decision. So you tell me.
\nBut, I didn\u2019t want to fight it with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), so I moved back to the New York\/New Jersey area for my next job. Where the exact same thing happened. I disclosed my condition to H.R.; this time they declined to make an accommodation; and shortly thereafter I was downsized \u2013 ostensibly because my functions would be picked up by an outside public relations firm.
\nFool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. So I fought this with the EEOC. They agreed I had a preliminary case.
\nA few months later, I received a giant FedEx binder at my apartment, carbon copied to the EEOC. In it was every single memo and every single e-mail I had ever written for the company. The sections with quotes like \u201cI need help with this project\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m not sure which direction in which to go with this assignment\u201d or \u201cThis might not work now that the parameters have changed\u201d were highlighted to make me look incompetent. Needless to say, the EEOC denied my claim. Ugh.
\nOf course I\u2019ve had good bosses as well. But perhaps not coincidentally, two of my best ones had depression or bipolar disorder as well.
\n4) Suicide attempts. You\u2019ve had two and at very vulnerable times: one when you were thirteen and your parents split and your mom was remarrying, the other shortly after your separation from you ex-wife, having come down hard from a manic spell and for which you were hospitalized for a week. This points to what so many psychiatrists and psychologists say about an emotional or psychological trigger. It is also what I struggle with when journalists respond to the suicide attempts of celebrities like Owen Wilson\u2014\u201cAhh, but he had just broke up with Kate Hudson\u201d says the press<\/a>. How do you explain the formula\u2014how much illness, how much emotional trigger–of what happened inside you at those two times\u2014why you were more desperate or more ill than at other times?<\/strong>
\nWell, it might be illustrative to say that, as much as I complain about E. (my ex-wife) on BB, I still consider my wedding day the happiest day or my life. Why do I say that? Because marriage is an occasion when families come together to celebrate a couple\u2019s new life, their ideals, their hopes, and their dreams. I realized that day why many girls and young women \u2013 even self-styled feminists \u2013 look forward so much to their wedding days, years or even decades before they actually meet their future husband.
\nSo imagine the horror when that life and all the ideals, hopes and dreams come crashing down. Even with my father\u2019s absences and punishments and alcoholism, he was still the only father I had ever known. To see him suddenly, literally replaced by a new stepfather within months of my parents’ divorce (while completely understandable on my mother\u2019s part) was nevertheless devastating. (Of course, my dad remarried within weeks of the divorce becoming final, so at least my mom showed more discretion — I guess.)
\nAnd all that much more is the horror when the ideals, hopes and dreams destroyed are not those of parents, but one\u2019s own. Particularly in my Catholic guilt \u2013 and my desire, now ruined in failure, not to repeat my parents\u2019 divorce \u2013 it felt like an end of life, far more than marriage. (Well, that and the fact in my hyperstress I averaged about three hours sleep for six weeks on end \u2013 mania, much?)
\nBut one other factor must be mentioned with the earlier suicide attempt \u2013 I was being tormented by a group of boys at my middle school, a bit like young Megan Meier in Missouri was heartbreakingly pushed to suicide at age 13 last year by people around her (including adults) using online messaging. (See http:\/\/community.beliefnet.com\/blogs\/2583<\/a> for more on this tragic case.)
\nBack in the old days, it was getting pushed into lockers (in the hallway and the locker room), having gum put on my chair, having my book bag constantly stolen if I let it even a millimeter off my body, etc., etc.
\nThe leader of the gang was a guy named R. He invited me to his bar mitzvah in the middle of this, but said that his parents insisted and that he would make sure I was ostracized during the party and in school afterward from here on out. He lived up to his word. Eventually, we ended up getting into a fistfight in front of the school and both getting suspended.
\nWhat stopped the hazing was something very similar to what was mentioned in BB recently about others\u2019 deaths dissuading one from suicide. When two of R.\u2019s dear friends were killed by a drunk driver a few months later, yes, it taught me about death and the finality of what I had tried to do \u2013 but it made him conscious of the error of what he was doing as well. Or so I thought, anyway.
\nFor the next three years, he begged forgiveness. I finally gave it to him. We became friends of a sort \u2013 though, given his constant \u201cadvice\u201d to me that I was ruining my life, peculiar ones. It was when I went stag to his wedding in 1992 that he gave me the advice to use the personals (the Rupert Holmes \u201cPina Colada Song\u201d kind, not the online kind back then) \u2013 which was how I met E.
\nR. and E. hit it off immediately. They were closer friends than I was with R., who again was constantly criticizing me and saying, \u201cYour wife has all the right ideas, you should shut up and listen to her.\u201d In fact, at the time of my second suicide attempt, R. \u2013 who was and is a highly successful entrepreneur — and E. were finalizing a business partnership. It was definitely a factor in my state of mind that people close to me were seemingly ganging up on me.
\nE. refused to see me when I was in the hospital \u2013 \u201cYou made your bed, you lie in it.\u201d But when I got out, with my new, far more serious diagnosis of bipolar disorder, openness and self-disclosure became very important to me. And I had never told E. what happened to me when I was 13. So when tempers cooled, I did.
\nShe was stunned. I know I\u2019m beginning to answer your next question ? but it\u2019s as if a light went on in her head to say, aha, this isn\u2019t something he\u2019s been doing to me, it\u2019s something he\u2019s been trying to keep from happening to himself \u2013 for most of his life.
\nShe broke off the business partnership and supported me in confronting R. with the truth about just how close his hazing had come to tragedy all those years ago. His reply \u2013 \u201cI don\u2019t remember any of that\u201d \u2013 was not very convincing, given how we had originally reconciled. I haven\u2019t spoken to him since.
\nWhen I tell people the story of my bizarre two-decade relationship with R., they say it has a literary quality to it \u2013 like Valjean and Javert from \u201cLes Miserables,\u201d or Mozart and Salieri from \u201cAmadeus.\u201d I think there\u2019s something to that.
\n5) You\u2019ve talked about your marriage many times in your comments on Beyond Blue. From what I understand, your ex-wife had no understanding of the physiological basis of depression, and repeatedly urged you to \u201cBuck up\u201d or \u201cSnap out of it,\u201d that your symptoms were signs of a moral weakness. I don\u2019t really see how you could make it work with someone so unsympathetic as that. What would be your advice to a depressive in a marriage with a spouse who doesn\u2019t get it and isn\u2019t willing to learn about the illness alongside his partner?<\/strong>
\nIn my quote you posted under question #1, about \u201cWrestling With G-d<\/a>,\u201d you omitted a very important excerpt:
\n(\u2026 probably the most spiritually lost person I have ever known — she was not a bad person at all, just lost; that’s the best way to describe it — was quite intentionally raised by her parents without any religious training. A wag once said that you send your kids to Sunday school — or Hebrew school, or what have you — so they’ll have something to rebel against one day. But I’m not sure it’s such a joke.)
\nOf course, I\u2019m talking about E., my ex-wife.
\nBB readers probably think from my characterizations that E. was \u2026 um, the technical name for my beloved dachshund. E. could be a witch, no doubt, but then again I was probably a warlock in the worst of my depression when we were together.
\nNo, I think what drove us apart more than the depression is that we married for the wrong reasons and didn\u2019t have enough in common. (And not just us \u2026 my own parents still have nightmares about my ex-in-laws, who for the most part were lovely people, but who were also unbelievably different from them \u2013 think \u201cMeet the Fockers,\u201d with my albeit divorced mom and dad as Blythe Danner and Robert DeNiro and E.\u2019s folks as Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand.) E. and I had dated for two years and gotten to a point where we said we should either break up or get engaged \u2026 and, visiting a jewelry store one day, on a whim we decided to get engaged.
\nThat\u2019s not the basis on which to build a marriage. Especially when we had different ideas about G-d, kids, careers, money, you name it. That\u2019s a house of cards \u2013 and my depression was just the stiff wind that blew it away. But it would have collapsed eventually of its own accord.
\nAnd something that should give a small bit of hope to BB readers is that from what I\u2019ve heard in my support groups, and read on BB, if you start with the kind of commitment and commonality a marriage should have and needs to have, you can survive one partner\u2019s severe depression.
\nSince my divorce, I\u2019ve met two women I could have married. One was like the Jenny Curran to my Forrest Gump \u2013 a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Southern gal who I adored, and who had a giant heart and even bigger problems (similar, tragically, to Jenny\u2019s if you recall the movie). That wouldn\u2019t have worked, to say the least.
\nThe other was almost my soulmate \u2013 exotically beautiful (she is the child of immigrants), intelligent, understanding of my condition, sharing most of my values (including my sarcasm!) \u2026 except she badly wants kids and I badly \u2026 don\u2019t. My heart breaks that I would and could not compromise on that, but I don\u2019t feel I can risk repeating a cycle of dysfunction. I believe that to have stayed together would have eventually devastated her, me, our potential marriage \u2013 and obviously badly affected any future kids.
\nYet I still love her, and probably always will. We\u2019re still good friends \u2013 maybe that\u2019s what was meant to be. (And she has taught me a lot about Catholicism, her religion as well, and reinspired me to a degree.)
\nI still believe my true soulmate is out there; this probably isn\u2019t the time in my life for me to meet her, but I know I will someday. As I\u2019ve said before on BB, I\u2019m an incurable optimist \u2013 and if depression hasn\u2019t cured me, nothing will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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