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Archive for the ‘healing recovery’ Category

Tools for Promoting Post Traumatic Growth: #1 (Recasting)

Posted in childhood suffering, depression, happiness, healing recovery, resiliance, therapy on March 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

In “How We Choose to be Happy,” Rick Foster and Greg Hicks describe a process they call ‘recasting’. In order to learn how to recast:

1. Identify a problem that you’re currently struggling with
2. Next, ask yourself the following questions in regards to the problem that you’ve identified:
• What am I feeling?
• Have I allowed myself feel all of the emotions that might be associated with the problem I’m currently facing?
• In spite of how hurtful this problem has been, what have I learned about myself or others as I’ve struggled with this problem? What have I learned about my life in general?
• Has this problem led me to make any positive changes in my life?
• Are there meaningful changes that I could make in my life that would make me more effective in dealing with this problem or happier overall?
• If this problem is unlikely to change, how can I improve other aspects of my life?

Take your time as you answer these questions, you may even want to come back to them more than once before you consider this exercise complete. Recasting provides you with greater perspective and will help illuminate the lessons that are invariably contained within any challenge that we commit to responding to thoughtfully and consciously.

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Andrew Solomon on Depression

Posted in depression, healing recovery, males and depression on December 6, 2010| Leave a Comment »

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=sageplace&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0684854678&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrhttp://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1123470503077018830&hl=en&fs=true

Despite the poor quality of the introduction, this lecture by Andrew Solomon, author of , “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression,” (based on his own struggle with major depression) is well worth the time it takes to listen.

Following is a quote from Solomon’s book:

“Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.”

On the PBS special, “Depression: Out of the Shadows” Solomon observes,

“I always say that the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality, and that depression has to do with finding all of life totally overwhelming…

…clinical depression really has to do with the feeling that you can’t do anything, that everything is unbelievably difficult, that life is completely terrifying, and a feeling of this free-floating despair, which is overpowering and horrifying…

…So that’s the real message of hope, is that you can get better. And when you do get better, not that you’ll look back on it with great longing, but you may look back on it and think, ‘I learned a lot by going through that. And I’m a better person because I did it.'”

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How Childhood Suffering lives on…

Posted in childhood abuse, childhood suffering, healing recovery on May 7, 2009| Leave a Comment »

“Some things that happen to you never stop happening to you…”
Author Unknown

Each of us who has endured prolonged childhood suffering leaves behind our own unique trail of tears. Some of us still have nightmares. Others no longer remember; we simply experience a sense of emptiness and a vague and disturbing suspicion that something was, and perhaps still is, terribly wrong. Although our symptoms and behaviors vary, we are each aware at some level that we have been deeply wounded. For most of us, there’s a secret shame imbedded in this knowledge. In spite of the fact that we intellectually understand that we were innocent and vulnerable children when the deepest wounds were inflicted, there remains a part of us that perceives ourselves as failing. All too often it becomes ourselves whom we cannot trust.

The child who blamed him or herself for the abuse becomes the self-condemning adult. The losses and betrayals he or she endured become promises that more hurt will be forthcoming. The child who was powerless grows into a frightened and defensive adult. The little girl whose body was abused remains disconnected from her grown up body. The anger of the small boy lives on in the man who lets no-one close enough to harm (or heal) him. Another compensates for his or her shame by devoting a life time to achievement, but the struggle never ends. There are no victories great enough to annihalate the inadequacy and self-doubt. The child who acts out his or her pain in destructive ways might continue the pattern into adulthood, unconsciously creating situations that inspire the very misery he or she so desperatley sought to escape. These sad cycles can go on and on. And they can be broken.

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