Healing From Depression: Find Your Own Way

When did depression last touch you? Ask some people that directly and they bristle. "I'm not depressed," they'll say, almost offended. For every person struggling with it, you can find another who insists they're fine. So maybe the better question is a quieter one: when was the last time you felt so hopeless, so flattened by sadness, that you came close to giving up on life entirely?

Living reminds me of a poker game. Some nights you're dealt a great hand. Other nights you play whatever cards land in front of you and make the best of it. Yes, that's a cliché, and I lean on plenty of them, but the ones I keep usually carry a little truth.

A few months back I attended a funeral. Sitting through it was one of the harder things I've done, yet I walked away carrying something. The eulogist chose a theme that landed perfectly: Winning the Game of Life. It suited the day and, stranger still, it suited me.

What stuck with me was simple. Life won't hand you roses on a steady schedule. There will be walls you can't climb, stretches when you feel completely alone, and seasons when you hit the very bottom. The thing that decides how your game goes isn't the hitting bottom. It's what you do once you're down there.

Driving home, I turned the idea over against my own history and the dark patches I somehow came through. People look at me and assume I've got no problems. Nothing could be further from reality. And I catch myself making the same mistake about others, picturing them as carefree and well put together, only to find out later they're carrying plenty. Suffering finds everyone eventually. Name one person it skips.

From where I stand, the people who sink into depression are often the ones who haven't yet figured out how to climb back out of their dark stretches with any footing. I'm not calling depression trivial, and I won't pretend it isn't serious. Still, there's a question worth sitting with: why do two people hit by the same kind of trauma end up in such different places? One woman finds the nerve to date again after surviving two or three violent relationships. Another shuts the door on dating for good after just one. Same wound, different endings.

Start with this: you have to grant yourself time to heal, and if that means sitting across from a licensed professional, go. If faith is part of who you are, lean on it without apology. Mine is one of the ways I cope. I also happen to think of myself as a strong person, and I don't see those two things as being in conflict.

Learning from a mistake means you stop repeating it, which keeps a whole category of pain from circling back into your life. Self-reflection is a solid tool for the work of fixing yourself, but it only works if you're humble enough to admit you can't do all of it alone. Admitting that doesn't mean calling the friend who agrees with everything you say. It means figuring out why you keep ending up sad, in rotten relationships, in toxic jobs, in situations that hurt you. The thread running through all of it is you.

One place to begin is an article on the site 1in6 about the Herman Stages to Recovery. It breaks down how to function in a healthier way after trauma, across three stages (2015). The first stage covers setting goals, building some stability back into your days, and picking up the skills to handle hard experiences (2015). The aim, eventually, is to reconnect with the people who mattered to you and return to the things you loved before the trauma rearranged everything (2015). Feeling hopeless and sad afterward is normal. Moving forward, though, asks you to learn how to let it go.

Three years ago now I was in an abusive relationship, and afterward I spent most of my time picking apart my own part in it. I had to face something uncomfortable: my need to be in a relationship so I could feel normal pushed me toward choices that ended up hurting me. For a while the whole experience made me swear off dating forever. Then I had to remind myself that it was my own unresolved baggage steering those bad decisions.

Search online and you'll drown in articles telling you how to cope with depression and the aftermath of trauma. The catch is that you still have to pick the approach that actually fits you. Try this to start. Make one list of things you'd like to do, and a second list of things you've always wanted to do. Somewhere in those lists you may start uncovering the healthier version of yourself that's been waiting.

- Heather Browning, MBA, BA

1in6.com. (n.d.). Herman Stages to Recovery. Retrieved January 28, 2015.