The January Resolution July 6, 2022

As I’ve mentioned before, since I retired I have had the luxury in early January of a break in the action. This has given me the benefit of a little time to rest, to reflect, and to redirect. In past Januarys, I’ve joined Al-Anon, committed to making a boundary with a someone I cared about deeply, Marie Kondo-ed my papers, clothes, and kitchen, taken a happiness course, and weaned myself off an anti-depressant. This January, I decided to take this anti-depression idea one step further: to vow to never again fall into that black abyss. 

I have never had a depression serious enough to plunge me into a hospital, but I have suffered four times in my life in what I refer to as “situational depression” – something happens in life that poses a great challenge and great sadness, leading to the debilitating mood disorder of depression. In a depression, for those of you who haven’t really experienced it, it is almost impossible to feel joy. Now think of spending maybe 15% of your life this way. What a complete waste of a perfectly good life!

(Just for the record, my low points were in graduate school, which seemed interminable, when my first husband decided he no longer wanted to be in our relationship, when my second husband died, and when my daughter was in the throes of addiction.) 

In January, I vowed to end this cycle. My friend Jeannette referred me to an online lecture by Zindel Segal, a Canadian Clinical Psychologist who, with two partners, developed a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy approach to preventing depression, based on the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. Segal describes how having once had an episode of depression, the neurological pathways are primed to transform sadness to depression once again. And so the task of the patient is to be more in touch with the pathways and to develop strategies to divert or blockade them. 

Segal’s ideas resonated for me. They are a variant on the old Buddhist saw “pain is everywhere, the suffering is up to you”. Yes, sadness is everywhere, but maybe the depression part is optional. How could I develop the mental attitude and skill set to deal with this monkey on my back? 

I bought the group’s book and workbook, enthusiastically plunged into the daunting daily commitment to meditations of varying types and durations and less daunting tasks of reflections. Segal et al. argue that we ruminate to try to intellectually pull ourselves out of depression – wow how true! – but instead we should just relax into the pain, recognize it as pain, but learn to absorb it through awareness and practice. They refer to it as “being brain” rather than “doing brain”. 

I wish I could report that I have transformed my approach or attitude or capacity or something like that, but the truth is that I have no idea. Several times, I have certainly caught myself dipping into that black ink, but managed to pull myself back out fairly quickly. I’m half-way through the year and a bit frustrated that I haven’t had the epiphany I expected. Maybe I’m a little sad, too, but I’m trying to be much kinder to myself. Maybe when the next challenge in life meets me, I’ll be able to ride the tsunami with a better perspective and a little more equanimity.