Depression

Depression is something I have know intimately. For most of my adult life I was depressed. So depressed in fact that I hardly felt anything at all except numbness, well, numbness and darkness.

While I was in the throws of depression I didn't really understand it, I just experienced it. Like a wave it would wash over me, hold me down, take my breath away and leave me with no energy, no desire, no will to live. It just swallowed me up like some mire of quicksand from which there was no escape.

I never knew when it was coming to claim me or when it would release me. All I knew for sure was that it wanted to devour me and wouldn't take "No" for an answer. It had complete control over me or so it seemed.

It wasn't until I began my "real" therapy that I had any idea about the role of depression in my life. While it seemed so familiar, I really knew nothing about it except for how it felt. Imagine my surprise to learn that my depression was the result of all my unexpressed feelings.

The deep dark hole was the direct result of years and years of swallowed down anger and rage. Every time I denied myself something I wanted or needed, swallowed my feelings because someone else's were more important, lied to myself, called myself stupid or an assortment of other names or all of those other self destructive behaviors I was so go at, I was digging myself a deeper and darker hole in that pit called depression.

That pit was there because I didn't take care of myself, emotionally or physically. It was there because I didn't like me. Well, to be honest, I hated me. It was there because all of those feelings have to go somewhere. Because I didn't express them outwardly where they belonged, the feelings went inwardly directed against me.

With a life like mine, that's a lot of backed up feelings to deal with. Finding safe ways to express all of that pent up rage was a daunting task complicated by my fear of "losing it" to such an extent that I would go insane. As a victim, I was convinced that expressing anger would kill me. Yet the opposite is what is really true.

So I wrote letters and poetry to my offenders and burned them. I drew pictures and put them on dart boards and filled them full of holes. I sculpted lifelike busts of my offenders and dropped them off of balconies and buried the remains in a muddy swamp. And of course, I screamed and yelled and swore until I was voiceless. I broke things and threw furniture, whatever it took(that was safe) to get the anger out where it belonged and directed away from me.

Then there were the ways I was adding to the load of depression each day. Addressing those negative messages that told me I wasn't worth it, whatever it might be, had to be handled as well. Because I was as merciless to myself as my offenders had been to me, the only way to totally free myself from depression was to stop my own self abuse.

To crawl out of that deep dark hole, I had to learn to quit being my own worst enemy. I had to learn to identify and give up all of the self deprecating behavior. I had to learn to accept myself. I had to learn to look in the mirror and love and respect whoever I saw looking back at me.

Now when I visit the blogs of other victims and read posts where the author calls herself/himself stupid or ugly or whatever the trash talk might be, I feel sad. Sad because I know that depression is an all too familiar part of her/his life. Sad because I know she/he is still caught in the trap laid by the offenders from the past. Sad because I know all too well, that place in which she/he lives.

multiple personality disorder MPD dissociative Identity disorder did deepression