The Pulling Power of the Void: how to deal with chronic depression
The Pulling Power of the Void: how to deal with chronic depression
Depression is a bastard. When darkness descends time and again, it's like standing in the pouring rain for days on end, while a storm rages. To make matters worse: there are no dry clothes left in the cupboard. And then lightning strikes.
There are thousands of ideas and theories out there to explain the nature of a depression. Someone once told me that, Depression is inward oriented anger.' If only I'd be able to express my anger in a healthy, mature way, I'd be getting rid of my depressions too. Bollocks.
Those inclined to a more mechanistic view of humanity place their faith in pills and potions. Depression, they believe, is caused by a chemical imbalance. Balance the imbalance, and the patient' is sorted. From experience I say, again: Bollocks. Pills at best have taken away the edge, the really nastiest of nastiness about a depression. But eradicate the demon from my being? No. Never. It's always lurking around. Somewhere. Ready to strike. Potion or no potion.
Trigger
When looking back on the advent of a depression, there's always a trigger. But that same trigger, or even another more hectic one, would at a different time or place funnily enough not be the onset of another dance with darkness. And I still wonder: this belief in some chemical' as the cause of (and therefore the cure to) a depression What exactly causes what? Does a depression cause the chemical imbalance', or does the chemical imbalance cause the depression?
Let me be clear, by the way, about one particular thing. Despite many an attempt no pharmaceutical company or PhD-carrier in Medicine or Psychiatry has ever been able to statistically prove the causal connection between any kind of hormone or bio-chemical substance swimming around in or amongst grey cells and people's moods. As I wrote just above: it is still scientifically unclear what exactly causes what.
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Sure, there is a solid connection between the hormonal factory inside our heads and the thoughts that pop up there, sometimes with the noise and chaos of a fairground on a Saturday night. A whirlwind of dark matter, fueling new dark matter, until it's darker than one could possibly imagine. Many great books have been written about this, by authors of name and fame. William James. Albert Camus. James Joyce. William Styron. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is one of the cynical things about depressions: once they're wearing off, they seemed to have cleared the way to avenues of fantastic creativity: In the heart of the Void lay pearls of outstanding beauty. Those pearls, however, can only be harvested once the darkness has lifted its suffocating weight.
A gate of sorts
Depression for me has with the benefit of hindsight and seen from the comfortable position of the hilltop overlooking the valley I've just walked through almost always been a gate of sorts. A gate into new insights. A gate which forced me to lay down excess baggage. A gate that somehow forced me to experience an aspect of life I'd have run away from. A gate that showed me strengths inside I didn't know I had, through confronting me with the worst of my own fears.
I am aware these days, that depression as such is not a curse, despite it being painful and in the worst of instances something that somehow closes down every possibility to be actively alive. Whenever I feel a depression coming my way, I from the bottom of my heart hope that it won't be too severe this time around. Yet, I also know that it's best to go with the flow of it. To not try and resist the demon, for it is way stronger than my will power can ever get.
By now I know that in the midst of the Void, it's better to dance with the demon. To try and find some kind of rapport with it. To attempt to tame it and ride its back. As I explained to a friend yesterday: Can I muster the courage to not climb out of the pit and find myself at the same place where this all started, but instead fall through the bottom of it, into a new world, a new place, a new reality, a new vision?'
Is depression an illness? I guess the answer to that question depends on how one defines illnesses'.
The scientist Stanlislav Grof perceived of a number of serious mental disorders' not as psychiatric illnesses needing medical cures, but as pathologies of a soul-gone-sour. He used the phrase spiritual emergency. "It is possible to undergo a profound crisis involving non-ordinary experiences and to perceive it as pathological or psychiatric when in fact it may be more accurately and beneficially defined as a spiritual emergency."
Liberate
Grof's approach turns the patient' into a person who, through serious soul searching and the willingness to face some facts of life, has the ability to liberate him- or herself from the scourges of chemical imbalances'.
I think, based on my own perception of my own recurring depressions, that beyond the mechanics of our minds and bodies (at its foundation most probably even) lies a soul, a Self. And I am convinced through the experiences of my own life, that the soul will speak through the body if its needs and desires, wishes and commands are not met. For me, that message of my soul is contained in every depression knocking on my door:
What, Aernout, have you ignored? Where is your reality out of alignment with your soul?'
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