Tag Archives: depression

Dec 04 2013
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learning to live, social work, what they are teaching me

drowning in forgetfulness

drowinging-in-forgetfulness

I met with two teenage guys this afternoon for therapy. I spent my time reminding them of all the progress they’ve seen against all the odds that were stacked against them, the odds they had recounted in previous sessions, the bad odds I had not tried to talk them out of because I wasn’t sure enough that they were going to come true.

And yet these two young men actually enacted these bad odds not coming true. They made choices and held out hope long enough that a different kind of future happened against all the odds, really. Over and over again.

But they’ve already forgotten. They are now in the middle of the next layer of stacked-against-them-odds and they don’t remember that they felt as impossibly positioned not so long ago. And they don’t remember that not so long ago they courageously chose to push into something they didn’t know and found themselves on the other side of something that seemed one-sided.

And so I find myself working to ask questions that remind them. And as always when any of us ask good questions of others, we hear ourselves asking good questions that we ourselves must answer.

More time passes in a day and we realize that sometimes we wake up in the middle of the night with worry and fear, drowning in forgetfulness, and we are overcome with anxiety and sorrow. And we find ourselves praying because someone once said we should pray when we wake up and can’t sleep in those dark hours of the night/morning.

So we pray that God will show us how to listen, and that we can learn what it actually means to love our awkwardness juxtapositioned to the honesty of others. And we ask for sleep knowing, owning for one damn time, that we aren’t orchestrating all of this and we need some help to be able to find any peace at all, waking or sleeping.

And we might finally catch some rest before the sun rises, or we might not.

But it doesn’t matter either way, because we realize that we are all learning from each other, and we need the people around us to remind us that we are capable of and intentioned for more than we could ever think to ask or imagine.  And though we often drown in our own forgetfulness, a sleepless night that reminds us to ask for eyes to see and ears to hear might just be what we need to remember that he is making all things new and he is the God of doing things against all the odds.

Even in the middle of a sleepless night.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

 

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Jan 01 2013
5 Comments
grief and trauma, learning to live, on, the calendar

intolerance of uncertainty | thoughts on a new year

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It’s no doubt that the things which are the most important for us to know are the things which, once heard, feel the most obvious. The things which, once said, feel the most simple. And yet, it is these things which are often, once heard and said, the things which change us the most. The things which make the biggest impact in our worlds because even though they are obvious and even though they are simple, they are still the things which are most important and have the most impact.

A New Year’s resolution has been to read an article a workday. Workday means ultimately five articles a week, and article means a research or peer-reviewed journal article, so what to do when throwing a party or how to build biceps fastest doesn’t count as articles.

I was reading, a few days ago (because I’ve also learned that New Year’s resolutions I wait to start until New Year’s are 100% less likely to happen than New Year’s resolutions I start a few days before) an article* about depression, anxiety and rumination. I was reading for a client that I’ve been making little progress with, and also reading for myself as is almost always the case whether any of us in the field choose to admit it or not.

The article speaks to depression, anxiety and rumination, or ongoing perseverative thoughts about situations or details, as moderated by the intolerance of uncertainty. And while the phrase “intolerance of uncertainty” feels as common and as known and as obvious as any other phrase that’s said over coffee or in elevators or across lunch tables, I felt myself freeze in the phase of the written words, as if the obvious and known was suddenly becoming an answer to a mystery.

The more we are intolerant of what we can’t control and what we don’t know, the greater our anxiety, depression and stalling.

With multitudes of caveats and uncontrollable variables, the notion has stuck with me since. The ability that I, or others, have to tolerate uncertainty influences the way we see the future and handle its impending realities in the present. Since all of the future is uncertain, no matter the degree at which we enjoy misleading ourselves, my ability to tolerate that uncertainty is a predictor of my emotions, attitudes, and decisions.

Since reading this article, no doubt an encouragement to keep up my New Year’s resolution, I’ve been challenged to face each day with a reminder to myself that what is to come is unknown, and my trust in the fact that all things are done well and that all things work together is and will be a major factor in my ability to move forward well into the grief and joy that lies ahead in 2013.

Here’s to an uncertain new year.

djordan
Pine Tree

* Liao, K. Y. & Wei, M. (2011). Intolerance of uncertainty, depression, and anxiety: The moderating and mediating roles of rumination. Journal of clinical psychology, 67(12), 1220-1239.

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Oct 29 2012
2 Comments
learning to live

again at the labyrinth

It’s been almost one year exactly since I last walked the path of the labyrinth outside my therapy office window. I took about fifteen minutes this afternoon to make the trek in, knowing I wouldn’t have time before my next client to make the walk back out.

My intentions, stepping foot into the concrete-puzzled path, was to pray through an anxiety that has been pressing in on me over the last few weeks. I intended to let the sharp red leaves falling and floating across the path offer a kind of poetic aesthetic that would remind me all is well and all will be well.

As one foot made its way in front of the other, my prayers were quickly replaced by the memories of what was pressing in on me the last time I walked through these same stones.  Fear and worry for friends losing jobs, relationships falling apart, futures unknown, and trying to function in the middle of the chaos in ways that were filled with grace and mercy at least in part while I was simultaneously bleeding anger and resentment.

A few loops in now, I remembered that the last time I walked this labyrinth, whatever my intentions were faded quickly and I started to become fully present in spirit learning the bodily art of putting one step in front of the other: something the homicide-loss group teaches me often. 

The sharp red leaves did begin to fall and swirl around the gray and burnt red stone as I made my way through a few more loops.

After a round of quiet breathing, I began to see a kind of baggage trailing behind me. In my prayer-walking, I was being given the gift of visualizing all that I am pretending to carry fall from my hands and back and gut and stay behind in my tracks, only where I have been. In the faithful art of putting one foot in front of the other, there continued to be a clear way, and more room to let go of all that is and has been pressing in and pressing down.

Moving closer to the center, I was passing the paths where I had already shed weight, so while I saw them and was right next to them, they were no longer in my way.

I made it to the center, read the etched in Psalm 46:10, and moved back to the entrance, back into the office, and back into a conversation at the heart of a family wrestling to make relationships work.

In spirit and body, and a commitment to putting one foot in front of the other, the weight lightens.

Sometimes.

djordan
Pine Tree

Related Posts | A Concrete Maze | What They Are Teaching Me

 

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