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Monday, October 4, 2010
It's OK to Be Angry - The Story of My Depression
I have this recurring dream where I am back in my old house, the house I grew up in, and I'm feeling very anxious. Although the dream is never the same, there are certain elements that keep reappearing:
After relieving some of the tension with abdominal breathing, I realized that I finally understood what this dream is all about, and, why I keep having it. It has to do with the history of my depression and the difficulty I faced for many years battling it.
Despite starting my university studies as a gifted 17 year old, I had to drop out after my first year due to a deteriorating ability to sleep, eat or concentrate. I was deeply depressed and miserable. My father eventually kicked me out of the house and I lived on the street for a period of time. This experience ruined my health both physically and mentally. As far as I and most people I knew were concerned, I was garbage. Worthless.
I was very, very angry at my father for many years. It started in high school after my mother passed away, due to his constant criticism and angry "lectures" that could go on for hours. I stayed angry for a long time. I finally recognized this anger as something that I was holding on to with my subconscious mind after starting to meditate nine years ago. I tried my best to let it go for the sake of my health. I think I did not recognize that I had been emotionally abused for a long time.
I say I was emotionally abused because I grew up in a household where I was not able to express my feelings. I am not talking about being ignored from time to time or experiencing the "normal" emotional ups and downs of a healthy teenager. Every aspect of my life was strictly controlled. I had to have perfect grades. I had to do well on college entrance exams and go to one of the best universities. I was verbally abused, much more so after my mother passed away and there was no one to defend me. When she died, by the way, my father offered little comfort. I was supposed to get back to business as usual: studying. If I asked for money to buy clothes or something else I needed, I would get a two-hour lecture on how selfish I was and how hard my father was working to eventually pay for my college education.
Growing up in a strict household with parents who immigrated from Asia, as a child I basically viewed my parents as gods and never felt that I had a say in anything. If you don't know what this is like, don't pretend that you know. You don't. In fact, the first time I raised my voice to my father was when he kept insisting that I stop being depressed. I was so frustrated by the insinuation that I was somehow to blame for being ill that I finally just snapped and screamed at the top of my lungs that I was not doing this on purpose. Of course, being an abuser and not allowing me free expression of my emotions, my father immediately kicked ome ut of the house. He had already threatened to abandon me or withdraw support many times in the past when he was unhappy with me in some way. I had already been severely ill and unable to sustain study or employment for over three years, despite numerous attempts to take classes and hold down any sort of job.
When my father kicked me out, all my hopes were dashed. I felt as if the last person in my family no longer cared about me. I no longer cared about myself and was completely distraught. I was allowed to return home a few times after being homeless for months. The last time I was allowed to live at home I spent more than a year with severe anxiety and depression, sleeping anywhere from 14 to 18 hours a day, barely eating and only able to skim books or watch TV to distract myself from a growing sense of dread. I felt so seriously broken during this time. Although I was allowed to see a psychiatrist and a psychologist for a time, my father made it clear that he didn't think that I had a problem that necessitated medical care. When I was kicked out of the house, I was unable to afford to continue seeing the doctors.
After getting kicked out again for raising my voice to my father for the second time in my life--for the same reason as the first time--namely, objecting vehemently to his claims that I was making myself depressed on purpose, I was determined to not undergo the experience of being homeless again. I worked a series of menial jobs at minimum wage until I caught a break and got a better job with a local company that paid a decent salary. I even thought that I was better, thinking that the ability to work and survive equated to not being depressed. Never mind the fact that I had very few healthy relationships with people and that I used alcohol to numb the growing restlessness and hopeless in my heart.
I eventually went back to school (with some help from my father) to finish my degree. He has always been consistent about stressing the importance of education. That much I admit. I earned near perfect grades, but I was still depressed and only functioning at about 50% of my full capacity. After graduating, I hadn't a clue as to what I wanted to do with my life and I was in debt. Nothing seemed interesting to me. Everything had become tedious and boring. I was most afraid of the boredom that seemed to dominate my life.
With no greater hopes than receiving little more than minimum wage and scanty benefits, I eventually pulled up all my roots, left my girlfriend and a large number of good friends and moved abroad in the hopes of finding a new life and a new direction. I remain an ex-pat living abroad, but thankfully I have been receiving treatment for my depression and I am finally realizing why I felt so numb, why I felt like I had no future, but more importantly, why I always felt so tired, so lonely, so wrong.
With the recovery of my physical and psychological health to levels I had never experienced before, I also realized that I had been treated very badly by my family. They never once showed any compassion for me when I was bedridden with severe depression or when I nearly lost my mind on the streets. They continuously judged me and blamed me for being depressed. And when I needed their help in more recent years, when I developed severe anxiety and crippling depression a few months after moving abroad (the stress of moving amplified my depression from dysthymia to full blown major depressive disorder). I begged my folks to let me come home to seek treatment and recover. I was told I could never come home to live in my parents' house. How dare I even ask such a thing of them?
At the same time, I can't blame my folks for my depression. That's not fair or realistic. I could have sought treatment when I eventually made decent money working for a salary before I returned to school full-time. I could have taken medication and sought the help of a counselor. As an adult, it is my responsibility to take care of my own health. I know I developed some bad habits over time. I drank heavily in my late teens and early twenties. I also smoked pot heavily during my last year of high school and on and off for more than a decade. I also smoked cigarettes for many years. All of these things damaged my body and my brain. No doubt about that. And then I look at my willingness to get well many years ago, my willingness to see doctors, to take medication, and how that was poo-pooed and how I was told I was weak, I was lazy, I was bad. After my experience living on the streets, all I knew how to do was survive. And that's all I did for many years after that experience.
But what I need to do now, in order to move on with my recovery, is to address the fact that my family, and particularly my father, did wrong by me in a major way. As a gifted child and a high-achieving student, the pressure was always there to be the best. Ninety-five percent was never good enough. All the emphasis was on academic achievement, never health, happiness, or the value of relationships. I was never encouraged or supported in any other activity besides martial arts and music, the former my passion, the latter my mother's obsession. However, by the second year of high school none of these activities could be sustained due to the rigorous academic load I was faced with. By my junior year, I was already suffering from extreme fatigue, irritability and insomnia. By my senior year, although I manged a perfect GPA before applying to and eventually being accepted by one of the best universities in the country, I was a complete wreck. I was lost.
And things only got worse the longer I remained depressed. I was treated as a complete failure for dropping out of school. I was judged for not being able to hold down a job. I tried my best, but things got so bad that some mornings I just couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I lost two jobs and did miserably in several courses as a result. I was treated like a pariah and was never once asked if I felt OK or if I thought I might need some help. There was absolutely no benefit of the doubt, no trust in the fact that I was trying very hard, but I still could not get things together. Believe me, I was trying. I sought answers in philosophy, music, mysticism, drugs, and later meditation, sex, and food. In fact, the search for answers, for the truth, dominated my thoughts since the age of 17.
My entire 20s were spent searching for something, but I wasn't really sure what it really was. I would occasionally have a fleeting vision of happiness, and it didn't involve being rich or famous. It was a simple vision of living life and enjoying it. I'd visualize a scene of shaving in the bathroom of my own apartment, relaxed and content, not feeling the chronic anxiety and emptiness that had long since become my constant state of being. A vision of being able to feel normal, not tired and unable to carry out a plan beyond the initial stage of inspiration. I had desires deep inside of me, to become a musician, to become a chef, to become something, but I could never sustain these dreams. I had the talent to start off quickly at almost anything I chose to do, but I didn't have the energy or the clarity that comes from calmness and stillness within.
What really made me feel absolutely powerless and ashamed of myself was the fact that I was completely aware of the disconnect between my abilities and what I was actually able to do. This was a very painful and frustrating realization. Only now do I recognize that my inability to actualize was a distinct symptom of depression. How do I know this? Because the first time I allowed myself to receive proper treatment that was not interrupted, the first time I was prescribed antidepressants, benzodiazapines and a Z-drug to sleep just two years ago, I felt like a completely different person. It was suddenly very easy to have an idea and to follow through on it, a subtle sequence of events that probably goes unnoticed in most people. I was able to exercise, cook, garden, and meet girls. I felt great. I was able to make myself happy, not by buying things or comparing myself to others, but by being myself. That's all. Just being myself. For the first time in almost two decades, I liked myself for who I was. There was nothing wrong with me as a person, there never had been. I had lived with that burden for so long, and suddenly I saw the lie for what it was. And I was angry.
Less than a year after achieving an albeit tenuous state of remission, I made the mistake of thinking that I was "fixed", that I didn't need to continue taking medication. I was scared of the stigma surrounding the use of benzos and Z-drugs, despite the fact that I didn't abuse them, nor did I have trouble getting off them, at least at first. I scheduled myself from morning to evening with school, work and martial arts training. I even kicked Effexor in a pre-planned 3-month timeframe by gradually removing more and more of the little time-release pellets inside the capsules that had brought me back to life.
What followed was a year and a half of sheer misery. And again, I thought that there must be something wrong with me, that I was a bad person. Thank goodness I finally relented and sought psychiatric help. It took almost six months, but I finally found a combination of medications and lifestyle choices that slowly but steadily restored my health.
Now I have absolutely no doubt that I suffer from depression, that I have suffered for a very long time, and that there is nothing wrong with me. I take my medications religiously and I have learned a great deal about using herbs and supplements to enhance recovery. I studied and trained various forms of meditation and martial arts in order to learn how to master my body and mind. I had been doing this for years in the hope of relieving my suffering, but without medication it was futile.
And now I know why I keep having these nightmares, why I keep reliving the frustration and anger of being written off by my family. I realize that it is OK to be angry, that it doesn't make me a bad person. I need to feel this anger. I was starting to feel like I was becoming emotionally numb again. Not depressed or anxious, but not alive. I know that I had my emotions suppressed for a long time, first by my family, then later through self-denial. In fact, my family still treats me like I am wrong in some way, their opinion no doubt bolstered by my most recent relapse. It doesn't seem to matter that I responded to medication in such a robust fashion. That fact is conveniently ignored by my parents. My father sends me emails asking me to accept God and to turn my life around. But God is with me and has always been with me. I never would have survived some of the situations I was in if that weren't the case. In His mysterious way, God used my depression to temper my willpower, my faith, and to instill in me an unabashedly positive attitude. Those who suffer are comforted, that's for sure.
I no longer respond to my father's emails. I have made repeated attempts to explain my understanding of exactly how things fell apart and how his neglect and abuse helped create the isolation and stressful conditions that provided the fertile ground for my genetic predisposition to depression to bud and flower into a terrible nightmare that still haunts my dreams.
It is known that depression and other affective disorders--or whatever you choose to label them as--get worse with time. The best strategy is to treat them as soon as possible, and to provide the emotional support needed by those suffering in order for them to deal with the tremendous psychological impact that these illnesses can afflict on the psyche and the soul. The absolute worst thing to do is to judge and to reject someone who already feels worthless and hopeless.
I can no longer ignore this fact. My subconscious won't let me, even though I'd like to think that I'm 95% recovered. The deepest parts of my psyche are trying to tell me that it is OK to be angry, that I need to be angry in order to save myself from being lost to denial, to a tapestry of lies woven over many years by myself and my family. It's time I started listening.
- I am alone in the house or I am with an ex-girlfriend or friend.
- I am trying to find something or get something done before my father and the rest of the family comes home. I'm searching through my desk or a bookshelf, but I can't find what it is I'm looking for. This makes me feel frustrated and nervous.
- If my family does return, they make me feel very uncomfortable by ignoring me or by laughing at me.
After relieving some of the tension with abdominal breathing, I realized that I finally understood what this dream is all about, and, why I keep having it. It has to do with the history of my depression and the difficulty I faced for many years battling it.
Despite starting my university studies as a gifted 17 year old, I had to drop out after my first year due to a deteriorating ability to sleep, eat or concentrate. I was deeply depressed and miserable. My father eventually kicked me out of the house and I lived on the street for a period of time. This experience ruined my health both physically and mentally. As far as I and most people I knew were concerned, I was garbage. Worthless.
I was very, very angry at my father for many years. It started in high school after my mother passed away, due to his constant criticism and angry "lectures" that could go on for hours. I stayed angry for a long time. I finally recognized this anger as something that I was holding on to with my subconscious mind after starting to meditate nine years ago. I tried my best to let it go for the sake of my health. I think I did not recognize that I had been emotionally abused for a long time.
I say I was emotionally abused because I grew up in a household where I was not able to express my feelings. I am not talking about being ignored from time to time or experiencing the "normal" emotional ups and downs of a healthy teenager. Every aspect of my life was strictly controlled. I had to have perfect grades. I had to do well on college entrance exams and go to one of the best universities. I was verbally abused, much more so after my mother passed away and there was no one to defend me. When she died, by the way, my father offered little comfort. I was supposed to get back to business as usual: studying. If I asked for money to buy clothes or something else I needed, I would get a two-hour lecture on how selfish I was and how hard my father was working to eventually pay for my college education.
Growing up in a strict household with parents who immigrated from Asia, as a child I basically viewed my parents as gods and never felt that I had a say in anything. If you don't know what this is like, don't pretend that you know. You don't. In fact, the first time I raised my voice to my father was when he kept insisting that I stop being depressed. I was so frustrated by the insinuation that I was somehow to blame for being ill that I finally just snapped and screamed at the top of my lungs that I was not doing this on purpose. Of course, being an abuser and not allowing me free expression of my emotions, my father immediately kicked ome ut of the house. He had already threatened to abandon me or withdraw support many times in the past when he was unhappy with me in some way. I had already been severely ill and unable to sustain study or employment for over three years, despite numerous attempts to take classes and hold down any sort of job.
When my father kicked me out, all my hopes were dashed. I felt as if the last person in my family no longer cared about me. I no longer cared about myself and was completely distraught. I was allowed to return home a few times after being homeless for months. The last time I was allowed to live at home I spent more than a year with severe anxiety and depression, sleeping anywhere from 14 to 18 hours a day, barely eating and only able to skim books or watch TV to distract myself from a growing sense of dread. I felt so seriously broken during this time. Although I was allowed to see a psychiatrist and a psychologist for a time, my father made it clear that he didn't think that I had a problem that necessitated medical care. When I was kicked out of the house, I was unable to afford to continue seeing the doctors.
After getting kicked out again for raising my voice to my father for the second time in my life--for the same reason as the first time--namely, objecting vehemently to his claims that I was making myself depressed on purpose, I was determined to not undergo the experience of being homeless again. I worked a series of menial jobs at minimum wage until I caught a break and got a better job with a local company that paid a decent salary. I even thought that I was better, thinking that the ability to work and survive equated to not being depressed. Never mind the fact that I had very few healthy relationships with people and that I used alcohol to numb the growing restlessness and hopeless in my heart.
I eventually went back to school (with some help from my father) to finish my degree. He has always been consistent about stressing the importance of education. That much I admit. I earned near perfect grades, but I was still depressed and only functioning at about 50% of my full capacity. After graduating, I hadn't a clue as to what I wanted to do with my life and I was in debt. Nothing seemed interesting to me. Everything had become tedious and boring. I was most afraid of the boredom that seemed to dominate my life.
With no greater hopes than receiving little more than minimum wage and scanty benefits, I eventually pulled up all my roots, left my girlfriend and a large number of good friends and moved abroad in the hopes of finding a new life and a new direction. I remain an ex-pat living abroad, but thankfully I have been receiving treatment for my depression and I am finally realizing why I felt so numb, why I felt like I had no future, but more importantly, why I always felt so tired, so lonely, so wrong.
With the recovery of my physical and psychological health to levels I had never experienced before, I also realized that I had been treated very badly by my family. They never once showed any compassion for me when I was bedridden with severe depression or when I nearly lost my mind on the streets. They continuously judged me and blamed me for being depressed. And when I needed their help in more recent years, when I developed severe anxiety and crippling depression a few months after moving abroad (the stress of moving amplified my depression from dysthymia to full blown major depressive disorder). I begged my folks to let me come home to seek treatment and recover. I was told I could never come home to live in my parents' house. How dare I even ask such a thing of them?
At the same time, I can't blame my folks for my depression. That's not fair or realistic. I could have sought treatment when I eventually made decent money working for a salary before I returned to school full-time. I could have taken medication and sought the help of a counselor. As an adult, it is my responsibility to take care of my own health. I know I developed some bad habits over time. I drank heavily in my late teens and early twenties. I also smoked pot heavily during my last year of high school and on and off for more than a decade. I also smoked cigarettes for many years. All of these things damaged my body and my brain. No doubt about that. And then I look at my willingness to get well many years ago, my willingness to see doctors, to take medication, and how that was poo-pooed and how I was told I was weak, I was lazy, I was bad. After my experience living on the streets, all I knew how to do was survive. And that's all I did for many years after that experience.
But what I need to do now, in order to move on with my recovery, is to address the fact that my family, and particularly my father, did wrong by me in a major way. As a gifted child and a high-achieving student, the pressure was always there to be the best. Ninety-five percent was never good enough. All the emphasis was on academic achievement, never health, happiness, or the value of relationships. I was never encouraged or supported in any other activity besides martial arts and music, the former my passion, the latter my mother's obsession. However, by the second year of high school none of these activities could be sustained due to the rigorous academic load I was faced with. By my junior year, I was already suffering from extreme fatigue, irritability and insomnia. By my senior year, although I manged a perfect GPA before applying to and eventually being accepted by one of the best universities in the country, I was a complete wreck. I was lost.
And things only got worse the longer I remained depressed. I was treated as a complete failure for dropping out of school. I was judged for not being able to hold down a job. I tried my best, but things got so bad that some mornings I just couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I lost two jobs and did miserably in several courses as a result. I was treated like a pariah and was never once asked if I felt OK or if I thought I might need some help. There was absolutely no benefit of the doubt, no trust in the fact that I was trying very hard, but I still could not get things together. Believe me, I was trying. I sought answers in philosophy, music, mysticism, drugs, and later meditation, sex, and food. In fact, the search for answers, for the truth, dominated my thoughts since the age of 17.
My entire 20s were spent searching for something, but I wasn't really sure what it really was. I would occasionally have a fleeting vision of happiness, and it didn't involve being rich or famous. It was a simple vision of living life and enjoying it. I'd visualize a scene of shaving in the bathroom of my own apartment, relaxed and content, not feeling the chronic anxiety and emptiness that had long since become my constant state of being. A vision of being able to feel normal, not tired and unable to carry out a plan beyond the initial stage of inspiration. I had desires deep inside of me, to become a musician, to become a chef, to become something, but I could never sustain these dreams. I had the talent to start off quickly at almost anything I chose to do, but I didn't have the energy or the clarity that comes from calmness and stillness within.
What really made me feel absolutely powerless and ashamed of myself was the fact that I was completely aware of the disconnect between my abilities and what I was actually able to do. This was a very painful and frustrating realization. Only now do I recognize that my inability to actualize was a distinct symptom of depression. How do I know this? Because the first time I allowed myself to receive proper treatment that was not interrupted, the first time I was prescribed antidepressants, benzodiazapines and a Z-drug to sleep just two years ago, I felt like a completely different person. It was suddenly very easy to have an idea and to follow through on it, a subtle sequence of events that probably goes unnoticed in most people. I was able to exercise, cook, garden, and meet girls. I felt great. I was able to make myself happy, not by buying things or comparing myself to others, but by being myself. That's all. Just being myself. For the first time in almost two decades, I liked myself for who I was. There was nothing wrong with me as a person, there never had been. I had lived with that burden for so long, and suddenly I saw the lie for what it was. And I was angry.
Less than a year after achieving an albeit tenuous state of remission, I made the mistake of thinking that I was "fixed", that I didn't need to continue taking medication. I was scared of the stigma surrounding the use of benzos and Z-drugs, despite the fact that I didn't abuse them, nor did I have trouble getting off them, at least at first. I scheduled myself from morning to evening with school, work and martial arts training. I even kicked Effexor in a pre-planned 3-month timeframe by gradually removing more and more of the little time-release pellets inside the capsules that had brought me back to life.
What followed was a year and a half of sheer misery. And again, I thought that there must be something wrong with me, that I was a bad person. Thank goodness I finally relented and sought psychiatric help. It took almost six months, but I finally found a combination of medications and lifestyle choices that slowly but steadily restored my health.
Now I have absolutely no doubt that I suffer from depression, that I have suffered for a very long time, and that there is nothing wrong with me. I take my medications religiously and I have learned a great deal about using herbs and supplements to enhance recovery. I studied and trained various forms of meditation and martial arts in order to learn how to master my body and mind. I had been doing this for years in the hope of relieving my suffering, but without medication it was futile.
And now I know why I keep having these nightmares, why I keep reliving the frustration and anger of being written off by my family. I realize that it is OK to be angry, that it doesn't make me a bad person. I need to feel this anger. I was starting to feel like I was becoming emotionally numb again. Not depressed or anxious, but not alive. I know that I had my emotions suppressed for a long time, first by my family, then later through self-denial. In fact, my family still treats me like I am wrong in some way, their opinion no doubt bolstered by my most recent relapse. It doesn't seem to matter that I responded to medication in such a robust fashion. That fact is conveniently ignored by my parents. My father sends me emails asking me to accept God and to turn my life around. But God is with me and has always been with me. I never would have survived some of the situations I was in if that weren't the case. In His mysterious way, God used my depression to temper my willpower, my faith, and to instill in me an unabashedly positive attitude. Those who suffer are comforted, that's for sure.
I no longer respond to my father's emails. I have made repeated attempts to explain my understanding of exactly how things fell apart and how his neglect and abuse helped create the isolation and stressful conditions that provided the fertile ground for my genetic predisposition to depression to bud and flower into a terrible nightmare that still haunts my dreams.
It is known that depression and other affective disorders--or whatever you choose to label them as--get worse with time. The best strategy is to treat them as soon as possible, and to provide the emotional support needed by those suffering in order for them to deal with the tremendous psychological impact that these illnesses can afflict on the psyche and the soul. The absolute worst thing to do is to judge and to reject someone who already feels worthless and hopeless.
I can no longer ignore this fact. My subconscious won't let me, even though I'd like to think that I'm 95% recovered. The deepest parts of my psyche are trying to tell me that it is OK to be angry, that I need to be angry in order to save myself from being lost to denial, to a tapestry of lies woven over many years by myself and my family. It's time I started listening.
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