Dealing with Depression - Letting go and letting be

On Sunday I had one of those ‘low’ days, the kind of day everyone has from time to time when it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s good in our lives and what isn't. The day gets ‘lower’ as we dig ourselves ever deeper into a generally negative view of our self, our current situation and other people. In the end we just become resigned to it all and, depending on temperament, will either turn to some form of palliative overlay, usually in the form of activity or ‘busyness’, or try to get a grip from within, through denial or self-enforced cheerfulness. Somewhere in between lies acceptance. We have to accept that the situation just is. We have to step back from it, at least in our heads, if not in our emotions, and take stock, by appreciating it’s being as it is and that it might even go on being that way for some time. We let go while at the same time accepting the reality of the pain itself.

In the sense that most day to day suffering is, of its very nature, tedious and repetitive, pain blocks our sensory perception of the possibility that we might be surprised by something new. So, as I have found in my own low moments, it is important to do everything possible not to allow the pain to block the way we might perceive things differently. Sensory perception gets blocked when we allow the pain to be artificially reduced or trivialised (in telling ourselves that it’s not all that bad really and that we should ‘snap out of it’) or, on the other hand, allow it to completely overwhelm us, mentally, spiritually and sometimes physically.

Taking control in low moments is not a matter of deciding on a course of action, or willing oneself into a different frame of mind by minimising the significance of our pain in sweeping it back to where it came from, wherever that was. It is a matter of sighing it out, of letting it go. It is the equivalent of ‘breathing through’ a contraction during labour, in order to relax the mind and body for the next one. The technique works in a similar way for dealing with depression. We breathe through it by a process of acceptance and sighing.

But accepting our feelings does not automatically entail unquestioning acceptance of our situation, as I know in regard to my own as a woman in the Church. Rather, it allows us to get out of the situation and look at it objectively, as well as looking objectively at the way we are feeling about it, especially as those feelings affect the way we relate to other people. Accepting negative feelings, with or without their being associated with unhappy memories, is the first step in taking real control of ourselves and of the situation which is causing us grief. Being simply passive to the pain is the quickest and surest way to allow whatever darkness we are experiencing in any given situation to overwhelm us. So we have to ‘labour’ through our feelings by sighing them out. The sighing is important because it obviates the need for words. But we still need someone to listen and be with us. With low days and low moments it is important to allow our sighs to be directed to someone who can show us how to get through the whole process of being ‘low’ and emerge intact, and not only intact, but a new person. This is part of what it means to be re-born in Christ. 

This happened to me on Sunday. I was sighing (yet again) about my situation vis a vis the Church. I was sighing into God and into his Christ. This was made easier by the fact that I was in the congregation rather than leading the service. It was a most refreshing change made possible by a cycle race which obliged me to take a major detour so that I arrived too late to be ‘up front’ with the other clergy. At the end of the service, having chatted to a few of the parishioners there, I was reminded of my great love for them all. Later, a colleague came up to me. I apologized for being late on account of the cyclists (I was pretty annoyed with them too which didn’t help the ‘low’ feeling) and she responded with a hug and something along the lines of ‘lovely that you’re here with your people’. Generosity of spirit, grace and goodness in a colleague who shares her ministry with me (when she doesn’t have to) with those particular words, ‘your people’, dispelled the low feeling in an instant, along with all its attendant bits of baggage relating to the Church and my situation in it. Her smile and those words were the answer to my sighing. Sighing out our pain into God opens us up to hearing him, or recognising his presence, in surprising ways. He makes himself felt from within the pain, often through the sheer goodness of others.