Posted by SyntheticSoul on August 23, 2006, at 14:18:51
I am going to take a risk here by throwing some observations about healing on the table.
I don’t post here much, in fact, I think I have posted just a handful of messages since I joined last year; however, I have spent, and spend a lot of time on this board reading, observing, and following your stories. I watch your ups and downs. I observe your triumphs and feel your pain when they sometimes slip away after the medicine stops doing its gig. I have struggled with debilitating depression for the better part of my life, I am now 35. I have run this course, taken all the meds, popped the supplements, and probably read far too much. In my search for peace I have tried nearly all forms of therapy available, dug up and examined each new explanation, heck, I even went to an exorcist once when it got unbearable and nearly psychotic. Needless to say, I have learned a couple of things about mental illness and healing over my long sentence with it.
I am not interested in sounding like an authority or like I have the answers; however, a few patterns about healing become apparent after reading post after post here that I want to share. First would have to be the strength I see in so many of you--even those of you who come to basically collapse with resignation week after week. I have watched a few of you become like the fabled Phoenix and emerge from ash. The most interesting part of that process is not always how you did it, but what you now are like. It’s like watching a Veterans Day parade sometimes. You learned along the roughest roads that you were actually powerful and had fire in you that just took all those years of waste to discover. Sure you might be back in the hole next week, but at least you know more about that hole this time around. It’s the defiance I love the most. Healed people seem unashamedly defiant. What little payoff these illnesses bring belong to them and don’t you dare think you can negate or diminish their experiences. You took so many bullets and bruises that all you could possibly do was wake up, brush, clothe the kids and get to work to see if today would be different. It often was. And tomorrow may be different, also.
I want to be respectful of board rules and regulations, I don’t want to offend, but it looks to me, and was true in my case, that healing really started not through talk therapy directly, but after exhausting every possible option available. The light seems to go on when you realize that some unseen thing, whether God or just blind force, is putting the weights on your chest just waiting for you to lift, to push, to hurt and struggle with the bench-press designed to turn you into something like Neo in the Matrix. Oh yeah, Neo is in there, but he doesn’t come out until you learn the karate. I am not suggesting that healing is a matter will. I have taken on more than one family member directly over such suggestions. No, it’s more than that. Unfortunately, I see a number of healed people ultimately leave Babble because they got chastised or banned for simply doing what healed people well: telling it like it is and making no compromises with hard facts. That’s unfortunate. Mostly because it enforces the idea for those new to this journey that if someone just coddles or protects them they will somehow emerge better off in the end. I don’t know for sure, but I doubt many people heal who have a primary interest in keeping their feelings from being hurt or their ideas from being confronted. This is a war, after all.
Take it or leave it.
poster:SyntheticSoul
thread:679363
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060818/msgs/679363.html