Posted by Daisym on July 24, 2005, at 16:33:07
In reply to I am so angry and sad, posted by happyflower on July 24, 2005, at 9:54:49
Happy --
Thanks for your response. I was concerned after I posted that you would misinterpret what I was trying to sort out, like my experiences were some how "worse" or "better" than your experiences.
I've been researching grief and child abuse for a long time now. When I first started working in therapy, I assumed I was depressed. I told several therapist I met that if I was screening myself, I would have referred me to mental health services, starring the "depressive symptoms" box. My therapist agreed that I had the symptoms but he pointed to a convergence of both a mid-life, existential crisis as well as deep grief that was boiling up, having been reactivated by my son's struggles. In discussing treatment options, he did offer that we could medicate the symptoms and in all likelihood I would feel better and go back to functioning in a similar manner. And crash again in a year, or two or five. But he warned that sorting through all of the "stuff" -- past, present and future, would be painful and it would take awhile. He said I needed to give myself room to grieve because the grief was forcing its way out anyway.
One of the articles I found talks about the "Dark Night of the Soul" and what a huge task it is to recover from childhood abuse:
"Those who grew up with severe abuse or neglect have a lifetime of inner work to do before they feel whole, healed, and complete. Child abuse/neglect causes a state that I call “The Void,” which is a giant emptiness inside. When I ask adult survivors of abuse to visualize themselves at the edge of an abyss, they will see and experience a bottomless pit that is as wide as the Grand Canyon. Out of the void arises addiction, feelings of emptiness, a feeling as if one is never living on solid ground, and a profound depression that can provoke suicidal thoughts and acts."These people suffer tremendously emotionally. Over the years, psychiatrists will treat them with every category of psychiatric medication. Medications rarely work, and when they do, the effect is usually short-lived. It would take too long to explain the biology of this, but it is easy to explain the symbolism. If you throw a pill of Paxil into the Grand Canyon, what is the impact on the Grand Canyon going to be? Nothing. When we treat adult survivors of abuse with anti-depressants, we are essentially trying to heal the great abyss with a tiny pill. It does not work.
"Whether you are questioning the meaning in life, having an existential crisis, or a Dark Night of the Soul, your experience should not be confused with Clinical Depression. You do not want to short-circuit this process with medication any more than you want to abort the grief process with medication. In both situations, medication will ultimately lead to genuine depression, the exact thing it is intended to treat. You cannot treat “meaning” with a drug. Nor can you accelerate your expansion of consciousness, your spiritual awareness, with medication.
"Before you can find the light at the end of the tunnel, you must first determine which tunnel you are walking through. " --By David Gersten, M.D.
Framing the work this way helped me change my expectations a tiny bit. I think the medications are important for keeping the symptoms manageable but it helped me to know that I couldn't expect to find a medication to take away all the pain. And it helps to think about grieving all of this. I don't agree with all, or maybe even half, of what Dr. Gersten writes about. But it made sense to me that I needed to grieve what I didn't get as well as what I did get and then figure out how to regulate it as part of my history, not the predictor of my future happiness.
I wish I was in a place to BELIEVE everything I've just written. But I believe it for others and I'm trying hard to follow one of the basic tenants of grieving - take each day as it comes and get through it the best you come. Eventually the nights won't be so long and you won't count how many minutes until this day is done and over. It is a process, as Billy Crystal says. And that means sometimes you are up and sometimes down. I wish this was an up time for you.
poster:Daisym
thread:532294
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050716/msgs/532865.html