When I am depressed, the same sentiments as many depressed people echo in my head:
“Please don’t try to cheer me up. You are invalidating a very real emotional experience of mine. It is mine to own, not yours to deny or take away or solve or fix. My personal failures depress me, and your prompts to cheer up – no matter how subtle or disguised with gentleness – are veiled confirmation that I am failing, that my state is a ‘bad’ or a ‘wrong’ that I must escape. Your impatience with my depression is fueling my own impatience with my depression. And that’s depressing.”
I have not enjoyed, cherished, or savored my lowest moments. Yet, efforts to abate them all failed. The state was all mine, and nothing would remove it. Nor would anyone else. All my attempts and all the efforts of others to remove the state were evidence that it could not be. Something deeper with great power signaled that I could not make life as I wished, but that life would now instead show *me* what is to be wished for. That is the enforced dark night of the soul.
“Neil, if you insist on clinging to the identities that you’ve falsely assumed to give you power, and you continue to insist that only something external can rescue you, then those falsities will be exposed as powerlessness. Your true power is there in the darkness. Wander within it until you stumble upon the foundation of your real power…”
Here are excerpts of a wonderfully different way to express the deep-rest of the depressed, from https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-healing-work-of-community-and-service-2023-05-24/
“…the hard parts of my life are not failure. They are evidence…”
“Womanist theologian and pastor Dr. Monica Coleman writes openly about her experience…:
…I had to detach myself emotionally from everything just to keep from crying all the time… It took all my energy to get up and get dressed and be there and not cry through the day…
Revelation did not come to me in thunderbolts. God was just there… In the knitting. God was in my uniform rows of stitches. God was also in the dropped stitch that created an imperfection.… Whether it feels like it or not…God is making something new. Something beautiful…
I was knitting God into the hat and scarf. No. God was knitting me. With therapists, medication, …and a name for my condition… God was knitting me back together…
I don’t want to be reduced to my symptoms and diagnosis… I am learning the difference between captivity and rest, between an illness and a condition. There’s nothing wrong with me. After all, this is the only me I’ve ever known. But sometimes I need to slow down, check to see if I’m okay; look at the emotional heap of yarn in my lap, undo a few rows, and try again. I need to know that the things I drop, the things I can’t do the way I want, the hard parts of my life are not failure. They are evidence that I’m human.”
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And the deep, deep gift of being human is not to be discovered in shallow places.
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Neil D. 2023-05-29
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What is “Dark night of the Soul?” Almost always misused and misunderstood. See Dark Night of the Soul (0) – Resources & Recommendations
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