Why our Complex Relationship with the Past Fuels our Depression and The Questions That Can Help us Heal and Discover Hope.

The RelationShifter Vol 1 Issue #4

 As I sit here, sipping my espresso martini, on my flight to Iceland and I took a moment to reflect upon how grateful I am to be exactly where I am supposed to be in life despite my past. Our pasts can be ones that haunt us in life due to negative experiences and touch us in ways that were unimaginable. They change the person who we were and transform us into the person we are supposed to become when we are ready for it. But sometimes staying in the the past is what keeps us safe and unfortunately stuck. Today I am going to talk about Why our Complex Relationship with the Past Fuels our Depression and The Questions That Can Help us Heal and Discover Hope. I have been one of the lucky ones who found what I call purpose and the meaning of my life. This would not have been possible without my life experiences because these are the incidents that created the person I am today. Each positive and negative experience changed my course in life which moved me closer to becoming me!

I have heard so many of my clients over the years struggle with the questions, what is my purpose and what is the meaning of life? These are existential questions that I find only create more struggles for us as a species which can lead us down the path of depression. It becomes an existential crisis and compound that with a past trauma or negative experiences and you have a recipe for a depression martini. So, I reflect asking myself, what happened to my depression? Yes, where the hell did it go? I find myself wrestling with the thought of this disorder that I kept me stuck with for two years after the loss of my son. Today, I feel a sense of gratitude to be able to support my clients with all types of trauma and negative experiences and those questions about purpose and meaning of life.  Why, because I have a decent understanding of what it feels like and how it can suck the life out of us until we have lost our connection with who we are.

Our relationship with our past is a complicated one, especially when depression is present. It is not an easy task and sure there are drugs that we can take, and I tried many of them. Unfortunately, they were a necessary evil at the time so I could function. However, It helped me realize that these drugs can be used to help us with a crisis but may make things worse long term. For me, living like a zombie on anti-depressants wasn’t the life that I was supposed to live. I want to be clear that I am not minimizing how we struggle with depression because it is one of the worst mental health disorders in existence and I empathize with  280 million people who are struggling with this disorder today. I am only offering my perspective and experience with it.

Severe, moderate, mild, recurrent, in remission and the list goes on for the levels of depression that I must diagnose in clients. Sure, I have the skills to sympathize and to validate one’s feelings and can provide them with a diagnosis based on certain symptoms and factors. However,  to understand 100%  of what a person has going on in their minds is impossible because our relationships with past and depression are intimate and there are times that we have no idea why we feel depressed.  My job as a their therapist is to support them in finding a way to help them heal themselves by working together as a team and asking better questions.

We all have superpowers and I consider that finding my calling was a direct result of my trauma, life experiences and yes, my depression! Nobody in this world can understand what we are going through because they are not us, they don’t have our experiences in life and our life experiences is part of what makes us so unique as a species. Most of the time our depression hits us out of nowhere and that is due to a past of bad life experiences that are compounded with interest. A typical response we hear as therapists to a what brings you in today question is “I am depressed, and everything makes me depressed.” Yes, everything makes us depressed because at times it is challenging to pinpoint one exact experience that makes us feel like we are dying a slow death every day. I would define Depression as past negative life experiences that we are not able to process, accept and heal from. We create a story from our past that is dark in live with that narrative in the present.

As a therapist I try to operate from the present as much as possible.  The past is gone, and the future has not been written so why are we spending so much time thinking about it.  I worked in the prison system for several years with incarcerated moms and dads. Their biggest fear was the time that they had being alone with their thoughts because it was just an opportunity to reflect upon the darkness, depression, and the poor choices that they felt they made in life and choices others made for them. There are reasons why we are not able to process, accept and heal from our past experiences because sometimes we are not ready and sometimes it is somehow serving a need within us.

For me I was stuck in the past after the loss of my son, and this was my first experience with depression. Sure, I had bad things happen to me my entire life, but life would not allow me to get stuck because I had to figure my stuff out. I had no choice but to move forward because staying stuck was not going to pay my bills and being in the past would not allow me to be in the present and that is where my family needed me to be. I have so much compassion for my clients that struggle with being stuck in the past because when we get trapped there it takes away from our present and that is where we live our entire existence. We inadvertently sacrifice our present for our past!

The reason we get stuck in the past is because we cannot help it which makes it hard to let go of. With my depression I felt that letting go of the past would be letting go of the guilt I had for not being able to save my son. My depression served a purpose, and all our depression does. Yes, we use our depression to satisfy a need inside of us. My need was to make myself pay for my son’s passing because I was his dad and my job in life was to keep him safe and alive. I allowed my depression to suck the life out of my present because I needed to make myself pay for what happened. The guilt and remorse was my penance for my son’s passing because most of the time our natural tendencies is the need to hold something or someone accountable for what is going on in our world. I was holding onto this self-fulfilling need for a long time because as a species nobody will punish us more for anything in life more than we punish ourselves. This became the story I was telling myself over and over. I was giving a lot of energy, time, and resources to events of the past which was feeding the depression monster and it was consuming my present. Honestly, it started getting old after awhile because I could not stand being around myself.

We all have this tenacity for punishing ourselves with no remorse more than any other creature on the planet. We are brutal in our pursuit to blame ourselves for things that are most likely out of our control. Why? Yes, the why question is the most ridiculous question we can ask ourselves because it can never be answered. Why did my son die? Why did I not have the foresight to see the future? Why did I lose my job?  Why? Why? Why? If you are asking yourself why, my first tip for this post is to start asking yourself a better question because the one you are asking yourself keeps you safe and stuck. That is the complicated relationship we have with our past and our depression. We just need better questions!

The why question is what we ask ourselves when we are alone with our thoughts. I spent two years asking myself why and read a lot of books and never found the answer. Why did my son die? What am I supposed to be doing with my life? I could not see myself moving through life on anti-depressants as a zombie from a scene out of the walking dead. So, I just stopped asking that question and found a better question to help with my depression and the existential crisis I found myself in. My new question became “What am I supposed to learn from my son’s passing and how can I use this to help others in the world and make him proud of me.” See the difference from one question to the other? The first question could never be answered and that is the reason we get stuck . The second question helped me change the meaning of my son’s passing from a negative one to one that would inspire me to help others and put on a new path in life. This was my way to process, accept, heal, and move forward. This is something we are all capable of and only when we are ready!

That day I chose to change my why question, was the day I became unstuck. This day was quite significant because that day I let go of the past. If I chose to hold on, I would not be a therapist helping people from all walks of life which is my purpose. That day I chose to get out of bed and do something that my depression was telling me not to do, remember I was safe and stuck. As I started letting go of my past, my mindset in life shifted because I changed my question which led to reflecting upon these two words. Meaning and Focus. Yes, just two words that I heard from a life coach, changed my life. I am hopeful that this newsletter offers hope and inspiration to others that are struggling in life. Maybe these two words will help you make that shift that you need. If not, you may not be ready now, but you must keep trying and doing different things because if not you will continue to invest in the past and sacrifice your present.  If you are interested in reading more about grief and developing your own set of skills to conquer depression, please check on my book. The Warriors of Life.

My being stuck in the past was due to my mindset and the question why. This created a complicated meaning for me, and I guess I figured we did something wrong as parents in life, bad karma, etc. It was a lot of negative meanings that circulated around my head for those two years and with that meaning my focus was on his death. So, my meaning was faulty, and my focus was negative and that is what I needed to change. Please take a moment and reflect upon what has you stuck in depression, what is your why? Why did this (fill in the traumatic event) happen to me, why didn’t the people I love do better for me? Our questions about the why consume our lives leading us into this dark hole of the past that we have absolutely no control over because we are not asking ourselves the right question. Without the right question, we will have a skewed meaning of life which result in focusing on things that will put us on a path to self-destruction.

Instead of asking, “Why were my parents neglectful”, maybe a better question to ask is What am I supposed to do with the gift I have been given. You see whether we want to accept it or not the shi*t that gets thrown at us in life are gifts from the universe, God, Messiah whoever your see as a higher power. We have no control over things that happen to us, and we can either accept and move forward or not. I will tell you from experience that a failure to accept will keep you stuck.  How is holding onto to your negative question helping you? What need is that question serving within you? Remember, we choose to be stuck because there is something about the past that we feel we need to punish ourselves for or are not ready to accept it and move forward. We need to discover a path of forgiving ourselves and at times others and for me I made peace with it and said, “I think two years of punishing myself was enough”. If we choose not to make peace, accept it, and stop punishing ourselves, we allow our toxic relationship with the past and depression to consume our lives. What would it take to forgive yourself and begin practicing some self-love?

Today, you have two choices you can take the path of least resistance and continue on the path you are on or choose a different path with a different question. I know there are a lot of you that are saying, well, “my depression is hereditary”, and I am here to tell you that it may be true but it also most likely may be a big part of your story. I believe we all have control over our lives regardless of our DNA. Is it easier to say it is hereditary and live an existence based on some genes that we had no choice taking. We become stuck because the pain to accept and confront our past and is too painful. If we never change our question, we will never meet the person we are supposed to become and discover the gifts we were given to help ourself and others?

If you read my last post about anxiety, you know that anxiety is a mechanism that our brains use to keep us safe. Depression is the same way because our minds know that if we stay depressed, we are safe because what is on the other side of depression is uncertainty and that we believe could be a lot worse than being depressed.

When we finally let go of the past we begin our journey of discovering how it will shape the person we are supposed to become.

 If you are depressed or stuck in life start by asking yourself these three questions.

What is the question that is keeping me stuck in the past struggling with depression?
What need is this question serving inside of me?
What are better questions to ask myself to help myself accept, heal, forgive and move forward?
So I can stop sacrificing so much of my present to something I am not able to change!

Then decide to either stay stuck or move forward. If you decide to move forward, change your question to something that will provide you with a new meaning of whatever has you depressed and then focus on something that is positive, which will give you hope. Because at the end of the day depression is a lack of hope. Hopelessness is not believing that life will be any better due to the events of the past and aren’t you tired of investing in something that can’t be changed? If you are unable to move forward, possibly finding a therapist to start talking about your past may be helpful. But only if you feel you are ready because we can’t do the work if we aren’t ready to do the work!

I am hopeful that you had one take away that will help you move forward in life so you can discover happiness and gratitude because life is way too short to live any other way!

 Richard Pryor, ACMHC, MS