Photo by Jonatán Becerra on Unsplash
HAVE you ever visited a psychotherapist once, never gone back, and realised it was the best hour you could have ever spent? I’ve had one of those experiences. And the older gentleman taught me the difference between depression (which I thought I had, but didn’t) and grief (which I had). Sure, I was depressed, but…
Being depressed is intrinsically part of the grief process, and
that can form into clinical depression,[1] but importantly, the basis for the depression is the
grief. Typically, when the grief is attended to, we recover. It takes months,
if not a year or three or more, but we do recover if we’re being honest — if we’re
wrestling with our stuckness.
Grief can feel like
clinical depression, but thankfully we have a reason for being so depressed. Not all depression has such
rationale.
About grief, pain is an indicator of reality; an important
factor in not simply our plummeting, but a pivotal feature in our recovery as
well. Especially when there’s more pain involved in remaining stuck than breaking
free and moving forward.
“…
pain [is] necessary to know the truth, but we don’t have to keep the pain alive
to keep the truth alive.”
— Mark Nepo
Loss is etched in truth we
cannot get away from. It leaves us stuck in a truth that has held us, embodied
in love or a state of being we found so acceptable it came to be part of us.
Even though grief isn’t
depression it certainly is possible that it could open the door to an extended
season of life where we do have clinical depression. But one thing that can
free us is knowing and remembering what started the cycle in the first place —
an event, a sequence, a tipping point.
That event may have been a
catalyst. It may have brought all our burdens to bear at once. It could have
caused a breakdown, and a deconstruction of our identity.
Additionally, often grief leaves
us with unanswered and unanswerable questions. It takes time to accept the hard
things we cannot change. Grief is a journey of acceptance.
And grief certainly does
challenge and change our identity. But the truth remains the same. When we can
accept that truth as a reality and the pain is gone — though it will always
remain as a sad reality — that is when our grief stages are complete.
Even in acceptance, reality
bears scars of a pain that once was, a reality we know was once so real.
One thing we can know about
grief is it is more tangible than classic clinical depression. One thing we can
do about it is, embrace the future with such meaning from the past.
[1] Defined as Major Depressive Disorder under the DSM-V. http://images.pearsonclinical.com/images/assets/basc-3/basc3resources/DSM5_DiagnosticCriteria_MajorDepressiveDisorder.pdf
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