Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (13 page)

As he came forth from his mother’s womb, naked shall he return.

Or they may say:

You have to lose yourself in order to find yourself.

Even if you are not ready to go to such spiritual lengths, you can try these three initiatives:

1
When you have lost precious things in the past, how did you manage
then
? Write down what you did. If you keep a diary, look back and see how you coped. Be honest: don’t belittle your former feelings and assume they hurt less than your feelings now. Get some perspective.
 

2
The loss that hurts you most may
also
have happened to someone you know reasonably well. If you haven’t already done so, talk to them. Find out how
they
coped. What did they have to do to get through the experience, to survive? Go on the Internet and ask people there. You will find kindred spirits who have not only shared your experience, but who may be further on in the healing process than you are and can pierce the gloom.
 

3
To make you realise how restricting ‘clinging on to possessions’ can be, try
giving away something that you value.
The feeling may surprise you. In the wild, animals can act possessive, for example over a carcass or a mate, but mostly they travel light. Having lots of belongings would seriously impair their freedom.

Disabled heroes – 1

Christopher Reeve broke his neck in a riding accident. In his dreams he could still walk and run, though in reality he knew he was a quadriplegic. He never gave up hope of a cure, and became an inspiration to others by carrying on with his career and setting a high benchmark for other equally disabled people.

Disabled heroes – 2

The Paralympians compete on a world stage at the highest level and hone their skills, not to come second, but to win.

Disabled heroes – 3

Battle Back, an organisation that rehabilitates war-wounded soldiers, including double and triple amputees, offers them thrilling adventure activities that give them back their self-esteem and joie de vivre. If you go on their website you can find out how some of them transformed themselves into the positive people they are now.

MOURNING

Grief is not a disease. Nor is it a sign of mental illness. Grief is normal to all living creatures when they have suffered loss. You don’t have to take a pill for grief. If you do, the natural process of grieving could be mutated or extended. When we grieve
we are undergoing change, and we are growing new wings, because our old ones have been battered about. If you give it time, the whole sad process will slowly make sense to you.

Sometimes people go on mourning because they are ashamed to stop. They think this would tarnish the love they feel for the individual they have lost, or demonstrate that they were somehow insufficiently devoted. Don’t be ashamed to move on. Even elephants, after they have stood round a fallen comrade sometimes for days, caressing the body gently with their trunks, eventually go on their way and continue with their lives. The seasons come and go, and the rhythm of life moves us forward. Be natural. Go with it.

My dear cousin Brian lost six members of his family – his wife Sandra, his mum Kath, his son Lee and three little grandchildren, in an arson attack on their home in Chingford, East London. When the site where their house used to stand was cleared, Brian found comfort in creating a small memorial garden there with trees and little plaques to his loved ones. He also raised money to buy two incubators for the maternity ward where the grandchildren were born. There was a small ceremony on the ward when the equipment was dedicated, and no one will ever forget it. Doing these kind and constructive things helped Brian to find the strength and the sanity to rebuild his life.

FIVE LITTLE LIFELINES

Here are five simple remedial actions to help you deal with loss. They are all methods that have proven successful for real people in real despair.

Keep a journal

Winston Churchill kept a journal and used it to get some perspective on his worst experiences. Try this yourself. Write down what you feel, day by day. Be honest. If you cry on the page, wipe it with a tissue and carry on writing.
We have to compose our thoughts in order to put them on paper, and this is a healing process.

Things to Do Today

Every morning when you wake up, give yourself a list of ‘Things to Do Today’. You may not do them all, but challenge yourself to accomplish at least one. It’s like winding up a clock: you will feel the little wheels and cogs begin to grind into action.

Create a memorial

It doesn’t have to be grand or expensive, but you can use your imagination to make something that pays a lasting tribute. An album of photographs with inscriptions, a book of memories you could post on the Internet, a painting, a plaque, a bench with an inscription, a feature tree in a special spot – these are just some of the ideas people have thought of to commemorate their loved ones.

Raise your morale

Your morale is important to your survival right now, so don’t leave it to chance, or passing moods. In a war it is vital to keep people’s spirits high or they will give up and lose. Take command, and take action that will make you feel positive. Choose something that has worked for you before, and put some
will
into it.

Tackle that task

One very good way to lift your spirits off the ground during loss is counter-intuitive, but it really worked for some of my trainees. It is this.
Go and find something that you have long put off, that you don’t want to do, and do it.
You’ll be surprised at the effect on your spirits: it’s like hitting the bottom and bouncing back up. This is especially true if the task makes you nervous.

FOUR-LEGGED LOSS

Finally, if the person you have lost had four legs, of course you can’t possibly
replace
him or her by getting another one. But there are thousands of unwanted animals in shelters around the country. Each one is an individual in its own right, with lots of love and faith to give. It’s not their fault your beloved companion has gone, and they need a home, hope and kindness. They too are grieving for those they have lost. You might find a real friend in need there.

10

Going for the ‘CC’

Depressed people tend to use games and leisure pursuits as displacement activities to avoid facing problems and challenges.
If you use them for this and don’t respect reality, or make the necessary changes in your lifestyle to deal with the real issues affecting your moods, you will stick where you are and not move forward. So this chapter is not about escaping, but about
exploring
.

Leisure pursuits can be very useful if you are in despair – provided you know how and why they work. But you need to understand the pay-off, and what games are actually designed to do before they can really enrich your mind.

As we have seen in Chapter 7 on crises, the brain is very adept at orchestrating its connections and coming up with brainwaves and epiphanies at big moments and crossroads in our lives. Religious people have actively gone in search of these revelations by exposing themselves to unusual hardships – from wearing hair-shirts to walking across hot coals, and from self-flagellation and fasting to wandering alone in deserts. We know exciting revelations don’t have to be left to chance (or to magic mushrooms either, in case that unworthy thought entered your noddle).

In our leisure pursuits,
artificial
versions of sublime religious revelations happen, and they happen quite deliberately. In fact we put ourselves in some version of harm’s way in order to reach something
like
the soul-sensing experiences of religious faith, of Near Death Experiences, of Zen
sartori
or enlightenment. So for those of you who are hopelessly low right now, getting off your bottom and taking action to make you feel good may be easier and far more pleasurable than you think. You too can have ‘wow’ experiences.

THE AROUSAL CURVE

In all of our key leisure activities, in our literary classics, in drama, cinema, sport, music, adventure activities and rites of passage, the same exhilarating sequence emerges:

1
a steady build-up of tension
 

2
a peak of excitement or crescendo
 

3
a moment of clarity and realisation
 

4
resolution.

I call these extreme experiences CCs or ‘cerebral climaxes’. My research, which spans 25 years in literature, sports psychology and the science on ‘stress’, highlights the importance to mental health and well-being of the CC. The theory of ‘managing’ our emotions by avoidance and calming down is really emotional censorship. It rubbishes our leisure pursuits, because despite our modern obsession with ‘managing stress’, people spend their spare time on climactic activities virtually guaranteed to involve tension, tears and fears.

They deliberately allow themselves to go on an emotional rollercoaster that climaxes in a crescendo, a result, a pay-off. The conventional wisdom is that we are all simply motivated by the pursuit of pleasure, but climactic activities are much more complex than that. They facilitate a so-called ‘adrenalin rush’, an arousal curve. They are purposely designed to give us ‘highs’.

GOING FOR THE GOLDEN FEELING

People have always been willing to endure tension, tears and fears, so long as there is a climactic experience at the end of it. Falling in love can be highly distressing but few would forego the amazing cerebral climaxes that a love affair can give. Or consider the 1970s personal development programme known as EST (Erhard Seminar Training), the brainchild of Werner Erhard. Adopting the often abusive
and demeaning approach of Zen master training, EST stripped away every layer of belief from trainees until they discovered within themselves a liberating, ego-less state known as ‘It’.

The modern equivalent would be tense quizzes like
The Weakest Link,
in which Anne Robinson seeks to humiliate general knowledge buffs on national television. There is no shortage of contestants. Afterwards a lot of them say it gave them a buzz, and that they would ‘highly recommend’ the experience to anyone (over the age of 18. You can download entry forms by e-mailing [email protected] – I gave them out to my trainees.

The need for the CC is very prevalent in human society. It may explain (explain, not forgive) certain self-destructive and anti-social acts such as gambling all the housekeeping or flirting with the forbidden. For most of us CCs are obtained more easily by taking part in leisure activities. The more extreme the activity, the higher the curve, but the pattern is always the same.

The brain’s powers are heightened during CCs, and scientists now have a good idea why it navigates us towards them, rewarding us with goosebumps and spine-tinglings when we are willing to undergo a particularly big ‘tension loop’.
Involuntary
loops that may occur during personal crises can provide the necessary tension–resolution pattern for an epiphany, a brainwave. If not, there is this lot listed below.

CC PURSUITS

Juveniles

•
Childhood dares

•
Fiction and fairy stories

•
Gruesome spewsome comics

•
Extreme computer games

•
Teenage daredevil pursuits

•
Romance and sex

•
Fighting and disputing

•
‘Recreational’ drugs

•
Fagging, ‘hazing’

•
Rites of passage

Adults

•
Classics of fiction

•
Thrillers & chillers

•
Drama & theatre

•
The horror movie

•
Poetry

•
Quizzes & contests

•
Punchline jokes

•
Hunting

•
Spectator sports