Episode 22: Depression From The Other Point Of View

As the title of today's show suggests, I am focusing this episode on how depression is experienced from the point of view of those who share their life with the chronically, long-termed depressed partner, parent, child or family member and come under fire from the missiles of silence, rejection, disinterest, passive/aggressiveness, self-absorption and more that the depressive volleys at the ones who are doing everything in their power to help and uplift the depressive. Your story and struggle are always swept under the rug and often overlooked as to how this experience is wearing you down on all levels. You want nothing more than to help your loved one overcome their depression because you deeply love them and want them to be happy. But there is also a futility, sadness, frustration and constant discouragement that leads to any number of physical ailments. You may even worry you are becoming depressed. But are you truly depressed? Or are you carrying depression for someone else through the entanglement with that person? Does distance from the depressive suddenly create a healthy shift in your energy field that is palpable and that reminds you of the life that you are not living because you are chained to the depressive’s prison cell? I’ll cover each of these questions and more in today’s episode.


Disclaimer: This podcast is for people who are ready to heal body, mind and spirit and are willing to take full responsibility for what that involves. I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. This podcast contains adult language and themes that are not suitable for young children or those who are easily offended or triggered. The views discussed in this podcast are my own, based on personal experience and of those I have known and worked with for my entire adult life. This show is not meant to take the place of sound medical or mental health advice. You and only you are responsible for the choices you make based on the information you hear on this show. 

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Transcript

            Welcome to Episode 22. Today’s topic is: “Depression From The Other Point Of View”.

            There are plenty of podcasts, YouTube videos, books, articles, DVDs and instructional audios and so much more that focus on the roots of depression, therapies that can be useful for depression and teach the depressive individual various strategies to heal and find the joy that has been stolen from them. But on today’s episode, I am not shining the spotlight on the depressive person. Today’s focus, as the title “Depression From The Other Point Of View” suggests, is on the point of view from those who share the battlefield with the chronically, long-termed depressed partner, parent, child or family member and come under fire from the missiles of silence, rejection, disinterest, passive/aggressiveness, self-absorption and more that the depressive volleys at the ones who are doing everything in their power to help and lift up the depressive in their life. Your story and struggle are always swept under the rug so that the depressive can dwell in the spotlight of their own self-destruction. You marinate in the energy of the long-suffering parent, child, partner, brother, sister, and so on as you grasp at any straw you can that will help the depressive and through that, potentially give you your life back. But there’s a problem with that thought process. And the problem is that you are putting all your eggs into the depressive’s basket and he or she keeps dropping that basket and breaking all those eggs. That creates a loop of futility, sadness, frustration, and discouragement that absolutely leads to stress-related illness, inflammatory conditions, chronic headaches and muscle tension and a quasi-sense that you yourself are becoming depressed and falling into the same dark hole as your loved one. But the question is, are your physical problems intricately tied to long-term exposure with the depressive individual? And are you really suffering from depression yourself? Or are you carrying depression for someone else through the entanglement with that person? Does distance from the depressive suddenly create a healthy shift in your energy field that is palpable and that reminds you of the life that you are not living because you are chained to the depressive’s prison cell? I’ll cover each of these questions and more in today’s episode. 

            I want to emphasize that the depression I’m talking about in today’s show is the hardcore type of depression that paralyzes a person and destroys their life. I’m not talking about fleeting depression or short-term depression that would occur from having a bad day or experiencing a stress that will eventually pass. I’m speaking directly about those who drown and suffer in the loudest silence of deep and dark depression for years and who refuse help and/or are known as “treatment resistant”. 

I have been depressed and I have been suicidal. So I don’t want this episode to give you the impression that I have no compassion or empathy for the depressed individual. If this episode makes you feel victimized or offended, that’s on you. I know what the darkest of the darkest pit of Hell feels like. I also know what it takes and feels like to crawl out of that pit and emerge into a brighter reality. And I also know what it feels like to be at the mercy - and it is at the mercy - of others who you live with who are chronically depressed and who are resistant to help or therapy. Who are basically frozen in the ice of their own inability to thaw and break through that ice and find their way back to themselves. A lot of you listening right now are dealing with the aftermath or current situation of living with someone who impressed that low vibrational energy of chronic depression onto you and forced you to live a life half-lived. Half felt. Half experienced. 

Depression, from the other point of view, is a thief because it steals the joy, peace, calm and serenity from everyone who is forced to live with the depressed person. Depression is an arsonist because it burns up every path that leads away from the depression and into a place of healing. Depression is a bully because it gives everyone around it no way to escape the daily passive/aggressive tactics. Depression is a terrorist because it’s a hostage taker and strips away the rights of everyone around it that would allow them to feel carefree, autonomous and to have the right to their own emotions whether those emotions are sadness or celebration. Depression is a dirty blade that cuts innocent people and forces them to bleed out and feel infected and at the mercy of the attack, while simultaneously having no escape from the knife’s edge. 

There’s this attitude I’ve noticed for decades that the chronic, long-term depressive is looked upon as needing empathy and compassion and space to maintain their inability to cope with the incoming pain they are doing everything they can to avoid. Just the idea of suggesting that the depressive is responsible or contributing to other people’s pain and lives that are half lived or hardly lived is akin to treason. How dare you throw shade on someone who is clearly suffering! But I noticed, it took me awhile of course because I was programmed to enable the many depressives I’ve had to live with or spend a lot of time with, that nobody seems to care or have concern about the people who must satellite around the depressive. And the person who is most unable to see or address the pain that is being inflicted upon the innocent bystanders is, of course, the depressive. So if you don’t have anyone introducing this concept to those around the depressive and essentially giving them a voice and demonstrating that they are seen and acknowledged and exist, they will languish in their own islands of horrible sadness, anger and resentment. So this episode is for those people. Because I see you, I get you and I want you to know that you are not disposable. That you are worthy of having a full life that is joyful and full of optimism and opportunities that are not dependent on the depressive or how that depressive gives you the impression that you are not worthy of attention and celebration. I know you can’t share anything great with a depressive because you will only be fed back the low energy responses or just blank stares or silence. When you share good news with them, they are only thinking about themselves and how your good news could potentially affect them. They will corrupt your milestones and celebrations with their heavy insistence that they just can’t be around that kind of effervescent energy. It’s just too much. So they will often be absent from birthday parties, graduations, weddings, holiday gatherings and more. If you are looking for support when you are in need, the depressive cannot provide that for you. That’s why I maintain that chronic, long-term depression is a selfish and self-destructive disorder that upends everyone who must deal with the chronic depressive who is resistant to getting help and rising above their illness.

I know you want the depressive’s love. I know you want them to see you. I know you want them to hear you. I know you want them to communicate with you without the conversation always tracking back to them. I know you want them to get well and I know you’ve done a lot to help them overcome their demons. And I also know how exhausted you are and how you have forgotten who you are and what you desire. You are not in the way. You are not an after-thought. Your role is not dedicated to being a satellite of the depressive. You exist as a separate individual who has needs, desires, wants and dreams that surpass anything that the depressive could ever imagine. 

            As you’ve probably already figured out if you’re a regular listener of my podcast, this episode is inspired and understood from hundreds of people I have known in my life as well as my own life experiences, as someone who grew up in a home where depression, unhealed trauma and constant self-absorption were the operating system of my environment. Because I didn’t heal this aspect of my life, I continued to attract the same types of people into my life who carried the same patterns of depression, isolation and suicidal ideation. I wanted to help each one of them because I loved them, I didn’t want them to continue suffering and I thought, naively, that I could fix them and make their depression melt away. Of course, that never worked but that didn’t stop me from beating my head against an immovable brick wall. But at the same time, I also attracted friendships with women and some men who were just like me. Who grew up in the identical controlled environment. I say ‘controlled,’ because the depressive always had control over everyone who lived in the house. And how did the people in that house get their needs met by the depressive? They didn’t. What choices were they given? They weren’t. They were not given choices except to stick it out or do everything they could to either help the depressive or stay out of their way.

I knew too many people who understood what it felt like to live within the darkened mind of the depressive they loved. We were like a sick little club. People who carried a lot of hope that the next treatment, the next drug, the next therapy would be the answer to their steadfast prayer. And like the good little soldiers we all were, we didn’t pay attention to the emotional, mental and physical drain that the depressives in our lives foisted upon us. We took the emotional hits and kept getting up in our dedication to helping the depressive. We grew accustomed to the low vibrational energy that the depressive put out. We sometimes recognized how tired we were after spending a few hours, days or weeks with them. And if we lived with them, that fatigue was translated by us as malaise, or lack of motivation. On the extreme end, it created the foundation for us to feel hopeless or a prisoner in our own home. Eventually, we began to sense the same depression invading us and believed that we too were now a victim of that insidious affliction. So some of took drugs to attempt to eliminate that depression we felt and for a period of time, those drugs gave us a sense of a cushion between us and the depressive. And we interpreted that pillow of space as a temporary break from the deep emotional pain we were struggling with. It became how we managed our relationship with someone who was unable and unwilling to address his or her depressive nature. We took drugs so we could hover through our days. But as long as we lived or were around the depressive, the drugs never helped us to feel joyous or free or relaxed. 

I see depression as the “great separator.” Husbands from wives. Fathers and mothers from their children. The gulf that is created becomes wider as isolation becomes the norm and eventually it becomes impossible to traverse. So if you maintain a relationship with a depressive, you cannot help but suffer the effects of that relationship. You can be the uplifting counterpart. You can inject optimism into the conversation. You can ‘think positive.’ You can exercise a little more or eat better or get more sleep, believing that you’ll feel better. But it’s always there in the background. That low energy vibration that begins to wear down your optimism and positivity. It’s the analogy of the frog in the pot of cold water and when the heat is turned up, the frog doesn’t notice it until it’s too late and he is consumed by the boiling water. Eventually if you are going to save yourself and heal from the years or decades of drowning in the boiling waters of the depressive’s world, you have to jump out of that pot of boiling water. You have to care enough about yourself, perhaps your children if they are still young and, in your care, and you have to remember who YOU are. You must remember who you were before the weight of the depressive bore down on you. You have to remember that joy, celebration, laughter, calm and relief are not luxuries, but necessities that make life worth living. To deny yourself those important aspects of the human experience is to willingly agree to a reality that is systematically destroying you and creating untold health issues that never seem to go away or resolve. 

Growing up in a home, as I did, where one or both of your parents suffers from either low-grade depression or chronic depression with occasional suicidal ideation or full-on suicide attempts, sets in motion lifetime patterns that seek to destroy and limit how much life you feel willing or capable to drink in. If your depressive is an alcoholic and a narcissist, you’ve drawn the triple threat. And that, my friends, is a potent recipe for disaster as you move through your life and carry the immense burden of being not just rejected and ignored but also gaslighted and abused. As a child, you operate within a template that controls the way you will move forward or not move forward in your own life. Until you acknowledge this template and choose to heal it, you will continually attract to you people who mirror the depressive energy. Why? Because until you understand the insidious, silent, destructive energy that was driven into you by the depressive, you will believe it’s YOUR job to fix or heal or make happy every depressive that comes into your world. You will constantly allow yourself to be drawn into their sticky web because it’s the only pattern you have inhabited. You learned this pattern from the parent who was half there and held court from their bed or comfortable chair or sofa. The sibling who barely slinked out of their room and had to be rushed to the ER in order to save their life. The same sibling who was in and out of rehab and when they came home, their heavy, moody presence was felt like a ghost with hungry teeth. The partner who you desperately want to save even though they are incapable of participating in your life in a healthy and uplifting way. Who provides no emotional or physical comfort to you and drives a wedge of steel between the two of you that you can’t cut through or melt. 

If you are the daughter of a depressive father who is also an alcoholic, you will most likely be attracted to a partner who mirrors this identical energy. And even if you insist, “I’ll never do that,” be careful what you say. I guarantee, you will attract the same wound because you never healed it. You left home to get away from that energy even though you didn’t understand the energy or that the energy was not connected to you. You just needed to get the hell out. But because you never understood what drove that heavy energy between you and the other individual or even took time to reflect on what you went through and how it still informed your life to that point, you will remain asleep. And in that slumber, you will sleepwalk right into the arms of the spitting energetic image of your father who is masquerading in your mind as your savior. And you and he will become entangled because you see something in him that is vulnerable and needs your help. You want to save him. You want to show him that your love and attention can heal what is broken inside of him. If you just love him hard enough and strong enough and big enough, you will heal him. Because even though it never worked out before, you can fix him and everything will be perfect because he’s got to be your savior. You’ve been looking for a savior your whole fucking life and this emotionally damaged man has fill those shoes for you. You will build beautiful castles in your mind of how wonderful your life will be together as you ignore all the red flags that he flies right in your face. There are the moments when you glance at him and he looks just like your dad but you shove it away because that can’t be. Oh God no. You can’t go there. But once his fragile veneer drops and he won you, you’ll clearly see the telltale signs of the way your father used to look when he was preoccupied. He’ll disappear in a conversation as he glances off to the side and detaches, allowing you to remember you are not the most important person in his life anymore. He gave you the impression you were but that was because he really needed you to right his sinking boat. He can’t hear you because he only has ears for the voices in his head that are telling him he’s worthless even though you keep telling him how wonderful he is and how much you truly love him. You’ll be on the receiving end of silence, rejection and dismissive turns of the head. And as the years melt together, you’ll start to wonder if you died and nobody told you because you feel like a ghost whenever you’re around him. You will feel more alone sitting in a room with him than you do sitting by yourself. 

To extricate yourself from this living Hell, you must come face-to-face and heal your original wound. The term “the original wound” often comes up in trauma therapy and some forms of shamanic healing. My take on it is the original wound is the first incision of your psyche when you were a child that penetrates to the point where it leaves an indelible mark or wound that can't be healed until you acknowledge it and put the intention into healing it. The original wound always gets reopened any time a person feels a replication of the energy that surrounded the original wounding. Rejection and abandonment are two of the biggest violations that trigger the opening of the original wound. Growing up with someone who is depressed or suicidal all the time imparts a wounding that guarantees a sense of rejection, certainly a lack of self-love and a lack of self-worth.

The original wound is not just there to penetrate and screw up your entire life. It’s there because it’s crying out to be acknowledged, seen and experienced so it can come into the light of awareness and be healed. It doesn’t want to fester under the surface of your own inability to recognize it. It is not revealed in the haze of denial. You can’t start deep alchemical healing of body, mind and spirit if you stay in defiant denial of how someone in your life deeply hurt you. You can’t blow off it off like I did and say, “Oh, hell, none of that affected me! That was like water off a duck’s back!” Yeah, that was deep denial I was in for a very long time. 

So once you fully accept that this wound does exist and not make excuses or attempt to rationalize or debate the realization, then you can begin to recognize where your loving and compassionate nature was leveraged against you and how it’s still being leveraged against you. And that’s your cue to not just get angry at the one who leveraged it, but how YOU agreed and allowed your good nature to be leveraged. The umbrage has to go both ways. It’s not that you become a shitty person because of this realization. It’s that you understand how people will take advantage of those who they see as willing to fall into their trap and you cultivate the right amount of self-awareness and self-respect and self-preservation to still feel compassion for a depressive while not absorbing yourself in someone who will eventually drive you under. 

Attempting to heal that original wound and doing it by bypassing anger never works. Oh, I get it. You don’t want to be angry at the depressed person because they are so broken, hurt and helpless and you can feel their pain. Okay. Can you stop for a second and feel YOUR pain? What’s behind that pain? Well, I’ll tell you what I found and what many others have found as well: Anger and grief. I was told by a therapist that depression is ‘undigested anger.’ Comedian Steven Wright said, “Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.” For the person who grows up within the depressive’s lair, then marries a depressive and comes to believe they too are a depressive, what about if you entertained the idea that you are actually not depressed but, rather, feel depression by proxy? Depression from association. And through that association with the depressive, are fighting off suppressed rage and grief. When you are not given the space or opportunity or permission when you are younger to express and get out your rage at the depressive and then deeply feel the grief that comes with the realization of your situation, you carry that burden into adulthood. And if you try to bypass that rage because you don’t want to feel like you’re attacking the depressed person because you don’t want to pile onto their depression or you feel sorry for them, well you are going to eat that rage and hold it inside you until one day, it begins to consume you and you are diagnosed with a chronic or terminal fill-in-the-blank illness. Because nobody can digest that much suppressed rage. Since it never is allowed to evacuate from your psyche and be released, it has nowhere to go but inward. And it will travel wherever you are the weakest. You have a weak heart, it’ll go to your heart. You have a fragile digestive tract? That’s where it’ll roost and replicate. You have a stuck colon? That’s where it will bury itself until it shows itself in a dire diagnosis.

Until you heal the original wound from growing up with a depressive, you will drag a shadow behind you and that shadow will dim anything in your life that is worth experiencing. You will not be able to inhale your Life because you will have been trained to diminish your own accomplishments, disregard your own needs and continue to believe in the futility that you and only you have the power to ‘fix’ the depressive who you love so very much. They don’t have to go to therapy! They don’t have to excavate their deep pain! They don’t have to do any inner work. No, you can do it for them! Keep doing that and you are digging your own grave. You will create a life for yourself that never feels fulfilling because you will constantly be seeking validation and love as well as emotional and mental feedback from the depressive who is incapable of providing that for you. 

So how does that original wound absorb into you? What emotions, patterns, belief systems, behaviors does it tend to bring out in you as you get older and attempt to live your life? Well, for starters, you’ll have periods of time and then months and then years when you feel exhausted when you haven’t exerted yourself. Why is that? Well, you were trained that you were only as valuable as what you could provide for someone else and so you give of yourself to exhaustion in the same way you gave yourself to the depressive in hopes that your gifts would translate into their release from their self-imposed prison. Of course, it never worked out but that didn’t stop you from doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. You’re also exhausted because it is draining to be around a depressive who carries a low frequency energy all the time. And if they also suffer from panic attacks and anxiety, that’ll also drain you. So mystery solved why you always feel tired!

You grow up feeling responsible for everyone’s emotions and feel it is your responsibility to lighten up the room or create joyful moments for the depressive in an attempt to make them happy or grateful. But it always backfires if you’ve noticed because you are asking gratefulness from someone who cannot lift their head up and recognize the plethora of people and things in their life that they should be grateful for. So you are already engaged in a battle that you will never win. How does that reflect back to you? Frustration. A sense of futility begins to creep around you. 

You don’t feel joy completely because for one, you have no model for that experience, and you’ve learned that all celebrations must be celebrated quietly so as not to disrupt the depressive’s need to be silent and isolated. So milestones and celebrations are never embraced fully and felt in the marrow of your bones. You wouldn’t know what to do with joy if it came up and kicked you in the ass.

You were never seen because the depressive could not see you. They were too obsessed with their relentless self-absorption. You were just an object that moves around the depressive. You were only seen when the depressive needed something from you. Otherwise, you didn’t feel as if you existed. I know someone whose father was suicidally depressed for most of his childhood and when his father went into the deepest pit of depression and did attempt suicide, apparently the camera was shelved because there are no photographs of him between the ages of ten and fifteen. Those years were never chronicled for him on film because his father was taking up all the space. So talk about not being seen! When you aren’t seen, you may do whatever it takes to get attention. Any kind of attention. You don’t give a shit. You may have gotten in your parent’s face once or twice but that backfired. You may have gotten in trouble on purpose with the intention of being finally seen. But that tactic didn’t work either. So eventually, you agreed to not be seen. 

You isolate too much. You hide in the shadows and it takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there because it feels oddly risky. Because you’ve been programmed to not put yourself first. You dim your own light to appease the depressive’s need for attention. 

Your feelings aren’t seen. Your pain isn’t seen. So you bury it because nobody will give a shit anyway. And the coup de grâce is when you are sick and the depressive one who you have constantly been there for (your parents, your partner, your siblings, your best friends) tell you something like, “You’ll figure it out” or “You got this.” And because you have gotten so used to not being seen, you accept that response. And you quickly learn to take care of yourself as best as you can. You learn to stay out of people’s way. You learn how to retreat. You learn how to be a good ghost. How does that extend into your life? Well, for starters, you don’t participate in your life. You don’t explore what life has to offer. You stay in the background. You’re a shallow breather. You don’t want to take up a whole lot of space or air because that space and air are for those who deserve it and need it more than you do. You still have pain but you sure as shit don’t share it with anyone because why would you? They trained you well. You hold it tight and a lot of that pain that you hold is what churns inside you and spits itself out as what looks like depression. But it’s really that rage and grief that you weren’t allowed to feel because it would overshadow the depressive. That, my friends, breeds huge resentment so that if you do choose the alchemical path of healing, you will get to a point where you must tap into this resentment (and remember that resentment is just re-feeling rage) and then you have to express it. And it is going to be ugly and you are going to have to agree to allow all of that ugly, buried, distorted rage to come out of you. And that will take time and when you really lean into it, you are not going to be a ‘nice, easygoing, get along, go along person’ for a period of time. You are going to have periods where you become so unhinged that people who have known you for your entire life are going to think you have lost your mind. But you haven’t lost your mind. You are excavating the parts of yourself that allowed you to believe you were worthless, voiceless, and unseen. You learn, to your shock, that you have a right to be heard, a right to your feelings and a right to have needs. And when that energy buoys up in you, that righteousness that follows the awakening of what you’ve been through and what you allowed – that’s the big one: WHAT YOU ALLOWED….Oh, boy, that’s when you become human napalm and you finally feel your FIRE.  And God help anyone who gets in your way at that point. 

Because when you start to heal, you are going to start taking up a lot of space. You are going to grab the largest slice of cake and you’re not going to apologize for it. You might even come back for a second piece! You are going to be loud because you have a lot of trapped screams inside of you that need to be released. You’re going to turn the volume up on your stereo and on your life. You’re going to be what they refer to as ‘disruptive’ for a period of time. And if someone doesn’t like it, you’re going to tell them to fuck off. Because when that dam breaks after all those years of being held back, there’s a lot of fire in that water that has to burn off before you can find your way back to whoever in the hell you were before the damage was done to you. And that person exists but you first have to burn up the rage. And then, when all that is done, you must sit in silence and finally feel the grief well up until it explodes out of you. Grief always follows the rage. You may volley back and forth between rage and grief and rage and grief and you’ll learn eventually how to handle it. But in order to heal, you have to off-gas all of it and brother, it takes time. Years. But the sooner you agree to get started, the sooner you can put yourself on the path to your own resurrection.

And if the depressive who holds you hostage will not get help and take it seriously, sometimes the only solution is to leave. I know that for a lot of people that’s not a financially viable option. But if you can’t do it permanently, at least get away as much as you can. A three-day weekend away from the depressive should begin to show you how much better you begin to feel. You’ll feel guilt mixed with euphoria and I encourage you to allow the euphoria to overshadow any guilt. Breathe deeply and exhale with gusto and feel the sweet relief that comes from that release and realize how long it’s been since you felt safe enough to risk it all and exhale. And then pay attention to how you feel when you return home to the depressive. Watch the aches and pains creep back, usually within a few hours. Feel the tightness in your shoulders and neck and jaw that weren’t there when you were gone or were drastically reduced or forgotten. 

Only you have the power to break this destructive cycle. And you break it by doing the one thing you were never allowed to do or even knew was an option that was available to you. And that is taking your focus off the depressive and turning that focus onto yourself. Without guilt. Without anxiety. Without feeling that you are abandoning the depressive in your life. You have done everything that you know how to do and the chronic depressive in your life has not taken his or her depression seriously or is incapable of seeing the damage it's doing to every single person who orbits that depressed person. If you continue to give your power away to the depressive, you will never be able to bloom and then blossom into whoever you are meant to be. You can’t bloom in the dark of someone else’s dysfunction. If you aren’t ready to love yourself, start by liking yourself. Then respect yourself and through that self-respect, you can learn to love yourself. When you can do that, you will feed yourself all the nurturing you never got. I learned firsthand on too many occasions that feeding a depressive your energy and constant love is akin to pouring water into a bucket with ten holes at the bottom so that as fast as it goes into the bucket, it drains out. And when you do that, you find yourself in this constant state of wasting precious energy that could be the difference between your salvation and your destruction. All that energetic food or manna that you pour into the depressive in an attempt to cheer them up, alleviate their sadness or give them another reason to live another day needs to be fed to you. You have earned it! The love that you are starving for and need or expect from the depressive must be cultivated in your own garden. And through this shift of attention from the depressive back to you, you can heal, you can fortify your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies and you can finally remember who in the hell YOU are. Who are you when you stand outside the shadow of the depressive? What are your desires when you walk outside of the tight circle the depressive has drawn for you? What dreams are possible for you when you choose to nourish yourself? 

When you remove guilt from your perception that it’s okay to be happy and joyful and to embrace life even though the early years were akin to walking across broken glass and wondering why you were always bleeding emotionally, you can wake up to the realization that yes, depression was a huge factor in your formative years. And yes, it shaped how you behaved and related to others in adult life. However, you’re not a child anymore and you are no longer required to carry any depressive’s unexpressed and unfelt pain. That’s their job. Your job is to embrace every opportunity that comes your way to heal and create the life you never knew was possible. When you become brave enough to dive into the center of your healing journey and accept that your identity is not molded by anyone but you because now you have access to choices and if those choices are focused on discovering the you that never got to blossom and exploring everything that that involves, you can absolutely have the best years of your life at an age most people are winding down. 

As you heal, you’ll learn that YOU are your strongest supporter, your greatest ally and that you can sit in the satisfaction of your own accomplishments without the acknowledgment from the depressives who raised you or who you are now partnered with. Because when you heal, you are not searching for the outside world or those around you to validate your successes. It is the fulfillment of achieving whatever you set out to do. That is what you’re after. And if someone else chimes in to congratulate you or celebrate with you, that’s just beautiful gravy on the potato you baked for yourself. 

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. If you like what you hear, share this podcast with others and follow me. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. On all the show notes, I’ve included the companies I personally support and have helped me in my own healing process, so please check that out. And there are coupon codes. Looking forward to you joining me next week when we’ll talk about how to cultivate and contain the strength you need to heal and rebuild. New episodes drop every Saturday. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”