I think I’ll be my therapist today, and try to figure out why I’ve been depressed. It’s a mild sick pressure behind the sternum. I’m not sure how, but it has kept me from smiling, even once, for at least three weeks. No circumstances have changed other than unexpected opportunities to extend my irresponsibility: taxes and student loan payments are deferred. I know my baseline, in childhood, was depression, but that has always been diluted by decent adult circumstances, a tablespoon of narcissism, some good therapy sessions, writing. And yes, some of it was evaporated by natural process: feeling through. Somehow none of that has mattered now.
We know that feeling is a magnet or a spray can that attracts bad thoughts, coats the back of our eyes with them. Less than our seeing the world through them, we only see the backs of our eyes. Last night, I shed some tears watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button again. Somehow the man who loses everything by becoming more and more alive, younger and younger, has felt absurdly real to me. He has the best life, but everyone else moves on as they should.
Versed in the Focusing process of getting deeply in touch with bodily nuanced feelings – the sensation verdicts of our history – I am not going to say “it might be this” or “it’s probably that.” The felt-sense can be read directly, without speculation. It opens up to our brain.
And right now, it has. It says this: I need to have a real conversation with my wife. She is my dearest (my only dear), but we haven’t had a real talk, a grave talk, in years, and we are growing old now, and nothing could be worse than remaining separate as the future fades. Love and hope should normally go together. But when the second is gone, the first must grow stronger.
(Thanks, Focusing.)
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.