Very often a person who suffers a major setback later describes the once-bitter cup as a fount of unexpected rewards. The loss of a job leads to an enthralling new career. The dreadful illness guides a patient to unprecedented fulfillment helping others with the same disease. Bereavement opens the heart to awareness of the fragility and preciousness of each day alive.

Suffering leads to growth; we see this all the time. One year of hardship will do more to mature a person than a decade of ease. Those who have suffered little often have trouble understanding those in pain. Tragedy releases wellsprings of wisdom, empathy, and art.

Yet we bridle against loss and injury.

Here is a phrase I included in a previous entry: “I doubt many people have experienced longer lasting or more severe depression than me (though a multitude have it just as bad).”

Following decades of struggle, and after trying numerous methods to ‘cure’ my depression, I finally found relief through acceptance. I still get depressed, but an embracing attitude has made the low times more enjoyable. Ironically, stopping the fight against depression has lessened the depth, frequency, and duration of my mood crises. (As an addendum placed after this entry was first posted, I want to point out that it takes more than just acceptance to reach true peace, including things like frequent exercise, regular sleep, and meditation. But acceptance is the most important step.)

By claiming my past depression to be as bad as almost anyone’s, I had hoped to reassure those who believe their despair too awful to accept, or their moods too dark to permit any enjoyment of life. I meant to imply, “If I can find peace, then anyone can.”

However, I felt uncomfortable with the sentence, and it turned out my instinct was correct: the phrase rubbed at least one person the wrong way. A portion of that reader’s comment follows:

This post is being written as I fill in at the local Suicide Hot Line. As I planned this essay, knowing where I’d be writing it, the topic of suicide naturally suggested itself to me. But after giving it more thought, I decided to write about something a little less depressing.

A book I’m currently reading, Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson, explains that dwelling on negative memories and feelings strengthens them. If we habitually focus on unhappy topics, and especially if we simultaneously harbor unpleasant emotions, then we increase the neural circuits that promote misery. The converse is also true: dwelling on happy topics and pleasant feelings leads to brain changes that foster contentment.

My goal these days is to improve my mental balance, and spend less time obsessed with depressing topics. Since my childhood was loaded with trauma and my adulthood has brought huge disappointments, negativity is already well entrenched in my brain. It will take the rest of my life to build in enough positive memory and feeling to counterbalance that burden of loss. Reliving my suicidal feelings and remembering the suicides of loved ones seem like counterproductive exercises. They can wait for some future day; no doubt depression will eventually descend despite my best efforts, and such subjects will be on my mind already.

The following piece was written for Hopeworks Community, where Larry Drain–a prolific writer and activist in the mental health field–invited guest posts for his blog. It captures the essence of my journey and my feelings about recovery, so I’d like to share it here also.

This is my story of recovery from severe depression, and my message is one of hope. On the one hand, I doubt many people have experienced longer lasting or more severe depression than me (though a multitude have it just as bad). On the other, I have found my way to a place of contentment and steadiness that I never dreamt possible.

Although depression has dogged me for most of my adult life, my mood reached new lows after I lost my surgical career to severe arthritis in my neck. My spirits were especially crushed because the loss of occupation brought up lingering self-doubts left over from a highly traumatic childhood.

In recovering, I tried every type of therapy and group program that promised to assist me with my problems. These methods helped me improve my thought patterns, accept the present moment, and find spiritual peace. To my delight and surprise, I am often happy. Although I still get depressed from time to time, my spiritual centering and acceptance work have taught me that grief and sadness are as important and rich as happiness; I would not want to miss the textured sense of connection with tragedy. Whether happy or sad, I am at peace with my mind and my history.

About four years ago, the mental health providers who were helping me suggested I take up meditation. Since then, I’ve found settling into the mind that lies beneath surface turmoil to be very helpful to my emotional balance. No doubt many readers will find what I write to be naive, which is unavoidable given that my practice began so recently. Still, meditation helps my state of mind so much that I can’t resist commenting on a recent realization.

When I first began to meditate, my instructors cautioned me to toss out the idea of emptying the mind of thought. They taught me to observe thoughts, sensations, and emotions without trying to influence them. Of course, those first classes were all presented from a medical perspective; they followed the Jon Kabat-Zinn formulation. Other schools place more emphasis on achieving a mind less dominated by verbal thought streams. But that early teaching held, and for a long time I assumed that achieving silence in the mind would be difficult if not impossible.

A recent post on this blog, by Peter Russell, discussed ways to be present, and finished with mention of a ‘witness’ mode of life. What follows is my own experience of that mode, which I wrote today before seeing Peter’s essay; that my topic is the same as his is either an odd coincidence or a sign of the times.

The witness inside us all goes by many names, including the observer, the true self, and simply consciousness. Quakers call it the still, small voice within. Although I’ve known it was there, I discounted this part of myself for many years.

Like everyone, probably, I am frequently aware of my mistakes even as I make them. Often, when I’m about to do something ill-advised, an inner voice will comment: “That’s a dumb move, but you’re going to make it anyway, aren’t you?” Long ago, back when I still consumed alcohol, I would watch myself pour another drink, knowing full well that my behavior was already edging out of bounds. Or I would say something unkind to a lover, knowing that it was uncalled for and would lead to a big blow-up. This observing part of my mind has always been wise, but until recently it remained largely passive. It seldom took the reins and averted disaster. As a result, I disregarded the watcher within. It seemed like a prudish and annoying sibling, quick to point out my folly but slow to assist. Only recently did I recognize that this watcher is my truest and strongest self.

Evolutionary biologists question whether there is any such thing as true altruism. The problem is that most, if not all, natural selection operates on the level of individual fitness. It is therefore difficult to see how genes for genuine self-sacrifice could survive the dispassionate fact that if you give up your resources (or life) for a stranger, you help someone else reproduce at the expense of your own chances to leave offspring. Any gene that promotes truly self-sacrificing behavior will tend to be eliminated due to diminished reproduction, unless it promotes self-sacrifice in the other guy. This seemingly bleak conclusion accounts for some of the uneasiness that the theory of natural selection provokes in religious circles. They fear degradation of moral principles if altruism is demonstrated to be an illusion. That fear seems misplaced, in my opinion, but the source and value of selfless behavior warrants consideration.

Long ago, a girlfriend’s grandmother opened my eyes to a rather cold-hearted view of generosity. A Belgian aristocrat, she had ideas quite foreign to my liberal Californian values. She believed that even when people behave charitably, they primarily do it to make themselves feel better. These do-gooders only look selfless; in reality, they are self-righteous and self-congratulatory. She argued that empathy is merely disguised pity, and that generosity is nothing but a tool for ego-inflation.

Even though the concept of altruism faces these challenges, we cannot deny that it is one of the cornerstones of humane behavior. Must we discard the widespread belief that good people act selflessly, and conclude that in reproductive and/or emotional terms, those who appear to sacrifice themselves actually accrue net benefits?

There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the … time of tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm, deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

James describes exactly a condition that I’ve been enjoying since the middle of January. However, he must be mistaken when he concludes that this state of mind is available only to religious men, because I am by no means religious. Setting that important discrepancy aside, the psychologist’s numerous case studies prove that a profoundly wise and peaceful state of human existence awaits us; our task is to find ways to achieve and retain this higher mode.

Like many others, I’ve suffered through years of severe depression. Fortunately, in recent months the quality of my life has greatly improved. In part this is because depression doesn’t distress me as much as it used to. One of the key points made by Tom Wootton of Bipolar Advantage (the host of this blog) is that depression carries a bit of beauty and majesty. It adds texture to life. Once I abandoned my relentless struggle against the darkness, the low moods became more tolerable. Coincidentally, once I quit despising my dark periods, they lessened in severity. (By the way, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has also helped me appreciate rather than hate depression.)

But many other factors have been involved, and I have begun to address some of them here. So far I’ve touched on the benefits of humility, ego-suppression, and mental discipline. Another useful item in my tool chest has been a deepening understanding of what it means to be a human being. The many layers to this clarity include growing respect for my biological nature; it helped remove a major obstruction in my path toward mental wellness.

To get to a point where lasting growth could take hold, I had to overcome very low self-esteem. Having suffered severe trauma during my upbringing, my opinion of myself has long been rather abysmal. It’s been hard to believe that I deserve love, or success, or happiness. Recently, a therapist helped me appreciate an aspect of my being that I had long overlooked. In the course of a visit during which I felt quite down, he instructed me to hold out my hand. “Can you love your hand?” he asked.

Regardless of one’s beliefs about the existence of transcendent realms, human beings need something akin to spirituality to counteract ego dominance. Religious systems encourage humility in order to bring practitioners out of self, and into appreciation of a larger reality. People argue about ‘God’, and obsess about whether we live in a purely material world versus one with mystical foundations. But debates about the nature of the cosmos, while fascinating and important, could be sidestepped if there were an easy way to escape the ego’s tyranny.

Recently, I read the textbook Animal Behavior, by John Alcock, which looks at the subject from an evolutionary perspective. It rounded out ideas that first came my way through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Despite the rudimentary abilities of certain apes, only humans employ verbal, rational, and linear thought. Predictive skills and long-range strategizing appear to have evolved only recently. Other animals have minds of some sort, but they must work differently from ours. Anyone with a dog knows it has desires and abilities to communicate them. A dog is good at getting humans to provide what it wants. But one of the wonderful things about canine pets is their lack of guile. They don’t plan, manipulate, deceive, or ‘think’ long-term. Those are uniquely human qualities. Although animals have very complicated, and even flexible, behaviors, they do not have complex thinking. Such cognition is a new development on earth.