Gloria,
Yes, it's good to know one is not alone. What Deepak says about the lower brain and "survival" emotions like anger and fear, socialised as guilt and shame, is particularly interesting. Only allowing ourselves to really feel our feelings from a degree of "observer" consciousness that enables us to see them as out of all proportion to any trigger, is a connecting clue to the buried stuff that evokes them. Uma is very good at recognising its origin in body imbalance which also shocks the lower brain. And writing (even for oneself alone) can be good: anything unresolved brings up the same feelings again.

If you find writing liberating, do you know Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way", about Morning Pages? Allowing "unacceptable" (and any) feelings onto the page daily is one way to become free of them. But sometimes it takes more. Having been an "only" child in traumatic circumstances and both unable to communicate with my family directly, and forbidden to speak to anyone outside it -- with knock-on effects for many years -- I find that even though I've long processed how its residue affects me, such an intense and lonely experience still demands a voice. It's as though even now I can't be "known" by anyone in ignorance of all that. But it's a bore and quite an imposition on anyone not paid to listen! And it finally occurs to me to join an autobiography group -- to get it out of my system once and for all! So if writing is your thing too, that might be another answer.

send green star

Great site I've searched and found someone who understands.I don't stand alone.Always looking for healing within.Writing is wonderious the cure to all happiness and uneveniness.Two claps for our bravery!

send green star

I have to say after reading everyone's posts that I feel pretty okay and good about my own bouts of the "pits". :) I mean, it helps to know that other people have some of the same battles I have. It also helps to know the methods used to deal with them and what has worked for some.

BTW, someone mentioned what sounded like EFT (emotional freedom technique) that is a very good non-chemical offering that has been phenomenal in helping lots of people heal. You can download and/or get stuff from the website www.emofree.com.

I know how to do it so why do I forget to employ the techniques? Glutton for punishment perhaps? I think I get so angry at myself for making some of the choices I have made that turned out badly and I get angry with myself for not sticking up for myself, being a wuss, and not taking better care of myself. Go figure. ;)

send green star

And PS Uma, forgot to say, have you checked out www.emofree.org? Though I forget her name, a woman (herself a physician, I think) who wrote a book about hypothyroidism tried EFT and found she could reduce her drugs dosage. If it worked for you, the periods of imbalance might be less awful than they currently sound.

send green star

Uma,
For devastated serotonin, have you investigated 5-HTP? (L-5-Hydroxytryptophan). It's a serotonin precursor, easily metabolised in the presence of vitamin B6, and natural: a seed extract from the herb Griffonia. You can check for possible interactions with prescription drugs, on various websites, but I've never found any. 50mg to 100mg per day (worth experimenting with dosage from 50mg up -- higher is not necessarily better). Even 50mg / day usually produces a palpable effect after two to three weeks: mood lift, and better sleep. I was prescribed it by a chiropractor when feeling pretty low (from assorted back pain and a high-stress, awful job), and was impressed by its effect.

send green star

When I find myself being held hostage by the "might have been blues", irritated by remembering exactly why I didn't want such and such, and knowing perfectly that for every proclivity there is an experience, Tibetan Buddhism calls it the "all performing nature of reality" and why I wouldn't trade my currant now for any of those might have beens that would have made it impossible, I know that my shifting body chemistry is , because of it's mental effect, looking for a mental framework to define itself in and that it's melodrama , unreal soppy drama, not real though unpleasant as if I had turned a corner and found myself moving through some type of foulness. Because it's a mental/emotional experience it's easy to be deceived into thinking it's actually part of one's mental makeup rather than understanding that it is an effect not a cause. Realizing this at any point makes it easier to distance oneself from the soppy mess, holding oneself aloof until it passes,seeing it for what it is, just a weather system passing through.this makes it possible to take that intellectual distance and judge what is needed to "straighten out and fly right".

send green star

Gabriele I'm lucky I don't;the effexor just leaves me feeling normal, whole range of feelings and intensities, just not echoing out of proportion. In other words I still may feel like dung or ecstatically happy, it's just that when I don't have it they are like echo chambers and I cant get out. It's like suddenly I'm in the blackest pit of fear and despair and it doesn't pass like when I'm normal. It's totally chemical but manifests mentally like If someone slipped me some bad drug without me knowing. I can tell because when I ask myself "whassup ?" there's no concrete reason it's just there and I get completely nocked down from it, I can't get put of bed, I have free floating fear that won't define itself concretely.I feel horribly sad. Mind body spirit are one entity so there is a trans-discipline effect, like when my dosages were increased but though the crises was past my inner self wanted to be listened to to be WELL again, before I increased my doses and I was at the acute stage there was no way I could do any listening, it's very intense and dramatic at that level, at that level only my intellect could help me being able after a few days to say" hey this is a chemical effect treat your self" (I'm very self sufficient medically) I'm good at being medically intuitive for myself.We are always functioning out of our whole selves. Clinical depression of my kind is due to devastated serotonin, in my case caused by ongoing trauma. I'm only glad there's a good med for me.

send green star

Nightcat M,

Sorry I got you out of reply order! And thanks for your concern. I don't think depression is likely to get me as badly again as it used to. Instead of getting stuck there for years or months, I can get through it in weeks or days now. The themes are too familiar and boring to put up with them for too long!

And you're right about anger -- which I spent so long feeling was "wrong" and "bad" (and other things) that I couldn't allow myself to feel it until I was 25 -- and then, it was incredibly scary! Like I could destroy people I was angry with. It takes time to learn it's just "energy" which can be used constructively.

Depression is often described as repressed anger, turned against oneself, though I think it can also have other causes. There's always a reason for it, somewhere: though the medical profession persist in labelling it "reactive" or "endogenous", all that means is they don't know enough about the circumstances of the latter. It makes it all the more important for us to find out for ourselves.

send green star

Uma,

Sounds like synchronicity was at work with your radio voice telling you what to ask and listen out for -- your being "really" tuned in to hear and respond to it.

It's sad that we feel shame for such natural feelings as loss -- even of our own youth. A day-by-day and year-by-year feeling of being always the "same" age can make it quite shocking, when our own youth suddenly looks like another country. I think it's much harder to cope with feelings of "might-have-been" than "has-been". I can't remember who said that we generally regret the things we've not done, far more than anything we did. I find myself too often regretting having turned down all the best job offers I ever had, for crazy reasons, and a career I ditched, and so many other things. But then find these maudlin regrets completely disappear as soon as I'm actually engaged in anything that consumes my interest. So who cares?

Sorry you have to take knock-out medicines -- but glad they work at all for you.

Sorry to hear

send green star

Brenda,

You're right that these buried feelings have to be allowed a voice before they'll go away.

I once spent a number of days (how many?) holed up in my bedroom, yelling at the walls -- instead of at someone I totally couldn't cope with (in the Green Party, of all places!) after some particularly awful episode I don't remember (with my saying nothing, as usual).

And finally reached a peculiar sort of calm, where I "saw" as though from high up in the air, a volcano explode. It described perfectly what had been happening. And then I felt much better!

send green star