Surviving the dungeon depths in depression

Today I heard a leader vouch for the need of support for mental health by himself admitting he’d recently felt the bark of depression nipping at his door.

Like he testified, I’ve occasionally had my wife suggest, “I’m a little worried, are you in a depression?”

The fact that this leader had the guts to be honest inspires others to be real.  We can’t get better until we’re real and, in fact, being real is the very start of getting better.

Let me share with you just a few moments in the dungeon depths of depression—where the grief buries itself amid the dread evoking despair that seems fathoms deeper than you previously thought possible.

The first experience is waking.  Yes, waking.  Not waking from a nightmare but waking up to the worst dread you can imagine, immediately.  It’s the complete opposite to waking up out of a nightmare to realise, actually, everything’s okay.  Those who’ve grieved will know that the elusiveness of sleep in the rawness of depression.  You truly just want to sleep—just to get some relief from the searing pain—but so much of the time you can’t.

The second experience is spiritual attack.  Out of precisely nowhere, just when you think all is going well, it’s perhaps 10:27AM and you suddenly think, “This day’s feeling good so far,” then WALLOP . . . a thought descends, or the recognition that there are still many waking hours to survive, or there’s the perception that time has slowed immeasurably—minutes feeling like an hour, an hour like an entire morning or afternoon.  What creeps into this kind of moment is a panic attack.  Not all spiritual attack works this way, but this is definitely an attack on our spirit.  I’ve had more than one event like this where darkness descended for hours within minutes—one of these I sank within the hour into catatonia.

The third experience is the moment of recognition.  “I’m depressed!”  For some, it’s a horrible time where the anger directed inward reaches fever pitch.  Personally, it’s usually been a rock bottom moment of mental self-harm upon which I receive the revelation—as much as if my soul yearns for an answer to the question, “What on earth is wrong with me?!”  To face such a moment is the first step on a momentous journey out of the dark night of the soul.

The fourth experience is of support.  When someone is present, shuts off their urge to advise or even talk much, and they just attend with eye contact, body language, time spent, meeting whatever needs are present.  There is something in this presence that seems easy, light, compelling, positive, healing.  I’ve learned as a wounded healer that it’s about chucking my own effort out the window.  For me as a pastor and counsellor, it’s about relying on the Spirit.  This is the discipline of not thinking—yes, that’s right, it’s about being so present as to not be preoccupied with one’s own thought.

The fifth experience is of trying with all one’s might to do physical things, like certain tasks and exercise, and finding them absolutely impossible.  It’s like there is a physical barrier against you.  You can’t even go through the motions.  Defeat lurks and crushes every dream of achieving anything, which only serves to make you even more depressed.

The sixth experience is being trauma triggered.  Post-traumatic stress is the real deal of facing what can be called flashbacks, where sometime evokes the panic, the mental, emotional and spiritual pain of traumatic events, as if you were right back there in that moment.  Parts of the mind go AWOL and other parts of the memory feel supercharged, and there is the complete lack of control over the triggering experience.  What follows is the debilitating state of both the worst kind of vulnerability—“like WHERE did that come from?”—together with such beleaguering fatigue you feel absolutely smashed.

The seventh and final experience is one where you begin to string two good days in a row together. Having been in a place where consecutive days of darkness swallowed all your hope, you begin to realise a pattern of emerging out of hell.  Like always, you’d take even one day’s respite, because each dark day really feels it’s from hell, and it’s unbearable.  Emerging, getting two good days, then one bad day, then another good one, a bad one, two good ones, you begin to discover what you can do to support your own recovery.

Photo by Sarah Wickham, Busselton, 2021.