>> I IV'd some 4-fa/4-fma early today i realized all the wrongs i had done in my life and felt like everything was going to be okay. I litterally cried all day feeling thankful to just be alive.
Since haloamphetamines are just molecules, and not of themselves a cause of happiness nor understanding, where do you suppose this catharsis of gratitude and realization actually originates?
Jman420,
I don't doubt that you're an intelligent individual, but it is true nonetheless that your responses to Icelander and myself have come across as highly presumptuous and inexperienced. The mere attempt to explain or diagnose somebody else's emotional or psychological state is presumptuous and inexperienced behaviour. This is compounded by further attempts to redress those perceived conditions with the application of a formula. While that formula may have served you well during your time of lowness, this does not mean that it will serve someone else just as well. These presumptions are themselves evidence for the exact inexperience Icelander and I are underscoring. [If Icelander disagrees with this assessment, it is assumed he will point this out.]
For example, you have addressed me in a way which indicates the presumption that you are addressing a depressed person. In fact, I don't identify with this state anymore. I do, however, empathetically identify with it when it is presented in others. This empathy is a property of direct personal experience.
Major clinical depression is a highly esoteric, existential experience which does not operate within circumstantial bounds, nor is it swayed by positive attitudes, positive self-talk, or similarly superficial cognitive techniques. For such people, depression is not a choice. There is no on/off switch. It is a condition, and it saturates their reality from top to bottom. Appeals to such individuals must be made in the broadest, most existential terms, and above all they must be listened to and compassionately understood. There is no set of instructions which can be beneficial when offered to people with this kind of need.
You identified a relationship which went sour, citing that your partner lied to you and cheated on you, effectively betraying the trust you invested in her. She treated your offering with disgrace, and that can be a major hit to your self-esteem. I know how this feels, and I'm very sorry for the emotional turbulence it caused you. It is a testament to your relative health that you were able to cope with the impact of that circumstance such that you could arrive at the apparently empowered state you're speaking from today.
When I was a child, it would be me who would pick up the telephone to dial 9-11 when my father, drunk out of his mind again, would assault my mother. On one particular occasion, after spending about an hour hiding in my closet listening to the violence ensuing just outside my bedroom door, my father ordered me from my bedroom. His booming voice froze me in place, and I was too afraid to breathe. Again his voice would boom a command for my appearance. I wished that somehow I could pull myself out of reality entirely, frantically clinging to the absurd notion that if I remained perfectly still it would be as though I wasn't there at all. But it didn't work. It wasn't until staying where I was became more terrifying than getting up that I finally left my closet, crept out of my bedroom and into the kitchen, where my mother was huddled against the refrigerator, sobbing.
While spinning the point of a butcher's knife on the kitchen table, my father instructed me to call my mother the most, terrible, awful names. If I did not comply, I would be struck by the same fist that was gripping the blade's handle. It took more than a handful of bruises before I finally submit to his will, again motivated only by being more terrified of not complying than I was terrified of doing as I was told. So I stood there for what felt like hours, so frightened as to be paralyzed from making even the slightest voluntary movement, helplessly reciting the depravities my father ordered me to utter to my mother. I could not look at either of them, and instead fixed my focus on an intersection of tiles on the floor. Those four tile squares and the cross between them became my refuge. All the while, my mother was pleading with him to stop, barely forming the words "don't do this to our son" through her frantic tears. She too was so afraid for her life that she could not move.
It wasn't until he became distracted in another sadistic game (the details of which are far too graphic to tell), that I managed to steal away to dial the telephone. As I had done many times before, and would do many times again in the years after, I dialled 9-11 and left the phone just off the hook enough that he wouldn't notice. Minutes later, the police would arrive, taking him away, taking my mother to the hospital, and taking me to a government-run shelter for orphaned and abused children. Sometimes it would be weeks before I returned home, and it would often be me cleaning up the smears of blood left behind on the walls, furniture and appliances, amid this palpable dread which hung in the air like smog.
This was the genesis of my own experience with depression, and it would become the only state I understood for twenty years thereafter. You cannot underestimate the fundamental programming laid out by these experiences, and you cannot even begin to fathom the hell I had to go through before finally emerging from it--completely by the grace of God, it is fair to say--including a suicide attempt and hospitalization. With all of this as background, still I do not presume to dispense summary advice to Cognitive_Shift. Still I do not presume to understand his experience, nor do I presume to hold the answer. Though I'd never wish my experience on anyone, not even my worst enemy -- if I could give you even just a glimpse of it, you would understand why this is so.
My father was in and out of prison for his assaults throughout my entire young life, and I was in and out of provincial custody and foster homes as a necessary consequence. Eventually, after undergoing a complete nervous breakdown which included a suicide attempt and hospitalization (the obvious parallel here is itself telling), my father was diagnosed with bipolar depression and placed on an in-patient treatment program. The doctors said that my dad's behaviour was likely the result of genetic factors combined with his own childhood of trauma and abuse, which from what I've been told was orders of magnitude worse than what I went through as his son. In less than a year, he was released. At first, I did not recognize him: it was like he was a different person. My parents have been married for 32 years, and my father hasn't had a drink in ten. Today, my parents enjoy a happy, thriving marriage, and I am proud to call them my family.
For me, and for my dad, and for many millions of others out there suffering from major depressive disorders, it is not a choice. It is not a matter of choosing what to focus on, nor a decision between optimism and pessimism. These kind of oversimplifications and their emergent axiomatic advice are in fact insulting, to be frank. They solicit harsh and dismissive replies. Such people do not create their own reality. Their reality was programmed for them, and it is only by virtue of their resilience and will to survive, combined with the advancements of medical science and a little bit of sheer luck, that they ever emerge from it.
Edited by Ped (01/07/13 03:42 PM)
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Seems to be a handful of you on here, why you people dont get together is stooooopid.
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