HEALTH & HEALIN G


Conscious awareness – a healthy way to deal with depression


Each of us will face grief – it will come in many guises and disguises. You can choose to numb yourself down with alcohol, tobacco, gambling and pills and even food, as well as other addictions, or you can use depression to become conscious.


by Jan Henderson


‘NOT HAPPY JAN’ memories of that advertising campaign come flooding back as I reflect on a time in my life when happiness completely eluded me. Yes, I tried to pretend I was happy, and the one person I was deluding was myself. In January, 1988, two events occurred


which were to have significant effect on my life. The day before our bicentennial my 14 year son left to live with his father. The very next day my father was admitted to hospital and subsequently passed away after eating three oysters. He had cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifetime consuming a bottle of scotch a night. One, or perhaps all, of the oysters he had eaten contained a rare organism – vibrio vulnificus – I can still remember its name. The organism got into Dad’s bloodstream and attacked the weakest part of his body – his legs - before it ate away at the rest of him. I had never seen gangrene before, but the sight of his legs and the marks on his body were obvious. In order to cope, I did the only thing


I knew how – I shut down. I went into survival mode, and stayed there. Oh, I had been there before. Nine years earlier I had separated from an emotionally abusive relationship and had had to fight for custody of my two sons; had moved to the country to put as much distance as I could


34 APRIL 2015


for my own safety and security; had lost my secure job and had to start again. I had to survive for my sons. Did I have any understanding that


all that stress was taking its toll on my emotional health? What emotional health? I was absolutely useless to anyone and everyone around me. I deluded myself that I was coping. I set up a business and went to work and became busy. I pretended that everything was FINE! Relationships were non-existent. I had


one very close friend and marvelled that when we walked down the street, men would always look at her, and ignore me!


I was the original ‘ice-maiden’. I had built an igloo around me. Oh, I was nice and comfortable on the inside – and presented a frosty cold exterior!


Life had brought me to my knees By June, 1989, it all came tumbling down around me. I could barely function. I found a support group, which got me to understand that what I was experiencing was grief. I worked through some of my issues at that time. Subsequently in 1996, two years after my mother passed away, and further emotional shutdown, I entered into a new relationship.


What I didn’t know at the time, was that this relationship would highlight for me all the emotional issues I hadn’t worked on from my first marriage. It was one turmoil after another, and one of the biggest issues for me was that I couldn’t admit that I had made a mistake.


In 2004 I attended a weekend workshop on developing my conscious awareness. It was through that program that I discovered that what I had been dealing with all those years ago was a deep depression. I had shut myself down so severely that it has taken a lot of gentle work to bring me to experience the joy of life. I got to see the way in which I had


deluded myself in my second marriage, how I had pretended that life was wonderful. I had the pretence of a wonderful life – and yet it was crumbling underneath me. I was not only morally bankrupt, emotionally bankrupt, I was almost financially bankrupt. Life had brought me to my knees. It took Christmas Day, 2009, for me to make a decision that I wasn’t going to do another Christmas in the relationship.


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