Standing in the Costco merchandise return line, I saw this lady walking out toward the exit with a cart piled high with boxes of Depends. She wasn’t that old.

I felt embarrassed.

I remembered the awkward evidence of wet pants after laughing too hard when I was pregnant. Or coughing when I was pregnant. Or basically doing anything that required any degree of bearing down when I was pregnant. She wasn’t pregnant.

The uneven balance of power between her and the rest of “the world” was announced by many boxes of Depends — the cumulative, “We don’t need Depends and she does.” In that moment, bodily control became an unspoken currency.

What does that say about me? About us?

The feeling was quieter than judgment. It was more uncomfortable than wet pants. A sudden awareness of bodies, of exposure, of who is still “contained” and who is not. Not a moral judgment, but an emotion in response to perceived loss of autonomy.

Way way way back, when I used to menstruate, I’d feel the need then too. I would hide my sanitary items going up to the teller. I’d hope hard at the people around. “Please please don’t see my period stuff!”  

Knowing people know you bleed or leak urine is embarrassing. Shame was up, eyes open, on point.

Isn’t it strange what we’re taught to hide.

We are schooled by everything. Community, commercials, the Lebanese heritage that is spliced into my DNA. Anything that signals dependency, permeability, or loss of control, is shameful. Bleeding is normal. Leaking is common. Needing products is part of being human. And yet the visibility of those needs is losing. A loss is there, of privacy, of boundaries, of dignity.

Standing there, I realized that what I felt wasn’t just that. It was vulnerability. Seeing her cart jettisoned the power-meter. It showed just how much power we quietly assign to bodily control, and how quickly that power can climb. Control, not character, had become the axis of comparison. Embarrassment wasn’t about her at all.

It was about fear.

Fear of being seen as dependent. Fear of the body betraying us in public. Fear that dignity is something you can lose simply by needing help. Unfortunately, these are not irrational fears; they are culturally reinforced and clinically familiar.

We learn early that our bodies should be discreet, quiet, sealed. That need should be invisible. That containment improves value. This belief system shows up repeatedly in clinical work — in stigma, nonadherence, and resistance to care.

What does that say about me? About us?

Maybe we are still learning how to untangle dignity from control. Or shame often masquerades as embarrassment when it’s really grief for the illusion of independence.

Question: When did needing help start to feel like losing for you?

Self-Care Tip: Notice one place this week where you hide a normal need. Then practice letting it be visible without fixing it, just to allow yourself to need something without apology.

I don’t know if you are familiar with David Asscherick, teacher, speaker, and author, but this guy’s a deep sink of knowledge and is a voracious reader.

We were talking about identity, one of yours and my favorite topics here at Friend to Yourself, where we wrestle with what makes me, “Me”.

Considering that all emotions and behaviors come from my brain, and that this can change so easily depending on the health of my brain, and if we define our identity this way… well, we’ve talked about this.

Asscherick shared this amazing poem that I thought you’d love.

Who Am I? (By, Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Who am I? They often tell me
I would step from my cell’s confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a country squire from his country house.

Who am I? They often tell me
I would talk to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I would bear the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I know of myself,
restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath,
as though hands were compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers,
for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,
trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation,
tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making;
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I?
They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.

…thanks for sharing this with me. Keep on!

—

Ed Darling had the hardest time tracking. One thing led to another, and then another. The problem was that it wasn’t always a straight line, and there were a lot of open cliffs that flanked whichever idea or activity he diverted from before launching onto the next. For the others in proximity to him, tracking him was tiring and even perilous. Tiring in the sense that it took a lot of energy to follow and fill in gaps when Ed Darling moved between this and that. Perilous in that to be in relationship with Ed Darling would often leave you feeling alone and unheard, because Ed Darling had moved on to the next thing so fast. He couldn’t “stand” with you, interpersonally. He couldn’t be there long enough for you to communicate or complete your meaning and then actually receive what you were trying to give him in it.

In clinical settings, this kind of pattern is often not described relationally at all, but translated quickly into symptoms.

Many patients come to me like Ed Darling, and because I don’t prescribe amphetamines, I often don’t get to work with them for very long. Amphetamines are the accepted first-line therapy for what Ed Darling suffers with, Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD.

I felt rather thrilled to read about a study I came across published in Cell. It was like bulbs flashing in my face. I felt seen. Smile. I may not be eager to prescribe for ADHD, but I do enjoy the medical workup of why we feel the way we feel and why we behave the way we do.

Ed Darling deserved a good medical workup rather than jumping to a psychiatric diagnosis, or any diagnosis for that matter. We all do. There’s a reason that psychiatrists still have to complete college, then four years of medical school, then four years of specialty training. They need to be able to see the whole body and mind, and what medically can look like ADHD but isn’t ADHD.

Sure enough, Ed Darling had a thick neck, high palate, and a recessed chin. And sure enough, he’d been snoring loudly since he was a teen. On top of that, Ed Darling had been a football player in high school, and although he didn’t report concussions, he was a linebacker and inevitably, I’m sure he had chronic head trauma. Both untreated obstructive sleep apnea and chronic head trauma lead to changes in the frontal lobe that look symptomatically a lot like ADHD. Ed Darling was long overdue for some laboratory studies, including a sleep study.

The study published in Cell shows that the amphetamines commonly used don’t act on the brain’s attention circuitry as had been assumed, but instead target the brain’s reward and wakefulness centers. The study supports an increasing body of research looking at sleep, or the lack thereof, as a contributor to ADHD. Reading this, I found myself thinking less about attention as a moral or cognitive failure and more about what might be interfering with sustained wakefulness and frontal-lobe function in the first place.

What would have happened if I had just referred him to a provider for amphetamines? Well, he may have felt better, because amphetamines target the reward pathways of the brain, and people generally feel good on them. Ed Darling would have felt more awake, because yes, amphetamines target the wake centers of the brain. But that would throw a veil over what really may be going on. And then if those underlying disease processes weren’t diagnosed and treated, they would continue to do damage, even if Ed Darling was feeling better in the meantime. It would be like locking down your house when there was a slow water heater leak you didn’t know about.

Self-care in this scenario is more than Ed Darling doing what makes him feel better, more awake, more focused, taking stimulants. Self-care is Ed Darling working hard to get the studies done he doesn’t really want to do, and then the treatments that target the underlying illnesses. Ed Darling has to do this for himself. No one else can do this for Ed. I can partner with him. But ultimately, Ed has to fight for this. This is self-care from a biological perspective.

What Ed Darling’s story reminds us is that feeling better is not the same as being well. Medicine that sharpens focus or boosts wakefulness can be helpful, but it should never replace curiosity about the body that is asking for attention in the first place. True care, especially self-care, often looks less like a quick fix and more like patience, testing, and humility: slowing down enough to ask what else might be going on. When we honor that process, we move closer to treating people as whole human beings rather than as collections of symptoms.

Self-care tip:
If you are struggling with an emotion or behavior, consider asking not only “What helps me function better right now?” but also “What medical or biological processes might be shaping how I feel?”

Keep on!

Question to the reader:
Where in your own life might feeling better be masking something that still needs to be understood or treated?

Asking for presence today. For rest as well. Putting down the weights. Stepping out with the lightness that comes from this.

I ask for you the same. This is an amazing place to be. You are not alone!

Keep on!

My parents met in a small Seventh-day Adventist hospital in Benghazi around 1960. They got married about a year later. Dad had promised Mom that they’d go back to Lebanon to visit annually. But this didn’t happen due to the increasing fighting, which eventually led to the civil war around 1975. What my parents were able to do was bring together the American culture of independence with the Lebanese culture of community. That lived tension later helped me notice something larger about the culture I grew up in.

In my home country of the USA, I notice that independence is a hypertrophied muscle. It pulls hard toward self-sufficiency, spontaneous free will action, and one’s personal choices; it has crippled us.  Like a spinal torsion that develops after nerve injury, we are lopsided and hurting. When a muscle overdevelops without balance, it no longer strengthens—it distorts. Independence grew, and its growth spanned roughly 200 years of our American history, with major acceleration after WWII and cultural saturation by the late 20th century. It began as survival independence, but became ideological independence, then moralized independence, and finally identity-level autonomy. In this progression, something essential quietly slipped away. And now, with our great gain, we have great loss.

Our human condition is one that inherently wants to believe that we are powerful in our own selves. This is a spiritual condition as well, where we believe, even though often unsaid to our own inner selves, that we are our own gods. Not explicitly, but functionally, this is what we come to believe. That we have power apart from. We begin to trust our own capacity more than our need. We confuse autonomy with safety. We believe that power lives primarily within us.

This is where independence feeds into human weakness. Not because independence itself is wrong, but because the human heart is quick to translate capability into self-sufficiency. And self-sufficiency easily becomes self-dependence. We begin to live as though we are the source rather than the recipient.

Over time, this posture shapes our inner narrative:

And eventually, without realizing it, we crown ourselves as our own small gods. And we lose. We lose in this false belief. We lose the immense benefits that come from considering the collective, from nurturing it, and from feeding into it intentionally.

This isn’t arrogance in the obvious sense. It often looks responsible. Functional. Even admirable. But it is costly. Because when power is located primarily in the self, we turn into a façade. Trust becomes conditional. Surrender feels inefficient. When this posture becomes widespread, it no longer remains personal—it becomes cultural. And we practice life as a transactional culture.

The great loss of independence is not community or guidance—it is dependence itself.

Because this distortion is learned internally, it must also be undone internally. Self-care includes an intentional redirection, a turning toward the opposite direction of our cultural instincts. Strength is found in weakness. Life is found in surrender. Freedom is found not in autonomy, but in relationship. And real maturity is not the absence of need. It is the willingness to acknowledge it.

I’ve watched my parents do this when they brought fourteen of my Lebanese cousins out of the war to live with us. They didn’t think, “My private space is being infringed on! We can’t cohabitate in such a small space. My freedom is seriously being suffocated.” I’ve seen my patients do this too in the way they are willing to attend groups for mental health, such as NAMI. Some even run peer-to-peer groups. I’ve seen this when my patients come to clinic, belly side up, willing to learn, in a condition of vulnerability.

The invitation is not to reject independence, but to hold it humbly. To recognize that competence does not negate dependence, and agency does not replace grace. We were never meant to be self-sustaining systems. We were meant to be upheld.

Perhaps the truest form of freedom is not becoming our own gods, but remembering that we never were.

Self-Care Tip: Practice dependence this week—join a group, share a meal, ask for help. Get you community!

Dear Readers,

Going into the holidays, I encourage you. It is a time of so many blessings, but also pain. Wherever you are at, I encourage you to:

1.) Avoid comparisons. Per Grok: The famous saying, “Comparison is the thief of joy,” is widely attributed to former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, though some sources suggest variations were used by others like C.S. Lewis or Mark Twain—and it is one of my favorite sayings too. Probably because I have always struggled with it and have felt the loss of joy.

2.) Be more dependent than powerful; dependent on your higher power that is. We were not actually created to be powerful on our own, but rather to be given what we need emotionally from our higher power. During the holidays, let yourself rest rather than try to carry “it.” Then what you have in your stronghold, your bank, let it flow out and serve with it.

3.) Stick to your self-care habits. Stick to your self-care habits. Stick to your self-care habits.

This brings joy. Smile.

How are you getting through the holidays?

What self-care tips work for you?

My name is Sana Johnson-Quijada and I’ve been a physician licensed for practice, psychiatry and board certified since 2002. I have the privilege of working with NAMI Temecula Valley as a board member and in the community of the Riverside County. I write a column called, “Ask The Psychiatrist, just for the fun of it and to connect. Please send in questions of any idea, tree branch, or thread. I can’t wait to hear from you.

This is the latest: “How do I quiet my thoughts?”

Many, like Joanna, come to see me hoping I can answer this. Joanna was a young mother—five children, all between 9 months and 9 years—and I supposed she had heard of the others’ answers to her question:

“Well, what did you expect?”

And there is some truth in that. Five kids between 9 months and 9 years makes for a lot of sound, outside and inside of a young mother’s mind!

She was 19 and a half when she started having kids, and I wondered if 9 was her lucky number. But this was her time for healing and for an answer.

Joanna had asked herself,

“Joanna, look who is telling you—and look who is answering?”

Your own mind. And the telling and the answering come from the condition of your mind. There is very little you can do above the health your mind starts from.

When you hear the story of the talents…

If we consider Joanna’s brain as a bank, and all the good in her as something she is commissioned to do well by – her children, her community, her own self, and the one who invested in her—what shall she do?

How shall she deal? Right now she is spinning, almost like being buried in fear.

Her thoughts turn to how. The thoughts come fast. The story invites her to consider what she can do with what she has been given in her biology, in her health, or in her illness.

Joanna, you have bank, and the question of what can you do both with your bank and to get more bank is important. But try don’t value yourself based on a greedily given value system. Value comes from your character, but most importantly, from the One who made you—who gave you your bank. Your value doesn’t depend on the quantity of your “talents”, or money, or even what you can do for others. No. You are valued because you are you in any condition you come it. But! But… it is true that you have more to give if you are well. That is a different value system. And to get that kind of bank, it takes hard work. It takes courage. And it may take medical care as an investment in you that will then in turn bless others with your health.

"So how can I quiet these thoughts?”

My area is brain health; psychiatry. If emotions and behaviors come from the brain, then one could say:

Healthy brain, healthy emotions behaviors and thoughts.

Not many like this take. It is impersonal.

I partly agree. In a way, it is… the beginning. Not magic. Not a single answer. But it is a place to start—where grace and biology meet. Where Joanna’s noise can be understood not as failure, but as a signal:

It is time to tend to the bank. To take inventory. To be honest about what is there—and what is not. And from there, to invest again. Gently.

Starting with brain healing—such as through medication, for a medical condition like generalized anxiety—is a great place to begin quieting the noise. It means being accountable to yourself and to what you have gotten. There is no judgment in your condition. It is simply where you are starting from at this point in time. There is hope for where you go from here.

Self-Care Tip: Invest in your mental health to invest in others. Keep on!

Question: What is the beach at low tide?

Answer: It’s a crowded beach.

Low tide at the beach was so pretty until I noticed all those people with their auto repair accoutrements like wrenches and screwdrivers, kitchen tools, gardening shovels—shovels I say! People?! Shovels! —all picking, poking, and killing off the last tide pool life here on this little planet Earth. There is a frailty in our ecosystems, both in our physical and psychological.

That day, I felt a sense of mourning. And I might have been catastrophizing a little when I said, “the last of life,” but it feels like Mother Earth, Gaia, is groaning – a cornered, beautiful creature, unable to escape what we are doing in this human impact.

All these choices we make brought my mind and thoughts into the office, where I met with Frederick. He – who had once been on the verge of hospitalization due to affective instability, then stabilized with medication. However, now he came to me partially treatment adherent. What is partial treatment adherence? Partial treatment adherence looks like missing one day here and there—maybe more—of treatment. For whatever reasons, we all have good ones, not to take our meds. Frederick told me, he was irritable. I could feel the irritability, in fact, coming off him in waves; something physical but not seen. His irritability spoke at me, hit me, and brought memories of what he was like when we first found his treatment and stabilized on it.

Frederick’s struggle with partial treatment adherence mirrors the environmental metaphor with the tide pools – harmed by small, cumulative actions, lapses in mental health treatment. This creates vulnerabilities, leading to relapses – progressive deterioration in the conditions, fewer star fish to see. There is a complexity in treatment adherence as well as in consistently helping our earth.

Fred told me that he had been doing so well, he just forgot to take it every day. His pill dispenser became a confusion of days—some filled with pills, some empty. He didn’t know when he had last dosed. But he was trying. It just was. No good reasons. It just was. And as his irritability found him, I remembered those poor tide pools being slashed and hacked, Mother Earth groaning trapped beneath a shovel, like Frederick unable to escape one’s mental illness. Fredrick was in a sense cornered too.

Mental health can be like that: where we find our beauty again with treatment, become a horizon with clear skies, clapping waves, the tide pulling back. We are thrilled to see the rocks and sea life surface. Then treatment nonadherence hits us, and it feels like—no matter what—it’s just the way the Earth turns, the population interacts with us, and we are vulnerable to our own selves not taking medication.

There are no quick solutions. For example, Frederick was doing good things for long term health, like using his pill dispenser. He was educated, and he wanted care. It wasn’t like he was trying to lead his own treatment plan. His lapse in adherence just seemed to happen, like population growth, pollution, and the inevitable damage of our tide pools. There is room for compassion.

As I walked on the beach, passing these layers of families and individuals and the crazy toys they were using in the crevices of the tide pools, I wanted to stop and explain, “Please don’t touch.” Please don’t harm. Please stand and enjoy the ambiance that nature provides—the sensory privilege of seeing color and life that you had nothing to do with except not to harm. But much to my children’s relief, I did not. I walked on the grounds of Gaia filling my ears with her groaning, a cornered creation with nowhere to escape. Remember Romans 8, “All of creation groaning in earnest expectation…”.

I was there, at least, seeing our humanity in action.

And I thought of Frederick. What can I do for him except restart him on his meds and routine dosing? I felt that internal conflict of knowing when to act versus when to observe and reflect. Frederick’s partial adherence to treatment was floating in the gap between knowledge and action.  But then I also thought that suffering beside Frederick, letting him know that someone understands—that his mental illness comes back without treatment, and I’m not blaming him for it—is enough. That’s something I can do. I’m just standing with him as his body suffers, as his identity suffers, as his relationships suffer, and I sorrow with him. I bear witness.

Treatment adherence is not easy for anyone. Knowledge doesn’t always create change considering all the forces.

The other day, when walking on a much emptier beach with my daughter—newly minted in her own oceanography experience from a summer on the Puget Sound—she happily relayed to me, “Mom, we are making a difference. The ocean is slowly recovering. The measurements people are taking show that the reefs and tide pools are healing.” Both the tide pools and Frederick’s mental health journey are dynamic systems subject to cycles of harm and healing. Progress is possible, even if setbacks occur.

So I juxtapose this to what I saw: this crowded low tide, surplus of people and their tools. I think of Fred, his own relapsing condition. And I think treatment does make a difference. He has had a period of stability worth celebrating. And when, inevitably, he—like so many of the rest of us—becomes partially treatment-adherent and when he starts having symptoms again, we can remember that treatment is making a difference.

The ocean is healing in contrast with despair.  Consistent, mindful efforts—whether in environmental conservation or mental health—we can stand and bear witness to the pain, suffering in the journey and we can still hope.

Thinking about you, Friends. And they are good things.

I bless you today. I bless you with all the kindness found in knowing one’s flaws, grace in knowing your own, mercy when you are right, and forgiveness when you are not. I bless you with peace.

May your journey be one in company of love.

Have a lovely day Friends.

youtube.com/@tamree3970

Today a patient, speaking with a sense of peace and hope, reminded me of the saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.

Mm mm.

Self care indeed.

Keep on!

While Audrey and Marlo peruse their Cheesecake Factory menus I people-watch. (I already know I’m going to have the vegan cob salad.) The place is filled. Some are sitting alone, while others are working hard on feeling connected. And once more, a weightlessness hits me.

It amazes. God loves each person in this topped off restaurant.

Even as self-absorbed as I am, a rhythm of thinking that God is all about “the fantastic me,” a Quincy Jones funk beat breaks in. Bounce. Boom. I realize that He is just as intensely absorbed with each individual.

When the weightlessness intrudes, I try to understand it, grasping. Where is the root or rock to grasp while I fall? The only way to date that I can is through our children. We love each of them, not in a quantifiable or qualifiable way—it just is. Weightless. And that’s how God loves us. It simply exists. It’s not about an amount.

I also hesitate to say that it’s qualitative, even though God’s love is relational. Qualitative implies measurability, and God’s love is immeasurable. It just is.

I hope you had a wonderful Palentines. (The term Palentine originates from the combination of the words “pal”, which is another word for friend, and “valentine”.) And if you didn’t, for whatever reason, know that you are loved.

Self-Care Tip: Know the love and value you are held in.

Keep on!

Like walking around parking lot puddles, we spend our lives trying to avoid losses and suffering. That makes intuitive sense and I’d recommend continuing to do that. Smile. However, consider the reversal processing of that.

In film development, there is this option, after the negative image has been developed. The film it is totally bleached away using an acid bleach that starts the development of the negative image. This leaves the unused silver halide untouched, but it is not fixed out, as it will later be used to form the positive image.

In mental health, I might consider this the self care we do for our biology. The stuff no one can do for us. Like the basic 6: food choices, clean air/sunlight, exercise 3-5 days a week, sleep greater than 6.5 hours a night, spiritual, and taking your medication. No one can do these for you. That is what I call being a friend to yourself. They are the most important part of avoiding those puddles in life.

Self-care tip: Doesn’t need saying again after this blurb. :) But let me know how it is going for you! Please reply. People need to hear your voice.

A woman in our community shared this with me about her grief and I thought you’d appreciate it, and even relate.

This woman lost her mom when she was 19 years old to breast cancer. Then, her only sibling had a sudden heart attack in his late 40’s. Then, shortly after, her father died in a matter of days from COVID. Her dad was alone in the hospital. This woman was minutes away and not allowed to be with him, to hold his hand while he passed. There’s other miseries that punctuate the in-between spots but we really don’t need to list them all.

As tragic as her story is, and it really really is, she’s not the only one with grief. She, unfortunately, is not specially targeted by the universe to suffer. But suffering is a lier like that. (…The meaning of LIER is one that lies, as in ambush.) It makes each of us feel like we are “special” in our suffering. And then that “being alone experience” leads us to more isolation, toward progressing danger of becoming a victim to it. We are in danger of practicing “Terminal Uniqueness.”

“Terminal uniqueness” refers to the belief that one’s experiences, feelings, or struggles are so unique and individual that no one else can truly understand or relate to them. It’s a mindset that can hinder connection and empathy with others who may be going through similar challenges. In reality, while each person is indeed unique, many share common human experiences. Recognizing this can foster a sense of connection and support. And that’s not friendly.

I’m blown away that this woman reached out when she did. That she fought the current pushing her into isolation.

Yesterday marked a sad day for me, and after attending my brother’s service last night, I penned down these reflections:

What signifies healing? Is it the capacity to discuss painful matters without tears streaming down your face or suppressing the choking sensation that seizes your breath as you attempt to stifle the cry of agony?

Today, I found myself ugly crying—recalling this day four years ago when I lost my brother as I woke up. I sobbed while being embraced by my family this morning, as we tried to share the weight of this memory. During our ritualistic journey, we laid flowers on their headstones to mark our presence, and I cried again at my family’s gravesites. Despite my efforts to smile through the tears, I continued crying while driving home, in the shower, and even now in my bed. It’s the kind of crying that causes your eyes to swell shut and your sinuses to congest, forcing you to breathe through your mouth. Physiologically, it happens as you squeeze your eyes tightly to stop the flow of tears, pushing the fluid into any available space. It’s the kind of crying where sobs cannot be silenced, your heart literally squeezes in your chest, and you become light-headed from the effort. It’s unsustainable, but grief takes you there time and time again.

So, I attempt to reframe my brain, tricking my body into thinking it’s a good idea to endure this again another day. To face and even embrace what lies ahead, because those of us still here are the fortunate ones, right?

But for now, in this moment, I miss my nuclear family—the core of my memories, my childhood, the ones I call mine. I miss them from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, with every breath and heartbeat, every fiber of my being. I miss them in an abyss, a void that never diminishes. In these moments, I realize I am forever changed by their loss and acknowledge I may never find my way back because, in the center of it all, there is nothing and no one that can fill that piece of my puzzle.

Self-Care Tip: If you have your own story you’d be willing to share, please do. Be in community with your suffering.

Keep on!

• Are you irritable?
• Do you have a chronic illness?
• Does your family complain that you don’t seem like yourself?
• Is it hard to feel pleasure?

These, and more, Signal a high likelihood of a chronic untreated, low-grade depression. Your quality of life could be much higher.

Today I’m speaking for a group of all unmarried females ages 25-55. Varied educational backgrounds. The members are all Christian so I am told that they usually appreciate scriptural references, and also real life examples and practical applications.

Subclinical depression reminds me of those verses in Revelation about how/(whom) we don’t see ourselves.

14 And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; 15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. 16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. 17 Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked…

Revelation 3:14-17 (KJV)

A people who are doing relatively well by the looks of it, but who are not really able to see that although this is how it seems, they actually are in a condition of suffering.

I don’t really use a lot of Bible verses in my general speach or writing because I just don’t know how to do it w/o become icky and preachy but i’m going to try. Please give me as much of a break as you can and know that yup. I hear it too. Ick. It’s not God’s fault. So there you have it.

But why would depression bring this seemingly unrelated reference to Laodicea? Because of the next verse.

18 I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and [that] the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.

Rev 3:18 (KJV)

I don’t know if the word “insight” was even around when John the Revelator wrote this but that’s what he was talking about.

You can’t listen to your insight and intuition all the time. You have to have a healthy dollop of distrust for your own inner voice. The siren’s song of our inner self to isolate and “do it on your own”, however dulcet and powerful, are dooming.

When Marsha suffered a dramatic loss in the stock market, she became crippled by anxiety and irritability. It had the further outcome of estranging her from her spouse and friends. She spent all her clean, controlled, but lonely time, alone, like a many thorned beautiful rose in a glass vase.

Marsha and I tugged with this concept, like holding onto different ends of a rope. She did not want to start pharmacotherapy. She did not want to disrupt her flow.

Sometimes our lives are “in flow,” but it’s not a healthy flow. We are doing some healthy behaviors, such as exercising, getting our sleep, eating well. However despite this, our emotional disease progresses, unchecked by uncomfortable deliberate efforts. Sometimes we are medication adherent even, and yet our behaviors and emotions are not kind to ourselves. We remain in a condition of suffering, isolated; unable to connect to self and others. We are undertreated but we can’t see it. We think because we are going to work, taking care of things, we are “making it.”

As my beloved residency attending used to tell me,

Look who’s telling you that.

By which of course he meant, your own brain can not be the best mirror of your soul.

Compare Marsha to Madge.

“I like the way he sees me.  I have a lot of trouble seeing myself.”

Madge really had it going, as far as I was concerned.  In this one statement, she is insightful.

Juxtaposing being able to see into oneself with the self-declaration of not being able to see, is ironic.  It is lovely, like going toward anxiety to diminish its power over us.  It is complex, as are the many hues of gray.  A beautiful weed.  Great weakness.  Useful trash.  It is a pretty great irony to come to that place of wisely recognizing how little wisdom we have.

We have trouble seeing ourselves. Part of what makes it so hard to be friends is that doing that is like shaking our own hand.  When we try, we are a purse flipped inside out.  The crude insult, “Her head is stuck up her own a–!” comes to mind.

Back to our handy John the Revelator, …

18 I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and [that] the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.

Rev 3:18 (KJV)

Everything he counsels us to buy is from outside of “Me” and in this case, the “eyesalve” is the brain-changer.

Looks who’s telling you that…

Now if you want to know more about undiagnosed untreated chronic depression, lets talk today at the meeting.

Keep on!