“The definition of a dysfunctional family is one with more than one person in it.”

~ Mary Karr

For me, one of the most frustrating parts about living with depression was that nobody else seemed to understand what I was going through (except those who were suffering from it themselves). Just snap out of it! Or, Just put on a smile, think happy thoughts, and you’ll feel much better, they’d say, as if that’s all it would take.

Don’t you just want to slap someone upside the head when you hear that? I know I did. And inside, you’re screaming, Nobody understands what I’m going through!

Depression is one of the most debilitating and prevalent health issues of our time. I would speculate that this is due to a number of factors, such as cultural, political, economic, and dietary changes (at least here in the United States). But I would also suggest that from a group consciousness standpoint, we’re all slowly awakening to bigger possibilities for ourselves, and a higher consciousness as a species about Who We Really Are.

And I suspect that this “awakening” process is manifesting itself as an intense dissatisfaction with the way things are in our lives at the moment, so that we are literally forced to seek new ways of seeing and doing things. Otherwise, if we were so happy now, why would we ever bother to change?

Those of us who suffer from depression are disgusted with how things are, and we know there must be something better out there than this mess. But we continue going about our daily lives, often working in unfulfilling jobs for substandard wages. Or, we have high paying and challenging jobs, yet we’re still suffering from a painful void inside.

What keeps us stuck in these awful living conditions?

• Fear of the unknown
• Lack of awareness of the limitless possibilities that await us, as soon as we choose to wake up. In other words, ignorance.

That is not a judgment – heck, I lived in ignorance most of my adult life.

Eventually we become so fed up with the way our lives are going that we begin searching for an alternative. We finally start asking questions, often coming out as an angry rant:

Why is this happening to me, damnit?! Why am I really here? Who the hell am I, anyway? Why am I so miserable? And how can I feel better?

Then, much to our surprise, an answer comes. It may arrive in a book, or an email, or even as a comment made by the guy at the donut shop, delivered with a quick smile. It contains a hint, a tiny clue of something much bigger. We follow it, and it leads to a little more information, and then a little more. Eventually, we realize we’ve just opened up a fabulous box of shiny new toys! And this toy box is our amazing inner power.

(Whack! Whack!) “Snap out of it!!”

~ Cher, as she slaps Nicholas Cage’s face in the film Moonstruck

Depression is not something that can be resolved by simply “snapping out of it”. It just doesn’t work this way – you can’t go from a state of utter despair to a state of joy in one leap. Although I knew from my own experience that this was true, it wasn’t until some time after I recovered from my depression (which you can read about below) that I finally learned why it’s true.

It’s because we’re energetic beings, vibrating at a certain frequency. And the lower your vibration, the worse you will feel emotionally. Vibrations = emotions. So the trick is to gradually raise your vibration until you feel a little better. This will eventually cause your “default vibration” to be slightly higher than before, at which point you can then reach for an even higher one.

Think of it like a ladder, where you’re standing on the bottom rung (i.e., utter despair and hopelessness). The top rung is joy and happiness. You can’t get to the top rung in one quick leap; you must take it one rung at a time. And, it can take some time to get there, because as you’re climbing, you’re literally resetting your default frequency. This means that over time, although you’ll still have some ups and downs, they will be much higher overall than the ups and downs you had at your lowest point.

I discovered this bit of wisdom in one of my favorite books, Ask And It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks. It was one of those “Ah-ha!” moments, a grand epiphany. They describe how, if you’re feeling utter rage, you need only to reach for the next highest emotion, which might be “revenge”. Once you sit in the emotion of revenge for a while, you might then reach for a slightly higher one, such as “anger”, and so on. As you do this, your default emotional state rises, and eventually you’re much closer to the top emotion of joy. Not only that, but in the process of raising your vibrations, you’ve also become a far more powerful “magnet” for attracting a more satisfying life overall.

This book describes almost two dozen fun exercises you can do to raise your vibrations. You can also learn more about vibrations here and here.

What follows is my personal story with depression. There’s also a short essay at the end for those of you who may be having difficulty recovering from a painful childhood.

"It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times..."

I discovered that the root of my depression was that I was not being true to myself, and I was not allowing my full potential to unfold.

I remember the exact week when depression hit me. It was the first week of December, 1978, when my stepfather took me out to the woodshed (literally!) and told me I had exactly one week to get out of the house. I had just turned sixteen.

Twenty-some-odd years later I was still suffering from depression, and I had developed a daily drinking habit that I just couldn’t seem to kick. Although it had subsided from earlier years, it was still a daily necessity as far as I was concerned. I had been in therapy for about seven years, which helped a lot. But there was still an inner void coupled with a feeling of being defective, and a sense of despair and hopelessness regarding just about everything. I was on medication but all it did was even out the depressing effects of the drinking. My doctor would ask me how I was feeling, and I would reply, “How the hell would I know, since I don’t even know what ‘normal’ feels like?” I thought I might have to be on the meds for the rest of my life, even though I always had a strong desire to go off of them. I even tried a few times, but I sank so low I had to resume taking them.

If you're interested, you can read the rest of my sordid tale here. If you’d rather skip it, I won't be offended...just read on…

To me, depression felt like trying to drive with a muddy windshield. Nothing looked clear, and nothing looked fun, except perhaps a wild upcoming drinking party (which of course wasn’t much fun after the fact!). After a year or two of therapy, eventually it began to feel like somebody was squirting fluid on the windshield and then turned on the wipers. It was as if they smeared the mud around for a while, then eventually, things became clearer and clearer. I worked through a lot of stuff in therapy. But I still had the drinking problem, which my therapist reminded me of far too often for my liking. And I still had the windshield.

A few years ago I saw a wonderful homeopath named Dr. Ron Whitmont. He told me that depression was caused “when you are not looking at the one issue that is bothering you most.” It took me another two years to figure out what that was. But that day, he gave me a homeopathic remedy that somehow resolved a huge amount of the rage I was carrying around inside, in just a matter of days. Then, although most of my rage was gone, the void remained, as well as the drinking and depression. (This man also cured me of Lyme disease in five days, but that’s a whole 'nother story.)

Then The Answer Came...

A couple of years ago, I came to the realization that what I should focus on most was something called "raising my awareness". Somewhere I read that if I did that, whatever that was, all the other pieces in my life would fall into place. At the time, I really didn't know what that meant...all I knew was that I wanted it.

Sure enough, once I decided to make raising my awareness a top priority, indeed everything did fall into place. I also did some healing sessions, and between the two, the drinking soon became unnecessary. But a huge part of this process was that I wanted to raise my awareness more than I had ever wanted anything before. And I realized that I couldn't do that if I was still drinking--clearly, the two were mutually exclusive. So that created a huge source of motivation for me. When you want something bad enough, miracles can happen!

You can read more about raising your awareness here.

I slowly went off of my medication in the end of 2004, just a month or so after drastically reducing my alcohol intake. (Note: if you are on anti-depressants, in most cases you do not want to go off of them cold turkey! You may suffer horrible withdrawal symptoms if you do!)

By the way, for those of you who still need to take something, I highly recommend that you look into a wonderful natural supplement called Sam-E (of course, be sure check with your doctor before taking it). In addition to my pharmaceutical anti-depressants, I was also taking this phenomenal supplement that replicates something created in your own cells, but which may be deficient in your system. From what I've heard, this is one of the most prescribed anti-depressants in Europe, but thankfully, it’s sold over the counter in the United States. Check out the book Stop Depression Now: SAM-e, the Breakthrough Supplement That Works as Well as Prescription Drugs in Half the Time... with No Side Effects if you want to learn more about Sam-E.

Although I was feeling a lot better by then, I realized there were big deficiencies in my energy system. I still felt lethargic, and I had the sense that there was a vast untapped source of energy in me that I just couldn’t access. So I began working with Jaap Van Etten, who helped me re-claim my missing energy. As time went by, I felt stronger and stronger, and much more alive than I had ever felt before! I began learning about the human energy system from people like Dr. Carolyn Myss, and making much better decisions on a daily basis, based on what I had learned about how not to give my energy away. I became bolder with financial investment decisions, and started making more money with them. And, I put myself out there in the world of the Internet, for all to see. So here we are.

"I have lived longer now without depression than at any other time of my life. I marvel at my ability to move in and out of ordinary feelings like sadness and disappointment and worry. I continue to be stunned by the purity of these feelings, by the beauty of their rightful proportions to actual life events. I'm hardly carefree--I still scan myself for depression as if checking for broken bones. But I consider my ability to participate at last in the everyday as a gift. I don't know where depression comes from or where it goes. I do know that it was the crucible, the rite of passage, that allowed me to create my life."

~ Lesley Dormen, in Unholy Ghost (Nell Casey, Editor)

What I Have Learned About Depression

Obviously, drinking and other mind altering substances numb your pain. But the main harm they cause is that they prevent you from seeing clearly what is going on in your mind and in your life. If your thinking is foggy (which is the case even when you’re sober, if you're a daily drinker or drug user), you have no solid basis upon which to resolve what’s bothering you. So you’re stuck where you are, and unless you get out of this cycle, true growth is virtually impossible. Substance abuse merely covers up the symptoms of something much deeper, so you’re actually dealing with three levels of cause and effect: the root cause, the resulting depression, and numbing the pain of the depression.

I eventually discovered that the root of my depression was that I was not being true to myself, and I was not allowing my full potential to unfold. I was limiting myself and hiding who I really was from the world. I did not have a grasp of my own power, and indeed, I had given much of it away as a child for self defense purposes. But from an early age I always had a feeling that I had an important purpose—I just hadn’t yet identified it. The glimmer of hope that I would find it someday was the only thing that kept me searching for answers all of these years.

Now that time has come. I am now living a happy life, without medication and without alcohol having a stranglehold on me. What incredible peace, freedom, and light I now experience, every day!

Once you increase your vibrational frequency (which really isn't that difficult), you will have no choice but to feel better! Yes, it will take some time, but if you are sincere in your desire to become free of depression for good, it should only be a matter of months, not years. But you must be dedicated to this purpose, and do something every single day, even if it’s only reading one chapter in a book.

Feel free to peruse the rest of our website for lots of articles about quantum physics, and about applying its principles to consciously create your reality the way you want it to be. Stick around a while!

The Rest of the Story

Granted, it wasn’t exactly the most wonderful home you could imagine, but it was the only one I had. Its daily rhythm meant I knew who would be there when I got home, which bus I would take to school, and probably what we were having for dinner. I knew what to expect every day. Up until that moment in the woodshed, it was my own warped sense of security. It was all I had. And then, in about five minutes, it was gone.

To be fair, I must disclose the dastardly crime for which I was being penalized. I drove my stepfather’s pickup truck to the post office and back, about a quarter mile away, against strict orders. Never mind that all of the mail belonged to him and my mother, and never mind the fact that I had a driver’s license—he saw the odometer had inched up about a half mile since they left that morning and that was enough.

Yes, I was guilty. But overall, I was not a bad kid, compared with some of the scoundrels I hung out with. To my stepfather, this was the last straw, and coincidentally, it closely followed the moment when he realized I would no longer put up with his crap. So, I had to go, and shortly thereafter, my twin brother had to go too.

I showed up at my father’s place in Mill Valley, California, where he wasn’t. He was busy cavorting on a sailboat in Hawaii that belonged to his friend The Rock Star, oblivious that his daughter was coming. But thankfully, my sister (who had left home at age 13) told me I could come.

To make a long story short, it was one of the worst years of my life. My father was a high volume coke dealer, addicted to freebase cocaine, who had no place for me in his playboy lifestyle. And he had no room for me in his house, except for a tiny cubbyhole across from the front door, with only a curtain for privacy. He and his friends would come in at 3 am and party in the kitchen next to my "room" until after I left for school. It was painfully obvious that nobody wanted me there and I was just a nuisance to them all.

Sometime during the following spring, my father thought he was doing me a favor by moving me (just me) into a house we were all planning on being in some time later. The bedroom I moved into had just been vacated by a young man who had been my close friend, because he had blown his brains out on the lawn about two weeks earlier.

Immediately following my move to Mill Valley, depression set in. I remember sitting on a grassy windswept hill overlooking the ocean, begging the gusty wind to blow my pain away. And it worked for a little while—it’s amazing what forty-mile wind gusts can do to a person’s soul. I did this about once a week for the entire year—it was my only escape. I learned a big life lesson on that hill: Nature can be a wonderful salve for a hurting heart.

After a year of hell, I moved to Reno, Nevada to finish high school. Once there, I continued my walks into the hills, where I would sit on big rocks and just stare at the valley lost in my thoughts. Over the years I always found solace in nature, but when I eventually moved to New York City, I found I could drink my way through it as well. Nature just isn’t very available when you live in a big city.

What If YOU Had A Horrible Childhood?

You can’t change what happened. But, you can change your story about what happened and what it MEANS. Your horrible childhood is your interpretation of certain events, and you’ve created a particular meaning to that interpretation. It may mean that you think you’re dirty, slow, inadequate, unlovable, irreparably damaged, forever bitter, always afraid, and that you can never trust anyone.

You can absolutely change these thoughts. Changing your thoughts about an event won’t change the event, but it will change what you create in the future, and isn’t that the main point of what we’re doing? Do you care MORE for your story of your past than what you will create in your future?

Carlos Castaneda, author of the once-popular “Don Juan” series on Toltec mysticism and shamanism, said that the best thing he ever did was to give up his past. He simply gave it up, like one might give up alcohol or chocolate. The stories weren’t serving him for his future, so he gave them up – let go, so there’ll be room for something new.

Now, doesn’t that sound like a wonderful idea?

I had what everyone (except for the people who were involved in my parenting, of course) agrees was a pretty awful childhood. It took me decades to “get over it” and move on with my life, and even many years of therapy didn’t fully resolve the problems I was grappling with.

I used to live completely within my “story”, thinking about aspects of it almost daily. It was my identity – poor abused neglected child, how could those people do that to me!? I was filled with intense rage, which I took out on myself by drinking every day. I spoke about it with anyone who would listen, and they would all gasp and tell me I should write a book about it someday. My rage infiltrated every single aspect of my life, affecting my relationships, my work, my attitude, everything!

Then one day, by some miracle I still cannot explain, I decided that I needed to change my focus. I made raising my awareness my top priority. And it totally changed my life. No, I didn’t “get Jesus” or anything like that. I studied, I read, I listened, and I talked to people who seemed to be getting this Life Thing right. In a nutshell, I learned everything I possibly could about Who I Really Am.

So if I can give you one suggestion that was more powerful than anything my therapist ever told me, it’s to spend some time every single day on raising your awareness of Who You Really Are. Because the fact is, You Are Quite Special, even if you don’t yet remember – it will come back to you eventually. Even if it’s only five minutes a day, read a few pages or a chapter in an uplifting and educational book about the nature of being human, the nature of the universe, and your role in it.

The study of the material we teach here is the only thing that lifted me out of decades of depression, medication, and daily drinking. That learning led me to certain healing modalities which also helped tremendously (all of which you will find on our website). But it all began with my thirst for learning about Me, and especially about how much innate power I have to change my life for the better.

These days, I spend literally zero time dwelling and wallowing in the past - in fact I rarely think about it at all. And my anger is all gone. If you had a difficult time when you were younger, you can change the way you feel about it simply by focusing on different and better things...perhaps the few happy times you had as a child, your optimism about the future, or better yet, your gratitude for the present.

It may take some time, but the more aware you are of your thoughts and how they impact your daily life, the more likely you are to make different choices in the future about what you think about. And the more you know about Yourself, the better you will feel about Your Self.

I wish I could just wave a magic wand and take all the pain away from you, but that’s just not possible. We all have to do our own work. So take just a few minutes every single day to learn about How Special and How Powerful You Really Are, and you will be amazed at how much better you feel in just a short time. I promise.

With love and light,
Jessica

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