Tag: trauma

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Depression Series – Anti-depressants or how depressing, they’re screwing me up.

Anneli Rufus

Anti-depressants

It’s fortunate that depression is finally recognized as a real problem.

There are help lines out there, organizations (Where I live, there is one called Beyond Blue, which is a wonderful initiative) and they are developing drugs to help us cope.

Medical treatment is still in the early stages, though, in my opinion, but at least they are doing something.

That being said, I have tried anti-depressants. I was going through a terrible time, and my partner at the time suggested I see a doctor. He prescribed them to me. I tried several types, but found they did not work for me.

What I found was that it seemed to cut me off from my empathy, and I felt like I was walking around in a vacuum. I also found that it has a negative effect on my moods and certainly didn’t like my body. It was a very unpleasant experience.

I know that anti-depressants certainly help people, but I suspect that many empaths are not doing themselves any favours by taking them.

They mask the symptoms, not heal the causes.

If you are on anti-depressants, do not go off them without medical advice. It can harm you.

As mentioned, I believe that the Bach Flower Remedies would help many with dealing with depression. Personally, I know I’d be a basket case many times over without them. For those who are interested, I will start blogging about them, and all the ways they can be used to help heal depression soon.

The remedies do work well with any other type of treatment, and this is because they don’t work on a physical level, so they are not like homeopaths, drugs, aromatherapy, and the like, each of which has their own particular set of dangers.

That being said, if you wish to try the Bach Flower Remedies, it’s important to note that they are preserved in alcohol. While the remedy itself is completely safe to take, and does not work on a physical level, some people cannot tolerate alcohol.

There are some solutions to this:

You can dilute the remedies into a dropper bottle of water, and then put 4 drops into a glass of water. The alcoholic content is said to be too small to measure.

You can rub the remedies on your wrist or temples or other pressure points. That does seem to work. My partner responds amazingly well, and she’s sensitive to alcohol.

You can try making your own remedies. There are books on that subject.

I understand that the Bach Centre is making non-alcoholic versions of the remedies. Most certainly they have put out Rescue Remedy in different forms now.

If anti-depressants are working for you, then this is a good thing. I just have spoken to too many for whom they do not work for, and they are in an even bigger mess.

Whatever you do, make sure you know exactly what you are doing. Find out as much about them as you can. This is your body and your quality of life you are dealing with.

Depression is an epidemic and not understood enough yet. But it can be cured. I’m living proof of that. (And others I’ve treated, too.)

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Depression series – Empaths and Trauma or why am I clinically depressed?

Shock and trauma

Check list:

Do you feel depressed without any cause?
Does even the slightest setback send you spinning into depression?
Do you ignore traumatic events and quash them so they don’t bother anyone?
You feel dead inside.

This is an insidious type of depression. It is certainly a clinical depression and sometimes it may be identified as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

This is one of the worst types of depressions because on the surface, there is nothing wrong. Your life might even be going extremely well, but still you feel down, depressed for no apparent reason, and worse, the slightest setback will send you spiralling into a deeper state of darkness and gloom.

Onlookers will not understand. In fact, they will just dismiss this as someone in a drama, or someone who is just depressing to be around.

This is the type of depression that will power cannot overcome. Sure, you might be able to shift your mood for a bit, but the moment something doesn’t go quite right, you will come plummeting down.

What is actually happening here is an accumulation of shock and / or trauma over a long period of time. When something traumatic happens, we should process it, get support and validation, and do what needs to be done to resolve it.

The type of shocks and traumas we are talking about might be an accident, a death, separation, loss of a job, illness, near death experience, abusive childhood, rape, incest, or any one of countless life events.

Even the process of being born can be traumatic.

So, over time, we accumulate a backlog of these unresolved issues that become toxic and affect us on an ongoing basis and the chances are that we are not even aware of it.

Talking about how you feel can help and if you are fortunate, you will find a friend or a confident who will listen. If you’re really fortunate, they will know how to help you.

However, what seems to be more likely is that people don’t want to know about it. They will tell you to ‘get over’ it,  give you a pep talk, or worse, make themselves the focus, and make your problems all about them.

If you try to bring it up again, their response might be: Yes, I know it already, while they will go on and on about their own issues, thus making you more inclined to no longer discuss what is going on. This will compound the problem as there will be no outlet to discuss those feelings. It is not their fault, though. They just don’t have the knowledge or the tools to help you.

It’s not surprising that we get angry and frustrated with this from time to time, and then decide to supress those emotions, making things even worse.

But most of the time, apart from feeling depressed, you will just feel cold and dead inside, as if all the joy has been sucked from you.

Empaths tend to put their own needs last and often at their expense.

The accumulation of shock and trauma, especially over a long period, will produce clinical depression. What’s worse is that you may feel it’s somehow your fault and that by being depressed, you are inconveniencing other people. You might also be tired of the same thing happening time and time again, and so start to withdraw from others because you no longer wish to inflict yourself on them.

This really is one of the more insidious types of depression because the cause is not obvious. Most don’t know they have uncleared trauma. Most won’t remember much of it, because they have repressed it.

I’ve not seen too much out there on this subject. I hear a lot of reports about people suffering from depression, but not the reasons why, let alone how to really cure it.

There is a cure for this type of depression. (As I believe there is a cure of all things) and I accidently stumbled upon it around 2002.

For years, on and off, I would experience clinical depression. It would be debilitating, and it was as if all the life force was being sucked out of me. Emotionally, it was extremely painful and I had no hope for myself.

On my birthday, I experienced a really bad episode (brought on by my partner of the time attacking me on something that was not in my control).

One of my life’s missions is to find cures for those conditions that are said to be incurable. I think I’ve tried a good many things, but the one thing I keep on returning to are the Bach Flower Remedies, which are a an effective, safe and gentle healing system.

To that point, even though I had not found any that helped me for my depression on a long term, I would keep on trying different remedies in the hope I would hit upon something I had missed. For this particular episode, I took Rescue Remedy ™ to try and obtain some relief.

I noticed that I felt slightly better. Not a lot, mind you, but it was enough to make me wonder why. As the Rescue Remedy contains five Bach Flower Remedies, I ran through the list in my mind, and found that the only possible one that could have made any difference was Star of Bethlehem, which is the remedy for clearing Shock and Trauma.

At that point, I had never used it on its own because I believed that being part of the Rescue Remedy, there was no need.

I took out the bottle from my kit and placed a couple of drops on my tongue. The relief was instant. It was as though an enormous weight had been lifted from me.

It was then I realized that uncleared shock and trauma had caused my clinical depression. The key was that you needed to take Star of Bethlehem by itself in order to gain full healing from it. When it was mixed with other remedies, its effectiveness was severely reduced.

Initially, I kept on taking it every time I felt my depression returning. First it was every few minutes, then it lengthened to hours and after three days, it was gone.

I am now mindful that if I do experience a traumatic event, to make sure I take some.

I have duplicated this result with other people. One case was a lady who e-mailed me a few days later, saying she was considering going on anti-depressants, but asked if I had any last minutes suggestions. I told her my experiences. She bought a bottle of Star of Bethlehem, and wrote to me that night, saying that she had never experienced such a profound relief. In the morning, she wondered how she would get through the day, and that evening, she was at peace with the world and happy to be alive.

While this is not the only cause for depression, it is a major one and well worth looking into if you are experiencing such symptoms.

Nearly everyone suffers from traumatic events in their life. From their birth to the present and they are rarely cleared.

Bach Flower Remedy: 
Star of Bethlehem.

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Truth is the best policy, though sometimes lying can stop a beating.

Empaths and Weight: Part 3

As in the previous entry, this is an examination of the causes of my self-esteem which I theorize contributed to my weight gain. It is written, not as a victim’s story, but so others may see themselves in me.

Nowadays I cringe at all the fundamental errors I made while trying to find a partner back in the 70 to mid-90s. It’s clear to me what I could have done differently, but while I was doing them, I could not see it at all. The entire process was not only a mystery to me, but I swore what I was doing was logical to me; hence it should be logical to everyone else.

I am also thankful I didn’t succeed as it would not have brought me any happiness, at least not after the initial short term.

As stated, even though I was in much better shape, I did not feel attractive at all to the opposite sex.

I believe my poor self-image issues didn’t really begin until I was thirteen. Until then, I was pretty much being me, and, even though I was just a tad too young, there were girls who were interested in me.

However, my father disapproved of my being myself, and seemed to hate everything about me, including what I liked, how I laughed, the fact I laughed, and even the music I enjoyed. He was a sociopath, but I wasn’t aware of that at the time. To lounge back in a chair would risk being beaten. To enjoy something meant that it would be taken away from me. I pretty soon learned to hide the things I enjoyed, and I became very secretive. I would even be guarded about what book I was reading, or what music I would listen to. No one ever caught me relaxing either.

However, that was at home and I was fine outside of the house until one particular incident at a school camp changed everything.  At the time, I was very short for my age, had not reached puberty,  so I had a high piping voice. A couple of people I hang around with were supposedly gay, but being 13, I had no clue what the hell that even meant. I was quite innocent.

At the school camp I found myself being picked on, and in one incident I suddenly was being bullied and beaten.

I thought it was because I was short, but it wasn’t, of course. They assumed I was gay, and in 1976, that was not something you wanted to have people think of you as, especially if you were actually straight, which I certainly was.

The only thing that clued me in, and saved me was that a few days ago, I had made up a story about having a girlfriend. It was half wishful thinking on my part, and also a desire to fit in. The details came from my imagination, and a girl I visited in my mind on a daily basis that I called Patricia. She had no last name. So, when someone asked me if I had a girlfriend, I told them I did.

One of the guys who had just been beating me said, as he was walking away, “and that’s bullshit about you have a girlfriend.”

The others who were with him however, said, with some surprise: “Do you have a girlfriend?” and I said I did. Suddenly, they changed their attitude, plied me with questions on her, and I happily made up an elaborate story to support it, which wasn’t very hard, as I had all the details already. I told them I didn’t have her surname as it was complicated, and they accepted that.

Suddenly, I was in. People accepted and liked me, and I learned that if I modified my behaviour, people would change towards me.

Young teens were so homophobic back then.

No one ever found out that the girlfriend was fiction. I ‘broke up’ with her a few months later, and it was promptly forgotten.

(As an interesting side note, in 1992, I met a girl called Patricia, she looked like my fantasy girl, and I had coffee with her a few times, but it didn’t go anywhere, and I never remembered her last name as it was too complicated!)

It was clear to me that by hanging out with two questionable friends, it was hurting my reputation, so I cut them loose (and while I regret the method of doing so, it certainly wasn’t any loss to them) and tried to be well, more sporty.

I decided that I had to rebuild my reputation. I did everything I could to try and change people’s perception of who I was, and tried to involve myself to become accepted.

The camp acceptance was a flash in the pan, though. I had impressed everyone there, and I had also showed them there was more to me then met the eye, but this did not continue at school.

I was lousy at sports, and that went against me. I had lost my coordination the following year due to being hit by a car while crossing the road. My hearing and coordination was affected, and even the leg I broke took three months to heal.

I was also paranoid, and anyone who did try to befriend me during those years would be treated with extreme suspicion, as I believed I was being set up.

The paranoia was a result of my home life, and the fact that there was a group of kids who loved to pick on me.

All in all, it made for a very bad combination. For two years I struggled every day to fit in and in the third year, I just gave up and kept to myself. I felt as though there was an invisible glass barrier between me and everyone else.

At the end of year three, it all changed and suddenly I was more accepted, had good friends (including some who were former antagonists) however I was never relaxed enough to just be me.

The damage had been done. I became a product of other people’s perceptions of me.

The perception of the opposite sex also didn’t help. I was told that their view of me was that I was too short (I’m 5 foot 6 inches), too serious, too intense, and not good looking enough to be seen with, and finally, I was told I was too nice.

Now, I realize that those were mostly superficial things, and really, it was their issue, not mine, but at the time, there seemed to be a complete lack of single females, and even the odd ones who were single certainly had those quibbles about me.

What was missing with me, though, was not that those things were wrong with me, because even if they were, that wasn’t the main issue. It was my lack of self-esteem that was the problem. The fact I had no faith in myself. I didn’t believe that anyone would want me for me and what was more, that I was someone that they would want to be with.

I had no self-confidence. The moment I was put in a situation that warranted it, I would fall apart within, and feel isolated, lonely and desperately unhappy. Of course, no one understood why that was.

Ironically, I had plenty of inner strength, I just didn’t believe in me.

Such is the story of many empaths. They don’t believe in themselves. They feel  so much pain, so much loss and isolation that the moment something good comes along, they fall apart, especially the moment they feel challenged.

It certainly was my story, and I ended up being quite the aloof / poor me / victim type towards the end. I hated being that way, and I did everything I could to shift and when I did shift, it was traumatic and painful, but it changed everything.

To those empaths reading my story, please don’t feel sorry for me. I am not looking for sympathy. I am sharing so, if you have gone through the same thing, you may see yourself in me, and reach a new understanding of why you feel so isolated and depressed.

I certainly held a lot of the anger on a cellular level. I never let it go. I was unable to do so. If I felt frustrated, I’d either repress it or vent it through biting humour. I was also passive aggressive, but I never truly vented my anger. I didn’t know how to. Those who were initially responsible for those early events were no longer around. I had nowhere to go with it.

If anger affects the liver, then it is little wonder that my liver has taken so much damage. Fortunately is had the capacity to heal and regenerate.

Though this subject is about weight, it’s worth noting that the main push is self-esteem, and that is a subject many empaths suffer from.

Next: Looking at how this all fits together.