Quotes About Healing

What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

We grieve because we have loved. We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we felt.

for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult.

One friend told me that she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again

Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about "social recovery.

The goal was to offer the patient two things at the same time. The first was an opportunity to describe the traumatic experience—to craft a story about it, so the patient could make sense of it. As this experiment began, one of the things they discovered almost immediately is that many of the patients had literally never before acknowledged what happened to them to another human being.

Depression is a kind of constricted consciousness," Bill Richards, who also led the experiments at Johns Hopkins, told me. "You could say people have forgotten who they are, what they're capable of, have gotten stuck … Many depressed people can only see their pains, and their hurts, and their resentments, and their failures. They can't see the blue sky and the yellow leaves, you know?

How could I still be depressed when I was taking antidepressants? I was doing everything right, and yet something was still wrong. Why?

A compassionate approach leads to less addiction.

An antidepressant, they have learned, isn't just a pill. It's anything that lifts your despair.

Your pain makes sense

I was beginning to think there was something significant about the fact that grief and depression have identical symptoms. Then one day, after interviewing several depressed people, I asked myself: What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

His goal as a doctor was always "trying to identify what happened in the past" of an addict that made them find everyday life unbearable, and to help them overcome it by offering compassion and helping them to build a good life as an alternative. Now they were asking: If this is the goal of all good doctors, why can't it be the goal of government policy?

Instead of saying our pain is an irrational spasm to be taken away with drugs, they see that we should start to listen to it and figure out what it is telling us.

the English doctor had realized that when you give a patient a medical treatment, you are really giving her two things. You are giving her a drug, which will usually have a chemical effect on her body in some way. And you are giving her a story—about how the treatment will affect her.

Others are run by people like the man I met in L.A. who too often seem to be playing out their own traumas and internal stigma on people too raw and fragile to argue back.

De todos modos, seguimos pensando que podemos curar la depresión por la vía conceptual. Yo lo veo más sencillo. Primero arreglemos lo fisiológico. Sal. Muévete».

Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them,

a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

Los dolores serían menores entre los hombres si éstos (Dios sabe por qué están hechos así) no se ocuparan con tanto ahínco de imaginación en evocar los recuerdos de los males pasados en vez de soportar un presente tolerable.

Sweet moonlight, shining full and clear, Why do you light my torture here? How often have you seen me toil, Burning last drops of midnight oil. On books and papers as I read, My friend, your mournful light you shed. If only I could flee this den And walk the mountain-tops again, Through moonlit meadows make my way, In mountain caves with spirits play - Released from learning's musty cell, Your healing dew would make me well!

Scars heal, glory fades, and all we're left with are the memories made. pain hurts, but only for a minute. life is short, so go on and live it.

Unless you heal the root of a problem, the pain will not go away. You can hide from it, but the problem stays until you dig deep.

Convalescence is a sort of grown-up rebirth, enabling us to see life with a fresh eye.