Betty Skinner, on using your pain to end your pain: “View it as a gift and not as a threat—as a hand reaching out, pressing you down to find a place where you can stand without fear, without anxiety, without guilt and shame.”
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Video Transcript
Transcript
I want to encourage you to persevere in this time of your darkness and your depression. This place of darkness is a means to wholeness. View it as a gift and not as a threat—as a hand reaching out, pressing you down to find a place where you can stand without fear, without anxiety, without guilt and shame. A free place. Use your pain to end your pain. So, I would encourage you now to come to these sessions and take this step by step and use it in your inner growth, in your movement toward healing and wholeness. Well, I don’t think any of us as individuals are going to wake up, if you will, to come alive inside because depression is the death of the inside person. You don’t feel anything. You are numb. As I carried this weight and as I felt nothing but despair and fear, I began to even label it as the death of the inside person. So, we are inside and we are in a dark place, but the problem is that we are dead. We just don’t have any feelings, we don’t have any uh….There is a desperate sense of despair, of failure, of shame, of guilt, almost to the point that the whole world would be better off if I wasn’t here. So I am forty-two years old and I am at this place. I have a husband, four children and I am backed in a corner. And there is no worse feeling than being backed in a corner and not having a way out. That’s what depression makes you feel like. So, I submitted and recognized the fact that I needed help. This was a huge step. I didn’t recognize how big it was at the time, but I am beginning to submit. I am beginning to say, “I need help. I can’t go on any more.” So when it was suggested that I go into psychiatric care, I submitted, because I can’t do any more. So, I’m in that dark place when I enter in-patient psychiatric care. I had no idea at all about what the emotional aspect of my being was. I had some up reach and some outreach, but I had no idea, even of the term emotional, “You have an emotional problem.” I didn’t know what that meant. So when the doctor told me that, after they had given me all these tests, physically, and convinced me that there wasn’t anything wrong with me physically…I’m living this illusion, hoping that they will find something physically so we can put a name to it. Depression is hard to put a name on. All I was hearing was shape up or ship out. But I didn’t get that sort of answer from this very objective, non-threatening doctor. He is telling me that I have an emotional problem, and I’m saying, “What is it?”