gemini://arcticfire.sytes.net/posts/what_we_pass

My older son has his pediatrician appointment this morning. He's finally old enough that they're starting to ask the questions about feeling down and depressed, which to his credit he answered honestly that he was.

It's hard for me not to lump all the blame in the world on myself. I was very conflicted on wanting a family because I saw how rampant depression was in my family, specifically on my mother's side. It was pretty evident in my grandmother, my mother, and her siblings. Now it feels like a horrible "gift" that I've given my son.

Growing up, my parents rarely fought. But when they did, it usually ended with my mother yelling that she was going to kill herself, and my father taking my sister and I out for ice cream to give her a chance to cool down. Spouses of my some of my aunts and uncles have confided in me how much my mother's sibling suffer from depression, and their worry about the way things will end. When my aunt passed away a few years ago, the most common sentiment was that everything in her life seemed to be a struggle, and at least she wasn't struggling anymore.

Growing up I remember really having a lot of depressive episodes the age my son is now. All through middle school and high school, suicide was a common thought. I would mentally concoct extravagant Rube Goldberg like devices for killing myself. The more complex the better because it still let me have the fantasy, without being practical enough to be possible.

It's why I never let myself have a gun or anything that would make it easy. It's also why although he hasn't shown as much inclination towards depression I'm absolutely terrified of my younger son having the same thought patterns I did. As a Type 1 Diabetic he has an insulin pump, and an app on his phone that would make suicide always a few button presses away.

The one thing I didn't have growing up was a healthy perspective on mental health. Therapy was seen as a punishment "Quit acting up or we'll take you to counseling." Or it was something spoken about in hushed tones that only really crazy people did. It wasn't a healthy and normal way of helping someone through life.

This caused me to spend a lot more years suffering before I sought help. The first Psychiatrist I saw seemed to confirm everything I heard from my parents and their generation. She diagnosed me as bipolar and every time I told her I was struggling, she upped the dose. Every time I told her I was having a pretty good day, she upped the dose. Eventually I was on so much medication I didn't feel an emotion for over a year.

I ended up in the ER for something completely unrelated, and overheard a nurse outside telling the doctor that she was unsure of the accuracy of the dosages I had given her. That much medication should make a whale happy.

I had to find another Psychiatrist to help ween me back off the medicine over the course of the next 8 months. Then I went looking for a Psychologist. I lucked into the only Psychologist that had a spot available basically said he wasn't qualified to help me. He specialized in helping victims of trauma, PTSD, violence etc, not clinical depression. But after he checked around with the other Psychologists in the area to try and find someone qualified to help, he realized that the next one that had an opening was 4 months out, and that he would try to help until I could be passed on to one of them.

That's how a decade of seeing him started. I know there's some controversy about Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and most of the research on it is focused around its use in dealing with trauma. I've never been great at just opening up and talking, especially in person, so it gave me a structured way to go about this.

EMDR helped me link feelings and emotions back to experiences I had in my life. It doesn't seem like much, but that really took the power out of those emotions. Like a kid fearing a monster under the bed, the unknown is scary. Suddenly "I'm feeling down and I don't know why, and I don't know if I'll ever be happy again. How can I escape this?" became "I'm down, but the negative thoughts in my head sound an awful lot like that asshole in High School that bullied me. Let's move on to other feelings."

There was definitely a lot to unpack, and why it took so long. But it did really change me for the better, and gave me this big mental map of things that I can link together to lessen their impact. I expressed my desire to my therapist for a family, but my worry was that I would pass on what I had seen in my mother's family.

Many of the EMDR sessions had a component of observing the moment in my past and being present with who I was then and offering comfort and experience to the past version of myself. This definitely helped lessen the impact of those events to me now, and I thought they would prepare me if my children struggled with something similar.

The problem is that it hasn't worked quite as well as I had thought. I think this was such a deep seeded fear, that when I see signs that my son is struggling, I crumple under my own self blame, rather than being there when he needs me the most. This creates then a feedback loop of shame and blame on myself that not only did I create the problem, but I'm not helping solve it.

I went through hell, and I wish I could better share the lessons learned from those experiences with my son. But instead I struggle watching him struggle.

What We Pass On