Originally published 16 July 2014

This work (birth), when it is perfect, will be due solely to God’s action while you have been passive. If you really forsake your own knowledge and will, then surely and gladly God will enter with his knowledge shining clearly. Where God achieves self-consciousness, your own knowledge is ofno use, nor has it standing. Do not imag­ ine that your own intelligence may rise to it, so that you may know God. Indeed, when God divinely enlightens you, no natural light is required to bring that about. This (natural light) must in fact be completely extinguished before God will shine in with his light, bringing back with God all that you have forsaken and a thousand times more, together with a new form to contain it all.
– Meister Eckart (c. 1260-1328)

Originally published 16 July 2014

One of many questions that arise in a person’s mind as they make that first courageous step into the fellowship of Depressed Anonymous is “How soon and how quick can I be free from the pain and isolation that has imprisoned me for so long?”

This question can only be answered by time and frequent and active participation in the fellowship of the group. It is by reading the text of the Depressed Anonymous manual and attempting to put these principles into effect into one’s daily life. Also, one can begin to feel some improvement in their lives as they slowly gain a belief, a faith if you will, that they too can get better- – with time, patience and sharing they will begin to accept themselves for who they are and try and change what they don’t like in themselves. By the fact that one comes to a meeting is in itself half of the battle in overcoming the depression. It is this interminable isolation that keeps the disease of depression at its height and intensity. It is only when a person can come to a meeting, begin to trust the group and so share some of the pain that has been bottled up for as many years as one can remember.

The program has been built by those who have experienced depression and know about the need to get connected and to be part of others like themselves. This is where the hope begins-when we see and hear others like ourselves sharing their past pain and how sharing how today it is all dif­ ferent because of their willingness, their openness and their honesty about themselves that has forced open the prison door that has till this time kept them imprisoned in their own fears and phobias.

The program is a very simple one -but this doesn’t mean that it is easy. All change is painful and if we are to grow we have to change. We have to get resolved some of those old issues that keep pop­ ping up in our lives and that want our attention but we cram them back in place and don’t want to look at them. The 12 Steps of Depressed Anonymous will help promote your own personal discovery of what it means to force oneself from the despair and self-hatred that normally comes with depression.
If you are new to our fellowship and this is the first that you are reading about a group whose sole purpose is to help ourselves and others escape the prison of depression ­ you might be surprised to learn that we neither discuss medicine nor religion at any of our meetings. But really this makes sense as religion is about certain prescriptions and dogma that various religious bodies demand of their adherents -whereas spirituality is about one’s concept of a God of their understanding – not of someone else’s
understanding of who god is supposed to be for them­ selves and for everyone else.

The first step in getting past our depression is to first get into the door of a Depressed Anonymous meeting -take a seat – keep our ears open and know that we will not be pressured to say a word. Usually they only ask for the first name and leave it at that. Since we want to keep our anonymity we only use our first names at the meetings. There is a phone list for those who would like to keep in touch with fellow members between meetings. At each group meeting a passage is read from our big book or any other book that specifically deals with the spirit of the 12 Steps. After all, we believe that the depression experience is much more than simply a brain disorder or a problem with misbehaving neurotransmitters.

Personally I believe in God but that is not true for all people in DA. I made an announcement asking for help from atheists and agnostics to share their spiritual journey in recovery. Here is one such story.

I was raised by atheist parents of Jewish heritage. I was, at best, turned off by religion, but as an ethnic Jew, I felt some particularly antipathy to Christianity’s persistent antisemitism. (I never thought this was true of all Christians – for one thing, I grew up loving the Christians in the civil rights and peace movements!). I was also acutely aware of the patriarchal authoritarianism of so much religion. Overall, I saw religion as a force of oppression.

I also have always considered myself to be scientific and logical. I have flirted with agnosticism during my life – there are certainly myriad phenomena and forces that are far beyond human understanding. But I have ended up believing that everything we currently don’t understand has some logical/scientific explanation at its root. The one exception is how everything came to be in the first place. That is simply not explainable and a deity doesn’t solve this for me, for I’m left wondering how that deity came to be. The bottom line is that I am indeed an atheist. And I determined that I was by no means spiritual, since that seemed like just another form of hokus pokus.

So, I came to my first 12-Step experience (DA) feeling suspicious of god and those who tout a particular, specific understanding of god. And, since this is a predominantly Christian country, I felt particular turned off by a religiosity that was bound to be largely Christian.

By the time I found DA, every other potential treatment for my depression had failed (and I had tried nearly all of them). I had no trouble at all with Step 1 – my desperation, my powerlessness, the unmanageability of my life were all apparent to me.

During my early weeks of DA engagement, others shared with me a variety of readings about the place for agnostics and atheists in the fellowship. Still, at times I recoiled and described DA to others as a cult. I resisted and kept coming back to my opposition to the idea of an anthropomorphic (male) god as a conscious decisionmaker for individual humans. I still hold that view (and the “thy will” portion of the Third Step prayer remains difficult for me).

I was glad to read that the higher power can take different forms for different people. But I was only “acting as if” as I tried to embrace that idea.

One of the readings (by Hugh?) talks about electricity as a mysterious phenomenon that we can’t understand. But I do understand electricity. Then, one day, I thought about gravity. This is a powerful, essential force that I absolutely do not understand. But would gravity be a force I could surrender to? Would it help relieve me of depression?

What has started to change for me is that I have begun to really feel spirituality. In the past couple of weeks, I have seen a coming together of elements of Buddhism (which I have just started to learn about) and meditation and words from my therapist (who is an atheist 12-Step alum). Even the Washington Post had an article in recent days about radical acceptance. No, I don’t believe that coincidence is the result of a conscious decision by a higher power. But I believe that a higher power is at work for me when I recognize these kinds of alignments.

One day recently, a DA member called me out of the blue. She was someone I’d had a little interaction with, but never any real one-on-one exchange. Her message to me was profound: that I was full of love and, therefore deeply spiritual. It hit home hard and I knew it to be true.

I have begun to feel the fellowship of the group in a new way. It’s more than comradery. Rather, it is deep compassion. And the service I was doing (I had started by being a timer in meetings and had progressed to chairing) was feeling so damn good. I could feel myself helping others by being there. One of my negative thought patterns has been not forgiving myself for doing almost no charitable work – but DA is giving me a true chance to serve.

Just last week, I stopped introducing myself as “Keith struggling with depression” and began saying “Keith, recovering from depression.” I don’t know that this will stick. My deep pain is still there. But I’m feeling better about myself and embracing love and DA as higher powers for me. I am a spiritual being and am hoping that this will alleviate my suffering.

Keith B.