Step Two of Depressed Anonymous
“Came to believe that a Power Greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
“Jane was given an ultimatum to get help by her daughter, who saw the Depressed Anonymous group as a last chance for her mother, who was suicidal and despondent over the death of her husband a few months earlier. Jane didn’t want to come to the meeting-she came only to please her daughter.”
To give an ultimatum has a familiar ring to those of us who have been physically exhausted as we have tried to get our Depressed Significant Other up and moving.-but to no avail. Ultimatum’s hardly ever work when we are concerned. We have learned the hard way, that by trying to force our DSO into help many times backfires as rescuing someone who doesn’t want to change –continues to frustrate our efforts at helping. So we have finally learned that the real source of getting others well is to first get ourselves refurbished and filled with faith in our self. That is what Step Two is all about.
We have now made a personal commitment to our own healing by sharing with those in the Dep-Anon family group our feelings of aloneness, inadequacies and the direction that our lives should take. So often it is our anger that keeps breaking through the surface of our lives. We are angry at our DSO. We are angry at ourselves for putting up with all the things the DSO keeps pulling on each of us. By our frustration and irritability which actually mirrors the DSO –we fill our minds with greater feelings of guilt and shame.” Dep-Anon Family Group, 37.
FAQ
QUESTION
What exactly is Dep-Anon? Is it like Al-anon? A 12 Step approach for family members?
ANSWER
DEP-Anon is a support group for family and friends of the depressed. This program is very much like Al-Anon where family members gather to help each other learn how to detach and cope with an alcoholic loved one. In the same way, Dep-Anon is an effort of family and friends to gather together and learn how to live and cope with their Depressed Significant Other (DSO).
At a planning meeting for Dep-Anon family members were asked to list all the feelings that they experience while living with a depressed loved one. From the discussion we were surprised to learn some amazing facts. 1) That the feelings family members were experiencing were very similar to those which their depressed loved ones were experiencing, and 2) these feelings were also having an equally destructive effect in the lives of their family members.
It is the above information provided by family members that helped us decide that we needed to do something for these family members who were in need of help and who were hurting. When one member of a family is hurting the whole family hurts. We are hoping that this brief informational encounter today with our Dep-Anon program of recovery will help family members know there is a support group for them just as with Al-Anon.
In the days to come we hope to be sharing more information on Dep-Anon at this site: depressedanon.com .
We hope to hear your comments about this effort and welcome all your thoughts here at this site or email us at [email protected].
Thank you.