My first severe bout of depression was in 1990. In reality, I had struggled with depression all my life, but 1990 showed me just how deeply depression can affect someone. Soon after moving to a new state, I had just come back from my first visit to my childhood home. The juxtaposition of my wildly free childhood with my prisonlike life of 1990 sent me spiraling into a depression like nothing I had ever experienced before.

For those who have never suffered true depression, let me explain a few things:

• Telling someone to “snap out of it” or “cheer up” is not only not helpful, it reveals you as a person that is not safe to confide in. Since I was new to the area, I had no friends. My husband took the car to work every day, so I was stuck at home in a wooded neighborhood, with nowhere to go. My friends and family were so distant that they had no idea how bad things were for me—and I simply lacked both the words and the courage to tell them.
• Beyond that, I also lacked the strength to tell them. You see, depression is exhausting. Every breath feels like a chore—one that you feel ready to stop doing. The pain in your heart isn’t exactly physical, but it’s real nonetheless.
• Sleep is your only escape from depression, which is why most sufferers seem to sleep their lives away. However, I am of the minority for whom sleep becomes elusive. I was only sleeping about three hours a night. Do I really need to explain what sleep deprivation does to your emotional and cognitive functioning? This is why sleep deprivation is a favorite device of torture: it’s easy, cheap, and very effective in breaking people down.
• You don’t see a way out of depression—not when you’re in the middle of it. Things that seem obvious to people on the outside are definitely not obvious to the person suffering depression. One evening I was watching America’s Funniest Home Videos with my family. One after another video amused me, but failed to make me laugh. Emotional numbness is a trait of depression. Then there was a video that made me laugh. I laughed so hard that I became hysterical. Then began crying and I was crying hysterically. I couldn’t speak, but even if I could have spoken, I couldn’t possibly have explained why laughing had made me cry so hysterically. In that moment, I believed that this was the last time I would ever laugh.
• Soon after this I began having suicidal hallucinations. I didn’t want to kill myself. I had no intention ever of killing myself. But these things were so real, so visceral, and so sudden that it was like I was living in the worst horror movie ever. It was always one of two very bloody scenarios. I will not describe them beyond simply saying that while I was hallucinating I could feel the cold steel of the knife, but no pain. I could feel the sudden hot gush of blood and smell the coppery-salt smell of hot blood. The hallucinations came while I was doing the most mundane tasks: making the bed, washing dishes, and once while I was bathing the baby. That last one was the most frightening of all because one moment I was holding his hand in one hand and a washcloth in the other and the next moment I was plunging a knife into my heart. When I came back to myself, I screamed for my husband to finish the bath and ran to hide in the closet[1].
• Therapy helps. Thank God my husband had good insurance through work. Otherwise we probably couldn’t have afforded therapy. I knew that I just needed someone to talk to, so I went to a counselor instead of a psychiatrist. At this point I had been depressed for almost a year. I wanted this to be over. So I went in and started talking right away about everything that was painful in my life. At first I was going once a week, but I told the counselor that for two days leading up to our sessions I started shaking, so I thought we should meet twice a week. Meeting twice a week meant that I was shaking all the time, but I was determined to get it all out. After meeting for two months, I finally began to feel some relief.
• Medication also helps. Years later, I suffered depression again as my marriage was ending. This time I wasn’t hallucinating, but was having suicidal thoughts every waking moment of every day. For example, I would look out the window at the barn and wonder if there was a good, strong rope to hang myself with. One day after two years of this I went to the garage and got into the car, leaving the garage door closed. Then I stuck my key in the ignition. It was the only concrete step toward suicide that I took. But instead of turning the key, I took the phone out of my pocket and dialed 911. When I told the operator what I was doing, she told me to go to the county mental health clinic. So that’s what I did, instead. The doctor there prescribed Prozac. Normally, I hate taking pharmaceutical drugs, but it saved my life. Not that it instantly cured the depression—it doesn’t work that way. But it gave me just enough of a cushion so that I could begin to think rationally again. And when I could think rationally, I realized that our marriage was never going to get better. It gave me the strength I needed to make the decision to leave.

It was during this time of horrific depression that I learned the Life Coaching skills that changed my life.

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[1] My husband knew that I was suffering from depression, but knew nothing about the hallucinations.