Depression | The Road Less Traveled

The feeling associated with giving up something loved – or at least something that is a part of ourselves and familiar – is depression. Since mentally healthy human beings must grow, and since giving up or loss of the old self is an integral part of the process of mental and spiritual growth, depression is a normal and basically healthy phenomenon.

The therapist's job, therefore, is to help the patient complete a growth process that he or she has already begun.

[Patients] frequently desire only relief from the symptoms of their depression "so that things can be as they used to be." They do not know that things can no longer be "the way they used to be." ... [The] "old self" and "the way things used to be" are outdated, [the patients] are not aware that their depression is signaling that major change is required for successful and evolutionary adaptation.

What makes crises of these transition periods in the life cycle ... is that in successfully working our way through them we must give up cherished notions and old ways of doing and looking at things. Many people are either unwilling or unable to suffer the pain of giving up the outgrown which needs to be forsaken. Consequently they cling, often forever, to their old patterns of thinking and behaving, thus failing to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity.

[The] unceasing practice of discipline leads to mastery, and the spiritually evolved person is masterful in the same sense that the adult is masterful in relation to the child. Matters that present great problems for the child and cause it great pain may be of no consequence to the adult at all.

Decisions affecting the lives of others must always be made. The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive.

You must forge for yourself an identity before you can give it up. You must develop an ego before you can lose it.

Discipline has been defined as a system of techniques of dealing constructively with the pain of problem-solving.

It is also reasonable to ask whether such processes as biofeedback, meditation, yoga, and psychotherapy itself are not techniques of discipline, but to this I would reply that, to my way of thinking, they are technical aids rather than basic techniques.

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Dr. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

From sections:

The Healthiness of Depression

Renunciation and Death