Off the Couch

When I was about six, my (non-Jewish) school had a sports day. Every child in every class was assigned at least one race to participate in, and I was designated to take part in the sack race.
 
When the starter blew the whistle, you had to climb into the potato sack laid out on the ground next to you, and sort of jump in it to the finishing line. I hated the sack race. I hated jumping. I fell over. I got covered in mud. I started crying – and my poor mother had to paste the fake smile on her face that she kept handy for those occasions when her oversensitive daughter couldn’t quite get into the spirit of things and nearly ruined it for everyone else.
 
That was the first time I can remember feeling ‘depressed’. That feeling of being a loser, or being a failure; that the world would do much better without me weighing it down; that life was HARD.
 
From that point on, ‘the black dog’ of depression, as Winston Churchill famously termed it, was a constant companion. In school, if I wasn’t top of the class, I was depressed. If I was having a bad day (and I had plenty…) I was depressed. If I couldn’t afford to get the latest ‘trendy’ piece of clothing, I was depressed. If there was a birthday party and I wasn’t invited (which happened quite a lot…) I got depressed.
 
Then, my family upped sticks and moved to Canada, and I was depressed for about three years solid. Boohoo, I had no friends! Boohoo, I could get run over by a bus and no-one would even notice. Boohoo, I had to go to school (and graduate) in French, a language I barely understood. Boohoo, I had no-one to hang out with on a Saturday night; no-one to talk to on the phone; no-one to share things with.
 
By the time I was 19, I had a very long list of grievances and complaints about how my life had been to date. But I realised that it was impossible to carry on depressed and miserable for ever, so I made a decision to seal it all up, pull myself together, and to try to make the best of a bad job.
 
If I had known about the Garden of Emuna by Rabbi Shalom Arush, or listened to an emuna CD, or watched a Rabbi Brody shiur on the internet, the thought would probably have struck me that there was also a tremendous amount of good in my life, too. But I didn’t, so the only option seemed to be to ignore all my pain and disappointment, and just get on with it.
 
University was easier in some ways, and harder in others. But when I met my husband-to-be, at the age of 22, a lot of things fell into place, and I looked forward to never being sad, depressed or lonely ever again.
 
But that wasn’t what happened. If I got overlooked for a promotion at work, I was still depressed. If I had a spat with a friend, I was still miserable for weeks. If someone had a birthday party and I didn’t get an invite (remember, I was now a grown woman…), it immediately sparked off another attack of ‘no-one likes me!’ – and I’d be depressed and out of sorts for ages.
 
As I got older, I got depressed for more serious reasons: I was having troubles having children. I was getting very stressed at work. I couldn’t figure out the whole work / home balance thing. I was caught in the middle of a very nasty divorce involving close friends of ours. My best friend moved to Australia – etc etc etc.
 
If I’d known about emuna then, the thought would probably have struck me that Hashem was trying to get my attention, and that I needed to do some serious introspection. But I didn’t, and as all the stresses and strains of daily life began to mount, I started to experience panic attacks and difficulties breathing.
 
So I went to a ‘Neuro Linguistic Programmer’, and for a few weeks, things were a bit better. But I knew in my neshama, I hadn’t really solved the problem, I’d only stuck a plaster on it.
 
Things really came to a head a few months later, when we were about to make aliyah. The panic attacks were hitting me full force, and I was often short of breath and completely stressed out to my limit.
 
I woke up and decided one day: “I have to do something about this!” And the only choice open to me then, as a person with a very distant relationship with Hashem and virtually no emuna, was to go to a therapist.
 
She was a very good therapist. She was a very expensive therapist. And very quickly, I was paying nearly as much to the therapist as I was spending on my mortgage. But therapy worked enough to keep me breathing, and to get me on the plane to Israel – which is where, in a very short amount of time, I learnt the limitations of therapy.
 
My life fell apart within a few months of arriving here. Within two days, we’d lost all of our savings and had horrible, hurtful ‘email rows’ with a couple of close family members. The new house we bought wasn’t ready to move in to, and I was stressing over where we were going to live until it was. The lawyer miscalculated the tax on the house, leaving us with a huge underpayment to try to cover. The exchange rate had moved against us since we signed on the house, and we had another huge underpayment to try to cover.
 
I was trying to deal with all the bureaucracy, in a foreign language that I didn’t know a word of – and failing miserably. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. The panic attacks roared back, big time. Then, things went from bad to worse. My husband lost his UK job. My business tanked. Our debts mounted exponentially. And I found it harder and harder to drag myself out of bed. I spent hours and hours crying and feeling so sorry for myself.

My therapist agreed that things were really hard, and suggested that I take some medications, to ‘get me through’ the tough patch. I said no, but inside, I was starting to feel so desperate.
 
All those years, I’d always believed that therapy was the way to sort everything out. It was like my ace in the hole, that I could always pull out when I really needed to. But the more I was talking to the very well-recommended, very nice, very professional therapist, the more I realised that instead of making me feel better, I was actually feeling worse.
 
The more I talked about my feelings, and my difficult circumstances, the more overwhelmed and trapped I felt, and the more miserable and depressed I became. But I really didn’t know what else to do.
 
Until G-d had mercy on me, and sent me the first 8 English language CDs in Rabbi Brody’s emuna CDs. A couple of them mentioned therapy, and explained that every emotional problem that a person has stems from a lack of emuna.
 
If a person believes that all their successes are down to them, and their own hard work and abilities, they get very arrogant and very full of themselves and feel on top of the world. But then, when it crashes and everything goes wrong, they get terribly depressed and miserable.
 
The light bulb went on, and I recognised myself in an instant. In His kindness, Hashem gave me some more clues: if I wanted to really solve my problems at their root, I had to go to the source.
 
The source was not my ‘bad’ childhood, or my difficult school experiences, or all the moving around. The source was Hashem. And if I really wanted to get my problems sorted out as fast as possible, I had to deal direct.
 
The way I saw it, I had a choice: either, I could continue to pay a lot of money to talk to a human being three times a week who was very insightful, but couldn’t really solve any of my practical problems; or, I could try to talk to G-d every day, get things off my chest that way AND speak to the One ‘force’ in the universe that could actually sort things out for me.
 
I picked the latter.
 
And I never looked back. Those first few minutes of hitbodedut were so raw and crude, I don’t really know if they count. I just kept yelling at G-d, and crying, and asking Him to give me emuna and help me to stop feeling so depressed all the time.
 
And He answered. Within a few days, the feeling of depression went away, and it’s really never been back, thank G-d.
 
But practically speaking, things went from bad to worse after I stopped going to the therapist. All the things that I was worrying about happening, happened: we had to sell our house, as we couldn’t afford it anymore. My husband was unemployed for months and months and months. We had absolutely no cash, and struggled to buy groceries. We moved community; and moved again; and moved again.
 
But Baruch Hashem, the depression never came back.
 
I’m not saying people shouldn’t go to therapists. If they aren’t willing, or aren’t quite able, to talk to Hashem directly, then a Torah-observant, emuna-dik therapist could certainly be a very good ‘messenger’ for them.
 
But you should know, the help you get from a human being is always, inevitably, limited. I have quite a few friends who spent years ‘on the couch’ and thought they’d solved all their problems, only to find them cropping up again in a different guise a little while later.
 
A good therapist is great for dealing with the symptoms. But the causes? Only G-d can sort those out. Only G-d can help you to see the good in a traumatic, distressing or difficult-to-bear situation; only G-d can give you an ‘out’ when the bank is about to foreclose on your house; only G-d can bring your child back on to a path of true holiness and happiness, or help you to remember why you fell in love with your spouse. Only G-d.

So when you’ve finished reading this, why don’t you shut the laptop, turn off your phone and go and talk to Him? Even if it’s just a few minutes, even it’s barely a sentence, it’s the first step on the path to a peaceful spirit, a happy soul, and a genuine and lasting solution to all your problems.