Do You Have to Lower Your Expectations of Life to Recover?

I’ve often mentioned how crucial it has been to my recovery that I made basic changes in my work and way of living as a whole.

Did I have to give up on hope and lower expectations of life in order to get better? My answer is No.

But if you had asked me before I made the switch, I would probably have said, Yes. Leaving the work I had done for so long seemed like giving up on myself – and I didn’t want to do that. I had been feeling bad enough without wrecking the last bit of self-esteem and hope for the future that I had left.

That’s the way I thought about the prospect of recovery back then.

But since making those changes I haven’t felt at all that I’ve lost hope, lowered expectations or given up on myself. Just the opposite. I feel I’ve gained a new life.I do sometimes look back with regret, but it’s not about giving up that high-stress life. It’s about having held onto it for so long despite its terrible cost to my well-being.

There were strong reasons for resisting change, but they had more to do with what I thought I should do rather than what I wanted to do. There was a long history behind that way of thinking – all the way back to childhood. Early on, I started assuming that something was wrong with me, that I wasn’t a real person.

I had to make up for that by trying to be first in every project I undertook. I felt instinctively that doing what I wanted to do was dangerous even destructive. I could only justify myself by working on what seemed to be more socially useful – by taking on a purpose that was not my own.

For years I accepted this flawed belief about what I could and should do. I knew I was good at certain things and bad at others. I wanted to be a writer but believed I could never be good enough to make a go of it.

As if to prove that, I kept trying to write in my spare time but soon hit a wall of fear that I couldn’t break through. My mind stopped working, and I felt only confirmation of the belief that I simply couldn’t do it.

That was the real defeat, the lowering of expectations, the giving up, losing hope.

A reader pointed me to a post at PsychCentral by Shannon Cutts that gets at these beliefs from a different angle. She refers to the story you tell yourself about what you can and cannot do. You relive this story with each choice you make that follows its assumptions. You fix yourself into it every time you tell your story to someone else. You don’t imagine that you can rewrite it, and so you avoid anything new.

Jane Chin wrote two posts [alas, no longer available online] I find helpful in thinking about living in a trap like this. One talks about Why Failure is Good. If you always avoid the possibility of falling short, you will never learn that failures are survivable and can teach resilience.

The other is I Don’t Know What I Want to Be When I Grow Up. If you’re preoccupied, even well into life, with the question of what you want to be, you can avoid exploring any new interest because it couldn’t possibly be the final answer.

Both strategies can lock you into a narrow view of who you are.

Add severe Depression and a collapse of will and motivation, and you’re locked in even more. Anything new feels so impossible. What’s the point? I can’t do anything well. The only prospect is more defeat, more failure.

It’s hard to follow the twisted logic because you’re hardly conscious of it most of the time. I lived that way for so long because I was often filled with drive and energy, but only when I felt secure that I was meeting someone else’s needs, not my own.

In my (hypomanic??) periods, I’d spin out ambitious goals and stay high with them through the first years. Each was a career that felt like the real thing.

After a while, depression would set in, and I’d start falling short in meeting the expectations I had set – and that others counted on. Especially over the last ten years, the illness got worse and worse, and it was clear to everyone that I was falling apart. No one is going to hire a person so depressed that he can hardly function – especially when they don’t know that depression is the cause. So when the possibility of retirement came up, it was the obvious choice.

But right after getting out, I felt the kind of relief from stress, the lightness, that made clear how much I had been fighting myself. I felt deeply energized and vital once again. Changing my life in this way was decisive in getting me out of depression.

There is, though, no instant cure for the illness. Recovery has to be supported every day, and that means, among other things, keeping the level of stress low. But that doesn’t mean cutting down my expectations of life. There are two kinds of stress. One bears down on you with the force of life that feels out of your control, a constant threat. That’s the one you have to watch.

The other comes from the excitement you feel when pouring yourself into what you love to do. That’s the kind of stress you can live with.

So, no, I have no feeling of expecting less of life. I’m finally doing the writing full-time that I’ve always wanted to do. Working hard in that way improves my life, and my wife’s as well, since depression has taken its toll on both of us.

How do you feel about making big changes in your life in order to get better? Does it seem like you have to lower expectations? Do you dismiss the idea as impossible to do, even if you wanted to?

Image by laslo-photo at Flickr

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