Book: I don't want to talk about it

Terry Real’s I don’t want to talk about it is a wonderful yet painful read. It took me almost three months to read it cover to cover with numerous dictionary lookups. Glad I purchased a Kobo Libra Color that has dictionary integrated, which indeed saved me a lot of time. While I highlighted all new words and kept them in notes, there is not a good way to export the notes to anywhere else. So, I guess they will just be gone when I return the book.

The book itself is intended for depressed men who want to understand how depression works, where it originates, how it manifests in daily life, and how to recover or seek treatment. It provides a plethora of stories and conversations between Terry and his patients, sometimes with the whole patient’s family. I started reading the book with the hope of finding a way to explain my depression to myself so as to feel better, assuming once I knew the mechanism I would be free from its spell. It’s not like that.

Recently I watched an interview between Zhong Shu and Christopher Nolan on his latest movie The Oddysey. One remark by Nolan stuck with me is ”… to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism”. Given the amount of knowledge any therapist has, it doesn’t necessarily immunize him from having mental issues (even if he is immune to all mental issues clouding his patients’ mind.) Let alone me.

It still helps though, to read the book and see how early days trauma may disconnect one from his own feelings. Looking back honestly, I do have childhood trauma I never told anyone. I didn’t consider it as trauma before and still am not able to link how the trauma has embedded depression in me one way or another over the years. I can identify my state of depression(yes, depression is a state, not a feeling), my attachments to grandios as self-defense, and now clearly see a detrimental part of patriarchal culture in my daily life.

I can also feel the two inner children inside me and promise myself to protect and nurture them (reparent/fathering). It takes time and practice AND DISCIPLINE. I finally fully understood when Seth told me that “I can recover from depression through those moments when M triggers me. Each trigger is a projection of myself and my inner child on him and through parenting him, I also get to heal from my own childhood trauma.”

What I still don’t fully understand, but aim to follow, is what both the book and Seth point to: the right question is not “What can I get?” but “Whom can I serve?/What can I provide?” Seth describes this as the final stage of maturity — a term Terry uses as well. The book illustrates it through the myth of Perceval, who saves the Fisher King and his kingdom. The answer to everything is in the doing, not the saying.