Sorrow's Web: Hope, Help, and Understanding for Depressed Mothers and Their Children - Softcover

Sheffield, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 068487086X ISBN 13: 9780684870861

Verlag: Free Press, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

One of every four women suffers from depression at some point in her life, often during the prime childbearing years, yet most fail to recognize the telltale signs of this common, treatable illness and its potentially negative effects on the children of all ages. Drawing on her experience as both a child of a depressed mother and as a depressed mother herself, as well as on extensive research by experts in psychiatry, psychology, and child development, Books for a Better Life award winner Anne Sheffield offers advice on how to:

• recognize the symptoms of depression and protect children from their impact
• choose among the range of medical and psychotherapeutic options available
• outline a strategy for fathers that will help them and the marriage weather the crisis
• ensure that the illness does not return

As the first book to demystify, destigmatize, and humanize a long-taboo subject, Sorrow's Web points the way to sustaining and regaining a loving relationship between mother and child.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne Sheffield, formerly director of development for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, is also author of the award-winning book How You Can Survive When They're Depressed. She lives in New York City.

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Chapter 1

Shedding New Light on an Old Problem

An eminent child psychologist once observed that all children need at least one adult who is irrationally enthusiastic about them. I lacked such a parent because my mother suffered from a chronic depression that prevented her from feeling enthusiastic about anything, including me. Neither she nor I is alone in the brand of lasting grief her depression caused us both. One in every four women will suffer from this illness at some time during her life, often during her childbearing years. Although depression is not contagious in the sense that measles and tuberculosis are, its presence virtually ensures that those closest to the depressed person will in their turn suffer from the depression's fallout. Even the most selfless, caring moms cannot, when they are depressed, avoid causing pain and problems for those they love.

Searching my childhood memories for images of my mother, I find I am a poor navigator, unable to hold a true course. I am buffeted by the ill winds of our later relationship, which was an unhappy one. Those recollections are clear, unlike the few remaining from a more distant past. I thought that I had a happy childhood. But the only psychotherapist I ever consulted insisted this was not so, that in fact I was an unhappy child, not on the basis of my memories but because of my lack of them. "You're screening them out," she told me, shaking her head at my stubbornness as though I were being deliberately uncooperative. I would dutifully sift once again through the handful of early recollections about my mother; finding nothing new, I would tell her more about my grandmother, my teachers, my friends, my games and achievements at school. If my therapist was correct in her assertion, I can only congratulate myself on the effective barrier to the truth that I appear to have erected. It served me well for many years, obliterating earlier memories and softening the impact of later ones. When I was twenty-three, that protection crumbled abruptly with my mother's attempted suicide, the only spectacularly overt evidence of her depression. The sympathy this should have engendered in me was dissipated by her statement, issued on recovering from the effects of stomach pumping, that she had done it because I didn't love her.

Before that event, I had spent my life engaged in the business of growing up as the only child of a divorced mother. Perhaps her depression was in those years less enveloping than it subsequently became, or perhaps the bright pleasures of school and the friends and rewards it afforded me were sufficient nourishment for my psyche. My father had left when I was an infant; during my childhood I saw him only once, when at the age of seven my mother allowed me to visit him in Florida where he lived with his second wife and my two young half-sisters. When I returned home, my tales of delighted discovery were ill-received, and I understood that my father did not belong in my thoughts.

When I was nine, my first stepfather arrived and stayed for several years, bringing me two stepsisters and a stepbrother, and the semblance of a normal houseful of parents and kids. My mother's growing negativity and critical outlook now had multiple targets, and I had in my stepsiblings sympathetic allies, but by early high school I was once again the reigning bull's-eye for her dissatisfaction. Nothing I did was right; nothing I did was enough; and everything wrong in her life was, she inferred, my fault. She eschewed the big guns of outright warfare, preferring instead furtive guerilla sallies, disguised as the urgings of a concerned mother: "Why can't you...How is it possible that...You could at least have...But you always..." I became more than ever a striver for excellence, propelled by the rewards I believed it would win me, among them her love and support. My mother wanted the same from me, but not in return for hers. The unspoken pact was to be one-sided.

Once again, a new stepfather arrived, a kind and patient man with whom I shared a deep affection. In public my mother displayed pride and pleasure in us, but in our absence she confided to friends the hurt our failings as husband and daughter caused her. Occasionally one of her intimates would pull me aside and urge me to be more supportive and demonstrative, hinting that Tony was already a heavy cross for her to bear. Behind the closed doors of our apartment and fortified with alcohol, she complained to each of us about the other, welding us into an unspoken conspiracy of protection. Not long after my mother's suicide attempt, Tony abruptly decamped during one of my mother's hospital stays for the cancer that eventually killed her. Friends heaped abuse upon him for this abandonment in a time of such need, but, although I missed him terribly, I understood and condoned his departure. Had I been able, I would gladly have escaped.

By then I had my own apartment. Finding the distance it afforded me an insufficient shield, I elected to marry an Englishman and moved a comfortable three thousand miles away. But in my haste to escape I chose badly, and I returned shortly with an infant daughter. This steep and sudden fall from excellence seemed persuasive evidence that I was indeed the inadequate and undeserving person my mother had long perceived. Dorian Gray-like, the portrait she had so long been painting became my self-image. Overlaying it with broad brushstrokes -- impressive jobs, an enchanting child, and a constant supply of suitors and friends -- I kept its existence well hidden, but it bound me to my mother, the artist. Longing for the love and approval she continued to withhold, I sought them with a resentment and anger that matched hers. At her death, my relief at the freedom it portended caused me to add shame and guilt to the toxic mix. Despite the staged appearance of confidence, I felt like the consummate loser.

My memories of my mother after her suicide attempt are clear and unpleasant, colored with a resentment and anger that spread beyond their immediate target. Decades later, these emotions still lie just beneath the surface, waiting for any opportunity to cause dissatisfaction with who and what I am. When I feel brave enough to travel down that road, I find them connected to everything I most dislike about myself: an inability to sustain intimacy; the belief, against ample evidence, that I am a failure and a fraud with its concomitant burden of perfectionism; and a bottomless longing for approval and recognition that I try to hide.

The pathways in my brain that lead to these deficits, I assume, did not spring into being at the moment of her postsuicidal pronouncement. They must have been long in the making, the product of innumerable exchanges between us, each infinitesimally deepening the grooves of feelings, thoughts, and behavior until they settled into a pattern that holds me hostage. Together with that part of me of which I am the sole creator, what I think of as the good part, they constitute the essential me. I have come to accept and to live with the flawed whole, but I remain stubbornly angry at my mother.

What brought me a measure of tolerance and understanding was, paradoxically, my own depression that fully blossomed fifteen years ago. You have to live through this illness to have an inkling of what it does to the human psyche, of how much it distorts and mangles not only the interior but the exterior landscape as well. That a tiny fault in the production of this or that neurochemical can cause such havoc is a testimony to the intricate miracle that is the human brain. While many gifted artists and writers have created lasting beauty from their experience of this illness, for most who suffer from it the principal product is negativity and unhappiness, both for ourselves and for those who live with and love us. It's as though our internal...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Free Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 068487086X
• ISBN 13: 9780684870861
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande