Conquering Despair

Overcoming Trauma

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Deliverance from Depression

by Traute Klein, biogardener

A personal story of deliverance from depression through divine intervention, group support, nutritional supplements, and aerobic exercise.

Depression Strikes in an Instant

In 1983, I was injured in a motor vehicle accident. A drunk driver hit me from behind at high speed. He then almost ran me down in an attempt to get away before the police arrived. I suffered posttraumatic stress disorder as well as physical injuries. I remembered the incident long enough to tell the police and then blanked it out. The external happenings were fairly clear in my mind, but the traumatic aspects got erased from my memory.

Beside excruciating physical pain, I suffered from emotional pain, something which had been foreign to me till then. I withdrew from the world and felt myself falling into a bottomless abyss of black hopelessness. I literally saw the world around me in shades of grey, not in the colors of the rainbow. Even my nightmares appeared without color. Normal dreaming totally stopped.

Spiritual Healing

Throughout this ordeal I lost faith in all people except my immediate family. I lost faith in the insurance system which was supposed to compensate me. I lost faith in the lawyers who were to advance my claim. I did not, however, lose faith in God's love for me, because that faith had been established on a solid foundation of trust since my childhood. I was, however, no longer able to hear God talking to me, and carrying on a one-way conversation seemed meaningless. I tried reading the Bible, but lack of concentration did not allow me to follow a sentence from beginning to end.

Then one day, two years after the accident, while trying to read Psalm 24, one verse suddenly jumped out from the page, enlarged and illuminated. I had no problem following it. That was verse 24:

Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.

Yes, I was falling, but I was not falling into nothingness. The hand of the Lord was holding me, making sure that I would fall no lower than he would allow.

That was my first step on the long road to recovery, a road which I am still traveling.

Emotional Healing

To be effective, treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder must start immediately after the incident which caused it. The primary method of treatment is to let the patient talk about the incident without commenting, letting her talk her own way through the problem. I was not able to take that route. I had no recollection of the incident and could therefore not talk about it.

I did not make any progress and did not try to communicate with people until two years after the accident. At that time, the recollection of the attempt on my life had returned, but I was still not talking about it. I did, however, decide to attend a ladies' Bible study. I would sit on a comfortable seat for two hours a week and sleep while everyone around me was singing and talking. I heard nothing. This was the one time of the week when I relaxed enough to be able to sleep soundly.

Physical Healing

It took five years before the physical healing could begin. That is when I found a chiropractor whose methods proved to be effective. I wrote about that experience in "Healing Touch" where I contrast it with the ineffective treatment of other health practitioners. That article is linked below.

Herbal remedies like St. John's wort are said to be effective in treating depression, but I did not hear about this herb until just recently. I would not have been able to take it anyway. It has definite side effects and is dangerous for fair-skinned people like me. I have experienced trouble just touching the herb.

My physician suggested L-tryptophane to help me to fall asleep, but it had the opposite effect on me. It helped to clear my mind, but the heightened awareness made me more painfully aware of my hopelessness.

Vitamin B6 is also helpful and was suggested to me by one of the therapists whom I saw, but I cannot say how much worse I would have been without it, because I had been taking that vitamin in high doses for years to control cold sores and warts.

At one time, I won a three months spa membership as a door prize and started to take part in aerobics classes on a regular basis. I was not able to keep up with the rest of the class but participated to the best of my ability. To my amazement, the sustained, regular exercise heightened my well-being more than anything else I had tried. Gradually I came to experience the occasional feeling of euphoria at the end of a class.

Having grown up in Europe, my family spent every holiday on bicycles during my teenage years. Cycling evokes fond memories. I soon found that for me a stationary bicycle produced the euphoric feeling more readily than aerobics and it was less stressful on my injuries. That exercise also allowed me to work out by myself at times when the contact with other people was just too strenuous.

Since I have learned to communicate with people again, I have gone back to my favorite aerobic exercise, aquacising. It is the easiest on me, because it is the least aggravating to the physical injuries.

Deliverance and Resurrection

Recovering from depression has been like the deliverance out of Egypt, the land of bondage. It started with an act of divine intervention followed by forty years of wandering in the wilderness. According to that timetable, I have more than 20 years to go to reach the promised land of total freedom from depression. By that time, I will probably be truly in the promised land.

I might also equate my deliverance to the resurrection of Lazarus. After coming back to life, Lazarus still needed the bandages removed. And that has been a long process, one that is continuing to this day.