Inspiration to Kick Depression

[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

The sight of Louise Speed at the inquest into her husband's death from hanging is one that will probably haunt many of us. What she is feeling we will never know, but "there for the grace of God go I" will be uttered by any woman who's been in a long term relationship with ups and downs and/or a husband who's experienced very high highs in his work life. These stresses and strains are part of the evolution of a marriage, part of what makes marriage the highest form of meditation, and a process which develops and supports both parties. But none of us would want it to end in a coroner's court.

Depression, Winston Churchill's Black Dog, is a heavy, overbearingly dark cloud looming overhead which, in many ways, affects men like the English weather. Men and women react to depression differently. Women, well we're used to our feelings going up and down daily with hormones, and deep down know that tomorrow's another day no matter how bad today is; we can create that tomorrow. Our depression tends to be tearful, melodramatic, hot cups of Tea, shoulders to cry on, withdrawn and solitary, tinged with knowing that there are people who depend on us. 

Men's moods are far more drawn out, they are more akin to seasons, or that heavy low pressure which sits out in the Atlantic for months on end, causing dreadful, grey, damp, depressing weather. A depressed man is a depressed man today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, until finally he is inspired to change the weather pattern and rise up out of it.

It is in these very moments when a man is broken, passionless, without anger, that he is at his most vulnerable both to his own self-destructive nature and to a woman's inspiration. It's a moment when his defences are down, the rampart has been breached and you literally hold his life in your hand.

It's a moment either to get professional help or to step out into the unknown and make him know that he is everything, not to you, not to his family, not to his work, but to himself. And it's not just one hop-skip-and-a-jump but taking him off on a a long haul flight to a new way for him to inspire himself in his own life. 

You need to give him...

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