James S. Gordon - Unstuck: Your Guide To The Seven-Stage Journey Out Of Depression

Praise for UNSTUCK

Whoever you are, whatever it is that you do, wherever it is that you come from, and especially if you practice a healing art, whether as Psychiatrist, Physician, Surgeon, Naturopath, Chiropractor, Nurse, Alternative Practitioner, Priest or Counsellor, there is pure gold in this book for you. This book is the King Solomons mine for mental health and wellbeing for our time. I never want to be without this book as a resource on my shelf for myself, for my patients, and for my colleagues.
Dr. Kim A. Jobst MA DM MRCP MFHom, Editor in Chief, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine

A practical, proven guide Superb.
Mehmet Oz, MD, author of the YOU guides

Extraordinary Both therapist and patient will benefit hugely from reading this book.
Deepak Chopra

Exactly what this over-medicated country needs right now.
Christine Northrup, MD, author of WomensBodies, Womens Wisdom

Unstuck is truly remarkable In this warm, practical, and user-friendly book, Dr Gordon takes great care to remind us how much power we have to change our own lives.
Dean Ornish, MD, author of The Spectrum

If you want to find out the real causes of depression and how to cure them, read this book.
Mark Hyman, MD, New York Times bestselling
author of UltraMetabolism

Addresses the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the problem, not just a possible chemical imbalance in the brain. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who feels stuck.
Andrew Weil, MD, author of Healthy Aging and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health

Copyright James S. Gordon, 2008
All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise be copied for public or private use, other than for fair use as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews, without prior written permission of the publisher.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual wellbeing. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutionalright, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-8485-0239-0 in print
ISBN 978-1-8485-0516-2 in epub format
ISBN978-1-8485-0515-5 in Mobipocket format

Excerpts from Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, a New English Version with foreword and notes by Stephen Mitchell.
Translation copyright 1988 by Stephen Mitchell.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Names and descriptive details have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals involved.

Designed by Stephanie Huntwork Illustrations by Meighan Cavanaugh

FOR GABRIEL GORDON-BERARDI AND JAMIE LORD

D epression is not a disease, the end point of a pathological process. It is a sign that our lives are out of balance, that epression were stuck. Its a wake-up call and the start of a journey that can help us become whole and happy, a journey that can change and transform our lives.

This book is the story of that journey and a detailed map of its challenges and rewards. Ill be your guide. Ill show those of you whove been suffering with clinical depression how to move, step by step, through and beyond its dense darkness. And Ill walk with all of you who are simply unhappy, anxious, or confused, and help you to discover ways to help and heal yourself.

This journey, which is as old as recorded history, has seven stages. In Unstuck, Ill give you the tools and the compass you need to successfully navigate each one of them. And Ill share with you the stories of people the ordinary, and yet remarkable, men, women, and childrenwhove taken this journey with me. Like them, you too can move through and beyond depression and distress, learn from and be healed by your experience, and find fulfillment, even delight.

Ive been preparing to write this book for more than forty years, since I myself had an experience of clinical depression that lasted many months.

One late-winter morning in 1965 in New York, six months into a pathology research fellowship, between my second and third years at Harvard Medical School, I awoke in a sweat. The sheets were twisted around my body, and I was clutching the blankets to my chin. My mouth was dry, and my head ached. My chest hurt when I breathed, as if a hand had pushed my sternum up against my spine. I felt feverish, but didnt seem to have an infection. I didnt know if I could heave my body out of bed, but I knew I didnt want to.

Several weeks before, my girlfriend and I had broken up. Now the irritable unhappiness of our last months together, the loss of our love, seemed to be breaking open in my body, weighing me down. The doubts and frustrations of my first years in medical schoolof long days in dry lectures and tedious labsrushed back. My mind was filled with anxious, accusatory questions. What had I done wrong? Why hadnt I been able to love better? How could I ever find fulfillment in medicine? What was the matter with me?

I told myself to get over it. I was young, privileged, healthy. Perhaps my girlfriend and I would get back together. In any case, there would certainly be other women I could love, wouldnt there? I knew I should be able to sort out my confusion and pain about medical school, to embrace my upcoming years of work with patients, and find a way to become the kind of doctor I wanted to be. I said these things to myself, but none of them seemed to make any difference. I felt worthless and hopeless, ashamed of my weakness, horribly lonely, without strength or will or direction. It felt like the end.

It was actually the beginning.

In the months that followed, I was wrapped up in and constrained by the damp heaviness of my depression. It looked to my frantic parents and bewildered friends as if my easy, confident, forward progress had come to a crushing halt. It felt that way too. I resigned my fellowship, left New York, moved back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began to see a psychiatrist. Before, Id always been sociable, often laughing. Now I spent many of my days alone, crying for lost opportunities, relentlessly examining and judging my faults, missing my girlfriend. I plodded slowly, head often down, through Cambridges lovely spring and summer. And yet I felt something new, something very necessary and overdue, was growing in me.

When I returned to medical school a half year later, I was still unsettled in many ways, but I felt different, more solid, as if my center of gravity had begun to drop from my head to my heart. My own suffering, and the early days of my own journey of self-discovery, had opened me to people who were dealing with situations far worse than mine. On the Beth Israel Hospital surgical ward, I sat with ancient Jewish men and women, some of them Holocaust survivors, as they moaned through latenight pain and early-morning loneliness. On my medical rotation, I held a giant, bewildered black man who, believing he had to fly or die, was trying to pry open the windows at Boston City Hospital. While sitting with and caring for these people, and many others, and sometimes helping them find strengths theyd forgotten they had, I began to discover my own strength and purpose and meaning.