Gregory L. Jantz - Healing Depression for Life: The Personalized Approach that Offers New Hope for Lasting Relief

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Healing Depression for Life: The Personalized Approach that Offers New Hope for Lasting Relief

Copyright 2019 by Dr. Gregory Jantz. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration by Jennifer Phelps. Copyright Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-1-4964-3461-6

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This book is dedicated to the scores of people Ive known who had the courage to confront their depression... and found healing.

Throughout my life, Ive battled depression. During my childhood, it came as a dark veil, accompanied by traumatic childhood experiences and carried through my blood and brain by what we now call depression genetics.

Because of my moods, when I was ten years old, my parents took me to a psychiatrist. I got some help but also found more trauma, in the form of sexual molestation. This experience led to still more depression.

Both the already-established depression and the molestation would later become two pillars of my adult resilience. But a boy could not know that then. I only knew confusion, pain, and tunnels of darkness. As the trauma and darkness moved through my adolescence, I went back into therapy at sixteen, a boy-man who spent the next ten years talking, journaling, medicating, self-medicating, writing, thinking, feeling, withdrawing, competing, risking, and loving my way out.

Each process worked for its part, and ten years of therapy helped a great deal. By my early thirties, I authentically felt that I was an adult who had been healed of childhood trauma and was quite functional, quite alive. But I still battled depression. Medication helped, as did getting better sleep, ending addictions, eating no more junk or food I was allergic to, exercising, forming close relationships, growing in self-awareness, and engaging in therapy, spiritual practices, and discipline. Indeed, many of the practices represented in the chapters of this new book by Dr. Gregory Jantz became best practices in my own life.

But depression is a song inside us, and it keeps singing. We need constant help, constant companionship, and constant self-awareness.

And we need good teachers.

Gregg Jantz is a good teacher. Healing Depression for Life is a constant and powerful companion. I can attest to its best practices in the way that someone who stares at dawn skies for months can attest to seeing only little sun or no sun at alljust a dullness, a numb, inhibited destiny of narrowed corners. But then something pivots, the world moves, the person moves, and the person has the new feeling of seeing full onwithout opaqueness, without fear, without an internal stormthe lovely world again. Healing depression for life is a real concept, even though we know it gets its greatest power from our individual ability to live it out as a prolific metaphor.

Meeting Dr. Gregg Jantz, talking with him about depression and addiction, and providing consulting and training to the clinic he foundedThe Center: A Place of Hopehas been one of the highlights of my career. Weve worked together on projects not just in Edmonds, Washington, where the clinics are nestled at the base of beautiful hills and mountains, but elsewhere in the country toospeaking, training, researching, and writing together.

Gregg and his team live at the leading edge of whole-person health and wellness. They take on the big issues, the big themes, and the epic journeys of sadness, addiction, anxiety, pain, and loss, and they do so with best practices always in mind. The clinic, its practitioners, and Dr. Jantz give new hope to their clients. Throughout my friendship with Dr. Jantz and my consulting work with The Center, Ive most admired two basic precepts of the work, both of which ground this book:

• the importance of spiritual process (connectedness, mystery, purpose, mindfulness), which provides a basis for healing depression
• the idea that mind and body cannot be separated in a human soul and person: to heal depression, we must heal the body, too

A pill might be helpful for a person, but a pill is not enough for either of these precepts to be fully realized. The body requires action, as does the mind, in the same way a pilot is only as good as the airplane he or she is managing.

In Healing Depression for Life, a lifetime of Dr. Jantzs own work joins a lifetime of confidential client stories and the assistance of his colleagues and science-based research to form an impressive, accessible, gently written, and essential book for those on the path of depression.

No matter where you are in your journeywhether you are currently struggling with depression or one of your progeny or family members is haunted by the darknessyou will find in this book a blueprint for a healing process that will provide you with what you need to succeed in the struggle.

With depression statistics skyrocketing today, The Centers approach is not just timely; it can also be life saving.

Dr. Michael Gurian

New York Times bestselling author of Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls

If Depression Has You Feeling Hopeless, Youve Come to the Right Place

Depression is a worn-out word these days. Sports fans are depressed after their teams lose. Most news reporting is criticized for being depressing. The blogosphere and social media sites are clogged with every viewpoint under the sun as to the causes and cures of depression. As happens with most overused words, the real meaning of this one is fast becoming vague and abstract to many people.

But not to the millions of Americans who suffer from its all-too-real effects every year.

And not to me. As a mental health expert, I resist assigning the word depression to others as an impersonal diagnosis with professional detachment or superiority. Over the years, Ive learned an enormous amount about the medical science of this condition. But by far the lessons I value most are those I learned from the inside out. I understand firsthand how deep the cavern of depression can go and how dark it can getbecause Ive been there.

I know how it feels to wake up in the morning and wonder where Ill find the energy to take my next breath.

I have looked out at the once-vibrant world and seen only shades of gray, dull and flattened.