She went away to boarding school for tenth grade, and after a conflict in style with the riding instructor there, she gave up on the sport. She told her parents to sell her pony; she didn’t have the energy to ride him. That first term at boarding school was a time of looking at what she now recognizes as “spiritual questions: Why am I really here? What is my purpose?” Her roommate, to whom she addressed some of these questions, promptly reported them to the school authorities, repeating fragments of conversation out of context. The authorities decided Claudia was suicidal and promptly sent her home. “It was so hugely embarrassing. I was very ashamed of it. And I just didn’t feel like I wanted to be part of anything anymore. I had a tough time coping with that. Whether other people forgot about it quickly or not, I couldn’t.”
Later that year, very much shaken, she began cutting herself—suffering from what she calls the “totally unattractive alternative anorexia.” Her trick was to make a slice and not have it bleed and then pull it apart so that it would bleed. The cuts were so fine that they did not scar. She knew four or five girls at school who were cutting themselves, “which seems like a significant number to be in the trenches.” The cutting has continued very occasionally; she cut herself periodically in college, and in her late twenties she sliced parts of her left hand and her belly. “It is not a cry-for-help thing,” she says. “You feel this emotional pain and you want to go away from it. And you happen to see a knife and you think, wow, that knife is sort of sharp-looking and it’s very smooth and I wonder what it would be like if I just put pressure on it here . . . you become fascinated with the knife.” Her roommate saw the cuts and once more reported her. “And they said I was definitely suicidal, and that put me off my rocker. My teeth were chattering, I was so nervous about it.” She was sent home again with instructions to visit a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist she saw told her that she was really fairly normal and fine, and that her school and her roommate were nuts. “He recognized that I was not trying to commit suicide but was rather testing boundaries and who I was and where I was going.” She returned to school a few days later, but by now she had no feeling of safety and she began to develop symptoms of acute depression. “I just got tireder and tireder and I slept more and more and I did less and less and I wanted to be alone more and more—I was extremely unhappy. And I didn’t feel I could tell anyone.”
Soon she was sleeping fourteen hours a day. “I would get up in the middle of the night and go into the bathroom and study, which everybody thought was extremely odd. People would knock on the door and wonder what I was doing in there. I’d say, ‘I’m just studying.’ They’d ask, ‘Why are you studying in there?’ and I’d say, ‘I feel like it, you know?’ And then they’d say, ‘Why didn’t you go to the common room?’ But if I went in there, I might have had to interact with someone. That’s what I was avoiding.” By the end of the year, she had pretty much stopped eating ordinary food. “I would have seven or nine chocolate bars a day because that was enough so that I never had to go to the cafeteria. If I had gone to the cafeteria, people would have said, ‘How are you?’ and that was the last question I ever wanted to answer. I kept working and finished the year because I was more invisible if I just kept showing up; if I’d stayed in bed, the school would call my parents and I’d have had to explain, and I couldn’t cope with the visibility, the vulnerability of that. I didn’t even think of calling my parents and saying I wanted to go home; I thought I was trapped there. It’s as though I was sort of hazy and couldn’t see more than five feet away—and even my mother was six feet away. I was so ashamed of being depressed and I just felt everybody had only terrible things to say about me. Do you know it was embarrassing for me to go to the bathroom even when I was alone? I mean, certainly in a public place I would have a lot of trouble. But even alone, I just couldn’t face me. I didn’t feel worthy as a human being at all, even in that particular act. I felt like someone might know I was doing that and I was ashamed. It was incredibly painful.”
The summer after tenth grade was rough. She developed eczema that was tension-related and that has continued to plague her. “Being around people was absolutely the most draining thing I could imagine. Just talking to someone. I avoided the world. I mostly stayed lying in bed, and I wanted my shades closed. The light hurt me then.” As the summer progressed, she finally started on medication, taking imipramine. The people around her noticed a steady improvement, and “by the end of the summer I had worked up enough energy to go into New York City one day with my mother shopping, and go home again. That was the most exciting and energetic thing I did that summer.” She also bonded with her therapist, who was to remain a close friend.
In the autumn, she switched schools. Her new school gave her a single room, which worked well for her. She liked the people there, and she had the medication buoying her spirits. She felt that during the summer her family had finally faced her mood states as a real issue, and that was a big help. She began working extremely hard and doing lots of extracurricular activities. She was made a proctor her senior year, and she was admitted to Princeton.
At Princeton, she put in place many of the coping strategies that would be with her for life. Though she was intensely private, she found it difficult to be alone, and to solve the isolation of the night she had six friends who would take turns putting her to bed. Often they stayed over in her bed—she was not yet active sexually and the friends respected these boundaries. They were there just for companionship. “Sleeping with people and that feeling of up-closeness snuggling became a very important antidepressant for me. In favor of snuggling, I would give up sex. I would give up food. I would give up going to the movies. I would give up work. I mean, I’d give up just about anything short of sleep and going to the bathroom to be in a safe, snuggling environment. I wonder if it stimulates chemical reactions in the brain, to be honest.” It took her a little while to move on to the next step in physical intimacy. “I was always self-conscious about my naked body; I don’t think I’ve ever tried on a bathing suit and not been traumatized by it. I was not the world’s earliest person to have sex. People spent a lot of time trying to convince me that sex was an okay thing. I didn’t think it really was. For years, I didn’t think it was right for me at all. Just like 7UP—never had it, never will. But eventually I came round.”
The winter of her freshman year, she went off medications for a while. “The imipramine I’d been on always gave me the side effects at just the wrong time. It was when I had to give a talk in front of a whole class of people that my mouth became so dry I couldn’t move my tongue.” She sank rapidly. “I couldn’t go out to eat again,” she explains, “so a friend of mine would cook me dinner every night and feed me. For eight weeks he did that. And it was always just in his room, so I wouldn’t have to eat in front of other people.
“There’s always the desire to keep going without the medication, and when you’re in that mind-set, you don’t realize how bad things are.” Finally, friends convinced her to go back on the medications. That summer she went waterskiing, and a dolphin came up and swam beside her. “It was the closest thing to knowing God that I’d ever experienced. I was just like, I think I’ve got some company here.” She felt so up that she went off the medications again.
She went on them again six months later.
At the end of her junior year, she started on Prozac, which worked well except that it killed certain parts of her inner self. She lived with that for about eight years. “I take medicine for a while and then I go off because I begin to think I’m fine and I don’t really need it. Yeah, right. And then I go off it and I feel fine, fine, fine, and then a series of things will happen and I’ll start feeling beaten down. Like I’m carrying too much weight. And then a couple of small things will happen—you know, it’s really not so terrible that the toothpaste cap, for example, fell down the drain, but the fact that it did is the last straw and more upsetting than when my grandmother died. It takes me a while to see where I’m going; it’s alw
ays down, up, down, up, down, up, and it’s difficult to assess when the downs are further down than the ups are up.” When a temporary setback caused her to miss a bridal shower—“I couldn’t get out of my apartment and get on a bus to go there”—she felt she simply couldn’t call. She went back on Prozac.
Eventually, she gave up the medications, so that she could reawaken sexual feeling, and began on the homeopathic remedies she was taking when I first got to know her. The homeopathic remedies seemed to work for quite a while; she feels they are effective at keeping her stable, but when circumstances drove her into a new depression, they could not bring her up out of it. There were some tough times, but she stuck out homeopathy through a long winter. When, once a month, she panicked that her depression was returning, she’d realize that it was just PMS. “I’m always so glad when I start bleeding; and I’d think, ‘Oh! Well, that was that!’ ” Though the lack of medication did not cause any major regression, she did have a harder time with hard things. The overall treatment program seemed to be inconsistent for her physical ailments, the tension-related ailments in particular; her eczema got so bad at one point that her breasts bled through her shirt.
At about this time she gave up talking therapy and began writing what Julia Cameron calls “morning pages,” twenty-minute written exercises in matinal stream of consciousness. She says that they help her to clarify her life; she has not missed a day in three years now. She also keeps on her bedroom wall a list of things to do when she is beginning to feel down or bored—a list that begins, “Read five kids’ poems. Make a collage. Look at photographs. Eat some chocolate.”
A few months after she started writing morning pages, she met the man who is now her husband. “I’ve come to realize I’m much happier in my life when I have someone in the next room working. Companionship is very important to me; it’s very important to my emotional stability. I need comforting. I need small remembrances and attention. I can be in an imperfect relationship much better than I can be by myself.” Her fiancé accepted that she had been depressed. “He knows that he has to be sort of poised and ready to help me when I come home from discussing my depression with you, for example,” she said to me. “He knows he has to be ready all the time in case I relapse. When I have him around, I feel a lot better about myself and I’m much more able to do things.” In fact, she felt so well after she met him that she decided to go off the homeopathic regimen she had been following. She spent the year in an up, happy place, designing with him the ceremonies to solemnize her marriage.
It was a beautiful summer wedding, planned with the same meticulous care as a homeopathic treatment program. Claudia looked beautiful, and it was one of those occasions at which you feel the great welling of affection from the many friends who are gathered. Each of us who knew Claudia was so happy for her: she had found love; she had transcended her lifetime of woes; and she was glowing. Claudia’s family now live in Paris, but they have kept the house in which Claudia grew up, a seventeenth-century house in a prosperous town in Connecticut. We gathered there in the morning for a ceremony of intention at which the bride and groom invoked the four directions and the four winds. A luncheon followed at the home of a family friend across the road. The wedding ceremony took place in a beautiful garden at four in the afternoon, and then we had cocktails; Claudia and her husband opened a box of butterflies, which came out and flitted magically around us. There was an elegant dinner for 140 guests in the evening. I sat next to the priest, who maintained that he had never performed a wedding that was so carefully orchestrated; the ceremony, which Claudia had written with her husband, had had full directions “of operatic proportion,” he said. Everything was exquisite. Our place cards were on handmade paper with a woodblock print that echoed the handmade paper and woodblock prints of the menus and of the order of service. The images had been drawn especially for the occasion. The groom had actually made the cake, a towering four-story affair, himself.
Change, even positive change, is stressful; and marriage is one of the most enormous changes you can make. Problems that had begun before the wedding worsened soon after it. Claudia believed the trouble was with her husband; it took quite a while for her to accept that her situation might be symptomatic. “He was actually more worried about me and my future than I was. During my wedding day, everyone remembers me happy. I look happy in the pictures. But I went through the whole day feeling I should be in love, I should really be in love if I’m doing this. And I felt like a lamb going to the slaughter. My wedding night, I was just exhausted. And our honeymoon was frankly disastrous. I had nothing nice to say to him the entire trip. I didn’t want to be with him; I didn’t want to look at him. We tried to have sex and it was painful for me and it just didn’t work. I could see how in love he was. And I just thought: I can’t believe this. I thought it would be different. And I felt miserable at the thought that I had ruined his life and broken his heart.”
In late September, she returned to the homeopathic regimen. It had been stabilizing, but it couldn’t lift her out of what had become a truly acute depression. “I’d be at work,” she recalls, “and all of a sudden I’d feel like I was about to have a breakdown and cry. I was so worried I’d act in an unprofessional way that I could only just do my job. I’d have to just excuse myself and say I had a headache and had to leave the office for the day. I hated everything; I hated my life. I wanted a divorce or an annulment. I felt I had no friends; I felt I had no future. I had made this terrible mistake. I thought, my God, what are we going to talk about for the rest of our lives? We’re going to have to have dinner together, and what are we going to say? I’ve nothing to say anymore. And he of course felt it was all his fault and had huge self-loathing and he didn’t want to shave or go to work or anything. I was not nice to him and I know it. He was trying very hard and just had no idea what to do. Nothing he could have done would have been right to me, no matter what it was. But I didn’t see that at the time. I would tell him to go away, that I wanted to be alone; and then what I really wanted was for him to insist on being with me. What really matters to me? I’d ask myself. I don’t know. What would make me happy? I don’t know. Well, what do I want? I just don’t know. And that totally freaked me out. I had no clue. There was nothing I was looking forward to. I focused all that on him. I knew I was being horrible to him—I knew it in the moment and yet I felt powerless to stop it.” In October, she had lunch with a friend who told her she had “that happy married glow” and she burst into tears.
It was her worst period since high school. Finally, in November, friends persuaded her to return to Western medicine. Her psychiatrist said she was crazy to have stuck it out on homeopathic treatments for so long and gave her forty-eight hours to get her system clean before he started her on Celexa. “It made an instant difference. I could still feel depressive moments and thoughts, and it does kill my sex drive, so that I feel like I have to try hard to do this for my husband—it’s not just interest in sex that goes, but physical trouble, so that I can’t even get wet! I have maybe two percent interest when I’m ovulating, and that’s the high point of the month. But it’s just all so much better. My husband is so sweet; he says, ‘I didn’t marry you for the sex, it doesn’t matter.’ I think he’s just so relieved that I’m not the monster I was from the marriage on. Our lives feel restabilized. I can see the qualities in him that I wanted—the emotional security is back. The snuggling is back. I’m very needy and now he is filling those needs, and he loves the snuggling too. He has made me feel like I’m a good person. And I am happy to be with him again. He loves me and that is such a treasure now. At least eighty percent of our relationship is now wonderful.
“I feel slightly artificially up. When I was ten milligrams lower on my medication, the depressive moments would come in and they were very disturbing and disruptive and really painful and hard to get out of, although I could pull out of them and would. And I feel like I still need that to keep me up. I don’t feel stable. I don’t feel the same sens
e of smooth sailing that I had while I was planning the wedding. If I felt reasonably safe, I would go off the medicine; but I don’t feel safe. I find it increasingly hard to draw a line between the depressive and the nondepressive me. I think a depressive tendency is much stronger in me even than the actual depressions. Depression is not the be-all and end-all of my life. You know, I’m not going to lie on my bed for the rest of my life and suffer. The people who succeed despite depression do three things. First, they seek an understanding of what’s happening. Then they accept that this is a permanent situation. And then they have to somehow transcend their experience and grow from it and put themselves out into the world of real people. Once you’ve done the understanding and the growth, you realize that you can interact with the world and live your life and carry on your job. You stop being so crippled, and you feel such a sense of victory! A depressive person who can put aside navel gazing is not so insufferable as one who can’t. At first, when I realized I would spend my life doing the mood dance, I was very, very bitter about it. But now I feel like I am not helpless. This has become a major focus of my life: How can I grow from this? Maybe this hurts me now, but how can I learn from it?” Claudia Weaver cocks her head to one side. “I understood that. I’m lucky.” It is her questing spirit as much as any experimental treatment that has allowed her to make it through with a life more or less intact, despite all the difficulties she has faced.
Of the group therapies I studied, the one that seemed to me most subtle and nurturing, the one that brought people closest to resolution, was based on the work of Bert Hellinger in Germany. Hellinger, a former priest who was once a missionary to the Zulu, has a large and devoted following for his Gestalt-style work. One of Hellinger’s disciples, Reinhard Lier, came to the United States in 1998 and conducted an intensive treatment, in which I participated, my natural skepticism giving way to respect for the process as I became more richly enmeshed in it. Lier’s treatment had some effect on me, and I saw that it had enormous effect on others in the group. Like EMDR, Hellinger-style work is probably most effective for people who are dealing with traumas; but for Lier’s purposes, the traumatic thing can be a basic fact—“my mother hated me,” for example—rather than a single event bounded by time.
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