What To Do When Someone Doesn’t Like You

Therese J. Borchard

The other day a child psychologist was telling me about a very rigid, perfectionistic patient of hers.

“I want to control what other people are thinking,” the patient explained.

“How do you think you are going to do that?” the therapist responded.

The 11 year-old brainstormed but couldn’t come up with a solution.

Finally the therapist interrupted her thought process and said, “Do you know what you CAN control?”

“What?”

“What YOU are thinking.”

The young girl paused to think.

“No, that’s not good enough.”

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What You Build in Darkness

Therese J. Borchard

There’s a great e-card that reads: “Dear whatever doesn’t kill me, I’m strong enough now. Thanks.” It was the second most-liked item I posted on my Facebook page. The first was a quote by William Gibson: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, surrounded by xxxholes.”

Nietzsche was responsible for the line, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” I’m not sure I believe that, given the long list of names of extraordinary people who ended up taking their lives in desperation. Sometimes the pain of severe depression—the hopelessness that is its constant companion–simply becomes too much to endure. Having visited the doorway to suicide for periods of time that lasted months and years, I understand that.

However, there is also truth in what C. C. Jung writes, that “there is no coming to consciousness without pain,” that a clay…

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Dear Friend, This Is Depression

Therese J. Borchard

I wrote the following letter as a response to a conversation with a friend I have known since college. She wondered why I used the term “death thoughts” in my writing. But I wanted to publish it for all of the people closest to me, who have never seen me wail from the hollow place in my heart or throw things across the room in rage of this illness. I am writing it for my friends and relatives who wonder why I choose the words I do, if I’m exercising a creative license to keep a reader’s attention. This year my purpose has been made clear—to help people who are tormented by constant death thoughts, just as I am. This will mean rejection from those closest to me who cannot understand what I mean or why I would disclose such ugliness to the public. But it also means I have…

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