In numerous ways, I can’t help but feel that telling my story is a little premature. I can recognise the problems I’ve had and that I continue to have but too frequently still choose to take the path of least resistance and give in to negative, destructive thoughts and emotions rather than choose to fight them or take the positive actions I know would help.

The truth of the matter is that it’s often not enough to know and understand the causes of depression. It’s sometimes not even enough to be aware of the necessary steps and actions that will help you escape your unhappiness. Self-worth, or lack thereof, can play a large part in knocking and keeping a guy down and self-sabotage is a recurrent theme in my story.
At times, I’ve almost embraced and clung to my unhappiness as a kind of (dis)comfort blanket. To be brutally honest, I’d go as far as to say that in those low times when I choose to feel disempowered, I’m really abdicating responsibility for my own mental health. I tell myself that how I’m feeling can’t be helped, even though I know deep down that it can, as the testimonies of other Whirlwinders has shown. Sometimes I think I make only half-hearted attempts to shake off the melancholy, perhaps as a way of further validating my own conviction of helplessness.
Although I did suffer from some really quite dark periods in my University years and less so in my mid twenties, I think that it was in my late twenties that regular bouts of depression really started to take grip. At 28 years of age, married with two children and a decade into a career in IT, I had achieved recognition, an abundance of qualifications, and regularly increasing financial reward. I loved my wife and kids. I was a home-owner, financially secure, with a small circle of close friends I also loved, and nearly always took three enjoyable holidays a year.
Despite these things I regularly felt unhappy, often desperately so. The fact that I felt so unhappy would make me unhappier still. What right did I have to feel so periodically miserable when I had so much? I felt a heavy shame; a guilt perhaps commensurate with my Catholic upbringing, that I should be so selfish and not appreciate what I had when so many others were worse off.
The cyclic nature of the misery I was feeling didn’t occur to me until some years later, by which time it had become an embedded function of my day-to-day life: a learned response to a negative turn of events. I’d feel a little down, and then I’d beat myself up about it and feel worse, which made me even angrier at myself, and then a small event or mishap would feel cataclysmic and turn my mood even darker and so on.
The onset of these episodes could happen at any time, for any reason small or large, and last from days to weeks. With hindsight, I can see that it often took a sustained period of ?blandness? to take place, where there were no ?little incidents? to set me off or keep me down, before I’d emerge from these periods of seemingly random melancholy. Silly little things like dropping a plate, stubbing a toe, or just a disagreement with somebody (often somebody I didn’t even like, so why let it bother me?) were having a cascade affect on me, keeping me from surfacing from the latest well of despondency I’d created for myself, sometimes from quite trivial beginnings.
So, whilst I recognise the cyclical nature of my moods now in retrospect, all I knew at the time was that I felt largely unhappy and had to do something about it. I decided I needed to look at making some changes and started by focusing on my work-life. After all, I thought, a person spends a third of his life asleep, a third of his life at work, and a third of his life doing his or her own thing. In truth all three needed addressing but I concentrated on the work side of things, planning an ?out? from the tedium of IT work, with all it’s intrinsic back-stabbing and bollock-speak, not to mention the need to constantly keep abreast of ever-changing technologies that were of little interest to me.
With the vague idea that I’d be happy enough simply earning enough money to get by, doing something that actually mattered for a change, a conversation with a friend ultimately led to an interest in hypnosis and hypnotherapy. After some research and reading, both my friend and I signed up for some hypnotherapy training with a respected hypnotherapist.
Initially, the nature of the training itself, which taught me so much about the way the human mind works, helped enormously, as my enthusiasm for the subject surged. Over the next few years I returned to the same school of hypnotherapy to take advanced courses, and also attended workshops dedicated to specific specialties and techniques.
The ridiculous thing was that as I was learning more and more about how the unconscious mind learns patterns of behaviour, I continued to find myself experiencing these periodic bouts of severe unhappiness. In the daftest of ways, as my knowledge of what was happening to me grew, so did the intensity of the episodes, as I seriously beat myself up for not applying my new understanding in practical ways. I was wholly guilty of failing to practice what I’d already started to preach, having become quite adept at hypnosis, practicing on family and friends and helping them with their addictions, phobias, pain-relief and anxieties.
The hypnotherapy training was scheduled largely in intensive blocks, and whilst my exuberance increased with each new topic, I was finding myself experiencing more and more ?down? periods during the off-training periods, intensified in no small part by increased responsibility at work and particularly the pressures of fatherhood, where I began to feel completely out of my depth.
At around this time, we pulled out of buying a new house at the eleventh hour (more guilt, although I made myself go and tell the seller in person, so I could look myself in the eye) but we still sold our existing house, and moved into a rental property for a year. The idea being that at the end of that year we would immigrate to New Zealand.
If the decision to emigrate from the UK seems sudden, that is because it undoubtedly was: we’d never even visited New Zealand for a holiday! I was the driving force behind the decision, with my wife being fairly ambivalent but willing to give it a go on the understanding that if either of us weren’t happy we could always come back.
At some point in the following year I negotiated a sabbatical with my employer, which seemed a sensible way to approach the move, as it gave us a degree of insurance in the event that we regretted it and wanted to return to the UK. In hindsight, that was an understandable but bad decision on my part.
We arrived in New Zealand in late 2008, initially on visitor’s visas, excited and from a personal point of view highly motivated. Over the following three or four months I exercised lots, lost a ton of weight, ate healthily and secured a government agency job offer and a long term rental home.
Unfortunately, the job I took, principally to gain a work visa and as a stepping stone to NZ permanent residency, was making me very unhappy. In work-life, it’s my experience that it’s always preferable to be far too busy than it is to have nothing whatsoever to do. Disappointingly, the project which I had primarily been employed to undertake was shelved along with all other projects due to a recent change in government. I was having to spend my day looking busy, despite being given the best part of bugger all to do and there wasn’t even any formal line manager to discuss the issue with due to nearly all management positions within the organisation being disestablished (which I quickly garnered was a corporate Kiwi euphemism for making people redundant without having to pay them off!)
Despite the problems at work, we loved New Zealand, the change in lifestyle and everything the country had to offer. Again, in hindsight, I probably idealised the country during this period to an extent, caught up in the desire to make the move work. We spent nearly every weekend exploring the lower North Island on day trips and making the most of our time, but I was again beginning to find myself falling into a particularly deep pit of dejection every time I even thought about the long commute to the office each day, where I would try to look busy despite only having half an hours worth of work on the agenda. I think it’s a universal truth that if you’re already depressed at the thought of Monday mornings, when it’s still only Saturday lunch-time, something needs to change.
So it came to be when, having secured the permanent residency we needed to make New Zealand our new home (largely by virtue of already having permanent employment in a skill-shortage area), we (and by we, I really mean I again) made the inexplicable decision to return to the well-paid position in the UK when my sabbatical ended. The plan was to work there a further twelve months before returning permanently to New Zealand. It was a ridiculous idea, as even my own Mother tried to convince me (even though she had missed us terribly) but I couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. It wasn’t as if the job in the UK paid more than my job in New Zealand, nor was it particularly much more enjoyable (albeit I was definitely finding actual work to do). In fact, if anything, I loathed working in the IT industry more than ever, despite being thankful for a proper work-load.
Within minutes of arriving back to the overcrowded Heathrow airport and then travelling north for hours on the M1, I was desperately unhappy and missed our new adopted home. It probably didn’t help that we arrived right at the end of British summer-time, and shortly before a particularly bitter and freezing winter.
The first six months were awful. I was increasingly miserable, both at work and at home where my marriage was close to breaking-point. My eldest son, now 11, had settled back into his old school and declared loudly and often that he wasn’t going to go back to New Zealand again, and I couldn’t blame him. He’d been shunted to the other side of the world and back again, in the full knowledge that his renewed friendships would only be a short-term thing and he’d have to start again a few months later. Personally though, the only light at the end of the tunnel, was that I knew I would be returning to New Zealand (or home, as I now referred to it) in a matter of months, although the weeks seemed to crawl by.
I’d not undertaken any hypnotherapy activities, nor progressed with any of the other ?crazy schemes? that I’d periodically dreamt up as an ?out? from the career path I seemed to be stuck on. I was deliberately and wilfully blocking out the notion that I would soon be jobless (permanently so this time, without a sabbatical to fall back on), not to mention living on the other side of the world where I wouldn’t have the support of family and friends. I just blindly counted down the weeks until I could go back to the place I’d romanticised as a kind of paradise where everything would suddenly be fine.
When that time finally arrived in mid 2009 and I permanently left my cushy IT position, family, friends and life as I’d known it (apart from those nine temporary months) to return to New Zealand, I crashed. I had the vague notion that I should put a business-plan together with a view to becoming a self-employed Hypnotherapist but couldn’t muster the energy to undertake much of the work I knew needed to be done.
Kids are fairly resilient, particularly so the younger they are, and both kids resettled quickly (despite my eldest’s initial unhappiness). My wife landed a permanent job within weeks of returning which took some of the pressure off, although in retrospect I think I used the fact as an excuse to do very little. I was exhausted in truth and should have been thankful for some time to relax but felt utterly lost.
One of my hypnotherapy peers in the UK told me via email at the time that I was being harsh on myself and that immigrating three times effectively in less than 24 months, as well as the job changes and ?sudden? (although it really shouldn’t have been a surprise!) unemployment and isolation were bound to have an affect on me emotionally and physically.
As usual though, I chose to castigate myself for what I deemed to be laziness and for being so unprepared. I became obsessive over performing the housework to a ridiculously high standard (the new rental property was always spotless) in my new ?job? as house-husband. I should have given more priority to what was actually my new job as the primary parent. With my wife working a 40 hour week, I was now responsible for being a Dad first and foremost, but whilst the kids never went hungry and their clothes were washed with military regularity, I wasn’t taking the time to enjoy just being around them more and spending ?quality? time with them.
Within three months of arriving back in New Zealand, I was well and truly run-down. My physical health wasn’t good and it culminated in admission to hospital for several days with prostatitis following several persistent Urinary Tract Infections. Even after being discharged, I couldn’t seem to get a run of decent health, contracting more and more painful UTIs and having to be regularly pumped full of prescription antibiotics that often did little to alleviate the problems.
18 months after returning from the UK to settle permanently in New Zealand, my story had become one of persistent niggling health problems (I was under the regular care of urology specialists in Wellington), coupled with long, dark episodes of depression. I finally relented and agreed to get medicated for the depression on the urging of my wife, which I had to admit was a long-standing ailment and well overdue. My confidence was all but gone by this stage, and my self-esteem at its lowest ebb. I was as overweight as I’d ever been, unable to participate in much physical exercise because it only seemed to exacerbate the urology problems. I’d also not made the effort to reach out and meet new people. I’d become more and more reclusive.
It was at this stage that I first met Martin, in his capacity as a counsellor. Martin helped me to further recognise some of the causes and trends of my emotional ill-health, set some short-term goals and taught me some useful coping mechanisms. Whilst the physical problems were somewhat out of my control, I slowly began to accept that I could choose to take actions to control the mental and emotional side of things.
The depressive episodes did become less frequent until more uncontrollable external pressures once again sent me spiralling. Our rental home was suddenly put on the market and sold instantly, leaving us with a looming deadline to find a suitable new home. My wife and I seemed unable to agree on any particular property but with deadline looming we signed up for a new place on a periodic tenancy. Literally two days after moving in, I noticed the house four doors up was suddenly available for rent, and wandered over when I saw the property manager for a viewing. The following day, once my wife had also come to see what I was enthusing over, we handed our new landlord the requisite one month’s notice and signed up for the house four doors away!
Throughout the upheaval of moving twice in five weeks, I was still contracting UTIs on a fairly regular basis and being subjected to some fairly invasive and embarrassing pokes and prods from the Wellington Hospital team of Urologists. Added to this, shortly after Christmas I contracted some sort of viral infection that I couldn’t seem able to shake off. Even when the virus itself eventually passed, I continued to feel exhausted even at the slightest exertion, my neck and shoulders ached constantly and I suffered from shooting pains up in to the head.

This post-viral malaise took a full six months to thoroughly shake off, despite regular courses of antibiotics but thankfully concerns that the ongoing issue might have been symptomatic of Chronic Fatigue or Fibromyalgia proved unfounded. I suspect I would still be feeling the effects now were it not for the wonders of acupuncture.
Currently, it’s been almost three months since I was really physically unwell, which is about as good a run as I’ve had since returning to New Zealand three years ago. I’m still not coping as well as I should with the bad days and as recently as a few weeks ago I fell into quite a slump, listening to those doubts and fears, but ignoring the sensible logical voice that imparts the good, healthy advice. I’m quite a compulsive person too, and I’m aware that I still indulge in activities that aren’t helping me, such as over-eating. Again, knowledge isn’t necessarily enough: a commitment to change my behaviour and take responsibility for bad choices is overdue.
On a more positive note, despite the health difficulties of the last year, I have resumed some hypnotherapy work and study, receiving some quite positive feedback in the process, which has given me a real boost. The feeling of having made a difference and helped a person is far more gratifying than configuring IT equipment any day of the week and also brings home to me the importance of not being afraid to seek help when its needed.
In conversation, Martin used a phrase that struck a chord with me. Often, with my wife at work and kids at school, I am perhaps ‘the only voice in the room’ but that voice isn’t always helping me. Whilst I recognise that I need to strive for little achievements; not judge myself too fiercely; try to maintain perspective and a thousand other small positive steps, I’m not convinced that I’ve ever actually fully committed to this ?wellness manifesto?. Moreover, my up periods, where I am motivated, focused and forgiving of my own failings, usually ensue organically, rather than as a result of any real effort on my part. This unhelpful voice, the ?only voice in the room?, too often succeeds in stopping me from making efforts to pull myself out of the mire.

I know now as I type this sentence that I need to take responsibility in taking positive actions that help me get up when I’ve fallen down, instead of finding a false comfort in the notion that it’s all out of my control and letting the situation worsen as the negativity grips tighter. I also know that I need to be honest with myself (something I’ve not always managed). Yet whether I actually have the bravery, courage, or self-respect to take those steps the next time I suffer a low, remains to be seen. History has shown that I usually resurface from the down periods via the graces of chance, fate or body chemicals, rather than that of honesty, effort and commitment to change.
I may still return to the UK but certainly don’t regret the decision to come out to New Zealand, although I’d very much like to say to anyone who is considering immigrating to another country that they should ensure that they are doing so for the right reasons. I’ve learned that running away certainly won’t solve your problems and can serve to worsen them. Big decisions need to be made with eyes wide open and its crucial that you’re honest with yourself.
Finally, I’m striving to learn from the mistakes I’ve made rather than repeat them blindly. This is something I should have learned much earlier in life but I try not to berate myself for that too much as it only serves to knock me down again. As part of my hypnotherapy training, I also studied NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) in some detail. There is an adage frequently used by NLP practitioners which neatly sums up its ethos:-
‘If you always do what you’ve always done you will always get what you’ve always got’
I’ve often been too willing to embrace my own perception of helplessness, to take the positive steps required to improve and become healthier but my hope now is that with a decent run of health, I can maintain the physical exercise I’ve been building up over the last few weeks. I’m a firm believer in body / mind balance and do think that regular exercise (so long as its possible) will ensure that enough dopamine, endorphins, and all those other feel-good chemicals are fired by my brain, and keep me from falling down too often.
Long term, I hope to find the courage to actually apply the lessons I’ve learned and build enough momentum to start achieving the things I really want to achieve and live the life I want to live.