How to Heal Yourself from Depression When No One Else Can: A Self-Guided Program to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t

Sounds True

Boulder, CO 80306

© 2021 Amy B. Scher

Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author(s) and publisher.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical recommendations of physicians, mental health professionals, or other health-care providers. Rather, it is intended to offer information to help the reader cooperate with physicians, mental health professionals, and health-care providers in a mutual quest for optimum well-being. We advise readers to carefully review and understand the ideas presented and to seek the advice of a qualified professional before attempting to use them.

Published 2021

Cover design by Jennifer Miles

Book design by Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Illustrations © 2021 Richard Sheppard

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Scher, Amy B., author.

Title: How to heal yourself from depression when no one else can : a

   self-guided program to stop feeling like sh*t / Amy B. Scher.

Description: Boulder, CO : Sounds True, 2021. | Includes bibliographical

   references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020025067 (print) | LCCN 2020025068 (ebook) | ISBN

   9781683646204 (paperback) | ISBN 9781683646211 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Depression, Mental—Alternative treatment—Popular works.

Classification: LCC RC537 . S3838 2021 (print) | LCC RC537 (ebook) | DDC

   616.85/27—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025067

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025068

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Praise for

Amy B. Scher’s Previous Books

This Is How I Save My Life

Amy Scher is a brave warrior and a wonderful writer. She is a living example (very much living!) of what it looks like when a woman takes her health, her heart, and her destiny into her own hands. My hope is that this book will inspire many other women to do the same.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and Big Magic

A heartwarming and inspiring story that will change the way you look at life.

Vikas Swarup

New York Times bestselling author of Slumdog Millionaire

Amy Scher goes to the edge of losing herself in mind, body, and spirit, and shows us that . . . sometimes it takes traveling to the other side of the globe to discover what was right in front of us all along.

Laura Munson

New York Times bestselling author of This Is Not the Story You Think It Is . . .

A homecoming of healing, a human story of finding faith, wrapped in a blanket of humor and page-turning candor.

Kristen Noel

editor-in-chief of Best Self

This is the rare book that is both breezy and deep. It speaks to the magic of international travel and how it can tempt and taunt you to expand into the very best version of yourself, or perhaps become someone entirely new.

Adam Skolnick

author of One Breath and over thirty Lonely Planet travel guides

"In her stunning new memoir, This Is How I Save My Life, the refrain ‘we are the healing we’ve been waiting for’ rings throughout . . . A beautiful testament to resilience that veers from the comical to the tragic."

Los Angeles Review of Books

How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can

[Amy Scher is] an inspiration, not just because she teaches us how to take healing into our own hands, but because she’s living proof that it works.

Pam Grout

#1 New York Times bestselling author of E-Squared and E-Cubed

Amy has seen the truth and can be a coach to all those who seek healing and authenticity. The potential resides in all of us, so read on, do not fear failure, and fulfill your potential while living an authentic life that you create and not one imposed by others.

Bernie Siegel, MD

author of A Book of Miracles and The Art of Healing

Amy Scher takes you on a guided journey to resolve emotional, physical, and energetic blockages that get in the way of true healing. You will feel like you have a loving expert coach by your side along the way.

Heather Dane

coauthor with Louise Hay of Loving Yourself to Great Health

Amy Scher is a voice of calm, reassuring wisdom. Her own triumph over illness is truly inspirational, but what really puts Amy in an inspirational category of her own is her warm, kind, down-to-earth, truly accessible approach.

Sara DiVello

bestselling author of Where in the OM Am I?

Amy’s story is awe-inspiring. Her book is full of wisdom and easy-to-implement techniques that have the power to help anyone reconnect their mind with their body and their heart with their soul and heal their entire lives. A really beautiful read.

Luminita D. Saviuc

author of 15 Things You Should Give Up to Be Happy

"How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can is a comprehensive and user-friendly DIY manifesto that’s the real deal. Amy guides readers toward authentic self-healing in a way that’s easily accessible, honest, and relevant for today."

Chris Grosso

author of Indie Spiritualist

Amy is a courageous pioneer in the field of mind-body-spirit healing. With proven, easy-to-follow techniques, you will gain insight into the root cause of pain, physical dysfunction, and illness and transform your health. . . . This book illuminates the path to wellness.

Sherrie Dillard

author of Develop Your Medical Intuition

Also by Amy B. Scher

How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can: A Total Self-Healing Approach for Mind, Body, and Spirit

How to Heal Yourself from Anxiety When No One Else Can

This Is How I Save My Life: From California to India, a True Story of Finding Everything When You Are Willing to Try Anything

This book is for every person

who can’t just get help, won’t just get help,

or did just get help and it didn’t help.

My great hope is that this book gives

you the peace you’ve been looking for.

Joy sat me down and said it’s time to talk, I’ve missed you.

—Shannon Kaiser

Where We Start: My Story, Your Story, Every Story

You have probably picked up this book because you are at a loss for what to do next to help yourself. Maybe you feel so depressed that you can barely drag yourself through a day. Or maybe you get out of bed just fine but are experiencing life in a way that has you asking, What’s the point of all of this? In fact, you may feel like you’re sleepwalking, fumbling, or zoning out through life. In this day of constant social-media bragging, motivational memes, and inspirational quotes, it’s impossibly exhausting to reach that mountain of happiness that we’ve all been programmed to chase (spoiler alert: it doesn’t even exist).

When we can’t get to said happiness, and we’re feeling like shit because of it, we usually begin to search frantically—and I have been no exception to that activity. When we feel bad, depressed, or even just simply lost, we tend to rack our brains for what has messed us up so badly. We think back upon our lives to who did what to hurt us, what we’ve lost, and to all the traumas we’ve endured. Before we know it, we are off and running on a full-charge-ahead hunt for what happened that sent us wildly off the rails, ruining our life.

We look high and low, checking off everything from our list: the imbalanced chemical, the broken relationship, the stress, the nutritional deficiency. We listen to our caring doctors and focus on fixing the things that made this happen. We do a bunch of things to help ourselves feel better. We do yoga, we do therapy, we do medication. We do self-care like it’s a job that our life depends on. We fix it all, and often, we still don’t feel better. So we keep searching and doing. But the doing exhausts us because it’s so freaking hard to do anything when you feel like you’re coming undone. Everyone else seems fine, we think, seeing confirmation plastered all over social media. And the few of our friends who aren’t fine, well, they have been through worse than us, we conclude. Why then, do we, maybe even having all we want, feel like life is an empty hole?

Maybe this feeling is always there for you and maybe it waxes and wanes, popping through your blue skies again and again when you least expect or understand it. Depression is something that can occur during obvious times of change and stress, after those times have settled, or rise up during what seems like the best stretches of time in our lives. Depression can happen even when you have everything you’ve ever wanted—when it seems that you should be the happiest.

But no matter when or how it happens, the inevitable question remains: What is wrong with me? So, on top of feeling like shit, we might also feel not good enough. Unworthy. Ashamed. Guilty. Which was likely there long before the depression, even if you don’t yet realize it.

If this whole mess sounds like the one you’re in, I understand. Because this story has been mine too. And the fact that after all you’ve done, you still aren’t cured . . . isn’t actually as much of a mystery as it seems. Because it’s likely that much of what you’ve been trying to fix is not the entire problem.

By my late thirties I had, finally, captured the clichéd pot of gold containing what matters most: health. Just a decade earlier, I had been near death with a debilitating complexity of illnesses—chronic Lyme disease, nerve damage, autoimmune conditions, anxiety, and more. Exasperated after exhausting all medical options in the United States, I traveled across the world for an experimental stem cell treatment in Delhi, India. After almost nine weeks of simultaneously drowning and thriving in my new world, I took home with me a radically changed body and—like a car that had been sitting idle, waiting for a new part—it jump-started my life. There was almost no part of me recognizable from when I’d first arrived, in a wheelchair, doped up on prescription painkillers, vying for even a chance at reaching my next birthday. But just a year after my epic adventure in India, I found myself slowly sliding backward. I was disgusted, heartbroken, and at a loss for where to turn next. While the treatment had gotten me healthy, it was clear I had no real foundation for sustaining that coveted title I wanted so badly: cured. My body was, for some then unknown reason, undoing the health that medical advances had so graciously gifted me.

It was that low point in my life that opened me up to a new way of seeing things. I realized that the illness had not come out of nowhere, as I once thought—a robber in the night, to take my life without permission. Instead, I discovered that my illness was more than just the simple equation of physical malfunction = physical symptoms. Even with this epiphany that there was more to be uncovered, I had to contend with the difficult question of What next? Because what do you do when you’ve already gone around the world for the cure? It wasn’t until that point that I began to connect the dots on a stretched-out map of my life—between mind and body. My close examination of the link between how emotional trauma and stress affect our physical bodies was what opened up an entirely new path to health for me. Through the very same techniques I’m going to teach you in this book, I was able to do what no doctor or medicine could do for me: heal permanently and completely. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and consulting what felt like all the experts in the world, it turned out that, eventually, I had to stop chasing the cure and turn inward to address the deepest parts of myself. What I wish I had learned at that point, about getting to well—and staying there—is that it’s impossible to set off to hunt down the things you need to fix and check me off the list forever so you can move on to happily ever after.

But I didn’t know any of this after I had healed myself. During the almost ten years following my experience in India, my life felt like some kind of made-for-movie miracle. I had married my most perfect person, bought a house in Los Angeles, and built a fulfilling career helping others who were suffering just like I had. I wrote, taught, and shared everything I learned from my own healing process. I threw my life into my work, trying to build it up big and tall enough to reach every person who needed it. I had become a master at helping people detect emotional blocks, energetic causes, and subconscious thoughts that could be contributing to their symptoms or challenges. Much of my perfect life was driven by the will to help others—my waiting list of clients, animals that needed homes, people I knew who were going through difficult times—and everyone in between. I, however, never seemed to make it onto my own list.

By age thirty-eight, after I had finally convinced myself I had done enough to make up for all the lost from Lyme years of my twenties, I began to find myself tired, overwhelmed, teary, depleted, disconnected, and sometimes simply unhappy for no reason. The previous year had been an extremely challenging one for me personally. Whether it was that year that had cast this dark shadow on me or something more subtle that had gone unidentified, it became clear that it was something I couldn’t easily shake. Had I not fulfilled the requirements for true healing and happiness already, or not done it all right before? Was I just tired, or . . . depressed?

I was no stranger to depression, having grown up with a dad who, for most of my life, struggled immensely with depression. None of the various diagnoses assigned to his depressive episodes had been cured by the treatments prescribed. His struggle was heartbreaking, with erratic highs and lows, pulling our entire family along with him. And yet during my own experience with debilitating physical illness, I had never considered myself depressed. I had certainly felt depressed at times in my life before: during my teen years, as many of us do, and especially during my experience with debilitating illness. But it all felt circumstantial, easily explained by what I’d been going through. Now, though, when I had so much to be thankful for, I felt able to enjoy so little of it.

By the time this wave of heaviness hit, I had already been helping clients heal for years—from fatigue, depression, anxiety, illness, and more—with great success. Yet here I was, in the same position as my dad once was, and as so many of my clients had described: having it all, "not knowing what was that wrong," and feeling . . . like shit.

After my dad had passed away, and with all of his wise advice gone with him, I turned to his childhood friend, Barry. Barry is the man I extract pieces of my dad from: a sliver of a memory, a funny story, and sometimes clues to what had gone wrong with him. Barry helps me piece together the father who helped me understand myself. Barry, did Dad suffer with depression when he was young? I asked. I do think your dad was depressed, but we didn’t talk about depression in those days, he explained. What if they had talked? I wondered.

It was only once I began talking to other people around me that I discovered so many others were having a hard time too. Even with no good reason, some of them described feeling sad, bruised, apathetic, unsure, and lost. It was then that I came to a true understanding about the spectrum that we so casually refer to as depression. Depression is a spectrum that can range from low-grade (mild) to severe. It can be everything and anything and nothing of what it seems. Seeing depression in this new light, I scanned back over my life to realize that this may actually not be a new—or simply circumstantial—feeling for me after all.

What I realized next, about how and why I and those around me were struggling, became undeniable, irrefutable. We had lost the tether to our own core, becoming disconnected from ourselves and our lives: who we really are.

Depression is the literal depression of self. It happens while you are busy not meeting your own needs and, even unconsciously, are grieving for them. Depression is often born from the deep conviction that I don’t matter. Maybe it’s because you have been living for others, for your old traumas, or for that epic career you have tried so hard for. Maybe you can’t live for you because you are buried under the stuff of your life.

For me, it became clear that my lifelong pattern of being overly sensitive to the needs and wants of others had seriously caught up to me. Your dad was like that too, Barry said. What if they’d talked? I wondered again. But even more importantly, What if we all talked? Because it’s not too late for us. The problem is that all the doing good we do for ourselves—the yoga, the meditation, the self-care, and maybe even the medication—might not be enough on its own. There is no amount of doing that will excuse us from the requirement of the deepest, toughest, and truest self-care we seek: being attentive to our own lives and needs.

Depression is a side effect of being buried under our lives and, because of that, cut off from ourselves. It is the wave that comes, either by ripple or crash, when we ignore our own needs for too long, often because it’s too painful, and in favor of the demands and expectations we’ve created for ourselves. Sometimes, even when nothing terrible is happening, life comes just too fast and furiously to catch up to. Maybe you don’t know who you are anymore, and maybe you never did. But depression is the call to let yourself rise.

If we want to close the gap of empty space within ourselves, something has to give. While it may be impossible to live a life 100 percent dedicated to what we desire, there is something more we can be doing. In addition to eliminating the noise (the trauma, the fears, and the old patterns) that blocks us from getting as close as possible to our desires, we must make an unwavering commitment to our own lives. It was this combination that helped me circle back to myself, with so many of my clients and students following right behind. The work of becoming our truest selves allows us to reach the kind of real-deal happiness that’s not only attainable, but sustainable.

The medicine is not in finding the cure, it’s in the attention to why you need the medicine in the first place. It is in learning how to stay in touch with ourselves; and how, when we lose touch, to renavigate, reposition, re-angle, and reconnect. That is what our lives—and this book—are about.

Despite all the work I had done to heal myself at the core, I was not immune to depression. I’m still not. None of us are. Depression happens because sometimes we need to be reminded that our lives require us to stay tuned in to the very purpose of them: joy.

If you have done all the doing and have corrected the things that were diagnosed as wrong and still aren’t feeling better, there is something else making you feel like shit. But you are just fine. I know, when you feel like you do, you can’t imagine anything inside of you actually being okay, but just try to trust me here. The problem is what you are buried under. The stuff on top of you—the trauma, the people, and things that have taken precedence in your life—has cut you off from yourself. This is the heaviness you feel. This is depressing