Paying Attention to Our Depression

Depression isn’t just an illness.  It’s a messenger.

In his book, Unstuck, James Gordon, M.D., writes:

“Depression is not a disease, the end point of a pathological process.  It is a sign that our lives are out of balance, that we’re stuck.  It’s a wake-up call and the start of a journey that can help us become whole and happy, a journey that can change and transform our lives.  Healing depression and overcoming unhappiness mean dealing more effectively with stress; recovering physical and psychological balance; reclaiming parts of ourselves that we’ve ignored or suppressed: and appreciating the wholeness that has somehow slipped away from us, or that we have never really known”.

If we would but listen, we might find that our depression is trying to tell us something; important insights about our lives and the ways we live it that might be keeping us mired in a soupy gloom.

We often don’t heed our inner wisdom, but keep going full-speed ahead in the wrong direction anyway. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D. observed, “Depression is a vicious circle and we keep doing these destructive patterns because “we don’t how to do anything else.”

When we think of depression only as an illness, we oversimplify its causes and remedies.  No doubt, it has profound effects on our brains and bodies.  Surely, it runs in families and likely has a genetic component. But if it were only that, a blue pill would solve the problem.  And it doesn’t.

The pain of depression may be an impetus for sufferers to live a more authentic life.  Often people who suffer from depression are living from a wounded place within themselves.  Along the way, they learned that they weren’t “good” enough or were “bad people”.  As a consequence, they learned to hide their true needs and wants and live an inauthentic life; a life that may not work, but they don’t know how to change.

In this vein, folks can come to think of depression as some sort of punishment:  a recompense of some unknown sins from an undefined past.  Or, maybe the very real wrongs they may have committed are magnified, as they are prone to be in the mind of a depressive, by the process of generalization: a known cognitive trick of depression where we take a negative incident (e.g. “I lost this case”) and turn it into “Why am I such a failure?”

Depression doesn’t just happen to anyone. Rather, it is the accumulation of a lifetime of varying degrees of psychic pain suffered during a lifetime, often starting in early childhood.  In our early years, many learned that it was dangerous to live from a space of our true selves because of a parent who was an alcoholic, abusive or in some way emotional abusive or absent.

Ellen McGrath, Ph.D., writes:

“Scientists know that traumatic experiences such as child abuse and neglect change the chemistry and even the structure of the brain.  They sensitize the stress response system so that those who are abused become overly responsive to environmental pressures.  They shape wiring patterns in the brain and reset the sensitivity level of the machinery.   Eventually, even small degrees of stress provoke an outpouring of stress hormones, and these hormones in turn act directly on multiple sites to produce the behavioral symptoms of depression. They push the brain’s fear center into overdrive, churning out negative emotions that steer the depression’s severity and add a twist of anxiety”.

Our parents, acting out of their own wounded souls, unconsciously played out their unresolved pain with us during our childhood.  They did so because of their distorted way of seeing the world; a place that they found threatening, its problems unsolvable and against them at every turn.  This hardened them and led them to fail in life’s most important vocation: the nurturance of their own children.

I recall my mom saying to me as a child, “Well, what are you going to do?”  While one could say this was the innocuous lament of a middle-aged mother of 5 kids, later in life I learned it was mom’s worldview that there weren’t really solutions to life’s fundamental problems, that we are, at our core, helpless in the face of life’s thorny challenges. 

My mom suffered from undiagnosed and untreated depression for most of her life.  I now see how this passive, victimized way of seeing the world took root in my psyche as a young man.  And how hard I had to work to overcome it over the years; how I had to struggle to listen less to the inner voice and critic of my parents and incline my ears toward my true self which was always there waiting to be heard.

In Listening to Depression, psychologist, Lara Honos-Webb writes that depression is trying to tell us something: that we are on the wrong track in life.  In this sense, depression can be a teacher if we would only listen to it.

How can we come to see depression as a teacher?  Honos-Webb writes:

“Depression can be seen as a break-down in the service of offering the person an opportunity for a break-through.  In this way, depression can be a corrective feedback to a life with little reflection.  We only reflect on those things that break down in life.  For example, if life is going along smoothly you won’t spend time thinking about the meaning of life.  We tend to think deeply about life when something is not working.  When we identify a problem, we begin to reflect on what caused the problem and how to fix the problem.  If you are disconnected from your deepest feelings and impulses you may still manage to get through life without realizing it.”

I admit that it’s hard to see depression’s value when in the thick of it, the swamp through which we slog with little relief.  But there’s much to be said for seeing depression not just as a disease, but as a messenger that our lives need to change for us to heal.

 

 

Our Struggle with Depression

 

Everyone has had a taste of what depression feels like. Everyone feels the blues at times. Sadness, disappointment, fatigue are normal parts of life. There is a connection between the blues and clinical depression, but the difference is like the difference between the sniffles and pneumonia – Richard O’Connor, Ph.D.

Years ago:  I am walking down a Manhattan street on a grey day.  I am feeling so sad; beyond somber and without any external point of reference. I looked up at the grey buildings. I suddenly have the sense that I am a building; a tower with a cracked foundation slowly falling to the pavement below.

I step into a church I don’t know.  I try to pull myself together. “Please God. I need your help.” I have to be in Court shortly. I look at my watch. My suit feels tight against my skin. I struggle to make the sadness more manageable, more contained.  I leave because I must, not because I feel any better; but because I am an adult and have to move through my day, no matter the volume of pain ringing in my ears.

The sadness from that day would end.  I would feel better.    But a pattern was developing, even then.  A pattern of how I would respond to sadness in my life, both past and present.

The Struggle to Break Free   

Some folks have given up hope that depression will ever leave them alone. They’re just hoping for more good days than bad.  When it’s a relatively good day, when life is in flow and not stuck in the muck of melancholy, there is happiness, or perhaps, relief.  The depression gods’ hurtiling thunderbolts have missed them this day. But when they’re in the thick of it, they fight their sadness.  It’s as if they’re pressing on the gas trying to escape their pain while depression has its foot on the brake.

Sadness is not Depression – though they are cousins

First, let’s be clear: sadness is not depression, but it may manifest as persistent sadness that can be a symptom of clinical depression. When I developed depression ten years ago, my sadness was accompanied by lots of crying for no particular reason.

Paradoxically, Dr. O’Connor, in his book, Undoing Depression , wrote that depression is often the absence of despondency:

“We confuse depression, sadness, and grief.  However, the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality – the ability to experience the full range of emotions, including happiness, excitement, sadness, and grief.  It’s not sadness or grief, it’s an illness.”

Maybe this is why we don’t see – we don’t see how we react to our own sadness because we’re stuck in the vortex of depression where everything, like the perimeter of a tornado, is thrown together.

This relationship between sadness is troublesome for a depressive.  This is so not because there is anything wrong with sadness – it’s a normal part of the human experience and gives our lives depth and pitch.  It’s the bass tone you hear when B.B. King plays the Blues. In my experience, sadness has a bittersweet quality to it. As the great novelist Herman Hesse once penned, “It was if all of the happiness, all of magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flown away, becoming temporary and temporary once more.”

The Brain Knows How we React to Sadness

A recent study revealed that the brain’s response to sadness can predict a relapse into depression.  Faced with sadness, the relapsing patients showed more activity in a frontal region of the brain, known as the medial prefrontal gyrus.  These responses were linked to higher rumination: the tendency to think obsessively about negative events.  Patients who didn’t relapse showed more activity in the rear part of the brain, which is responsible for processing visual information and is linked to greater feelings of self-acceptance and non-judgment of experience. 

According to Norman Farb, Ph.D., who did the study:  “For a person with a history of depression, using the frontal brain’s ability to analyze and interpret sadness may actually be an unhealthy reaction that can perpetuate the chronic cycle of depression.  These at-risk individuals might be better served by trying to accept and notice their feelings rather than explain and analyze them.”

We keep trying to find the source of our sadness like squinting to find the bucket that has fallen in the deep well.  We circumambulate the hole, peering into the darkness, but don’t see the flashlight nearby that can help.  We can’t see that our attempt to break down and explain our sadness to ourselves isn’t helping – it’s hurting us.

A New Relationship to Our Sadness

In his book The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, Christopher Germer, Ph.D., writes:

“This is an opportunity to move from mental work to heart work.  Self-compassion has a distinctly nonintellectual and non-effortful feel to it. If we can find ourselves in the midst of suffering and acknowledge the depth of our struggle, the heart begins to soften automatically. We stop trying to feel better and instead discover sympathy for ourselves. We stop trying to feel better and instead discover sympathy for ourselves. We start caring for ourselves because we’re suffering.”

Don’t always try to figure out your depression. Give yourself a breather from solving it, this boulder of sorrow. Instead, see that you – yes, you – are worthy of compassion from yourself because you suffer. If you don’t know how to feel this compassion for yourself, isn’t it about time to try?