Understanding Depression
"Sadness is not depression," although every depressed person feels sad. Sadness is the feeling of being depleted and experiencing loss. Depression is a much deeper, much older feeling, but because it is actually a pattern of avoiding feelings, it is a complicated emotional state involving [a wide range of emotions.]
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Depressed people feel hurt because they've been hurt and because holding in feelings is hurtful.
Depressed people are angry because old hurt becomes anger.
Depressed people are anxious because they fear they will lose control of their repressed anger and hurt someone.
Because they have redirected their anger inward, depressed people feel guilty and worthless. While we all suffer blows to our self-esteem from time to time, depressed people have allowed their guilt to erode the very foundations of their goodness at all and have difficulty finding any meaning in life.
The Range of Depressive Feelings
Depression ranges from being sullen to moody, gloomy, defeated, woeful, melancholic, suffering, afflicted, miserable, tormented, tortured, hopeless, or despondent, to feeling despairing and condemned and suicidal.
What Causes Depression?
There doesn't seem to be just one cause of depression. There are numerous and varied causes that are manifested in each individual in their own unique ways. Some of the major factors involved include:- Brain Chemistry
- Family History of Depression
- Alcoholism
- Losing your Parents or being neglected by them
- Low Self-Confidence
- Relationship Problems with a loved one
- Lack of Friends or Family
- Recent Stressful or Traumatic Events
The Dynamcis of Depression
The dynamics of depression are straightforward:
- 1. A person is hurt but internalizes the hurt instead of expressing it.
- 2. The hurt turns into anger.
- 3. Anger unexpressed is directed inward as guilt.
- 4. The energy used in rerouting the anger inward and confining it in emotional debt uses up emotional reserves. This depletion of energy is called depression.
The more firmly established this pattern of concealing emotions becomes, the deeper and longer-lasting the depression.
Setting the Stage For Depression
Usually acute depressions are the product of emotional overload from one or a series of distinct losses. It's important to realize that it is a rare person who goes through life without accumulating feelings in emotional debt that can lead to depression.
When you consider that stress is the pressure of an unexpressed feeling, you realize how many feelings are being shunted into emotional debt every day of your life. You suffer unresolved concerns over your self-esteem, your relationships, your children, your work, and your parents."
"...While expressing your feelings openly in the present does relieve some stress, many feelings still manage to build up over the years. It is this accumulation of non- descript minor old hurts from many sources, the disappointment of your private life and the world around you that, combined with the loss of energy and self-esteem of aging, makes you sensitive to suffering depression. Theh accumulation of feelings in emotional debt is psychological aging and why you tend not to get rigid and irritable when you get older.
Acute Depression
You can become suddenly -- or acutely -- depressed after suffering a brief series of losses that overwhelm your capacity to feel openly. Your defenses were designed to cover your emotions until you're ready to process them, allowing them out a little at a time as you're ready to deal with them. Unfortunately, when the sheer volume of the losses exceeds your ability to manage your pain, most of your painful feelings are shunted into emotional debt.
Now you are confronted with an emotional overload that creates unfamiliar feelings of vulnerability. You try un- successfully to cover, but instead you become irritable and snap at people. You're preoccupied, negative, brooding, and find little joy in the world around you. People have difficulty making contact with you..."
As the events that contributed to your hurts are resolved, acute depression usually resolves. Mostly it is mild to moderate and is a simple matter of getting on with the business of identifying your losses and mourning them.
Chronic Depression
The most seriously depressed people not only accumulate the daily insults that everyone suffers but also have a long history of holding in important feelings of loss whenever they occur. Their low self-esteem has prevented them from coming forward with their hurt and anger when it was fresh, so they've been swallowing these feelings for years. They come to fear facing any of their feelings at all.
While some present loss or injury often precipitates a depression, solving the present difficulty does not solve the real problem for these people. When people have been depressed for years and have not sought help, the sources of their hurt and anger often lie so deeply buried that they often seem inaccessible. Such people are mistakenly labeled as having endogenous depression, meaning that the depression comes entirely from within, from no discernible source. In truth most of these so-called inner depressions are a collection of reactive depressions whose cause has been forgotten. The original depression and cause of low self-esteem have gone untreated for so long that they have been compounded by subsequent insults.
Unfortunately, this search for the sources of the original depression is often sadly neglected in therapy today, and symptoms are treated instead.
The Symptoms of Severe Depression
The anger repressed by depressed people causes night- mares, which eventually interrupt their sleep pattern. They get up early, lose sleep, and feel more fatigued. They also avoid sleep to escape the nightmares. Some depressed people sleep all the time but never feel rested or refreshed. Since their energy is already being consumed by redirecting anger inward, the loss of sleep futher taxes their strength.
As their energy is drained, less is available to invest in the outside world, so their attention becomes focused increasingly inward. The world then gives them little in response. They cannot be bothered playing with their children, so they feel like bad parents. They can't pay attention to the movie tey have been taken to, so they feel even more depressed by comparison to others. They cannot enjoy a good day; they feel that there is something wrong with them, and turn inward even more, wishing it would rain to fit their mood or that there would be an earthquake to swallow them up."
"...Suicidal thinking surfaces as a form of mental self-punishment. Such thoughts sometimes become pre- occupying as a way to escape the pain. At such times, when financial reverses hit hard, the loss of a spouse in the twilight years leaves them feeling abandoned, or the pain and hopelessness of chronic illness dis- heartens them, severely depressed people can become motivated to act on the thought, but often they lack the energy to carry it off.
Suicidal thinking is part of the guilt process, and often just expressing the feelings behind it relieves the pressure spawning it.
Souce: "Emotionally Free" -- Letting Go of the
Past to Live in the Moment
By David Visott, M.D.
Available for purchase on line at Amazon.com by clicking below:
Those with BPD and/or Non Borderlines can purchase A.J. Mahari's 3 "Core Wound of Abandonment" series ebooks packaged together with or without audio.
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