Contents
Preface 2
Chapter 1 The prison 2
Chapter 2 Inside the prison 2
Chapter 3 How to build your prison 3
1. No matter how good I appear, I am bad, valueless and unacceptable to other people 3
2. Others are such that I must fear hate and envy them 5
3. Life is terrible death is worse 6
4. Only bad things happened to me in the past only bad things will happen to me in the future 8
5. It is wrong to get angry 8
6. Never forgive anyone, least of all you 10
Chapter 4 The depression story 12
Background 12
Building the Prison 13
The key to the prison of depression 13
Building the prison 14
The key to the prison of depression 14
Chapter 5 Why not leave the prison 15
Chapter 6 Why I won’t leave the prison 15
1. I have high standards 15
2. I am a sensitive person 16
Confidante 17
3. I will not risk being rejected 17
Two types of existence 17
4. I prefer to expect the worst rather than risk disappointment 18
5. My problems are greater than anyone else’s 18
6. I would think there’s something wrong if I wasn’t suffering 18
7. Besides its safe within the prison 19
8. The deadliest sin 19
Preface
Depression as an unhappy withdrawal where there is the realisation that something has gone wrong with your life. Some discover what that is, some don’t and depressive symptoms continue.
Depression as the gap between what our life is, and what we thought it was, what we think it should be
Depression as a coping mechanism, where withdrawal is less painful than reaching out to others, reaching out to do things with people is painful or risky. Depression has a purpose. It allows us to re-evaluate a life that isn’t working, it’s a lie detector, and value evaluator. Depression says your current life is unbearable.
Chapter 1 The prison
Difference between unhappy and depressed is the former you can accept comfort from others and yourself.
Depression is a prison where you are the jailor and the prisoner.
In the prison of depression, you are disconnected from people and things, even though you can touch both.
Paint a picture of depression. There will be aloneness within confusion, there will be a weight\burden on you and a pointless hard desolate journey.
Chapter 2 Inside the prison
Selfish when depressed as you are fighting for your life.
The fear in depression of the death of your life, the realisation that you are damned and can’t lead a life of any worth or virtue. The fear of depression that the totality of your life is threatened.
As the fear that your life is threatened and unredeemable so you in turn weaken your belief in yourself so that the smallest of decisions becomes impossible.
Guilt is a key emotion in depression as you have failed what your life, and you have a catalogue of guilt based events to prove it.
You feel guilty about what you’ve done and you feel guilty about being depressed, and even guilty I dare say about being guilty.
Depression as emptiness, meaningless and total inner despair of finding meaning or purpose in your life as you and life don’t get on because you’re faulty.
Underpinning depression can be one awful event, where as a child you saw yourself as responsible for your parents splitting up, this proves your awfulness, which is the reason you are damned to a life of futility. One with no purpose or happiness.
You can also lose what it meant to be you, as father, partner or worker. This can be removed and you can then feel there is nothing of you, the meaning of your life, the identity that you had is gone and then you feel depressed, feel like life is futile and there is no longer purpose or happiness to be had. These griefs aren’t mourned they provoke hopelessness, the only change will be for the worse.
In the face of your hopeless loss you feel envy towards those that have hope. The world isn’t the way it ought to be and you feel its futility and very angry
You feel irritable and miserable but fear this will push people away so you put on a mask and pretend everything is ok. This then distances you from any support you could get as you aren’t engaged with people.
Chapter 3 How to build your prison
People can stick to their truths of the world and themselves as miserable certainty is better than uncertainty. We have developed our picture of the world and ourselves over the years and we get angry when other people don’t subscribe to our view.
There are 6 immutable truths to build the prison of depression
1. No matter how good I appear, I am bad, valueless and unacceptable to other people
2. Other people I must fear and envy and hate
3. Life is terrible but death is worse
4. Only bad things have happened to me and will continue to happen to me
5. It is wrong to get angry
6. I must never forgive anyone least of all me.
1. No matter how good I appear, I am bad, valueless and unacceptable to other people
Depression goes with a belief that you have that you are essentially bad, defective, disgusting or broken. This can happen developmentally or by accident that something happens to make you like this.
On the basis of this, you need to fear your influence on others, you expect others to dislike you. You then need to find an acceptable face to present to the world, you can’t show them the real thing. You cannot trust your own judgement as you are bad, so you need to act on the basis of what other people think. This then is hard work, which part of the thought of others do you take, they differ in option and also how can you be sure you have it right.
Rules: Sometimes there are rules which can help you understand why you are bad.
You must keep your house tidy at all time
You must be successful at your career and have many friends.
You must always be competitive and be better than those around you.
If you break these rules therefore you are bad.
Playing roles denies our desires and values and therefore our identity.
People manage their internal badness by
1. Hide the badness within and punish yourself
a. Experiencing it as something to be controlled so they control things they can instead, e.g. appearance
b. They try to avoid being noticed so no-one else finds out
c. Try to distract people so they doing notice by wearing or doing things to put people off the sent
d. Be good as much as possible to counteract the bad which will lead you to being rejected
e. Be good as much as possible to show that other people are selfish and self-indulgent
Where do you learn you are bad and need punishing?
Hmm either developmentally from your parents, or because your parents say you are only good\acceptable because of x and then x goes later in life. Alternatively you can end up suffering at the hands of your parents, now you could think this is because they are not looking after you properly, but you can’t look after yourself and depend on the. So often children blame themselves, mother punished me not because she is bad but because I am.
You preserve in later life that your parents were perfect, such that you forget your childhood.
You can model your punisher then and seek out to punish other people who are bad in your adulthood.
People with depressive symptoms find it hard to feel sorry for what they endured as a child. If they felt sorry for themselves as child, then they would have to see themselves as ok\good and their parents as bad. As they don’t they can keep themselves as bad, as people that need to be punished? There is a deep fear of criticising your parents, even as an adult.
Children who grow up with conditions of worth, will apply them to all authority figures. Should they lose their ability to achieve them then they become depressed as by definition they have then become bad. Likewise it is difficult to be good to all the people whose approval you require to be seen to be good. This can get tiring and you can’t achieve it, then you open up the, I am bad thoughts.
You can also learn I am only good when mother is happy.
You don’t question the 5th commandment honour thy mother and father, it is fear that you could have coped without them when little that led you to believing your own badness.
The advantage to believing in your own badness is:
If you see yourself as weak, i.e. bad as incapable:
You don’t need to take responsibility for yourself
You don’t need to make the effort of trying, nor risk failing
You can keep alive the dream you could have been great but rather you didn’t try as you were weak and bad
You don’t need to feel angry that people (your parents) have restricted you and you avoid the guilt felt about that
Depression is held in place when you believe its advantages outweigh its disadvantages.
The opinions we hold about ourselves forms the basis of the opinions we form about everything else.
2. Others are such that I must fear hate and envy them
Others can judge you to be inadequate, others can remind you of difficult relationships you have had in your life, your parents, your siblings. Their age, their sex, their authority..
We end up hating the people we fear as it is an easier emotion to manage, a stronger one. We see others as disliking us and we end up hating people who cause us pain.
Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.
If you are bad and others are good then you fear them as they are better than you, I they are bad then you fear them too as they are malicious.
You envy people who have what you want, so much that you end up hating them.
You fear hate and envy others but as you lack self-confidence due to your inherent badness, and deficit in the face of others, then you also have to depend on the others that you mistrust. You demand that your parents, partner be close at hand, to ensure they don’t leave you which is your fear. The lack of trust worsens the relationship and reinforces your dependency and prevents you from finding your own self confidence.
You get what you give out, although maybe not by the person you give it to. The man that is impossible to please is never pleased with himself.
To interpret the other correctly you have to understand them, but understanding is difficult but if we fear the other it is very difficult to understand the other.
We initially learn about people by who they are grandmother does x, father does y. Then we judge by role, fathers do x, teachers do y. The immature understanding of people is when we only understand them in our terms.
To be able to understand other people we have to see our views as not absolute and eternal.
We do not even know our ignorance of other people, therapy can then illuminate the fact that we know very little about our nearest and dearest.
Understanding other people is a skill we need to acquire, if we don’t then we will continue to get it wrong and make mistakes and others will get angry. If you are afraid of others and make a mistake, then this mistake will be magnified. Contrariwise, if you feel happy with others then you won’t be so worried.
Hatred is a defence when we fear someone but feel weak and vulnerable. It can make us feel stronger in ourselves as the other person is seen as wrong, this takes away the fear as we have a moral advantage... Hating can define you, give you identify, take up time, so you don’t need to do anything else. Hatred focuses the blame on someone\something else, and can help alleviate any responsibility you have.
If you complain without action, this saves you from finding out that the world doesn’t conform to your desires. The way you think the world should be, just isn’t the way the world is.
Hatred is simple, love is complicated. Love is loving a person as they are not as we want them to be. Love can only be freely given and can be rejected.
To open yourself to the other is risky and if you feel your inner core is rotten. Through fear you build a wall. The opposite of fear is courage and is love.
3. Life is terrible death is worse
Engaged with your own terribleness, you may assume bad things always happen to you, so the ache, the twinge may be a sign of serious illness.
Either we see death as the end of our identity or we see it as the doorway to another.
If the former then we see this as our only life then we need to make it satisfactory, if a doorway then we have to live this life in accordance with the rules of the next one.
Metaphysical beliefs fall into to two camps those that give courage and optimism and those that give fear and pessimism.
The secular popular beliefs are the just world theory and that love is all you need.
Just world means nothing happens by chance if a bad thing happens to you it means are bad, or have done a bad thing. The just world system is the backbone of many religions and denigrates humans to the pawn of gods justice.
When bad things happen to people, they think why me, they might try to bargain with their god. /
When bad things happen to people, they don’t give up their belief in god, they give up their belief in a benevolent god.
If you do believe in god you have to ask yourself why does evil exist?
If you don’t you have to ask yourself why does evil exist, you can talk about the blind cruelly of nature, the stupidity and carelessness of man, you can hope science can improve things, or you can resign yourself to this being part of life.
If you believe god punishes wickedness, then you can take bad things happening to you as proof that you are bad. If depression is your punishment, then you might hold onto it for fear of worse punishment.
If god is all powerful he can’t be all good as there is evil. If god is all good then he can’t be all powerful.
Fear of death
Fear of the pain of dying
Extraverts fear being alone
Introverts fear losing control
What we fear most is that which is what threatens our sense of being.
The afterlife can be the place where we can have some belief in the just world principle as we don’t see it the world we know. If you see yourself as bad then the ability to get to the level of good for the afterlife can seem overwhelming, and can make you highly anxious.
If you see yourself as bad and set yourself standards of perfection, then you can never achieve them. This can lead to resentment, cheated of your birth right, fate got in the way, wasted talents.
Some people’s ambition is to leave some legacy after they die, children, works that will be remembered. If people fail in this then they can consider they have failed at eternal life.
How you see your death can haunt you if it is one of suffering.
The fantasies you have about death determine whether you will commit suicide when you are depressed. Death both terrifies and charms you. If you are indifferent to the feelings of those you leave behind, see your death as the end of suffering, see your death as some kind of vindication of your life.
Depression is to be stuck inside the body of someone you loathe, it invites paranoia as you expect others to behave the same way to you, to hate you. You also don’t want to engage with others as they will loathe you to, or are loathsome as they can’t recognise the truth, or you are worried that you can infect them with your inner badness.
Some suicide is committed by people who no longer want to be a nuisance any more.
Suicide is an act of violence against the part of us that wants to go on living.
We maintain the survival of our body by protecting it from injury, we maintain our sense of being, by protecting ourselves from humiliation and from being treated as an object of no importance. You will protest any time someone says something that doesn’t accord to your own sense of yourself even if that is bad.
People will risk their lives to be the person they think they are. Likewise if you cannot be that person you believe then you can take your life, as your life is not worth living.
Depression as a protection against the threat of annihilation of your invented sense of self
So I see myself as x, I am not and the world offers no ability for me to be that. So stay away from people and the world, hide I am not suitable for either, do not inflict this fake self on the world, keep it hidden until the real self can be produced. Again depression can lead you to suicide better die as a hero than live as a dog. Suicide says my life was only valid a x, now either I can never be x, or I have lost x, so I should stop living. Suicide can be about avoiding meaninglessness. It is about saving the idea of the higher part of you, and punishing the part that couldn’t make it (and those who care for you as you are.)
Depression says that everything is someone’s fault, and my feelings, my life is my fault and it’s inadequate. A tragic figure has a distinction which contented mediocrity lacks.
Your vision of perfection leaves you as lacking and depressed but at least it gives you certainty.
4. Only bad things happened to me in the past only bad things will happen to me in the future
The present seems as an eternal treadmill getting nowhere, the past a huge dark menacing room, the future a dark tunnel ending in a blank wall.
Time for a depressed person means that the past has more significance, the present slows down and the future is just a bleak emptiness, there is nothing there but pain.
Elderly people can engage with the past as superior to the present and future such that they can be reconciled to dying.
The past of the depressive is one of regret, of loss, of mistakes made, of blame. It is one of bitterness, sadness and anger.
Depressed people have unpleasant life events but they don’t get over them as the way to do this is to talk to people, to get some perspective, to make sense of it but if you are cut off you don’t. Whilst you haven’t been able to come to terms with these events you also haven’t redefined yourself in light of these events.
How you define yourself is in terms of the past, although if you don’t come to terms with or define yourself by I am bad then this won’t be the case.
Only by running can you avoid falling into the bottomless pit that is your life. Hell is ceaseless activity.
What is the purpose of depression? It can help us avoid responsibility for our actions, our depression\badness caused this, and I don’t need to change it as I can’t. It can save us from making an effort. If we concentrate on the problems of the past, we can avoid the problems of the present.
Predicting an unpleasant future can take your mind off the present
The past and the future are held in my mind so can’t contradict me in the way that the present can. If you are not contradicted you can keep fixed rules, you do not have to behave spontaneously
5. It is wrong to get angry
As we are small the thought that are parents could be wrong or die is difficult to comprehend.
If you see your ideas about yourself as true and not a belief, if your situation changes to challenge this belief it is unutterably frightening.
If you build your perception of yourself on the basis of a strong mother figure who then withdraws then your world falls apart.
The world falling apart is an accurate representation of the moment you find there is a huge discrepancy between how you see the world and yourself and how it is.
The fear of being annihilated as a person is utterly terrifying. This annihilation can be, is entirely mental.
To defend against annihilation we can tell our self the bad thing to change our world happened by chance, but then it can happen again. If we tell ourselves a person did this, then we can fear that there is worse to come. So often we take the popular route that it was our fault. Blaming our self-give us a belief that we have some control over it. We can give our self-hope by saying if we had been really good we could have avoided this disaster. This compounds the sense of our badness.
To be depressed all you have to do is to blame yourself for disasters that befall you.
When young children become depressed they become naughty. If children are punished for their naughtiness, then this strengths their sense of their own badness.
If you become angry and are rejected for your anger, then you associate the two.
Sometimes you might blame the bad thing on yourself as it protects the image you have of the other person, perfect parent?
A child can come to think they are a bad person through any clash with their parent, they can confuse the disgust the parent has with faeces with the disgust they have with them. Likewise a parent can find their child’s anger intolerable. Rather than teach a child how to manage their anger, how to use it constructively they teach them to suppress it when anger is as natural as breathing. Sometimes children suppress their own anger as they live in an angry environment or an angry empty environment and they learn that anger is wrong.
Once you think anger is wrong then you can:
1. Deny you have it
a. However this can then come out physically, in migraines, trembling
If you always want to please people, then you can never take decisions or take a position of authority. However if you want to do things perfectly then you have a dilemma.
However if you don’t like offending people then you end up doing things you don’t want.
If you can’t say no to others for fear of offending them, then any good feeling that you can get out of doing something nice for someone is taken up with the resentment you feel in having done it.
Humour can defuse anger, it helps people manage the frustration of living and working with others.
If you grow up in a family without jokes, then if someone says something outrageous you can’t tell if it’s a joke or if they mean it, although of course, in every joke there is a grain of truth.
Some people are frightened of their anger as it burst through in rages and like a tornado can smash everything around it.
Some people only have angry fantasies but they become so powerful it is difficult to tell thought from action. Ought from action. Some people also think that their guilt should be the same for thought or action.
Some people see their anger as a defence against a cruel world and they don’t know how to cope with being hurt.
Sometimes the person who hurts most after an angry outburst is the person who has it, who will think about it for a long time afterwards.
If you see anger as a way to overcome obstacles, your drive to survive, then you can master it
You can feel angry, but then feel guilty of your anger, and you feel virtuous because of this. You spend all your time suppressing your anger there’s no time for anything else.
If you show anger to a depressed person they can think that they made you angry. Just because someone gets angry in your presence, doesn’t mean to say they are angry with you. If someone gets angry with you it does not mean to say they do not like you.
(Dissemble: to conceal ones true feelings)
6. Never forgive anyone, least of all you
We achieve our dreams and they do not live up to our expectations or we do not achieve our dreams. Our dreams can act as a buffer against a harsh reality.
When we were small others with power humiliated us, shamed us, and threatened our sense of being. At that point we vowed revenge, and vowed to never forget.
Sometimes this revenge is on the basis of I’ll show them, become so successful that they will eat their words and give us a hero’s return.
Fame is reserved for very few people. You can make yourself miserable by rejecting all successes bar one.
Sometimes the revenge is based on you’ll be sorry. This can lead to depression being self-punishment so others will grieve for you. Then you can say, see what you made me do, and they will feel guilty, and they will say sorry.
If you don’t talk about your resentments you don’t get to work through them to achieve forgiveness and reconciliation.
If you can let go of past events they won’t dominate your present. You can learn from them and apply them to the present.
Some see not forgiving as a virtue, as their sins are so great that they should still be punished. If your wickedness is so bad, you keep it secret and can never let anyone close to you for fear they will find it.
When we do not forgive ourselves we do not take account of where and when it happened, rather we make this about the unalienable badness of our character.
If we do not forgive ourselves we do not learn from what we did and we are torturer and tortured.
(Dudgeon: high resentment)
If offended the depressed can sulk loudly. When sulking others may tend to you, others may you think see the pain they have caused and feel guilty, maybe they might apologise to you.
Judgements we apply to other people, we expect them to apply to us.
If you never forgive yourself for something. You can remind yourself over and over and punish yourself. Doing this prevents any greater understanding of it, what brought you to do it, what in the context led you to this. Thus you don’t understand it.
When we glimpse some truth about our self and ignore it, we do ourselves great damage.
Freud believed lying to yourself causes neurosis.
If you see yourself as essentially bad, and others as essentially good, then you deny the truth about yourself and are forever split. You don’t forgive, you don’t forget and you don’t understand and learn from these things.
In psychotherapy the aim is partially to forgive yourself, so that you can cleanse yourself and be reborn.
You may not forgive yourself as you hate saying sorry and that you have made a mistake. To continually punish yourself is to avoid the sense of why what happened happened, that you made a mistake, and that you are sorry for that and that part of the world or what we thought is not as we thought it to be. So in some ways criticising yourself keeps the idea that you knew but you were bad. So you have knowledge, you didn’t make a mistake because you are bad.
Some people will hurt other people, so that they know how much they have hurt them.
If you feel yourself bad or weak then you have no right to stand up for yourself and you are in danger of being wiped out by those who hurt you.
Some people grow up in cultures of not forgiving, e.g. Ireland, Palestine, and to give this up would mean they lose their identity. Not forgiving can also be called intolerance.
(Pusillanimous=lack of courage)
Sometimes we cannot forgive, an injury that we have suffered and suffer still that can be the result of malice or stupidity. At this point we need to detach from it, so that we aren’t consumed by it and we can move on to focus on other matters. If you can’t forgive, then to save yourself from dwelling and reliving, detach.
To forgive as detachment is a strength. We can try to hang onto the past by not forgiving.
Wanting revenge as a way to avoid the feeling of helplessness that we didn’t prevent the bad thing that happened.
As you say why didn’t I do more, tell her I loved her etc. it keeps the past present, keeps it alive and in mind.
You can only overcome the past by forgiving by understanding or by detaching.
You can act on these 6 immutable truths without consciously thinking of them.
They can combine to form depression via one basic essential feeling, our being, our sense of our self.
We need to be part of life as much as we need air, solitary confinement is a punishment, the effects of living these 6 rules will place you in solitary
Love and forgiveness are necessary to get yourself out of depression. The possibility of love, the ability to forgive. Forgiveness allows you to move past the bad things you have done or have happened to you. The ability to love is the ability to take pleasure in others or the world.
Sometimes medication can give you a feeling of pleasure that can enable you to forgive and love. If you believe in the 6 truths, that you are essentially evil, that you must work hard to be good, that anger and forgiveness is wrong, that the past is irreconcilable and the future is hopeless, then depression will come and return.
Chapter 4 The depression story
Two major plots in stories, good conquers evil and the love story, the meet, a difficulty then tragedy or happily ever after. There is also a depression story.
Background
• We experience the world by forming a picture in our brain, then convincing ourselves that the picture is outside. The picture gets formed using our memories and our hopes. No two people have the same experience.
• What determines our behaviour is not what happens, but our interpretation of what happens
o We only put some of our meaning into words, our emotions are meanings, images in our minds are meanings, as our how we act.
• You are your structure of meaning (that changes constantly) and you are it
• Your structure of meaning is a guess about the world and yourself, you feel secure if you’re accurate and the world seems predictable. If you are badly wrong then then you can feel shaky as your being, your structure of meaning is threatened and your knowledge of the world, and therefore to keep yourself safe is threatened.
When you discover that there is a serious discrepancy between what you thought about the world and yourself then you feel as though you may be annihilated and you need to defend yourself.
One defence against this is depression.
When you were a baby you had self-confidence and didn’t worry about people loving you. Then the smiling face that you saw became angry and after a while you thought As I am I am not acceptable I have to work hard to be good. Good people believe as they are they are not good and they have to work hard to be good, to be better than they are. Only good people can use the defence of depression.
The belief that you are not good enough then provokes the other 5 beliefs: that others must be hated and feared, that life is terrible but death is worse, that only bad things have and will ever happen to you, that it is wrong to be angry and that you should never forgive. When things are going well and you are achieving being good then you are ok, and these fears merely lurk, when they don’t then these get activated.
Always trying to be good is tiring so you daydream about a pay off in the future. This leads you to believe in the Just world principle, where the good is rewarded and the bad is punished. It’s also possible you got the just world belief from society or religion or culture. Either which way you got it.
When you have the just world principle and something bad happens to you then there are three types of bad thin
1. It happens to you
2. It happens to someone you know
3. It happens but only you know about it.
The third is the hardest as there’s no one to confide in.
In the first two if you blame yourself then depression follows which in turn acts as a provoker to change your views.
The first two can be difficult if comfort is offered but then that is on the basis of what the other person understand is upsetting. It can be difficult with the second one, when people tell you it’s not that bad, that you should pull yourself together but what they miss is what it means to you.
You then asked why did this disaster happen, and believing in the just world theory where nothing happens by change either it was my fault or someone else’s. Being a good person you blame yourself. As bad things happen to bad people it must mean you are a bad person.
Building the Prison
Connectedness to other people is essential. Individuals who live completely by themselves lose the ability to distinguish between perceptions from thoughts and feelings.
The best way to destroy a person is to put them into solitary confinement that’s why depression is the harshest defence that there is.
We can feel connected to everything, our past, present and future. To animate, inanimate, to fictional, to virtual. We can feel connected to ourselves, the I that watches and the I that acts. We can feel part of it but only if we value ourselves.
If we hate ourselves everyone of these connections fails.
When we hate ourselves we have the hater and the hated, the latter feeling worthless and invaluable. So you cant connect be part of things, because of the hater, who makes you feel worthless and unworthy of connecting being part of. Who would want to, anyone who did would be as bad as you. As much as you aren’t worthy, you also protect the other from you.
You cut yourself off from all connection as you are too wicked to belong. The barriers you put up are the walls of depression.
The key to the prison of depression
What you need to do is to change how you see yourself and how you see the world. Instead of seeing yourself as bad and only redeemable through doing good, then you choose to do good if you want to but you don’t expect reward.
If you are no longer frightened of other people then you don’t hate and envy them.
To see yourself as valuable you have to cease to be so judgemental of yourself. You have to give up ridiculous targets and demands and set yourself reasonable ones.
Valuing and accepting yourself gives you an exhilarating sense of freedom.
You can then realise you have no control over what happens in the world but you do have control over how you interpret it.
The depression story does have a villain and that is pride
Building the prison
We create our own individual meaning structure and therefore live in our own world. However we need to be connected to others because
1. Physically we wouldn’t survive for long without others
2. Psychically we need others to make sense of things with. Without them we couldn’t distinguish between what we experience and what we think, i.e. Wittgenstein third man argument
3. Emotionally you lose touch with what is going on around you, so there is little new or exciting
We are connected to someone in so far as we trust and feel affection for someone. This person doesn’t have to be close, alive, or born. WE can feel connected to people we have never met or who are fictional people. We can feel connected to ourselves to the I that watches and the I that acts. We can feel connected to nature, or to the mass of people doing things.
This connection though only happens if we value and accept ourselves. When you blame yourself then you can hate yourself, the I splits into the I that acts and the I that criticises.
When you hate yourself you cut yourself off from other people as you are frightened of them. As they will be the same as the part of you that criticises you. You also have to protect them from the part of you that you criticise.
Because you are bad you cut yourself off from past, present and future to protect yourself. You are now isolated in a prison of your own making and you suffer from not being engaged with the world and with people.
The key to the prison of depression
The key is to change how you see yourself and your world. You need to change seeing yourself as bad and unacceptable and to having to work hard to be good in order to keep yourself safe, you see yourself as valuable and acceptable as you are. You can choose to do good just because you do, not for any reward.
If you are no longer frightened by other people you do not hate and envy them.
To see yourself as valuable and acceptable you have to cease being so judgemental of yourself. You have to abandon ridiculous targets you set yourself. You also need to see that somethings you influence, some other people and some are chance. Most are all three.
I have little control over what happens in the world, but I do have control in how I interpret.
The villain of the depression story, that keeps it going is pride.
Chapter 5 Why not leave the prison
Because I’d rather be good than happy. If you see yourself as bad, then depression is the right outcome, you deserve punishment.
From expecting my perfect mum to totally protect me if I’m good, to then the state or god to doing it when I’m an adult. As you do not trust yourself you do not feel responsible for yourself, instead you are good and then expect to be looked after.
If you are not being looked after then you need to try harder.
Chapter 6 Why I won’t leave the prison
1. I have high standards
People who don’t get depressed can set standards but if they don’t hit them don’t worry, learn what they can learn and try better next time
People who do get depressed demand perfection and when you don’t achieve it you berate yourself. You do not forgive the world for not being the way that you want it. You have sacrificed so much in your continual good ness, the world being perfect is your reward.
If you can’t make the world perfect, at least you can make yourself, and your family perfect.
Constant carping over faults, resentment at the failures of standards produces the bad moods and irritability of the over virtuous.
You can continue to be good in order to get your parents protection even if they are long since dead.
Sometimes the parents we need to please are fictional.
You come to believe that you can make your life secure save yourself from death if you have complete control over your life and are good and achieve high standards.
You can expect of others what you expect of yourself, You can judge others by how you judge yourself.
Any system approaching self-control is also approach self-frustration. You cannot throw a all whilst trying to hold it perfectly controlled.
The idea of control is a replacement of trust. Because you think of yourself as bad, then you can’t trust yourself to be, to exist at the moment. Then you can’t allow yourself to naturally change, to become, so you need to control that process. To be good. You therefore have to make yourself like a box and use symmetry, rather than allowing yourself to grow like a plant, asymmetrically. As a box you see yourself as an object rather than as a living being.
As you use these high standards then everything becomes joyless work rather than pleasurable activities. You constantly feel tired and exhausted through how much you try to do, and frustrated and angry you never achieve it.
Some people don’t complain as they don’t think they will be listened to or will be criticised.
Some people don’t complain as it weakens their superiority of people depending on them, as others might feel superior to them, as the not complainers.
You have to maintain high standards as you cannot bear to be mediocre.
If you can’t be the best, don’t be mediocre, be the worst.
Sometimes your isolation can be a pride, don’t associate with inferiors, don’t do things that would be perfect, just don’t do as you won’t achieve superlatives, so don’t do. Your depression is a part of your high standards and not breaking them.
If asked to join a group you can say no on the basis of not wanti9ng to waste your time and this saves you from the fear of having to think about joining a group.
You know what’s best and therefore find it difficult to admit you have made a mistake. You berate yourself for not being good enough but never question your assumptions for how you should live and therefore the rules that you berate yourself on.
It’s hard to lie to yourself, you have to split yourself into the liar and the one who knows the truth. Truth will out, through indirect means, slips of the tongue, jokes, alien behaviour. You also split your power.
To do this you have to give up your childhood ideas of perfection, this is scary and will lead to despair.
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If you seek the perfect you can continually reject the imperfect, but perfection is only achieved when you accept the imperfect and fuse it with the perfect. You are prepared to be bored, depressed, rather than see there is no road that is entirely right. You want to see good\bad, right\wrong as immutable laws of the universe, as that gives you certainty, rather than conventions that guide people’s lives.
Any change requires acceptance of uncertainty, not know the outcome, not knowing if the choice was right. Good defines bad and vice versa, as does perfection\imperfection.
If the gap between actual and ideal self is unbridgeable, and in that gap is despair and pride
2. I am a sensitive person
People who talk about being depressed often talk as themselves as sensitive. They feel the suffering of others, and avoid the news. If someone is rude to them, it cuts them to the core and it takes a long time to overcome it. They also may do many things for other people because they feel their suffering.
Seeing yourself as sensitive means you are caring and loving which means you are good. But being sensitive means you get hurt and upset and depressed. Therefore to be good means you must get depressed.
Some people link their sensitivity to their creativity and to their depression. Thus any attempt to change depression is resisted as this is a threat to creativity. You can also get the other side whereby depression inhibits creativity such that you claim you could be a great artist were it not for your depression. The pleasure that: “If it wasn’t for my x then I could have been great” gives.
Confidante
We all need one or two people who understand us and we can confide in. Indeed a confidant is correlated with your ability to have depression.
When depressed the longing to be understood outweighs the mere need for companionship. However to understand someone on one level is impossible, therefore is a life times work. So maybe the depressed person is saying I want to possess you, I want you to be completely absorbed in me and that you will be a continual let down. Also to truly understand, to empathise means you will not be hurt, as to understand the other, means you will feel like they feel.
3. I will not risk being rejected
To be rejected by one that you love, or want to love or be friends with can feel like an arrow piercing the heart, the world feels terrifying and has lost its security. After a while the piercing becomes a dull ache and it lasts so long you forget what it means to be fancy free.
Those who get depressed have experienced a lot of rejection. To know that you are sad you must have known happiness, if you have always been sad you act upon it but couldn’t name it as a state you feel.
People who know they are depressed, if they haven’t just learnt to mimic language know what it is to be happy, accepted and free.
When you felt love and had this taken away, you felt the pain of rejection but then swopped it to the pain of guilt, blaming yourself for this to give yourself some semblance of power, and to prefer your ideal parent. You can also avoid the pain of rejection.
If you expect rejection then you may be wary of giving love as the less you give the less the rejection hurts.
Deaths can be felt as rejection.
No one can live as an island, we live in an invisible network of relations. Any group membership is only understood in terms of groups that it’s not, man\woman, English\foreigner etc.
If you pay so much attention to what you should do, you can lose awareness of how you do feel, and therefore what you want. If you spend too much time on external reality you can miss internal reality and vice versa.
Two types of existence
Introversion where achievement is all and a threat of annihilation is to not be able to achieve
Extraversion where social status is key. Solitude, caused by rejection and abandonment is the threat of annihilation.
Warding off chaos is essential to the introvert’s life
Either you want to be part of a group and valued by that group to show your membership is safe or you want to have a small group of people by which you earn their praise for your achievement.
If you are depressed and think you are essentially bad then you expect rejection by groups and don’t think anyone would want you in their group.
When you value yourself you place reasonable demands on yourself, when you don’t value yourself you place unreasonable demands on yourself. You feel that you are bad, so you need to ensure that everything you do is good to counteract this. Your standards are an inversion of what you think of yourself.
If you are afraid of rejection all the time, then in aiming to get the approval of others you lose sense of yourself. If you are afraid of rejection all the time, then you can become afraid to act.
We give people power to hurt us by their criticism as we can ignore them if we want.
If you see yourself as helpless then you do not have to be responsible and if things do not turn out the way you want you can blame other people.
4. I prefer to expect the worst rather than risk disappointment
If you are an optimist your world is full of uncertainty as you could be disappointed. As a pessimist your life is certain as everything will turn out badly and if you’re wrong occasionally you may be surprised. Pessimism can also be protection against expected criticism from others if things do go well. You may also fear success as you believe something bad will follow it, and rather than to wait tormentedly you will make it happen by doing something unpleasant to yourself. Instead of waiting for a bad thing you do it to yourself to relieve the tension. You may not be happy but you feel more in control. It is always easier to destroy than create.
People can use small fears to focus on as it protects them from looking at their big fears.
5. My problems are greater than anyone else’s
When depressed, you can see other people as being happy and without problems. Your suffering is the only real suffering in town. When you are entranced by your own suffering you become oblivious to the suffering of others.
6. I would think there’s something wrong if I wasn’t suffering
To be ignored is far worse than being criticised. To be ignored means you are lonely and have no value. When criticised then at least someone notices you and thinks you’re worthy of their criticism.
Some people cope with not being noticed by believing that everyone notices them, i.e. paranoia.
If you are ignored as a child but get attention when you are sick, then you might find yourself with a life time of illness.
If you are noticed your life has some significance.
The depressed person’s ability to turn everything into their suffering, to enhance their martyrdom, to increase their punishment, to get attention, to give identity, to show the reason why they need not try and risk failure and rejection. By suffering we can wipe away our sins, cleanse our badness.
You’re suffering to atone for your guilt. You are faced with impossible situations where there is suffering and no escape, you can conclude the life is tragic. You are the tragic hero that will carry a burden of suffering. You are significant for this and noticed. You fear natural disasters as they are uncertain you prefer the stability of creating your own.
7. Besides its safe within the prison
When you return from depression you see all the things that need doing that you didn’t do when you were depressed, it’s safe in depression, you don’t need to sort anything out. There is a certainty to depression, you know where you are, change is uncertain, engaging with the world is uncertain.
8. The deadliest sin
We have our personal myths, personal narratives that helps us to make sense of the world, to guide ourselves. However it is just a myth and rarely represents reality. When reality contradicts it we have to adjust our myth, our map of the world. However this means we have to admit that we were wrong and this is something the depressed person finds it very hard to do. Better to be right and depressed than wrong and happy. Being wrong gives more uncertainty as if we are wrong about this, then what else?
Absolute certainty seems a wonderful thing, but if you have it you give up freedom and nothing will change. You must give up freedom, love and hope.
Love can only be given freely
Freedom requires choice and uncertainty
Hope means the future is uncertain.
Pride prevents you recognising when you are wrong and making changes on the basis of that.
