If you are simply unhappy, your image would not have the quality of you being alone and trapped in some kind of prison. For instance, an unhappy person might say, ‘I feel that I’m at my attic window looking out on a cold, wet day’. If asked, ‘Can you leave the attic?’, the unhappy person will say, “Yes, I can go downstairs and be with my family’, whereas the depressed person will say, ‘No. The door is locked on the outside and in any case the house is empty”.
It is this sense of isolation which is the essence of the experience of depression.
It is a powerful and compelling sense of isolation which is different from all other experiences of aloneness and isolation. In those other experiences you could, if you had chosen, have contacted other people. From your camp in the woods you could have gone back home. From your lonely college room you could have found a phone and called home. But from the prison of depression there is no path, no telephone that will connect you with others. All paths peter out, all telephone lines are down. You are surrounded by a wall which, though it is invisible, is impenetrable.
Outside the wall those who know you realize that the wall is there. They reach out to you and, though their hands may touch your flesh, what they feel is the wall which resists all their love and entreaties. Their cries of, ‘You’re shutting me out’, and ‘I can’t get through to you’, are not empty clichés but reports of real experience. To them the wall is as palpable as it is invisible.
Banging our head against a wall is frustrating, but what makes the wall around a depressed person doubly frustrating is that the person inside knows and the person outside senses that in some way the person inside wants to be there.
The prison of depression is so terrible that it seems inconceivable that anyone would choose to enter it.
Yet, as anyone who has been there knows, inside the prison of depression you are safe from all those forces on the outside which threaten to destroy you. All the horrors and the disappointments of the outside world lie far beyond the walls of your prison and have less power to frighten you or even claim your attention, and all the demands, importunings, expectations and criticisms from your loved ones do not penetrate the walls to inflict their usual hurt.
So, as the prisoner and the jailer, you stay safe in your prison.
However, life in such a prison is not pleasant.
Your only company is your jailer, and you are a cruel jailer, taunting yourself with even worse criticisms than those you have shut outside. ‘You’re bad,’ your jailer says. ‘It’s your fault everything has gone wrong.’
With only the cruel jailer for company you start to feel the worst torture human beings can ever experience – complete isolation. As torturers the world over know, courageous people can withstand the greatest physical pain, but the one torture which will eventually destroy the strongest person is complete isolation. We all need other people just as we need air food and water. Without other people our body aches, then ceases to function properly and becomes vulnerable to illness, while our mind, without the encounter of other minds, loses its capacity to distinguish its own contents from the contents of the world around it. Visions in the mind’s eye seem like objects in the real world, while objects in the real world take on sinister, persecutory meanings.
Thus the isolation of depression begins as a place of safety and goes on to become a place of torture.
What leads you to seek such a place of safety and to remain in it, even through such torture?
It is fear, the greatest fear we can ever know.
Beautiful though our world is, it has many dangers about which it is appropriate to be anxious. The earth quakes, hurricanes blow, blizzards freeze. Necessary as other people may be to us, there are many dangerous people about whom it is appropriate to be anxious. Banks crash, wars start, cars collide, guns fire, fists smash, sex becomes hate instead of love. So we maintain an appropriately anxious guard and we teach our children to feel an appropriate amount of fear.
A certain amount of fear is necessary for our survival. We need to be alert to possible dangers and to respond to them with a spurt of fear which both focuses our attention and prepares our body, by increasing heart rate and adrenalin flow, to take the necessary action for fight or flight.
Some time ago a New York editor rejected my book Beyond Fear on the grounds that I did not instruct my readers how to give up feeling fear. I was amazed that he had never considered how essential for survival an alerting fear response is, especially in New York. What I was trying to do in Beyond Fear was to show how our fear response can go past the necessary alerting and mobilizing response and actually prevent us from dealing effectively with the danger. However, it is possible for us to become aware of such overlarge fear responses, to understand why we feel such fear, and, through such understanding, reduce the fear to appropriate levels.
In doing this we can come to realize that what we are afraid of is not something in the world around us but something inside us, and that what is inside us is nothing to be frightened of at all.
Until we do this, we all, to some degree, experience a fear which seems to have no object.
Sometimes we experience this fear without an object as anxiety, a persistent alerting to unspecified dangers and a kind of physical shakiness; or as worry, a persistent round of thoughts which project bad outcomes for all events, large or small; or, as Pat and Tom felt it, as an overwhelming dread and terror, our greatest fear. This fear can come upon us at any time, but it most often comes as we wake out of sleep where all the defences we have created to keep the fear at bay have dissolved.
Our most popular form of fear without an object is worry, where we create objects for our fear. The world is full of expert worriers. There is no situation, no matter how blissful and secure, about which expert worriers cannot worry. The sun shines, and they worry about drought; the rain falls and they worry about flood; spring comes and they worry about winter; dawn breaks and they worry about night. They hoard worries like a squirrel hoards nuts, and, like Charlie Brown, they see an absence of worries not as happiness but as evidence that something dangerous has been overlooked.14
Lisa laughed when I described her as an expert worrier. She had never thought of worrying requiring any expertise. It came to her as naturally as breathing. She described herself as ‘an anxious person’, with ‘anxious’ being an attribute like her blue eyes and blonde hair. She saw herself as inheriting her anxiety from her mother, in the way that she had inherited her blue eyes and blonde hair. She was at first astounded when I suggested to her that feeling anxious about many small things was a way of dealing with a much greater sense of fear, but she went on to reminisce about times when she was especially fearful – when her husband was away, when her mother was dangerously ill, and, remembering her childhood, when she would be punished for being naughty by being sent to bed and she would sit with her ear to the door, straining to hear the sounds which assured her that her parents were still in the house. Later, in another conversation, Lisa mentioned that whenever her parents had quarrelled her mother would always scream at her father, ‘You take me for granted. One day you’ll come home and I won’t be here’, unaware that the person she terrified with this threat was not her husband but her child.
Lisa and I looked for the common element in her husband being away, her mother being ill, her mother’s constant references to leaving home, and the little girl with her ear pressed to the door, and we found her greatest fear was her fear of being abandoned. (She feared death, but for her the terror of death was that all the people she needed might die before her, or that she might die first and so find herself alone.)
Lisa said, ‘I always have this fear that everyone