The aim of this book is to break the silence and to show that the fear and the isolation are not shameful aspects of inadequate people but are central to our experience and understanding of ourselves and our lives. Through understanding our fear and isolation we find courage and relationships.
Let’s begin with the isolation, for we have a word for that – depression.
2 Depression – the Painful Isolation
‘Depression’ and ‘depressed’ are very common words. We often use them, and usually when we mean something else.
We say, ‘Isn’t it a depressing day?’, when we mean, ‘I don’t like this weather’.
We say, ‘This job is so depressing’, when we mean, ‘I’m bored with this job’.
We say, ‘I’m really depressed about having to spend Christmas with my in-laws’, when we mean, ‘I’m angry’.
We say, ‘I’m depressed about my child’s exam results’, when we mean, ‘I’m disappointed’.
We say, ‘I feel really depressed’, when we mean, ‘I’m unhappy’.
Until we have actually been depressed we do not realize that there is a great difference between being depressed and being unhappy. When we are unhappy, no matter what terrible things have happened to us, we still feel in contact with the rest of the world. When other people offer comfort and love we can feel it warm and support us.
When we are depressed we feel cut off from the rest of the world. When other people offer us comfort and love that comfort and love does not get through the barrier and we are neither warmed nor supported.
When we are unhappy, even if there is no one there to comfort us, we comfort ourselves. We are kind to ourselves and look after ourselves. We are close to ourselves. We are a good friend to ourselves.
When we are depressed we do not comfort and look after ourselves. Instead we hurt ourselves and make life even more difficult. We become cut off from ourselves. We become our own worst enemy.
Tom described the difference between his experience of unhappiness and depression. He said. The time of my greatest unhappiness was in early 1976. I had a good chance of being selected for the Olympics in the long jump when I was knocked down and run over by a car. It smashed my right leg. I was in hospital for weeks, and most of the time I was miserable and angry with the guy who’d done it to me. But one of the best things that ever happened to me happened then. I knew Dad cared a lot about my going to the Olympics, but when he came to see me in hospital straight after the accident I could see he was upset about me and not about the Olympics. He put his arms around me and gave me a big hug and said he was so glad I was alive. He came to see me every day in hospital and we had some great talks. I felt really close to him.
‘That memory’s very precious to me because he died about five years after. At least he wasn’t here to see what a fool I made of myself when my firm let me go. There I was, thinking I had this great job for life, then one afternoon, no warning, the message, dear your desk and go. I should have realized that something like that might happen. The firm had been taken over by a large conglomerate, but then I didn’t think about it, and afterwards I blamed myself. If I’d been any good they’d have kept me on. At first I couldn’t believe it. I wandered around in a daze, thinking that at any minute I’d wake up or there’d be a message from my boss saying they’d made a mistake.
‘When it started to get through to me that I’d actually been let go I felt that I’d lost my identity and that was terrifying. For years I’d thought of myself as Tom McPherson, accountant with Intercel Inc., and now I wasn’t an accountant with Intercel Inc. I felt I wasn’t anybody. I got so scared I didn’t know what to do with myself. I holed up in a hotel room and phoned my wife and told her I had to go on an urgent business trip. I stayed in that hotel room for three days. I couldn’t speak to anyone and I didn’t want anyone to see me. Finally, when the hotel management were getting suspicious and making a nuisance of themselves, I went home. My wife was beside herself with anxiety. Someone from the firm had phoned her, so she knew.
‘I couldn’t talk to her and I didn’t want her to touch me. Her sympathy just made me feel worse, and when she got angry with me I’d get so angry inside that I thought I might hit her. So I’d stay in my room or go for long walks. Walking didn’t make me feel any better. Most of the time I felt I was in a dark tunnel under the earth, but when I was walking I felt that that tunnel was going down deeper and deeper. It didn’t level out until months later when an old friend came and literally dragged me off to a group for executives who’d been let go. I hated it at first. I was so scared I couldn’t speak, but once I realized that everyone there had been through what I’d been through, I could open up and talk. That group saved my life.’
When Tom spoke of walking in a tunnel which was going down deeper and deeper, and Pat of being in a jail where ‘they’ve thrown away the key’ they were describing vividly and accurately what they were actually experiencing. They did not say, ‘I feel as if I am …’, but ‘I feel I am in a tunnel, in a jail’. When we say that experiencing something is like experiencing something else, we put a distance between ourselves and the similar experience. For instance, if we say, ‘Listening to Beatles music is like being a teenager again’, we know there is a separation between ‘me now’ and ‘me as a teenager’. When we say that experiencing something is the same as experiencing something else, we make these two experiences into one and show that the experience is important and intense. To say, ‘When I listen to Beatles music I am a teenager again’, gives an account of a profound and absorbing experience.
Thus it is that when depressed people speak of what they are experiencing, they say, not It is like …’, but ‘It is …’, and what it is is something fearful.
These images can stay with us all our lives. One elderly woman, describing an act of betrayal by her father when she was twenty, said, ‘I felt that I had been skating on thin ice and then I fell through into utter blackness, and afterwards I always knew that I was skating and the blackness was always underneath.’
Each of us experiences depression in an image which is idiosyncratically our own, and yet which shares a meaning with all other people’s images of the experience of depression.
‘I’m at the bottom of a black pit.’
‘I’m trapped inside a black balloon.’
‘I’m in a glass cage. The glass is blurred and I can see people only vaguely and they can’t see me.’
‘I’m wrapped in a thick black cloth that I can’t undo. I’m trapped and helpless.’
‘I’m alone, immobile and weighed down by a huge black bird sitting on my shoulders. Even when I’m not depressed I can feel that bird hovering over me.’
‘I’m trudging across an empty desert and I can’t find water. The desert is endless.’
‘I’m lost in a swirling black mist.’
‘I’m in an empty boat on an empty ocean. No sail or oars, and night is coming on.’
‘I’m locked in a tomb and no matter how much I cry out nobody hears.’
‘A hole, grey, very grey, a closing greyness like a cave, a hole that goes down for ever and it holds on like crazy. The hole is inside me and I’m inside the hole.’
What would you say if I asked you, ‘If you could paint a picture of
(D 1) what you are feeling what kind of picture would you paint?’
Does your image have the same meaning that all the images mentioned here