Many depressed people have a lot to be angry about, a lot to be sad about and most often both.
They find it difficult to express these emotions; indeed try not to feel them at all. Expressing no feelings they are said to be depressed.
Many depressed people feel emotionally cut off from life around them, living in a sort of emotional greyness. It’s the price they pay for being cut off from the emotions inside them. Once you’re committed to walling off your emotions, you can’t take the chance of dropping your guard.
I don’t want to suggest for one moment that it’s not absolutely awful, it is. But at some unconscious level a choice is made between the awfulness of depression and the seeming impossibility of dealing with whatever it is that makes them feel angry or sad.
In fact you can do the sort of exercise that my boys used to bring home from school; such as,
HEN ..................... chick
GOAT ..................... kid
MARE ..................... foal
Try
HAPPY ..................... laugh
SAD ..................... cry
DEPRESSED ..................... ????
What is the appropriate activity that goes with depression for God’s sake? Other than staring at your knee-caps I’m not sure there is one.
Efforts to help depressed people by trying to interest them in life around them are most often doomed to failure.
If the name of the game is to avoid acknowledging the emotions on the inside, then encouraging someone to focus on external things; the beauty of a rose, the children, a hobby etc. actually supports the overall strategy¬.
Encouraging a depressed person to find another name for what they feel; a word with a behaviour, (as above), may be the first step in breaking¬ down the barriers separating them from their own emotions, and ultimately enabling them to deal with the problems that overwhelm them.
I know that when you read these pieces that many of them keep banging on about being in the moment. A chap I met some years ago now suffered from recurrent bouts of depression and had a pharmacy of medication and a range of therapies, all to no avail. We ended up talking of how as a lad, following some minor mistake his grandfather, the founder of the family business, casually told him that he would never make a builder – “he had the wrong hands.” He spent the next thirty years trying and failing to overcome this non-handicap. Switching his attention to the moment he was in and dealing just with that rather than the range of dramas in his head, he didn’t go back to being depressed.
