Читать книгу Breaking the Bonds - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 10

‘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 have, namely,

I am alone in a prison.

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.