Emotions

In order to learn any new skills that will help overcome and prevent depression, it's essential to start with emotions. Depressives fear feelings. There are many self-defeating habits that depressives have developed to help them not feel certain things. Unless they understand first that these emotions are not to be feared, they won't be able to change.

Most people, depressed or not, have some fear of feelings. Many experts think that "anxiety"-the fear of being torn apart, consumed by our emotions-is the underlying problem in most human situations. And one of the central truths is that there is really nothing to fear. It is our fear itself, and the habits we develop to control or avoid it, that leads to most of our suffering. If we stop running, and turn around and face the demons, they usually turn out to be no threat at all.

People with depression have a special talent for stuffing feelings. They can pretend to themselves and the world that they don't feel normal emotions. They are very good at the defenses of repression, isolation, and intellectualization. They raise self-denial and self-sacrifice to the point where the self seems to disappear.

People with depression hardly let themselves feel any emotion at all. Instead of the normal fluctuations of happiness, sadness, disappointment, joy, desire, and anger that most people cycle through many times a day, depressed people don't have these feelings. However, even though they aren't aware of the emotions, they still get to feel guilty about them. When the meek, depressed wife of a bullying husband doesn't consciously feel angry at his ill treatment, she will still feel guilty about her rage without even experiencing it. If a person's drinking interferes with their ability to work, even though they are in denial about their drinking, they can still feel guilty. This is one of the great secrets of depression. The depressive is full of guilt about feelings, desires, and impulses that he doesn't even know that he has. The first step in overcoming the guilt is to become aware of the feelings.

Learning to Feel

How do you go about recapturing the ability to experience emotions? First of all, it's necessary to understand that emotions are innate, instinctual responses that are with us from infancy on. When the baby is feeling warm, comfortable, and secure, she experiences an emotion we can call contentment or happiness. When she experiences something that pleases her, like a new puppy, she experiences joy or delight. When something startles her, she feels fear. When she's deprived of something she wants, she feels anger. Left alone for too long, she feels the beginnings of sadness.

The capacity to experience these emotions is hard-wired into the human nervous system. If someone steps on your toe, you feel pain. If someone steps on your psychological toes-for example, by being rude-you feel anger. If you don't experience these emotions, it's because you are spending psychic energy to keep them out of awareness. This psychic energy could be better spent on other things.

Emotions in themselves are absolutely value-free. They are reflexes, like salivating when hungry or withdrawing your hand from a hot iron. But how we express emotions carries important social and individual values. We have the ability to control how we express emotions, but we get in trouble if we try to control how we experience them. If a man gets angry and beats his wife, that is both condemned socially and destructive psychologically. But if he tells her why he's angry and then tries to work things out, or if he blows off steam by exercise, or throws himself into his work those activities are both socially approved and psychologically productive. The point is that although we have control over how we express emotions, we've been taught that we shouldn't even feel some feelings-an almost impossible task.

It takes a great deal of practice for the depressed person to learn how not to experience emotions, but we get very good at it. Women get especially good at not feeling anger and men get good at not feeling sadness. All of us stop experiencing much joy or happiness. It seems as if when you lose the ability to feel painful feelings you also lose the ability to feel positive ones. We go through life numbed.

The Function of Defenses

Depressed people overuse certain psychological defense mechanisms-denial, isolation, and repression, among others-to help keep feelings out of conscious awareness. The concept of the defense mechanism is one of the lasting products of psychoanalysis. Defenses help protect our conscious minds from awareness that underneath, we are in conflict with ourselves. We are constantly trying to find a balance between our desires, our conscience, the constraints of external reality, and our needs for other people.

Defenses distort reality to restore the balance temporarily. When external reality is too much to be accepted-the death of a loved one-we can go into denial. When our desires are in conflict-for instance, sexual desire for someone our conscience tells us we are not supposed to desire-we may transform the desire into a wish for someone else, turn it into hate, intellectualize it, or any of a number of other possibilities. Defenses are like art, a creative production. The mind unconsciously creates something that was not there before.

Defense mechanisms themselves are necessary for human existence. They are often creative, adaptive strategies for dealing with difficult situations or people. But they can be used by the depressive as ways to try to avoid feeling. They can become habitual; protecting ourselves from some truly horrible feelings, we run the risk of losing the ability to feel altogether.

All defenses distort reality to some extent, but some do it more than others. So-called "immature" defenses, like denial and projection, can stand reality on its head. In denial, an alcoholic can't see how their alcoholism hurts others, although it's plain as day to any objective observer. This is why people get so angry at alcoholics. It's very difficult to believe they really don't see things as they are. But the alcoholic lives in a different reality dominated by the bottle.

People often attribute their feelings to others. Feeling grouchy and looking for a fight, a husband may interpret his wife's neutral comments as hostile and provocative. Other, so-called "mature" defenses may distort reality only a little. Humor, for example, works by shifting one's perspective: what had seemed all-important and frustrating seems ludicrous, perhaps trivial, with the help of humor.

Denial means simply being caught between reality and wish and not accepting reality. It catches us when we learn of a loved one's death-"Oh no, it can't be true." It catches the alcoholic who simply can't see the damage his drinking is doing to himself and to all those around him. The depressed wife of the alcoholic may use denial to protect herself from experiencing the anger and hurt that come from repeated disappointments. Why do wives stay in abusive relationships? There are many reasons, but when a wife says to herself, "He didn't mean it, he won't do it again," that's denial. For the time being, she really believes it.

Isolation drives a wedge between the experience and the feeling. We are aware of what's happening around us, but we don't experience the emotion that we would expect to accompany the event. Isolation is useful for surgeons, rescue workers, police officers, and teachers who have to remain calm in very stressful situations. But for the depressed person, isolation can be very destructive. Many depressed people report suicidal thoughts or impulses-like driving down the road and thinking about pulling into oncoming traffic-that seem to come from nowhere, disturbing ideas that have no feeling connected to them. These thoughts are indications that there are painful, agonizing feelings going on under the surface that are not experienced.

Repression has two meanings now, both important for depression. One meaning is the opposite of isolation: it's experiencing the feeling without the idea. The depressive gets suddenly sad without knowing why-but the objective observer sees the event that led to the feeling. This may be a criticism, a disappointment, or a snub that passes quickly in and out of the depressive's consciousness. The event itself is quickly forgotten, repressed, but the feeling lingers. This leads us to the other, more common, meaning of repression, that of "forgetting" events that are too painful to remember. This is not an uncommon phenomenon with trauma-sexual abuse, combat disasters. The events are not really forgotten, of course, they come back as nightmares or in other manifestations. The depressive who has been through traumatic experiences will use repression to help keep the feelings associated with the event out of consciousness.

What the depressed person typically experiences instead of emotions are mood changes. One minute they'll be feeling pretty good, then without warning they feel depressed-sad, discouraged, no energy. One of the favorite phrases of depressed people is "out of the blue"-"It just came over me, out of the blue, and I felt so awful again."

The basic principle that the depressed person has to learn is that these mood changes do not come out of the blue. Mood changes are always caused by an unfelt feeling. The feeling is usually a response to an interpersonal event, although sometimes it is just a response to a memory, something they read about or heard on television. Something happens that makes them angry, makes them feel hurt, sad, or scared-or even happy-but the event doesn't register on their consciousness. The feeling seems disconnected from reality. They don't understand what's going on with themselves so they feel inadequate, out of control, frustrated and depressed again.

Short of psychoanalysis therapy, the depressive can monitor his or her own moods to help detect the feelings underneath. There is always a trigger to a mood change. This is why keeping a Mood Journal (see sample on next page) to help analyze the connections between events and the change in mood is so important. 

On the next page we will talk about how to create a Mood Journal.