Joy and Pride

Anhedonia is the technical term for the depressive's inability to experience joy. In the depths of major depression, nothing touches a person, not the most intensely pleasurable activities, not the most familiar comforts. They are emotionally frozen. In this state, the person either has to get professional help or simply wait for weeks or months until the depression lifts by itself. Nothing is going to make them feel better.

Less dramatic than anhedonia but a much more common problem among the depressed is a condition that doesn't even have a clinical name. It's the gradual withdrawal into isolation and indifference that creeps up on people as they live with the disease. It's a gradual closing down of the world. As depression makes them lose interest or pleasure in ordinary activities, their range of activities constricts. They stop taking chances, they avoid stimulation, they play it safe, and they begin to cut themselves off from anything that might shake them up, including loved ones. It's the gradual poison that sinks into marriages and makes people vulnerable to affairs. It's the withdrawal from their own children that leaves them questioning why they bother to live.

Pride is what we're supposed to feel when we've accomplished something, but, like joy, it's not something that depressives experience very often. This is partly because of their inherent perfectionism. They rarely feel that anything they've done measures up to their own standards. Remember that depressives consistently evaluate their own performance more objectively than do nondepressives, whereas nondepressed people tend to forget their failures and give themselves more credit than is actually due for their successes.

One reason why depressives don't allow themselves to experience these pleasurable feelings is their wish to remain in control at all times. Intense feelings of any kind are destabilizing. They start to worry that they will keep on inflating with good feeling until they pop like a balloon or float off into the sky never to be seen again.

The depressive fears retribution; they've been conditioned to expect that something bad inevitably follows something good, so they'd better not let themselves feel too good. Better to feel numb or neutral than to feel the crashing disappointment they fear will follow good feelings. Most important, perhaps, is that for the depressive, feelings like joy or pride evoke painful memories of past disappointments. They remember the father who was never satisfied, or the mother who didn't seem interested. The bereaved child within them, who has never completed grieving for those incomplete relationships, is always tempted to stay numb.

Depressives assume that everyone else is happy most of the time, and that there is something wrong with them for not feeling the same way. An important thing for depressives to remember is that happiness must be cultivated. They need to practice feeling good. When they feel happy, they need to express those feelings to others. When they feel proud, they need to let themselves sustain the emotion.

On the next page we will talk about Learning To Express Emotions.