What is depression and what to do about it?
Dr. Omar Javaid
Gabor Mate says that what is referred to as mental illness is often a normal response to an abnormal life condition. This perhaps applies to depression as well. However, we are told to see this normal response as abnormal instead, while nothing is done to address the real cause of our psychological condition.
In this context, as per my understanding, depression happens when we force ourselves to suppress a necessary emotional response. Suppression can consume a huge amount of energy from our bodies, thus keeping us tired and drained all the time, and creating a need to avoid any activity which can make us anxious or frustrated (which is almost everything for a person with a dysregulated nervous system).
After suppressing these emotions for a long time, we can even forget which emotions were these in the first place. Since it’s a perpetual struggle to numb the feelings, it takes us to the point of suicidal ideation, as suicide at the end of the day seems like the only option to escape from the emotions that we are so trying hard to push away despite being unable to recognize what they actually were. But why you are suppressing them so hard? perhaps you were given a message by others that you are not good enough for them if you express these emotions. Parents can also give this message unconsciously even if they do not intend if their nervous system is dysregulated.
Click here to see what Gabor Mate has to say about this.
Often people indulge themselves in dopamine-releasing habits, which can make them feel better momentarily but worsen the situation eventually. Fast food, containing sugar, carbs, saturated fats, etc. gives you dopamine hits but makes it worse by causing inflammation in our bodies. Inflammation is also now considered a cause of depression (click here to jump to the source). We thus get stuck into this vicious cycle, only adding to the problem.
There may be many things going on in our lives, and also on a macro scale which can make us sad. Sadness is an emotion. And just like any other emotion, it does not go away, if ignored or suppressed, rather the emotions keep struggling to come into conscious awareness. But since we need to go to work, perform chores, complete assignments, and make our family and friends feel good, so we often choose to suppress emotions that otherwise obstruct our routine activity. Gabor Mate suggests that emotional suppression is the biggest cause of stress in our bodies, more so if you are pretending to be happy when sad. If this suppression is continuous, it can turn into chronic stress which in turn can produce inflammation in our bodies, which can further add to the depressive feeling.
So, inflammation caused by either chronic stress, junk food, or both, can further add to the state of depression, further pushing you down that rabbit hole to hell.
A lack of sense of meaning in life can also lead to a state of frustration when we do not get a clear answer as to why we have to live through the agony of existence. The very experience of existing can itself is painful in absence of a clear answer to the question about the purpose of existing. As Albert Camus once said, the only real question in philosophy is whether one should commit suicide or not. If there is a purpose in life, then one should not try to end life but rather focus on the purpose.
So, you are going through a bad day, or perhaps a bad phase in life, or perhaps there is childhood trauma that keeps haunting you, a natural question that may emerge in your mind is “why!” … “why do I have to go through this agony, perpetually” … and when you do not get a clear answer, your instincts force you to suppress the pain, but that doesn’t help either, rather makes it worse for the reason explained above.
The situation is aggravated much when we are wounded but unable to heal our past or childhood wounds, as life circumstances do not allow the necessary space and company needed for healing. People can show you compassion for the physical wounds, but not psychological wounds as they are invisible. See the following clip by Teal Swan:
Psychological wounds happen when you are unable to complete an emotional response. So, the emotions which are generated in response to an external event are stuck in your system, unable to find a release. This is also referred to as trauma by Peter Levine, Gabor Mate, and others.
So, before we try to make sense of what Campus or Nietzsche is saying, it may be better to find space and allow ourselves to complete the emotional responses. Unfortunately, the habit of emotional suppression, if lifelong, can generate a huge backlog of emotions, which can take a long long time to release. And since they are painful, the very reason we instinctually suppress them, we find it very hard to consciously feel or release them. Releasing often also requires a somatic response, and not just a verbal one. Art and writing can be used as well, but that may work for sadness, and not anger. The key is to understand what type of emotions are stuck and thus accordingly an appropriate strategy is required to release them. This better be done in presence of a trained therapist, or if that is too hard to afford, there are some good books like Self-Therapy by Jay Earley.
Fear is another very haunting emotion, which we do not want to feel. More so if it becomes perpetual, or because of macro issues, which are beyond our control, like a bad job market, political uncertainty, etc. If you are a member of a community and an extended family, where everyone takes care of everyone else, then the macro-economic situation may not affect you much, however, if you live alone, only dependent on your employer and market for sustenance, then market uncertainty can be a haunting experiencing. But again, to perform at your job, you may resort to suppressing your fears. If you have dependents, then you do not have much of any option other than to keep pushing yourself to perform while ignoring your emotional state.
And you ask yourself, why! why my life is like that, then you see people having fun on TV and sharing fun stuff on social media, and again you ask, why I can’t be in this state of joy and pleasure? This question cause even more stress when the media and the market have conditioned you to believe that your life purpose is to have more money so that you can have fun all the time and enjoy a stress-free life. But it doesn’t happen despite a huge quantity of self-help material that also promises that … but if you try to end this ‘contrast’, rather you feel that your journey is becoming heavier, so much that it even feels difficult to carry yourself, let alone the burden of a family, your children in particular.
‘That’s not fair’, ‘I deserve better in life’, ‘I want to be like these people on social media or on TV’, and similar thoughts keep bothering you making it even worse.
All of this can be a cherry on top when you already have complexes of inferiority rooted in unresolved childhood experiences. The current realities of life can make it even worse, especially in absence of a strong sense of purpose behind your entire life experience.
Assuming you are wealthy, money is not a problem, and you can buy anything the market can offer, but can you buy genuine companionship, love, and health even, for yourself and your loved ones? The market therefore cannot offer you everything you need. What the market can offer can only keep you superficially satisfied. In 2015, I was in the Maldives, attending a conference, when My wife informed me that my daughter is not well. The organizers took all participants to a beautiful beach. I could not enjoy myself there and rather wanted to run away and reach back as soon as possible. Thankfully my flight was the very next day. Thankfully it was a minor health issue, but still, I could not enjoy a bit there, also because perhaps I was projecting some of my unresolved childhood experiences on the situation at hand.
The point is that money is not the most important thing in the world. A lot of stuff can go wrong despite we have a lot of money in their pockets. Unless someone is a psychopath, thus unable to feel at all. But that’s not most of us.
When painful things happen in life, and when we can’t do much about them, despite being sufficiently resourceful, one asks why! what is the purpose, why do I have to go through all of this? Past unresolved experiences, aka trauma, which if projected on the present experiences can make them even worse. The complexes of inferiority are there as well, that having some painful emotions makes you worse than others. The stress caused by emotional suppression during such experiences adds further to it because of the physiological process explained earlier. And lastly, junk food which adds to the inflammation in the body, further contributing to the feeling of depression as explained earlier.
So, what to do about it …
Here is a list of stuff that is required.
- A worldview and a sense of purpose in existence give you a strong sense of worth, which also gives meaning to painful life experiences (more on this later).
- An understanding that we live in a toxic world, built on unhealthy principles, which starves us of some basic needs (including psychological and spiritual needs), and then blames us for not being able to perform. This is important to understand that it is not exactly our fault; (click here to watch Gabor Mate’s take on this)
- An understanding that all of us are unique, and can’t be judged on the same standard. Institutional standards today as used in education or corporations for example, often appraise individuals with toxic traits like narcissism, and even psychopathic tendencies, and brand them as normal. If you feel misfit, it's not because you are flawed or something, but quite the contrary. You are not alone, there are more people like you, and you need to join the right tribe to feel belonged.
- Resolution of past trauma, digestion of unresolved emotional material from childhood even, so that it is not projected on the experience outside, further adding to the emotional load in the present moment; (For this please consult a therapist who understands the emotional nature of these wounds, and do not make you address them mentally. Books like Internal Family System by Richard Schwartz and The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel ven der Kolk are good resources).
- Effective stress regulation (click here), so that stress cycles, also anger cycles, and grief cycles (click here) are completed in real-time, and not suppressed to further add to the stored trauma.
- Developing a healthy connection with the emotional body so that emotions are felt and digested in real-time, is also essential for complete self-acceptance. One must learn that fear, anxiety, and grief, don’t make you a lesser person, rather makes you human. (Peter Levine is a good resource in this regard, and Bessel Kolk as well, search their content on YT or read their books).
- Mindfulness is a skill to be in the state of compassionate self-awareness (Search on YouTube for guided meditations by Richard Schwartz or Eckhart Tolle).
- Quit junk food, this includes soft drinks, fried chicken, burgers, cakes, and ice-creams, which contain refined sugar, refined wheat, refined salt, and saturated oil, all of these ingredients are also to be avoided, etc. If you can’t leave them at once, then leave slowly over a month or two.
Each point requires a detailed discussion. Books are available on many of them, a few I mentioned above as well. I will here focus on the first point, which is about having a sense of meaning, and for that, we need a worldview, a grand narrative, which can help us make sense of the experience we are having in our lives. Also, a little bit of the fourth point is about projections of past unresolved trauma.
This is particularly necessary as there may be issues in our lives that we cannot find an escape from, or there may be a recurrence of crises one after the other.
Why does it happen?
But what exactly is happening?
Our experience is a sum total of what the external stimuli make us feel, and the projection of the past. A stimulus may not be threatening at all, like a smell of a flower, but it might trigger a past traumatic memory if the same smell was part of the traumatic experience in the past. The smell will then turn into a haunting experience, not because it is threatening in itself, but reminds you of what happened in the past whose emotional impact is yet to be digested.
When an emotional response to an event is not felt with full conscious awareness, it goes into the subconscious (easier to remember), or even the unconscious (parts of the psyche that are difficult to access which come out not as memories but reactions). The digestion of emotions happens only when felt conscious, but the process stops, is frozen in time, when it is pushed into the subconscious. Time does not flow in the subconscious or unconscious mind. When we sleep, we are unconscious for the most part, nor do we experience the flow of time. So, if the emotional reaction to an incident is too much for us to handle, or we do not have the luxury of space and time to feel through the emotion, we push them into the subconscious. We do this today also because we do not know how to feel emotions, and we have developed a habit of instinctually suppressing them, also because of this modern obsession to feel good all the time.
So, we forget temporarily, but often we are reminded by an external stimulus. Anything which triggers a past trauma must be seen as an opportunity to complete an emotional response, but again our habit to suppress kicks in. We thus get stuck into this perpetual conflict, where external events remind us of what we are holding inside, but we also do not want to let it out. Perhaps we are scared of what will happen if we let it out, or maybe do not want to create a scene in front of others. Or feeling them triggers an existential dread, as they remind us of the rejection we faced from our parents for example in response to these emotional reactions.
In my previous two articles (click here and here) I have briefly explained the process of how to bring these emotions into conscious awareness and feel them through.
Here I just intend to highlight that when we are experiencing something, we need to know if our emotional reaction is entirely coming from the stimuli in the present moment, or if it is coming from the past as well. Once we can differentiate this — easier said than done — we feel a little relief as the present experience appears less disturbing after such realization. We can then try to take time out to feel past emotions to digest them completely, which can take a lot of time depending upon how much emotional material is stored in the sub/unconscious mind.
But if you are sensitive enough, the world around already has enough to keep you on an emotional roller coaster even if you are not projecting anything from the past.
Why life has to be like this, what’s the purpose of all of this?
This is where your worldview comes in handy.
Here is how I see it.
Every (emotional) fire that burns us, doesn’t burn us something when we let it, it leaves a part, the real us, undamaged, unscratched, as good as new, nothing happens to this part no matter how intense the fire may be. Life in this context is perhaps a test to retain a sense of awareness of this undamageable part, the soul*, that we actually are.
(*Richard Schwartz, a psychotherapist, who was a staunch atheist, observed this undamaged part while doing therapy for his patients who have been into unbelievable levels of traumatic experience in their lives. This made him look for an explanation for religious beliefs as modern science could not offer any explanation. The soul is also a key point of focus in Jungian psychology)
I refer to it as a test because the joyful part of life kind of makes us forget, the temptations indulge us so deeply that we forget who we actually are, and when we are too much immersed in the perishable stuff, even identifying ourselves with it, the difficult experience in life shake them off. To the point where we are only left with a genuine sense of who we are.
But this process goes in cycles, and each cycle allows us to grow a little in consciousness, if we let it, without resistance, to eventually become aware of our true selves. The very essence of who we are.
Each event that disturbs us also can shake our ego, which intends to take control of everything, but cannot, so it pretends to be in control, but terrifying life experiences remind us that we aren’t in control, and there is a Higher Powers. This power does not just keep us alive, but also heals us, sustain us, also open ways for us to walk toward the path of ultimate growth, which is growing into the state of realization of who we actually are. During such moments we realize how limited we are, and how dependent we are on the Higher Power, God, for our survival.
Each storm that we face in life is also a test in the sense that it forces us into action. But which kind of action? An action that harms others or ourselves, an immoral action? Or a morally correct action. Religion like Islam tells us that acting morally or resorting to justice during testing times is exactly what is required from a believer. And those who keep acting righteously during tough times will be rewarded on the day of judgment.
So, the goal in every situation, which tests your nerves, is to remain righteous, not just in your action, but in your internal orientation as well. If your heart is turning towards God, you are doing great, it's not the lowest point in your life from a religious perspective, even if you feel like that in a worldly sense, because your heart is aligned towards God, and not towards your ego.
Since time immemorial ancient mythologies, religions, and beliefs systems have known that the universe is designed by God to respond positively to the giver, the one who sacrifices for the benefit of others, the one who takes the leap of faith while trusting the Creator of the universe when taking the jump. It of course requires a lot of strength and faith to step into the dark. But it gets easier if there is a purpose of acting justly, for the benefit of others, with no self-interest. But the attempt must be genuine, not a way to manipulate the universe.
The worst mistake that people do while trying to understand the above is to use the above description, as a means to invalidate or even suppress their emotional responses to mishaps. The idea is not to escape the emotional response, but to embrace it, as real transformation in our state of consciousness happens when we can feel the emotional response emerging from the body. Our emotional state at the time of an external crisis is the actual test, suppressing it is like escaping the test. And when we suppress it, the emotions later come out more powerfully or cause damage to our physiological health. The ego which typically resists the emotional response is the one that needs to be neutralized instead. The mindfulness exercises suggested above can help with that.
I have shared what I have learned about the problem of depression, and I am in the learning phase. So, if you feel that something doesn’t add up, or some aspect is not covered, please feel free to leave a comment below.
The idea here is to embrace life, and move towards the scary stuff, instead of running away from it, but to embrace it, one needs to be convinced that why it is necessary.
Hope it helps.
