Depression is a classic “freeze” response in our nervous system. Freeze is a state of “wait, don’t move just yet”, and is thus defined by a combination of lethargy and tension. Our body perceives that there are no safe paths forward, no place to flee, no way to fight, and so it keeps us still.
I see the freeze response in my cat whenever I’m vacuuming the apartment. She hates the vacuum, but has no choice but to “wait it out”. Her body stiffens, her head lowers, her ears go back, and she stays in place until I’m done. She is tense but unmoving. She’s unhappy. She’s stuck. For that brief five minute period, she’s manifesting something very similar to depression.
Fortunately for her, the experience passes quickly. My own depressive periods were more prolonged, and more existential. I was miserable, and I was angry at myself for being miserable. I was in despair about my own inability to move out of misery. There seemed to be no way to move forward, no safe path out of the depression. Thus, I was stuck. Thus, I was tense but unmoving.
Depression is a deep sense of “there is no way out”. Sometimes, this is true: sometimes we are stuck in situations beyond our control, and there truly is no way out, nothing to do but wait and suffer. But my own depression wasn’t like that. There was a way forward. I just didn’t like it, because it involved the one thing I didn’t want to do: face the truth of who I was and what I believed.
the avoidance of suffering
Carl Jung wrote that “neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” In my coaching work, I find we are frequently searching for the “black hole”, the one belief (or set of beliefs) that their entire being is contorted around. The ego wants to protect us from suffering: it wants to feel in control. As a result, it will try to deny and repress any truth that makes us feel out of control… but that denial and repression has a cost.
When we are denying a truth, then we must hold a necessary tension to keep it at bay. We must avoid anything that reminds us of that truth. We must shove it down whenever it threatens to arise. But since the whole point is to keep that truth out of our conscious awareness, we’re not usually aware of the repression itself, and so our own behaviour becomes inexplicable to us. We find ourselves repeating the same patterns over and over, and we can’t fathom why.
We can continue such an approach for a lifetime. Some people live their whole lives in denial of some truth about the world or themselves. I’d even say that most people live that way. But there’s another force at work.
Jung also believed that the psyche has an innate orientation towards integration and wholeness. In contrast to the ego, it wants to recognize the truth. It wants to integrate and accept the shadow. Thus we see where the inner tension emerges: the ego seeks to protect us, the psyche seeks to heal us. Between the two, we end up stuck.
Depression, in some cases, a consequence of that inner tension. It’s a sort of stalemate between our ego and the world. The universe throws our ego against the wall and says, “Look, there’s no way out. You either face this, or you’re stuck here. Got it?” Reality traps the ego. These are the moments when it seems life has us by the throat. This was my experience of depression. There was only one way forward…
embracing suffering
The belief that I was so desperately clinging to was that I could just decide who I wanted to be. From my childhood to my 20s, the foundation of my identity was a faith in my ability to “figure out” who I needed to be, in order to access what I wanted (namely love, safety, and belonging). Life was a problem to solve, and gods be damned, I was going to solve it.
How very egoic! The premise of this identity was that I was in control, I was empowered, I could just make things happen… I could avoid suffering. In retrospect, it was easy to see how neurosis was just a step away.
It’s important to acknowledge that this belief didn’t come from nowhere. The ego isn’t “bad”; it’s just doing its best to keep you safe. This belief system, at one point, gave me hope at a time when there wasn’t much hope to be had. It gave me something to strive for. It gave me direction.
That orientation was invaluable when I was younger, but eventually, it broke down. Depression became a self-reinforcing system: I felt miserable because I wasn’t who I wanted to be, but being miserable was also not who I wanted to be, so I became even more miserable… and so on.
The truth that my ego was so desperate to avoid was that suffering was inescapable and necessary. And not just grand, glorious, heroic suffering, but mundane suffering, the suffering of the everyday, the suffering of just being human.
There’s more I could say here about why that was so unpalatable to me (see: a deeply rooted need to be special) but the core point here is that there was an ugly truth that I felt I needed to avoid, and to embrace it meant suffering, but I could not move beyond my depression until I did so.
emerging on the other side
Life is not a series of epiphanies. My depression did not end one morning with me finally proclaiming, “Ah yes, I must simply submit to suffering!” Integration is slow, painful, and frustrating. But it does happen… if we are willing to allow it.
That truth that I was avoiding, that life is not a problem to solve, that suffering is part of the human condition, that suffering is often the source of growth and beauty… well, my ego still doesn’t like it, but I feel a sense of peace about it. Misery is no longer a sign that I’m doing something wrong; rather, it’s an invitation for me to pause and ask what my psyche is pointing me towards.
This is not meant to be an explanation of all forms of depression. As always, seek help when you feel you need it, probably before you feel you need it. This is an account of my experience, and what I wish I had known at the time. I probably wouldn’t have accepted it, back then, but it might have sped up my progress.
My cat will likely never accept that the vacuum cleaner means her no harm, but maybe she will. I hope she does, because in that moment she’ll finally be able to relax, and see that she’s free to move wherever she likes. There is a way forward, and it doesn’t mean the absence of suffering, but a different relationship to that suffering. But it takes time.
With love,
Scott
I resonate with so much of this. Thank you.