Depression or expression?

Depression feels at times like a huge force inside of us pushing us down from within,  It can make us feel so tired that we don’t feel we will ever stand up again, I had a very strong experience of this force within me on Christmas Eve.  I was all alone at home it was only when a friend called and I could talk that things began to shift.  I started to cry over so many things, all of the things being part of the dark ocean that was drowning me.  After the call I felt the heavy weight on me and then it began to shift and twist inside of me.  Later my mother called and asked me to join her and my sister for dinner.  It wasn’t easy as I have some resentments against how they treated me before when I was sad, but things are changing slowly so I chose to go. The miracle was that after the dinner I had enough energy to get my shopping, come home, tidy out the fridge and feel some hope when before I was totally drowning in darkness.

What this experience has taught me is that for so many years my true deep feelings have been buried down inside of me.  Yesterday when I met a new friend in the park we were talking about the grief over the loss of a pet, “it was my body that was weeping,” she said to me.  I thought of what astrologer Liz Greene writes of when Saturn (the force of repression) is on the Moon (representing our relationship with mother/emotions). That in this case the feelings which cannot be bought to mind actually get expressed by the body and are not as accessible to conscious awareness and articulation, most especially deep, deep disappointment which if you examine it is a cocktail of other mixed up emotions, including longing, need, desire, hope, love, upset, grief and pain.

This has got me to thinking about what happens in so called ‘borderline’ conditions.  The earliest primal memories exist at a bodily level.  In childhood we need the effective mirroring of a loving gaze to interpret, digest and reflect back to us what is going on inside of us accurately.

What happens when we don’t get this or when our emotional digestion and interpretation gets ‘spun’?  Our emotions are not accessible to our minds.  There is an expression that says ‘use your words’.  Well WTF if you don’t have them or know what they are?  We then suffer a profound confusion, mess or mix up of emotions that are undifferentiated like a huge ocean inside of us that may threaten to drown us.

Add to this that our cellular memory often carries imprints from our time in the womb.  I made a friend in AA a few years back, turns out her mother had been addicted to heroin while she was in the womb.  What chance did that girl have of not becoming an addict?  These are the imprints that slip below consciousness, that are difficult to access.

All I can say is that there is always a reason for the way we feel as we do.  I do feel the opposite of depression is expression.  In depressive states part of our emotions are blocked, resisted, tangled up or confused.  We may fear feeling then as they may cause a pain in our body, but even then if we can bring our attention to the sensation in our body and work patiently and gently with it, connecting through the breath we can often access or transform what is happening deep within.

The importance of emotional expression cannot be underestimated for those of us who were emotionally neglected.  It is one of the central issues dealt with by psychotherapist Jonice Webb in her book Running on Empty : Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect.     She explains how necessary it is for us to have at least one person around us with true empathy that we can express our true feelings with.  Of course this means we need to have some kind of connection with how we truly feel which may be problematic in and of itself if we suffered invalidation or shaming of core emotions such as anger, sadness or fear.

I personally know how much my own depression has improved over the past year through finally finding a therapist who can validate me completely.  I never got this with my Mum who has had to spend a lot of her life suppressing her own emotions.  I was thinking today how we can’t make certain demands or have certain expectations of our parents.  If we want to grow we need to look for healthy re-parenting from outside sources so we can learn to internalise what we never got growing up.

Once we have a deeper understanding our emotions, once we are empathised with we start to become more accepting and understanding of our own emotions.  This is our job and crucial work in recovery.  We can then learn how to express them to ourselves and safe others which will help us get free of a crippling depression.

That said, some of us have gone through massive losses and we may go through a current loss and feel a debilitation depression. What we may not be aware of is that that recent loss brought up all of the earliest ones.  We cannot get free of this pain by changing our thinking, only by grieving and unpacking and recognising the past deep associations and grief, sadness for what was loss, anger maybe that it was taken away or deprived us.  This takes time, work and insight and it helps if we can find someone safe who will assist us and not block or shame us trapping the emotions back inside us.

I do feel depression can be healed through finding ways to emotionally express and there may be other ways than just talking or writing it through.  We need to feel it to heal the pain and emotions in order to release them and dissolve the heavy burden of depression.

We also need to watch what our inner critic is telling us when we go through emotions. Is the critic shaming us in some way?  How does that mirror how someone treated us in the past?  How can we speak up for our true self and protect it from this repression in an effective and empowering way?