Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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      Whenever we come across an author, or a therapist or counsellor, or a preacher who says to us, ‘Believe as I do and all will be well’, it is very tempting to say, ‘Right, I’ll do that’. However, we cannot change our beliefs about the purpose of life and the nature of death in the way we can our beliefs about the best breakfast cereal. Our beliefs about the purpose of life and the nature of death relate to our own inner truth, and even though we may hide or deny our own inner truth, it never disappears, and it speaks to us clearly. You will know this if ever you have been in analysis and your psychoanalyst has given an interpretation which your inner truth knows is wrong. The respectful, fee-paying part of you can be saying, ‘Yes, I see what you mean’, while your inner truth is saying, ‘No’.

      This is where therapists can be dangerous. They can use their position, power and mystique to persuade us that what we know as truth is mere fantasy and that because we are anxious and depressed and having difficulty in coping with our lives we are intrinsically inadequate. If you have read any of the psychoanalytic texts on depression you will have discovered how little respect psychoanalysts have for a person’s own experience and how belittling to the client the psychoanalytic jargon is.

      So, whatever you have done to try to discover what depression is and how you might bring it to an end, all that has happened is that you have become more and more confused, and when we are confused we feel powerless and helpless.

      The aim of this book is to help you sort out your confusion and regain that which is rightly yours, the power to understand yourself and the society in which you live, so that you can make the best decisions about how you should live your life. With such power we can not only understand the causes and the purposes of depression but, more importantly, free ourselves from its prison and live life joyously, hopefully and freely.

      To do this, we begin by understanding our own real, lived experience.

      It is our own real, lived experience which leads us into the prison of depression. It is not a gene, or our hormones, or our dysfunctional and illogical thinking, our lack of faith, or our complexes and inadequacies which have brought depression upon us, it is what has happened to us and, most importantly, what we have made of what has happened to us; it is the conclusions we drew from our experience.

      That set of conclusions which leads us, finally, into the prison of depression was not drawn illogically, or fantastically, or crazily, but were the correct conclusions to draw, given the information we had at the time.

      If, when you were a child, all the adults whom you loved and trusted were telling you that you were bad and that if you didn’t mend your ways terrible things would happen to you, you wisely and correctly drew the conclusion that you were bad and had to work hard to be good. If, when you were a child, all the people you loved and trusted left you or disappointed or betrayed you, you wisely and correctly drew the conclusion that you must be wary of other people and that you should never love anyone completely ever again. You were not to know that if we grow up believing that we are intrinsically bad, and that other people are dangerous, we shall become increasingly isolated, the joy will disappear from our life, and that we shall fall into despair. Even if you did know that, you had to protect yourself. We all have to protect ourselves when we are in danger. The business of life is to live, and this is what we all try to do.

      The reason we get into a tangle, be it by becoming depressed, or finding it hard to get on with other people, or any of the multitude of unhappy situations we can get into, is because we fail to go back and check whether the conclusions we drew as children still apply in our lives. We all fail to do this, simply because there is not enough time to be forever checking our conclusions. When we were children we drew the conclusion that we should not put our hand in a fire because fire burns. When we grow up we don’t every day say to ourselves, ‘I’ll just check whether it’s still not safe to touch a fire’. We simply go on acting as if fire will still burn us.

      Similarly, many of us when we were children drew the wise and correct conclusion that we should not say what we think because the adults around us will punish us if we do. When we grow up we can fail to check this conclusion, and thus go on acting as if other people will punish us if we dare to say what we think. Never daring to say what you think leads inevitably to missing out on many things which would give you pleasure and confidence, and prevents you from discovering how joyous it is to share your thoughts and feelings with another person. As a child, your conclusion to keep your thoughts to yourself was a wise conclusion. As an adult, all you need to do is to check whether this conclusion still applies, or whether it can be modified – for instance, in conversations with your parents you might still need to be careful about what you say, but with close friends you can speak openly and freely.

      What I have put in this book are the conclusions I have drawn from my experience of talking to people about themselves, and I keep checking these conclusions because I go on talking to people about themselves. So much of what people have talked to me about over the years has had to do with the problem of depression.

      The problem of depression was first presented to me when I was a baby. I didn’t know it was depression. I just knew that sometimes my mother was loving and caring, sometimes she was silent and unreachable, and sometimes she was wildly, dangerously angry. It was not until I was in my thirties that I realized that my mother had been depressed for most of my childhood. By that time I was involved professionally with people who were depressed, for I was working in a psychiatric hospital in Sheffield, where there were many depressed patients and where the professor of psychiatry, Professor F. A. Jenner and his team were researching into the metabolic basis of depression.

      Professor Jenner thought that there might be some interesting, though not important, psychological aspects of those patients whose mood changes seemed to follow some pattern, and suggested that I take this as the basis for my doctoral research.

      So I began observing and talking to people who were sunk in depression or, less frequently, fiercely active in mania. I sat in case conferences, and in the staff dining room and lecture rooms, observing and listening to the psychiatrists, all of whom believed most firmly that depression and mania were physical illnesses. I read exhaustively every book and article I could find on depression and mania. Slowly I drew three conclusions from my experiences.

      These were

      1. From all the possible observations they could make about their patients, the psychiatrists selected a very narrow range of observations.

      2. The scientific literature on depression, whether written by psychiatrists or psychoanalysts, described depression only from the point of view of the onlooker. Nowhere was what it feels like to be depressed actually described.

      3. When depressed people talked about what it was like to be depressed, they described as central to the experience something which the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts completely ignored, namely, the strange but unmistakable sense of being isolated, of being trapped in some kind of prison whose walls were as strong as they were invisible.

      The psychiatrists, I found, spent very little time actually talking to their patients, so there was a great deal about them they did not know. When they did talk to their patients, or about their patients, they were busy turning what the patient said into what the psychiatrists called the symptoms of depressive illness. If the patient said, ‘I no longer enjoy love making’, the psychiatrist marked this down as loss of libido’, and did not enquire as to whether the marriage itself had become flat, stale and unprofitable. If a patient with a deep religious faith said, ‘I feel that God will never forgive me’, the psychiatrist marked this down as ‘irrational guilt’, and did not enquire as to how central to the life of this person a belief in God was. If a patient said, ‘I feel I’m trapped in a sea of mud and the more I try to get out the more I get sucked down’, the psychiatrist marked this down as ‘lowered mood’, СКАЧАТЬ