You feel so bad about yourself during a depressed period that when energy and inspiration come back, there is no more fear of making a fool out of yourself and you act with a different flavour of courage.
Depression has a bad name. And for anybody who is suffering from it there is a good reason for that.
But there’s another dimension to depression: underneath the painful experience of self-doubt and discouragement we might just find an ancient evolutionary process.
For efficiency’s sake, I will use some academically unacceptable shortcuts:
the Ego and the Self
The psychological identity we create for ourselves can be called an ego. It arrises from our need to identify as separate individuals. The way we build this ego is through our life experience. Based on a number of factors, we might be more or less inclined to over-inflate this ego.
Once over-inflated, it becomes part of a vicious circle that removes it even more from touch with reality which in turn gives it more reasons to artificially inflate.
At a more fundamental level of our being there is what C. G. Jung calls the Self which he defines as an all encompassing identity that unites the ego with the unconscious.
It is the integration of self and ego that can be identified at a psychological level with the evolutionary goal of life. It can be likened to the Middle Path in Buddhism.
But our outside world is not made for the self, it’s made for the ego. Society, its norms and standards, marketing, academia-they’re mainly directed towards the ego. So naturally, the ego sometimes takes over the ship with little regard for balance or moderation. So the only way the self can rebalance our psychological system is by sabotaging the ego’s foundations like self-esteem, memory, concentration, vital energy, etc. The only way our deeper self can depressurise our inflated ego is self-sabotage.
Letting go
Isn’t that what depression feels like? self-sabotage? The good news is that if we accept it as a guide instead of fighting it, depression will walk us through some of our most painful realisations, but it will eventually deliver us to a lighter, more open and more authentic psychological reality. It strips us of our masks, defence mechanisms, fake images about ourselves. Of course if we try to hold on to them, it will hurt. It will feel like you’re loosing something. But once you let go, it’s like being born again.
This is the desired outcome of any therapeutic process. LETTING GO…. of our image of ourselves so that we can fully engage with reality. It may take years of therapy and sometimes medication, but it can also happen in a second. Actually it does happen in a second, but some of us might feel they need to do years of practice before. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of practice, but I also know how over-preparation is the enemy of actually doing something.
Practicing letting go, of our patterns, our defence mechanisms, our personas is going to increase our ability to let go and be present to the moment. Preparing for said practice will increase our preparation skills. Not necessarily our ability to let go. Unless we practice letting go while we prepare for that practice… See where I’m going?
Letting go basically means seeing life from a different vantage point than that in which we are identified with a mental image of ourselves and compare that image to what we perceive to be the reality around us.
Flowing
We’ve all had those moments of just going with the flow. Where it seems like what you think is fully aligned with what you are doing, where there is almost no judgement and everything seems clear.
Different authors call it different names. In psychology it’s flow, in Christianity it’s kenosis, in Buddhism it’s sunyata new age spiritual teachers call it presence… And in my experience, it is not something you can replicate through a process- I’m still journaling and measuring my degree of let’s call it presence in correlation with other factores, but with little success in actually identifying a link.
Depression is the process that balances out our over-inflation of and over-identification with the ego. It allows us or better said forces us to systematically questions all our patterns and identifications and see which suit our purpose and which don’t.
It is an ancient process of integration involving both our individualised (masculine, rational) ego and our more collective (feminine, intuitive) self that allows us to experience life more fully, without constantly ruminating about the experience.
This is why I think that through integrating depression into our growth toolset, we gain a very powerful and very deep process for self-acceptance and self-improvement.
More about accepting and performance in this article.