DEPRESSION: THE LUMP UNDER THE RUG

Depression is the big lump under the rug -- the proverbial dust and dirt of different feelings we never wanted to face and unfinished business which is now just too distant and out of memory -- that’s all been swept under the rug and our awareness for a very long time. We don’t know what’s under there and we have never bothered or wanted to look. We purposely swept it out of our consciousness to hide it, to get it out of sight. As they say, “Out of sight, out of mind.” Who likes dealing with discomforts and pains when they can just be hidden away like that? That is, until we start tripping and stumbling on what has become the giant lump under the rug.

We call this giant lump, “depression,” which gets bigger and bigger, seemingly all by itself, as we pretend it is not there—and keep tripping over it again and again. Still preferring not to deal with it, we purposely avoid the lump itself, even as it grows larger. The depression becomes so large and looming, threatening and frightening, that we may find ourselves paralyzed by it or even just thinking about it. We may glibly speak of the “solution” of simply lifting the rug up and sweeping the great collection of dirt away, but, in reality, there’s more to it.

Before we can even begin to talk about “depression,” we must have some kind of common understanding as to what we are talking about. We speak of depression as though it were actually a definable, singular thing. We say we are “depressed” and believe

everyone knows and understands what we mean, even though each of them has their own version of what depression is and their own beliefs regarding it. In reality, depression is a whole constellation of variables—feelings, experiences, thoughts, and memories that are reawakened in the present moment—that come together within us and affect us in many ways, often most disturbing and unsettling.

What do we mean when we say we are depressed? What is really happening? We lump the feelings of a mother whose child has died with those of someone who has lost their job, or with those of someone who got a poor grade and to whom life seems unfair. We equate grief with despair, and despair with sadness, and sadness with anger, and so on. There is so much confusion around the word, “depression,” that all sorts of feelings, thoughts, and physical symptoms, such as sadness, grief, exhaustion, loneliness, anger, confusion, despair, hopelessness, and anxiety are generalized under the singular label of “depression.”

Depression includes many different kinds of emotional and mental states, and relates to situations which may be acute or chronic, external or internal, individual or collective. It is this very vagueness, confusion, and lack of definition that keeps depression in place by not allowing us to see it or identify it enough that we might understand it, much less come to terms with it. We have an overall “bad feeling” and simply prefer “not to go there” because it’s too uncomfortable or painful. To do so may indicate to us what we see as our failing or weakness, or compel us to be more responsible for ourselves and our behavior than we want to be. So our first response to what we see as “depression” is one of avoidance. We might believe it will all just go away if we ignore it long enough. Or we may devise reasons to explain its presence and also reasons to explain it away. We don’t want to feel, much less identify, the emotions and memories aroused by our depression. We just hope it will go away.

Sometimes we simply blame someone or something else for our depression, then explain and justify our blame, and leave it at that rather than being willing to observe the depression as it persists within ourselves. Blaming is an explanation for our depression which we justify because we believe we can find some truth in it. If we lose our job, we may blame our employer, or we even may blame ourselves. In all these situations of avoidance and denial of our depression, we react without even realizing it, and then we automatically associate our reaction with its seeming cause, whether it may be depression or the loss of our job. We don’t just realize that we are depressed or that we have lost our job and leave it at that. Instead, we have our reaction and blame our reaction on the particular event without understanding that it is our reaction that we created. If we remain “stuck” in our reaction, we are consequently unable, if not unwilling, to accept and recognize the reality of our current circumstances and, as a result, are unable to deal with, much less work with, our depression.