The Third Kind of Depression to beat: simple but not easy

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This article, unintentionally, has two parts. They are loosely connected. One part is about hitting bottom, the second part is about getting out of the judgment, getting out of the systemic value paradigm where you have no future.

Depression Is A Sign That You Are Unwilling To Hit Bottom.

When You Hit Bottom, There Is The Beginning Of Coming Up

I took a short break this afternoon. I lied down. This depression thing has been on my mind since I wrote that article: I felt something wasn’t complete about it.

Back in 1979 I spent some time in a psychiatric place, back in Hungary. It was almost like a sanatorium. A building on a beautiful mountain inside green grounds. An establishment, for rich folks and their brood.

My roommate there was the wife of a famous A-list actor… everyone there was a relative of a famous person, famous for something. I was a famous person’s daughter.

I made friends with a woman, my age, so around 32. She had a difficult time sleeping at all. She was depressed, they said.

Occasionally I saw her family visit her: a lovely boy, her husband, even her in-laws. She could have been famous on his own right, she was an amazing literary translator of Russian novels, talented as the sun.

So earlier today, as I was lying on my bed, I tried to feel her body to see what was underneath the depression.

It was guilt. Burning in her chest. It was preventing her from taking a deep breath.

Maybe she felt guilty that she didn’t love her husband? Maybe she had the child with another man and never told him about it? Maybe this maybe that.

Guilt is a funny feeling. It says that you are guilty, but it says it in a funky way. How funky? Why do I say funky?

I say funky, because the way to disappear guilt is by taking responsibility for what you did. You own your part in it. And you own your contribution to it.

You may end up with regret… but not with guilt. Regret allows your power to be on… Regret doesn’t try to kill you.

You end up with no guilty feeling and your power is fully on.

Same story, different participants: me.

My story was that I didn’t think I deserved to live. My mother didn’t love me, didn’t want me, and it wasn’t personal. Even though she personally didn’t want me.

Living on borrowed time, living without permission can wreak havoc on your life, unless… you guessed right, you take responsibility for it.

It took me till 1988 to do that: I had a one-way conversation with my parents (I was in New Jersey, and they were in Hungary) and I told them, no. I shouted at them: ‘I understand that you don’t want me. I am here… put up with it! It is not up to you!‘

I took responsibility for being here. for not having been wanted and not making easier to want me either.

My life changed, dramatically, for the better.

I am here because I am here. Not because they allowed me to be here. Not even because I want to be here. I am here because I am here.

If I am already here, I might as well make the best of it!

‘But I am good!’ another type of story.

A friend of mine grew up with an alcoholic mother. Growing up with an alcoholic is confusing to say the least. Especially if the alcoholic has a Dr. Jekill, Mr. Hyde personality, like this woman’s mother.

The mother was, at times, sweet, intelligent, at other times it felt to my friend that her mother was only there to beat her, frighten her.

The mother, quite the psychopath, said (or so it goes the story!?) that if you stand out they will chop your head off…

My friend ‘solved‘ the issue. She decided to hide. Hide herself, hide her light, become, somewhat, like a spider hiding behind her web, waiting for an unsuspecting insect to entangle themselves in her web… voilà, you have dinner. You didn’t even have to work for it.

Her poison of choice is seeing only the bad, the evil, the nasty, the greedy… in people. It makes her feel superior.

But her superiority comes at a high price: it’s lifeless. Her life has no accomplishment, no fulfillment, no purpose… so she is like a walking dead.

So, what could she take responsibility for?

That is the question that can turn things around…

What could she change? you ask. But it is the wrong question. You ask that  if you don’t want her to have a great life.

Most people’s instinct would be to tell her to change. To tell her to stop judging… Suggest to her to learn positive thinking. Advise her to be nice… These are all harmful. So if you are like my ‘But I am good!‘ friend, don’t try to change! Please.

Instead take responsibility for what is yours. What you CAN be responsible for.

• She could admit that she bought into her mother’s b.s… (and made up her own!).
• Also, she could admit that she fell into her own spiderweb trap.
• She could start getting an education instead of pretending that she has one.
• She could start taking risks
• And she could stop finding fault with everyone
• She could start seeing herself exactly the way she is. Warts and all…

Does it take courage? You bet your sweet ass it does. It takes tremendous courage to admit that how you are you amount to nothing. That you are an underachiever. That you never put enough energy into anything for it to amount to something.

But if you have the courage to do so: you can hit bottom and have a chance of coming up. Up and up and up.

Until you do that it will be flailing till your last breath. Until then you’ll be depressed

You’ll be ineffective, in twilight zone, and what you’ll have for beingness is deadness.

Flailing is an attempt to stop gravity. It requires all you’ve got… so no energy is left to actually DO something useful.

Flailing is what I call the state that you call stuck.

She is not the only flailer in my circle of influence. In fact most people I attract, to me or to my work, are flailers.

The behavior they share is that they will listen to the coaching and then continue life as if nothing happened. Uneffected. Unchanged.

Getting out of depression takes

• courage,
• takes commitment, and
• taking responsibility:

Are you big enough to do it?

OK, this third type of depressed person cannot be helped… unless and until they are ready. But if you have someone with this type of depression in your family, instead of trying to rescue them, you may be interested in getting busy with your own life…

It will beat depression, it will beat purposeless, it will beat any and all funky stuff that is holding you hostage now.

One last thing: Taking responsibility is like taking a bitter pill. In essence the blue pill in the Matrix was responsibility.

Once you take responsibility and mean it…

It is over before you know. Even if you need to deal with the aftertaste, it is done, it is done, it is done.

These bitter pills, any and all aspects you can take responsibility for, line up like the rungs of a ladder. The only way to get out of the prison of depression, a meaningless life, an empty life is through that ladder.

I got to where I am now through climbing that ladder.

Some of those pills… the aftertaste lasted for a whole week… so be prepared. But each rung of the ladder takes you to a place where there is more light, more fun, things look more funny, and somehow breathing is easier. When there are tears, and there will be, each tear drop acts like a cleansing.

In yesterday’s From Judgment to Assessment workshop I likened where you are, the place, to the Grand Canyon.

It has scarcely any width. It goes from one end to the other… linear. Like the space of depression, going from good to bad, from right to wrong… and it has only degrees… not as bad, not as good.

Unless you start to climb the ladder to the wide open space, none of the joy of living is available to you.

And believe it or not: life, living is beautiful. Even if it is hard… or maybe especially when it’s hard.

Your current reality is the systemic judgment reality… it is like a ditch.

In that ditch you can be right or wrong. Good or bad. Successful or a failure. Smart or stupid. Linear. Binary. No second dimension.

There is no winning in the Grand Canyon.

What is needed is the ladder… the ladder that takes you out of the ditch and onto the planes… where you can see 360 degrees.

But alas, for most people, for all the eight billion, the rungs of that latter is responsibility and courage.

The language of responsibility is simple. No story, just a simple sentence. I did that. or I was like that. or I had that attitude. I said that.

When you catch yourself giving me a story, you can be 100% certain that you are not taking responsibility.

And until you do I CAN’T HELP YOU! NO ONE CAN!

So why aren’t you taking responsibility?

You can’t even imagine that there is life there… outside.

I can relate.

Unless you can see it, you need FAITH to take a move.

Procrastinate? You need to work on using your imagination or your courage… Either will work… It is near superhuman to take a step when you can’t see that there is a floor that will meet your foot… That there is life there for you.

Going from couple to single. Moving from country to country. Going from occupation to another. Even going from one state to another.

I admit, my sight was not functioning, I could not see it. So for me it took all courage. And the responsibility part was simple: ‘If it is to be, it is up to me’.

Now jump.

It is like jumping into the abyss… Took me a lot of courage.

To my surprise the abyss always turned out to be more a threat than anything real.

Countries turned out to be places with people, buildings, cars… familiar.

So the fear was completely and totally unfounded.

Every time I was scared, the jump turned out to take me to a path upward. And when I thought I was going up, I always landed down…

It used to be my habit back in Hungary… Taking seemingly upward moves that ultimately landed me in deep depression.

So fear is a good indicator.

When there is no fear, you are going downwards. When the fear is fiercest that is when you are going upwards.

Life doesn’t work by YOUR made up rules…

Life doesn’t happen in the narrow confines of right and wrong… not even wrong and not wrong.

One of the disappointing things that is happening inside the Allowing Challenge I had so much hope for is that people, the participants in the challenge, are now looking at the world thinking that the challenge is to not FEEL wrong.

It isn’t.

The challenge is to take responsibility that you have been living life in the narrow ditch of the Grand Canyon, where things don’t have breadth. Where things are either wrong or not wrong…

So there is no color. There is no need for a vocabulary beyond right and wrong.

Barren and STUCK. The third kind of depression.

There is no future in the Grand Canyon.

There are no real choices in the Grand Canyon. So you are screwed, as long as you live there.

So what is really the job in the Allowing Challenge?

You see once you allow yourself to see something as wrong, and it is not wrong that you see it wrong, it allows you to be… it allows you to see.

See what?

See its different facets.

A wrong can be nasty, thoughtless, ugly, illegal, uncaring, selfish, blue, or any of the 400 thousand English words.

Until you allow the wrong to be wrong, you cannot look anywhere else, because of the tall walls of the Canyons. But after allowing you could see, you should see the other words.

The challenge has been running for some two weeks… and so far only one participant has actually allowed any of those wrongs to be wrong. And therefore no one else has been able to see anything other than wrong or no wrong.

So what is the difference between this one student and the rest?

The difference is that they looked. Unless you look you can’t see. When you see without looking, what you see came from the past, not from reality.

In our current morality saying anything bad about anything or anyone is not polite. So we don’t, and we don’t even say anything in our heads… And whoever invented this ‘polite’ morality was a genius. It has entrapped eight billion people in abject misery, powerlessness, and pretense, and lying.

Weird as it may sound, looking wider, looking to assess, instead of being stuck in the wrong-not wrong canyon takes courage, and takes responsibility. Takes, in a way, grabbing the bull by the horns.

• One of my students has invented that life should be always pleasant.  And you can guess: that made her stuck on the bottom of that canyon in every way.
• Another invented that life should always be that she is proven smart. And doing everything she can to be seen as doing everything she can.
• But most of my students are stuck with this ‘be nice’ morality… and unless they have the courage to look and assess what is in front of them, they will continue being stuck.

Life leads upwards through extreme fearful steps… once you really stepped, the fear goes away.

Anyway, if you want to hear how to go From Judgment to Assessment we had a workshop last year… where we devised a personal first upward rung on the ladder for you.

Start your climb out of the Grand Canyon