Stan 31 has battled depression since he was 14. His parents were both highly successful in their careers and Stan often felt like he was in their way and had to keep his needs quiet so as not to bother them. He painfully remembers several occasions where both parents were guilty of promising to do something with him and then canceling and breaking their promises at the last minute due to work responsibilities which left him feeling angry and disappointed. He remembers trying to talk to them about how he felt only to have his feelings dismissed with comments like, “I’ll make it up to you,” which often turned out to be just another promise that was broken. It’s no wonder that he often felt he could not express his needs to friends and often accommodated to their wishes. Over time he became more and more alone, depressed, and hopeless.
Feeling down is a normal part of a everyone’s life. All of us experience disappointment, loss, failure, loneliness, rejection, shame, confusion, etc. A significant difference between people who “get depressed” and those who do not is that those who don’t are able to tolerate and integrate their depressive feelings. They are resilient, while those who become depressed are not as resilient. Instead of tolerating and integrating their uncomfortable feelings, they become overwhelmed and seek ways to avoid them..
Why are some people more emotionally resilient than others? One can cite a number of factors, but one of the most significant, to my mind is the quality of the emotional environment a person grows up in. To become an emotionally strong and resilient person, who can tolerate difficult feelings, a person needs to grow up with what I call a “relational home for their feelings.”
If a child has at least one emotionally attuned adult (who does not necessarily have to be one of the child’s parents) to listen to and help her process her difficult feelings, she will be able to tolerate and integrate the painful and even traumatic experiences of life. If a child does not have a relational home for her feelings, then these painful experiences become more and more difficult to tolerate and integrate, eventually becoming unbearable. In order to protect herself against the accumulated pain, the child will unconsciously construct defenses which unfortunately, in the long run will derail her emotional and creative development.
Dr. Carl Jung maintained that, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” When we cannot consistently tolerate and integrate painful feelings and experiences, we will unconsciously end up substituting unhealthy and self-destructive defenses which Jung refers to as “neurosis.” There will always be pain in life. The only question is, will it be the healthy pain of growth or the unhealthy pain of neurosis?
Stan’s parent’s consistently failed to provide attuned responses to Stan’s painful feelings around his anger and disappointment. Stan’s defensive (neurotic) response for coping with these depressive feelings was alcohol. It was a great way to numb the pain of the feelings he experienced every time he experienced some disappointment with friends, school, or work. Because he lacked a relational home for his feelings as a child, he never developed sufficient strength and resilience to tolerate the pain that got triggered when others made him feel unimportant or marginalized.
What is the solution for Stan’s depression? He may well need medication if his depression renders him non-functional. The fundamental cause of his depression is his inability to tolerate feelings of loneliness and disappointment. At this point in his life, Stan needs a relationship with a trained therapist who can provide the relational home he never had in order to help him acknowledge and tolerate his feelings, in other words, to help him feel his feelings. The more he can tolerate his feelings, the more he will be able to explore them, learn about himself, and how his relationship with his parents impacted him. The more he understands himself, the more he will be able to integrate his feelings. As he grows emotionally, he will become less depressed. What we can feel, we can heal.
Are you suffering from depression or some other unbearable feeling? There are many paths to healing. Here I have discussed a developmental or analytic approach. Not every type of depression will yield to this approach. Nonetheless, if you’ve tried other approaches without success, perhaps exploring the path of gaining greater emotional tolerance, resilience, and understanding may be the approach you’ve been looking for.