There’s a Surprising Cause of Depression That Has Nothing to Do With Sadness
If you’ve never gone through a depressive episode, you may know someone who has or you may have seen it on TV — the hallmark symptoms of sadness, lethargy, numbness, hopelessness, bouts of crying, lack of interest in normal pleasurable activities. There are many reasons that lead to depression from chemical imbalances in the brain to vitamin deficiencies to grief. But one psychodynamic theory about the root cause of depression may surprise you, as it has nothing to do with sadness at all.
In his seminal work Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud makes a case for depression as a manifestation of the direction of anger. When we mourn the loss of a loved one, we are angry that they have left us, and the anger is directed at the lost love object even though they are no longer there to receive the anger. When we feel melancholia (depression), we are angry at someone who is still in our lives, but we cannot, or will not, direct the anger at them, and so the anger gets turned against the self.
If you’re wondering how this happens and what it might look like in the real world, picture this. Imagine that your parents promised they would go to your baseball game, but by the ninth inning they still hadn’t shown up — they got stuck in traffic, or got held up at work, or they forgot, and they feel awful about it… but they still weren’t there. Instead of telling them how angry and hurt you felt by their broken promise, you tell them not to worry, that it wasn’t important anyway and they didn’t miss anything. Maybe you even convince yourself that you’re not mad or upset. Oftentimes we feel like we can’t get angry with significant figures in our lives because it is off-limits or too threatening to us. We may have been exposed to messages growing up that if we get angry with our love objects, we risk losing them. This is a scary thought, especially if we still depend on them to survive, as we do when we are kids. Or, we unconsciously fear that our anger will be too much to bear and will destroy the people we care about.
If you couldn’t react or express anger in childhood, you may continue to suppress it later in life, even when it happens as a natural response to unjust circumstances. So instead we channel the anger inward and, in turn, it manifests as depression. But just because we don’t allow ourselves to feel an emotion doesn’t mean that it’s not there; it doesn’t mean that it will go away. The emotion always has to go somewhere, even if the somewhere is within ourselves fueling shame, harsh self criticism, and self-punishment – all of which often happen with depression.
The job of therapy is to help tap into unresolved anger and talk about it, process it, and give it somewhere else to go. That doesn’t mean calling up our parents and yelling at them for missing our baseball game. Sometimes even just acknowledging that you felt angry, and that anger is okay, is liberating work. Getting to the heart of the issue is where real change happens. Talk Suite therapists can offer more insight on the possible causes. Contact us today to get started.