What’s Causing My Depression?

Depression can be a very tough thing to tolerate, and almost eveyone gets depressed from time to time during their lives. Life is complicated, and there’s no way we can go through it without getting bruised and shaken up during challenging times. To get reactively depressed when a significant and emotionally upsetting event occurs is not unusual, and the “down” period we experience is usually time-limited. All that being said, I’d like to go out on a limb and suggest that a short-term reactive depression could be considered a “normal” reaction to a trauma or a loss. This might be a controversial statement seeing how we tend to demonize depression.   Most of us have been taught to believe that “depression is bad”, but thinking of it this way is a much more positive and workable attitude, which can make it easier to deal with and resolve the depression. During the “down time”, our psyche takes the opportunity to evaluate the situation, register the impacts of the event, and consider new ways of responding to the event. Also during this time we’ll find our energies pulling back from everyday life with the result that we become more inward, with less energy to devote to the outer world and all our usual day-to-day activities.

So, although trauma and loss are commonly the causes of a depression, sometimes folks get depressed without having either of these happen to them. There’s another, often overlooked reason for depression: withheld resentments. The founder of Esalen Institute in California, Fritz Perls, came up with this insight back in the 70’s. I cannot tell you how many times I have found in my work that withheld resentments – unexpressed anger – are at the root of a depression. Think about it; we get irritated about various things every day. We don’t express the irritation, we just hold it inside. It takes life energy to do that, and gradually there’s a lot of energy devoted to “containing” the irritations. The individual has less and less energy available to meet the challenges and activities of daily life…this is a picture of a developing depression. Whenever I encounter someone in my work who complains of feeling depressed, I ask “who or what do they resent? What are they irritated about?”

So, the next time you sense yourself in a down mood, ask yourself “am I resentful of something or irritated with someone, and feel unable to express it to them?” When you identify what might be causing your mood, it’s often easier to resolve the difficulty. You might be surprised!…