Dorothy Rowe - Breaking the Bonds

Some friends were not deceived. They contacted her son, and he came again to see her. He told her to consult a psychiatrist. Her friends and sisters said the same. She felt that she could not refuse, and so heard her life of striving, hard work, devotion and self-sacrifice dismissed as unimportant and her profound experiences reduced to a label and a pill.

Pat’s experience of fear and painful isolation is very common. For many people it comes towards the end of a life of hard work, self-sacrifice and disappointments bravely born. For many others it comes in the middle years, when the rewards for hard work, unselfishness and devotion do not materialize, or, if they do, prove to be a disappointment. For many women the experience comes in their twenties and thirties when, after childbirth, they do not discover in themselves the bountiful fountains of mother love which society assures them resides in all good, natural women. For many teenagers the experience comes when they face the insecurities, the hurdles and the dangers of adult life and they doubt that they have the strength and ability to deal with these. For many children the experience comes when the world which they took to be solid and secure is shattered by the death, defection or disloyalty of someone on whom they depend.

So terrible is this fear and the painful isolation that follows that few people have the courage to talk about them as they actually are. Instead we conspire to pretend that the fear and the isolation do not exist. Some of us maintain the pretence by remaining silent about our experiences, and others conspire to deny the fear and the isolation by ignoring, belittling and redefining them.

The aim of this book is to break the silence and to show that the fear and the isolation are not shameful aspects of inadequate people but are central to our experience and understanding of ourselves and our lives. Through understanding our fear and isolation we find courage and relationships.

Let’s begin with the isolation, for we have a word for that – depression.

‘Depression’ and ‘depressed’ are very common words. We often use them, and usually when we mean something else.

We say, ‘Isn’t it a depressing day?’, when we mean, ‘I don’t like this weather’.

We say, ‘This job is so depressing’, when we mean, ‘I’m bored with this job’.

We say, ‘I’m really depressed about having to spend Christmas with my in-laws’, when we mean, ‘I’m angry’.

We say, ‘I’m depressed about my child’s exam results’, when we mean, ‘I’m disappointed’.

We say, ‘I feel really depressed’, when we mean, ‘I’m unhappy’.

Until we have actually been depressed we do not realize that there is a great difference between being depressed and being unhappy. When we are unhappy, no matter what terrible things have happened to us, we still feel in contact with the rest of the world. When other people offer comfort and love we can feel it warm and support us.

When we are depressed we feel cut off from the rest of the world. When other people offer us comfort and love that comfort and love does not get through the barrier and we are neither warmed nor supported.

When we are unhappy, even if there is no one there to comfort us, we comfort ourselves. We are kind to ourselves and look after ourselves. We are close to ourselves. We are a good friend to ourselves.

When we are depressed we do not comfort and look after ourselves. Instead we hurt ourselves and make life even more difficult. We become cut off from ourselves. We become our own worst enemy.

Tom described the difference between his experience of unhappiness and depression. He said. The time of my greatest unhappiness was in early 1976. I had a good chance of being selected for the Olympics in the long jump when I was knocked down and run over by a car. It smashed my right leg. I was in hospital for weeks, and most of the time I was miserable and angry with the guy who’d done it to me. But one of the best things that ever happened to me happened then. I knew Dad cared a lot about my going to the Olympics, but when he came to see me in hospital straight after the accident I could see he was upset about me and not about the Olympics. He put his arms around me and gave me a big hug and said he was so glad I was alive. He came to see me every day in hospital and we had some great talks. I felt really close to him.

‘That memory’s very precious to me because he died about five years after. At least he wasn’t here to see what a fool I made of myself when my firm let me go. There I was, thinking I had this great job for life, then one afternoon, no warning, the message, dear your desk and go. I should have realized that something like that might happen. The firm had been taken over by a large conglomerate, but then I didn’t think about it, and afterwards I blamed myself. If I’d been any good they’d have kept me on. At first I couldn’t believe it. I wandered around in a daze, thinking that at any minute I’d wake up or there’d be a message from my boss saying they’d made a mistake.

‘When it started to get through to me that I’d actually been let go I felt that I’d lost my identity and that was terrifying. For years I’d thought of myself as Tom McPherson, accountant with Intercel Inc., and now I wasn’t an accountant with Intercel Inc. I felt I wasn’t anybody. I got so scared I didn’t know what to do with myself. I holed up in a hotel room and phoned my wife and told her I had to go on an urgent business trip. I stayed in that hotel room for three days. I couldn’t speak to anyone and I didn’t want anyone to see me. Finally, when the hotel management were getting suspicious and making a nuisance of themselves, I went home. My wife was beside herself with anxiety. Someone from the firm had phoned her, so she knew.

‘I couldn’t talk to her and I didn’t want her to touch me. Her sympathy just made me feel worse, and when she got angry with me I’d get so angry inside that I thought I might hit her. So I’d stay in my room or go for long walks. Walking didn’t make me feel any better. Most of the time I felt I was in a dark tunnel under the earth, but when I was walking I felt that that tunnel was going down deeper and deeper. It didn’t level out until months later when an old friend came and literally dragged me off to a group for executives who’d been let go. I hated it at first. I was so scared I couldn’t speak, but once I realized that everyone there had been through what I’d been through, I could open up and talk. That group saved my life.’

When Tom spoke of walking in a tunnel which was going down deeper and deeper, and Pat of being in a jail where ‘they’ve thrown away the key’ they were describing vividly and accurately what they were actually experiencing. They did not say, ‘I feel as if I am …’, but ‘I feel I am in a tunnel, in a jail’. When we say that experiencing something is like experiencing something else, we put a distance between ourselves and the similar experience. For instance, if we say, ‘Listening to Beatles music is like being a teenager again’, we know there is a separation between ‘me now’ and ‘me as a teenager’. When we say that experiencing something is the same as experiencing something else, we make these two experiences into one and show that the experience is important and intense. To say, ‘When I listen to Beatles music I am a teenager again’, gives an account of a profound and absorbing experience.

Thus it is that when depressed people speak of what they are experiencing, they say, not It is like …’, but ‘It is …’, and what it is is something fearful.

These images can stay with us all our lives. One elderly woman, describing an act of betrayal by her father when she was twenty, said, ‘I felt that I had been skating on thin ice and then I fell through into utter blackness, and afterwards I always knew that I was skating and the blackness was always underneath.’