Dorothy Rowe - Breaking the Bonds

Each of us experiences depression in an image which is idiosyncratically our own, and yet which shares a meaning with all other people’s images of the experience of depression.

‘I’m at the bottom of a black pit.’

‘I’m trapped inside a black balloon.’

‘I’m in a glass cage. The glass is blurred and I can see people only vaguely and they can’t see me.’

‘I’m wrapped in a thick black cloth that I can’t undo. I’m trapped and helpless.’

‘I’m alone, immobile and weighed down by a huge black bird sitting on my shoulders. Even when I’m not depressed I can feel that bird hovering over me.’

‘I’m trudging across an empty desert and I can’t find water. The desert is endless.’

‘I’m lost in a swirling black mist.’

‘I’m in an empty boat on an empty ocean. No sail or oars, and night is coming on.’

‘I’m locked in a tomb and no matter how much I cry out nobody hears.’

‘A hole, grey, very grey, a closing greyness like a cave, a hole that goes down for ever and it holds on like crazy. The hole is inside me and I’m inside the hole.’

What would you say if I asked you, ‘If you could paint a picture of

(D 1) what you are feeling what kind of picture would you paint?’

Does your image have the same meaning that all the images mentioned here have, namely,

I am alone in a prison.

If you are simply unhappy, your image would not have the quality of you being alone and trapped in some kind of prison. For instance, an unhappy person might say, ‘I feel that I’m at my attic window looking out on a cold, wet day’. If asked, ‘Can you leave the attic?’, the unhappy person will say, “Yes, I can go downstairs and be with my family’, whereas the depressed person will say, ‘No. The door is locked on the outside and in any case the house is empty”.

It is this sense of isolation which is the essence of the experience of depression.

It is a powerful and compelling sense of isolation which is different from all other experiences of aloneness and isolation. In those other experiences you could, if you had chosen, have contacted other people. From your camp in the woods you could have gone back home. From your lonely college room you could have found a phone and called home. But from the prison of depression there is no path, no telephone that will connect you with others. All paths peter out, all telephone lines are down. You are surrounded by a wall which, though it is invisible, is impenetrable.

Outside the wall those who know you realize that the wall is there. They reach out to you and, though their hands may touch your flesh, what they feel is the wall which resists all their love and entreaties. Their cries of, ‘You’re shutting me out’, and ‘I can’t get through to you’, are not empty clichés but reports of real experience. To them the wall is as palpable as it is invisible.

Banging our head against a wall is frustrating, but what makes the wall around a depressed person doubly frustrating is that the person inside knows and the person outside senses that in some way the person inside wants to be there.

The prison of depression is so terrible that it seems inconceivable that anyone would choose to enter it.

Yet, as anyone who has been there knows, inside the prison of depression you are safe from all those forces on the outside which threaten to destroy you. All the horrors and the disappointments of the outside world lie far beyond the walls of your prison and have less power to frighten you or even claim your attention, and all the demands, importunings, expectations and criticisms from your loved ones do not penetrate the walls to inflict their usual hurt.

So, as the prisoner and the jailer, you stay safe in your prison.

However, life in such a prison is not pleasant.

Your only company is your jailer, and you are a cruel jailer, taunting yourself with even worse criticisms than those you have shut outside. ‘You’re bad,’ your jailer says. ‘It’s your fault everything has gone wrong.’

With only the cruel jailer for company you start to feel the worst torture human beings can ever experience – complete isolation. As torturers the world over know, courageous people can withstand the greatest physical pain, but the one torture which will eventually destroy the strongest person is complete isolation. We all need other people just as we need air food and water. Without other people our body aches, then ceases to function properly and becomes vulnerable to illness, while our mind, without the encounter of other minds, loses its capacity to distinguish its own contents from the contents of the world around it. Visions in the mind’s eye seem like objects in the real world, while objects in the real world take on sinister, persecutory meanings.

Thus the isolation of depression begins as a place of safety and goes on to become a place of torture.

What leads you to seek such a place of safety and to remain in it, even through such torture?

It is fear, the greatest fear we can ever know.

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