If you Google the expression 'anger turned inward', you'll get about 53,000 hits. Almost all of them will be about depression.
I've always lived under the assumption that my depression is biologically-driven. My father had it and so did my grandfather. But now I'm wondering if it isn't partly 'anger turned inward'.
As a kindasorta buddhist, I guess I shouldn't get angry. But I know I do. I'm angry about the state our country is in. Do I direct that inward? I certainly don't blame myself for it. But I don't express that anger outwardly very much, either.
If I got down to the core of that anger, I think I would find it's because I indentify with working class people who have gotten screwed by the realignment of our economy over the past forty years. And the reason I identify with them is because I resent the way I was treated as a worker, and I have some deep-seated anger about that.
Granted, my situation now is modestly comfortable, but that's just dumb luck. It's not because of anything I did. If I look at what I have to show for the work I did, it's not much. So is my depression due in part to unresolved anger about that? I don't know; I'm just putting the question out there.
Another question: am I angry with myself over my shortcomings and failures, whether real or perceived? Again, I don't know; I'm just putting the question out there. Most men my age have a wife, or maybe a second wife, and a family. Maybe there's a house in the suburbs, and an SUV and backyard cookouts. Me? I've been married once, and I do my own my home, again more due to good fortune than any achievement on my part. But I have no family, and I'm pretty much relationship-proof.
I tell myself I'm okay with that, but am I really? Or am I just suppressing, or inwardly directing, anger over not being able to have these things?
I don't know. I'm just putting the question out there.
1 comment:
In my experience, you are doing a bit of mixing apples and oranges here. Depression brain chemistry is a condition, just as trauma may be a moment in time. Self loathing, however, has more to do with the experience of depression than the cause of depression. Much of the experience of depression is that sense that it doesn't matter (whatever "it" might be) and that there's no sense of going on. Sometimes, it's the guilt and shame of the thought that one isn't quite good enough to deserve happiness. At times, it is a sadness (brought on, say, by the death of a loved one) that, once begun, simply won't go away. Some part of the experience of depression may be a kind of OCD thinking: the spiral or circular thought process that simply will not quit and keeps us focused on some problem or event or sense of loss. So, anger directed inward as a child (because the social or physical costs of showing anger towards our parents, for example) may become a habit of thinking. Guilt over sex feelings is a frequent starter for anger turned inward, especially for those of us who were subjected to hellfire and brimstone religion.
In any event, my point is that one can be both inclined towards depression by brain chemistry that is inherited and, as well, inclined towards depression by the same kind of family dynamics that our parents experienced or by the adoption of modes of thinking at some later time as a result of a trauma, or some combination of factors. After depression-like thinking becomes engrained, it is often experienced as a kind of alienation combined with some personal mythology about being "less than" and results in a psychological inability to confront problems and the world to a debilitating extent. Everyone has some idea of depression because everyone has some of this kind of thinking (neurosis) going on inside. However, depression is a turbo-charged experience of this, a difference in degree so great as to be a difference in kind with respect to ordinary sadness. As an analogy, we all get angry but a homicidal rage is another whole animal because it is such exaggerated anger.
Shortest answer: brain chemistry depression and inward anger as causes of depression are not mutually exclusive -- both can be present. Further, inward anger isn't just a cause, it's also a symptom, one of many.
For someone like you, I recommend New Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis and Robert Harper. This isn't a book for everyone, but you might benefit as I have.
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