Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (12 page)

•
taking action
 

•
defending ourselves?

All of these behaviours are natural because they are all survival-motivated. In the wild, whether you are a mountain gorilla or a meerkat, you will struggle every day to survive, to find food and water, to defend yourself, your kin and your territory, to find a mate and reproduce. A lot of your life will therefore naturally be
arousing, scary, painful and worrying,
and a lot of your energy will be spent
rushing about, licking your wounds, disputing, displaying and socialising.

So it is with people. A lot of what we do to survive must necessarily involve a certain amount of ‘pressure’ – emotional activity, nervousness, being in a hurry, responding quickly to the demands of life, doing things that make us apprehensive, angry or afraid. According to the theory of ‘managing stress’ these activities and feelings
are all bad for us.
Because they trigger arousal, they must be unhealthy. And because they are unhealthy they must be avoided.

So now you see why ‘stress management’ may have got you into your present avoidant and inactive state. Pressure has something to do with feeling depressed, certainly. But it is not the pressure itself, so much as the
avoidance
that may have brought you low.

Remember
: Depression may mean insufficient pressure rather than too much!

BULLYING

It can hardly surprise anyone, in an age of emotion alleviation and arousal management, that bullying is on the increase. According to an HSE technical report on workplace bullying, for example, 40% of victims do not even turn to anyone for support. They simply bow their necks or leave.
⁴
This craven behaviour actually
encourages
bullying in the workplace. The proliferation of anti-bullying websites and charities – although it may help ‘victims’ to understand the injustice they have suffered – fails to address the underlying cause. Bullies generally pick on those who look like victims: people who are passive and meek, who do not complain and do not fight back. In other words, they choose people who are helpless in the first place. Don’t be helpless.

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Stand up straight and tall – don’t look as though you are about to roll into a ball out of sheer fright. Hold your head up.
 

•
Courteously assert yourself. Listen to them, register that you have listened, but say that you have the right to be treated with respect, just as they do. Ask them questions. Why are they behaving like this?
 

•
Don’t display emotion. Keep your fears to yourself.
 

•
Meet the gaze of bullies. Don’t look at your shoes.
 

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Whatever you are feeling inside, speak calmly and clearly.
 

•
Repeat yourself in different words if they ignore you.
 

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Afterwards, make a note of what was said and retain documents, faxes and emails sent to you, with dates and, if there were any, witnesses.
 

•
If you feel the situation is actually dangerous and you can’t handle it yourself, consult those who can: management, the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), your union, school authorities.
 

•
Don’t just let things fester. If you do you may eventually ‘snap’ and lose your temper. Unless you like fights, use assertion,
not
aggression.

You will find more on assertiveness in the Challenge programme.

NOTES

1
. J. J. Lynch,
The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness
. Basic Books, 1977; J. J. Lynch, K. E. Lynch and E. Friedmann, ‘A cry unheard: sudden reductions in blood pressure while talking about feelings of hopelessness and helplessness’,
Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science,
27 (2), 1992, pp. 151–69; J. J. Lynch,
The Language of the Heart: The Human Body in Dialogue
. Basic Books, 1985; J. J. Lynch, S. A. Thomas
et
al
., ‘Blood pressure changes while talking’,
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,
168, 1980, pp. 526–34.

2
. M. E. P. Seligman and S. F. Maier, ‘Failure to escape traumatic shock’,
Journal of Experimental Psychology,
74, 1967, pp. 1–9; M. E. P. Seligman,
Helplessness: On Depression, Development and Death.
Freeman, 1975.

3
. ‘Tragedy of man with only TV to live for’,
Daily Mail,
19 April 1997.

4
. HSE,
A
‘Management Standards’ Approach to Tackling Work-Related Stress,
Part I, p. 14.

9

Accepting loss

One of the main reasons why people slump into despair is loss.
Loss knocks us sideways. Everything suddenly goes quiet. We feel as though we have been in an accident, and it takes time for the brain to work out what’s going on. As the poet Emily Dickinson so timelessly put it:
At leisure is the soul that gets a staggering blow.

If it is of any relevance, your Heartless Bitch has experienced loss herself. I have been homeless, I have been made redundant, I have been dumped and rejected in love, I have faced crippling debt and more than once I have been bereaved. So I am not going to get on your case or shout ‘snap out of it’. What I will do is try to give you some fresh ideas on the subject. You don’t have to sink into a peat bog so long as you take action to help yourself.

COMING TO TERMS WITH LOSS

What do friends mean when they say we eventually ‘come to terms’ with loss? Is it just a saying designed to reassure us and make us feel better? Do they have any idea what we are going through? After all, we have been insulted by fate. When we were children we were promised there would always be happy endings. Now we find this was a lie. Of course we don’t suddenly ‘reach a peaceful settlement’ with loss, or say ‘fair enough’. It isn’t fair at all. What really happens is that day by day the realisation slowly dawns on us that, whether we like it or not, what is lost is not coming back. We may not like it, but so long as we try to deny and avoid this realisation, we cannot move on. We live a twilight existence. We are facing the past, using all our emotional strength to try to pull it into the present. Let the line go. Live in the present. Face the future. Though you may not realise it right now, you do have one.

Once we have the courage to accept the truth, the pain changes. It still hurts, but it modifies into a far less distressing emotion. The experience becomes something we can begin to understand and place in the context of our lives. Human beings
are not designed for permanent grief. We are designed for survival. In the end we make an adjustment, and this is nature’s way.

SELF-PITY

Self-pity is a destructive emotion. It prolongs the pain and demoralises the person who gives in to it because it lowers your spirits and makes you feel defeated, weary and fatigued. Consider what tears are for. Nature gave us lachrymal glands for crying, to communicate with others that we are sad. It’s a defence mechanism because other people need to know not to be unkind to us just when we are feeling fragile.

Crying is quite natural when we have experienced loss. But tears also make your eyes tired. This is so that you feel inclined to ‘sleep it off’ and rest up for a while to recharge your batteries. Then when you wake up, it’s time to start afresh and get on with life. On the other hand, if you misuse this natural response by continually sorrowing and weeping, you’ll keep feeling as though you want to close the curtains and go back to bed. You won’t have any energy or motivation at all.

Self-pity is also utterly undignified. ‘Look at me, I’m really suffering.
Woe, woe and thrice woe.
’ Yes, we know you’re suffering. We’ve all suffered. It’s not a competition in which you have to prove your pain is worse than anybody else’s. Besides, if you keep reflecting back your own misery like a fairground mirror, crying, playing sad tunes and staring into the abyss, you are sapping your own strength to recover.

Once you decide to survive, your brain will turn on its magical powers again (it switches them off out of sheer boredom when you can’t be bothered), and new ideas and connections will begin to blossom in your mind. Don’t sit there in a pool of toxic tears. I’m not just being a Scary Mary: you need to be told these things or you’ll wallow indefinitely.

TYPES OF LOSS

There are many kinds of loss. What I’d like you to do right now is ‘rate’ the following 20 kinds of loss, in order of emotional impact you think they make, according to your own experience and knowledge.

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Bereavement (immediate family)

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Contest (as in sport)

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Companion animal

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Employment

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Fight

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Hair

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Health

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Hearing

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Home

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Limbs

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Liberty

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Looks

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Love partner

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Material possessions

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Miscarriage

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Mobility

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Money

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Sight

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Teeth

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Youth

These are just 20 of the many possible losses I could have chosen. Some may mean nothing to you. Others may loom forth as
the
most devastating experience anyone could possibly have. But they have all, somewhere, sometime, broken somebody’s heart. It depends on what you hold most dear.

When you have made your assessment, look at the top three. The likelihood is that they have happened to you, and this is why you understand their impact. One of them may well be the cause of your despair. But whatever your ratings of the losses on the list, it is important for you to understand that, in a sense,
they are one and the same.

LOSS ITSELF

Loss may be deeply personal, but it is also generic. Losing is one thing all human beings know about. It is what we do as we go through life. As you get older, bits fall off. We lose our careers, our prospects, our health, our teeth, our hair, our eyesight, our hearing, our looks, our youth, our mobility, our loved ones and finally, for many of us, our possessions and our homes. We may also lose our dreams,
which can hurt most of all. Coping with loss is therefore par for the course for children and grown-ups. We do it all the time.

You are literally surrounded by people who have lost what they treasured. My Restart trainees had lost jobs, livelihoods, homes, families, freedom and self-respect. I could certainly help them with the last one, though they had to deal with the others themselves, using their courage and intelligence.

No matter how it hurts, we can learn from enlightened people who willingly relinquish their precious possessions. Some of them simply ‘give it all away’ and enter a monastic order. Some join a community where everything belongs to everybody. Those who are devoutly religious believe that if you give up all the things you hold dear, the sacrifice doesn’t leave you with nothing. By a mysterious logic it leaves you with
everything
, because you become a spiritual person. In fact devout people think that it is only when we
have
relinquished everything that we are currently grasping on to that we truly find ourselves. They may quote from the Bible (Ecclesiastes 5:15 and Job 1:21) and say: