Mindful Action Therapy

What is depression? And I am not asking about the symptoms; they describe depression and these are easy enough to ascertain, especially if you have experienced depression. The question now is: what is to account for these symptoms?  Unfortunately, the prevailing view is that it is a biochemical imbalance in the brain. I’m not saying that this is not a factor in the equation. I’m saying that this is simplistic. I mentioned this in a previous post and stated that it is a combination of biochemical, genetic and environmental factors that interact in a really complex system. I’d like to offer another angle on this, which I got from Jungian analyst and author, James Hollis. He contends that there are three types of depression:

1. reactive or environmental
2. endogenous
3. intrapsychic

Typically, we do not feel like doing anything when we are depressed. This includes doing what it takes to get out of depression. Now some of us are able to keep busy in our depression, but this kind of busyness is usually just a distraction from feeling bad. This is not an altogether bad strategy really, but we can do much better. For instance, we can be busy with intention and awareness, which is to say that we are actually aware that we are busying ourselves to stave off the bad feelings that are trying to drag us down. This may be an effective strategy within a more comprehensive plan, but we have to actually come to terms with what is our baseline experience. Who wants a life of continual busyness and distraction? We want to be fully present for our lives and fully engaged in a meaningful way.

In a depression we don’t “feel” like doing anything. And we may be waiting to “feel” like engaging in our lives. This is an understandable, but not generally effective strategy. For starters, when we are not actually doing anything, we are most often thinking about how bad we feel, or of what we might do, or how we might think, differently in order to feel better. In the previous post I wrote about how this doesn’t usually work, about how it actually perpetuates the cycle of depression. It’s called rumination.

I’ve also written about how it is that we come to hold certain positions as truth and how they just come to be the seemingly solid ground of our experience. One such example has to do with this notion of feeling like doing something before we do it when we are depressed. The assumption is that some internal change has to take place in order to feel better. This assumption persists even when we know that, for example, getting some exercise will make us feel better. We still wait to feel like exercising.

Are you one of us who “thinks too much?” Are you constantly going over and over in your mind the reasons you should, or shouldn’t feel or think as you do? Is your thinking full of foregone conclusions? In other words, when you think about what you might do, how you might be, or how you may feel in the future, do you find a very narrow window of possibility, a window that is dirty with should and should not?  More simply put, do you feel trapped in your present circumstances without many options?