When you're depressed without a cause
When you're depressed without a cause
The Liberation Cycle
Dear Readers,
I’m going to get personal here, which I’ve resisted since I began publishing my work on Substack a few years ago because I wanted readers to focus on content and the processes I describe derived from my own experience rather than on me. It’s taken me some time to feel ready to tackle this topic and abandon the safety of a detached, academic perspective.
After reading pieces from
and on the topics of suicide and depression, I felt inspired to share my own experience and the insights that emerged from those dark times to provide a bigger picture, humanizing and spiritual perspective on depression and suicidal ideation.I promise that this topic is related to hacking narcissism and the impact of disrupting the web of suffering to regain empowerment while letting go of needing to control.
Note to Readers: This piece describes a perspective about depression that might or might not resonate with you. The scope of this article is limited to describing depression as a temporary state and does not cover treatment, therapy or medical advice to readers with long term depression who are seeking that information. I’m sharing my own and others’ analysis of our lived experience that might shed light on the factors associated with long term depression and suicidal thoughts. As intelligent people, I trust that you will read this personal account and the proposed developmental theory with curiosity and discernment.
In 2017, I published a piece about my experience of depression in 2010 on Medium at the end of my short lived career as a lab research scientist (below).
I had spent 2017 in a depressed fog after a stellar previous year. Despite the plucky and optimistic tone of the article, I was still struggling after enduring a year of feeling directionless, self-loathing, intense shame and emotional upheaval. I couldn’t pinpoint the origin of the depressive fog and despite attempts to fill my day with meaningful activities and interactions, the fog persisted and I loathed myself for feeling like I was failing at life. I had a lot of support from from friends, counsellors and an understanding family, but no one was able to tell me why I was undergoing such a painful process. Not knowing how to change my current state felt like torture for someone who is used to investigating issues and quickly getting to the heart of it.
Depression and shame
Depression for me is always associated with low energy, loss of purpose, low motivation, loss of direction, loss of faith in myself, frustration, inadequacy, inferiority and a relentless voice of an inner bully, taunting me with insults and invitations to no longer exist. Managing the inner bully was only possible when I had enough activities to keep me engaged and distracted. The moment I was alone with myself, the demonic voice would taunt me again.
It wasn’t until a few years later that I came to understand the Inner Bully as a function of shame. There are different responses to shame; self-attack or self-punishment is one of them. Self-attack is a warped disciplinary action to coerce you to ‘get it right’ next time. The Inner Bully implies that I should have known better than to make decisions (whatever they were) that led me to this point of suffering. You can have this response to shame when you don’t know how to navigate the unknown and feel that your existence is meaningless, lacking a raison d'être.
It was challenging to make sense of all the losses mentioned above when there wasn’t a clear thing that was lost. I couldn’t say “I feel depressed because I had lost my grandmother/my job”. Feeling directionless - loss of a clear path - is still a loss that is destabilising. I had moments of sadness, despair, elation and anger, even joy with a depressed undercurrent that I couldn’t shake. The feeling of not being able to know what was going on and how to fix it left me in a shame feeback loop. I felt untethered from my life and reality, existing in the void of the unknown between the secure reality of the past and an emerging new reality.
From all my support, internet searches and inner reflection I learned that I was in a liminal space and the depression was an energy forcing me to stop. The suicidal thoughts were alerting me to something that was dying or ending rather than an invitation for me to end my life. I was undergoing a transition but unlike moving from one place to another, or ending one phase of life (ie. graduating from uni) and beginning another phase of life (ie. motherhood) I didn’t know what I was transitioning from or to.
Each phase of depression forced me to question my beliefs about life, my direction, my identity. I had to confront my past actions and the value of current relationships. If I was lost, I needed to find the right path somewhere in the depths of my psyche because no one could tell me where I needed to go (except to a therapist).
I’m not someone who believes that the source of my problems lay out there in society or in systems causing my distress. Societal and systemic issues contributed to my despair but they were not the root cause. I already saw the rot in academia many years earlier and again in other institutions since. I knew that when there was a mismatch between my values and those of a workplace, friendship or community, I would start to feel burned out and experience similar depression symptoms.
As a systems thinker, I tried to zoom out of my own internal experience and consider that perhaps something in my system was wrong. I thought about my own ecological system comprised of multiple interacting systems - the family system, workplace community system, spiritual community system, healthcare system, social service system and so on. I needed to examine my relationships and memberships in communities/systems that I believed were safe, fulfilling, beneficial and long lasting.
The fog started to lift after publishing that piece. Maybe it was that I was giving voice to my suffering, challenging the Inner Bully by exposing shame. Or that I was finally scrutinising all my relationships. Or, perhaps it was having new things to look forward to or maybe the planets realigned. I began to have insights about relationships I thought were safe sanctuaries to support my personal growth and development, when they were in fact deeply exploitative and spiritually draining.
Months later I had my revelation. Much like being ousted from a cult, friend group or religious community, I had undergone a slow and painful ex-communication from a reality that held me in a specific identity, affiliations, responsibilities, fantasies and a path that was never mine. I had become aware of the conditioning that fooled me into believing I was living my true path. I had been idolizing false gods.
Depression is a messenger trying to tell me that something in my life is wrong. I suffered because I interpreted that signal to mean that something was wrong with me.
Years later, the Liberation Cycle was born.
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