At the core of depression are memories

Reed College (part one)

“You can still die when the sun is shining.”                                                                                  -James Joyce

I came to beautiful, idyllic Reed College believing in possibilities. I believed—in a phrase I had picked up somewhere—that I was at the threshold of my life. A meaningful, purposeful, possibly even joyful life. I believed in learning as an end in itself, a high endeavor. I expected college would be challenging but it would be a challenge I loved, and I would do well. I would develop my intelligence and writing abilities, I would go on to have some kind of academic/research career. This was all vague—like most 18-year-olds I knew virtually nothing about the difficulties of any career path—but that’s what I was vaguely hoping for. And it seemed a reasonable hope because I had gotten into Reed.

I knew my family was somewhat dysfunctional, especially Billie, and I knew that what happens in childhood—along with genetics—shapes our character, but I thought I knew what my character was. I was an intellectual, a loner, an odd person, yes—but, essentially, fine. A high school teacher who wrote a letter of recommendation for me told me he had written that I was “an angel and a brilliant girl.” That was over-the-top—he was a kind man giving support to an awkward girl—but I thought his view was only exaggerated, not untrue. A few people—teachers, not family—believed in me. Therefore, at the level of my more-or-less normal self, I believed in myself.

I hoped to have deep conversations with people, and to make a friend or two. I had switched high schools every year, and I thought that might have been why I hadn’t developed close friendships. Maybe surrounded by hundreds of young people presumably very much like me, intellectually inclined, interested in understanding, I could make some deeper connections.

Even before classes had started, that possibility had receded. When I tried to hang out with the women in my dorm, I was bored and uncomfortable. Those deep discussions about life and meaning weren’t happening. Frustrated, I wondered why people liked to hang out and talk about nothing much, sometimes even playing loud music that made it difficult to have a conversation.

Now I can say that humans are social beings, innately enjoying just being with others. The pleasure results from the interaction itself, regardless of the ideas discussed. Now I understand that I couldn’t feel that pleasure of interaction because I was unconsciously waiting for each person or group to act like the members of my family had: to be decent to me for a while and then to turn on me. To hurt, manipulate, dislike—even hate and assault me.

It has taken me longer to understand that I was also unconsciously afraid they would see through me, see who and what I knew (in my non-conscious mind) I actually was. A person who had had sex with her paternal parent, brother, and others. A person who harbored murderous rage. A weak, sinful, lustful person.

Either way, for me to be with people was and is to be in constant unconscious fear. Since I had been that way for a long time, my attachment style—my patterns of interaction—was already set. An attachment style is procedural memory.

Procedural memory is a type of implicit memory (unconscious, long-term memory) which aids the performance of particular types of tasks without conscious awareness of these previous experiences.

I wasn’t hopelessly socially inept. I wasn’t volatile or rude like Billie. Though mostly silent in groups, I was able to talk to individuals. I could only get so close—I couldn’t initiate friendships or maintain them—but I was a loner, not an outcast. I was disappointed when I suspected that a degree of aloneness was to be my fate, but not crushed.

Mostly I was happy that first semester. I was doing well. I had a future.

September, 1977

. . . when I came here to Reed I felt "in the right place" immediately. What should I write about? I am so happy. Everything is right.

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In December, though I wasn’t homesick, I looked forward to flying home for Christmas break (my uncle had bought me a ticket) and visiting Cindy and Susan. I planned to look up an old friend. I didn’t long to see anyone else.

Susan picked me up from the airport. I stayed with her a day or two, then she drove us to our hometown and I stayed at Rrg’s and his wife’s house. I don’t know if Mike was living there or not, but he and my stepbrother were around some of the time. At the end of my month-long break, Mike drove me back to the airport.

Was I abused during that time? If so, I dissociated the abuse. What is unambiguous is that when I returned to Reed, I had changed.

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I returned from Christmas break in January, and even before classes started, depression hit me. Emerged. As if cracks had formed somewhere, letting depression in or letting it leak out. And part of it was the desire to die.

In my journal, I occasionally copy quotes from what I’m reading. Usually I name the author, but the following, from when I’m 17, is without attribution. I suspect it is a conversation from ancient Greece. A general and a king are standing on a hill, watching a battle unfold. The king ponders “the shortness of man’s life”—all this host “fated so soon to die.” But the general responds:

"Nay king. Weep rather for this, that brief as life is, there never yet was or will be, a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live."

So suicide was a compelling subject to me even in high school. This quote was particularly interesting because it claimed that ordinary everyday people—everyone—wished “to die rather than to live.” Even wished to die “more than once.” I knew some people were suicidal because I had read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s last novel The Brothers Karamazov. Anna Karenina had killed herself because her situation was untenable, a morass of pain. Was it possible to want to die even if your situation was normal? Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov contemplated suicide, but all Dostoevsky’s characters were unusual, suffering far more than regular people, more passionate and desperate in their day to day life. (Of course, that’s why his books appealed to me.)

I grasped viscerally now what I had read: you can hurt that much. You certainly can. And it doesn’t have to be about your situation; you can be in a perfectly fine situation. You can be at the college of your dreams, exactly where you want to be. You could be living in Utopia, for heaven’s sake! It doesn’t matter.

Why did I feel this way? From the beginning, I wanted to know:

January, 1978

I just want to type and type and type and not worry about what I say and type my troubles down the drain. Possible? Anything is possible when you're eighteen and on the threshold of life. Right? Anyway, wouldn't it be nice? I'm lonely and depressed and wondering if I'll ever be happy etc. but no, I know that I'll be happy - how stupid this is - but when will I be loved? What is true to this page is that I want to type my depression away but I don't know anymore about it.

Why am I depressed? Well mostly because I'm lonely and insecure. Lonely because that is the state my self is most consistently within and insecure because I don't know what to do with my life - as if life were an object - except to be happy and I'm not too sure how that is to be done though I have some pretty good ideas. Just a few minutes ago I was feeling even worse than I am now and I turned on the radio and Love Will Keep Us Together was playing and it was so corny and happy that all of a sudden I was ecstatic and began to dance wildly.

. . . But truly I never imagined it would hurt so much and will I make it through and is there life at nineteen? How old was Ivan Karamazov who wanted to dash the sweet old cup away? 24? 30?

Well, well, well. I haven't what it takes for suicide at this stage (I wonder what it does take). I've been thinking of seeing a psychologist if the school supplies one free and see what he thinks about my crying problem which has been helping to make me miserable lately. I don't know what he can do but I don't know much about it or much else so what has that got to do with it? I should say a lot more but am not feeling like it so I will not do so now - maybe later, see you soon, we're all in this together you know.

It intrigues me that I used the word depression to refer to the particular awfulness I felt. I might have labeled it “awfulness.” I might have called it “the state in which one would rather be dead than to live like this.” Instead I labeled it depression. Why was I so sure? Rrg had been hospitalized with depression in 1972, so maybe it was that. Or maybe I was just doing what we all do, plucking whatever word in common usage seems to fit best.

Labels matter because they come with connotations and assumptions. Once I labeled my state depression, I kept getting pulled into the belief that I had a disorder that caused my symptoms. Perhaps this isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s misleading. Cancer is a disorder that causes symptoms. Depression is more like a rut or a loop we get switched into and then get stuck in.

In 1978, I understood depression to have similarities to loneliness and insecurity, but I also could see it was different. I was right: even people who are successful and surrounded by loved ones can become severely depressed.

I didn’t describe how depression felt other than to say it hurt. I hadn’t yet learned the importance of noticing the sensations in my body—called interoception or mindfulness of the body. But I assume that the sensations I felt then are the same as what I felt later in life. I experience, at times, a riot of aversive sensations, but the one that I feel when I am depressed (as opposed to anxious/agitated) is a vague, sickly, almost-but-not-quite-queasy ache that cannot be located exactly. It seems to be everywhere, as if I’m impregnated with aversiveness.

This doesn’t sound too terrible, does it? Certainly not as terrible as the intense physical pain that some victims of chronic sexual abuse suffer. But it’s bad enough; a sensation doesn’t have to be intense to be aversive and debilitating. This ache—this feeling I called depression—is among the worst feelings human beings experience.

I believe depression is so aversive because it’s actually a partially suppressed pool of the most toxic emotions—or, more accurately, emotional memories. Depression is self-loathing or self-hate—that is, shame. It is also the felt sense of the indifference, dislike, or malice of the people we’re close to—what might be called anguish if we want to distinguish this reaction from shame.

I believe all psychological conditions also contain procedural memories: how to behave and what to do psychologically in order to cope with the often unbearable realities of our lives. In the case of depression there is a learned tendency to submit. That is, depression is a condition of submission.

Depression, repression, suppression, submission—they’re almost the same word, aren’t they?

These emotional and procedural memories are why what we call depression so often includes the desire to die. Or at least to crawl back into bed, or to not act, or to not interact with people.

I didn’t understand this then for several reasons. First, because of that assumption that depression is a condition that is causing the misery. Second, because all these feelings and tendencies are memories. You could say that depression is an intrusion of memories. It took me decades to understand this even though I was experiencing it.

Why is it so difficult to grasp? One reason: we think of memories as episodic memories and if we’re not remembering an event we don’t think we’re remembering at all. So we don’t connect our current moods and dysfunctions to what we experienced and learned in the past. And it may be a very long ago past, maybe even something we experienced as an infant, something we’re never going to remember as an episodic memory. Though it could be something that happened just last week as it apparently was that January, 1978.

Without episodic memories, our feelings or depressive state can’t be identified as the emotional and procedural memories they are because they are out of context. What is out of context isn’t understood.

This isn’t all there is to depression. If depression is a loop—a circuit of the brain, body and nervous system—we need an explanation for why one person gets stuck in that circuit and another person doesn’t. Most likely, genetics have something to do with this, as well as current stressors and learned behaviors that counter submission. But only by seeing our moods and dysfunctions as memories can we understand how they often come out of nowhere, even when our lives are good, and why depression is intermittent. And why depression is so very very aversive—why we want to hide in our homes and beds, to not act, to not continue to live.

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See my Resources page for links to more information about dissociative amnesia.