Different Approach to Depression and Rage

A therapist for over 30 years, I take a unique approach to treating depression and rage. Unique, I think, because it actually leads the therapist into thinking of innovative ways of considering the effect we want to have and using specific and effective language to help clients get unstuck. My training with Dr. Jon Connelly has given me a new direction in providing real help to people.

I teach that emotion is really effort. Nature has arranged it so that any negative emotion is the primitive brain's tool to get the animal to take an action to get something in the world to stop. Think of a mother bear defending her young or a rabbit fleeing from a wolf. The animal's mind is using emotion to activate their whole system to take an action to affect a situation, in rabbit's case - to run, and in mother bear's case, to attack. This is a different and more useful way to see it than attributing the cause of emotion to the external thing. As long as we attribute things like anger to an external stimulus, we will get stuck into a "victim" status and feeling helpless. The animal's mind is not pushing big negative buttons out of boredom or to put the animal in a bad mood. Pushing the button always has a practical and survival-oriented purpose-to make the animal act to change a current here and now situation because that's good for its survival.

But with humans, this older part of the brain has to constantly cope with a "data flow" about stuff that isn't even in existence - past things that are no longer happening and future things that we can forecast or imagine. So with us, a threatening picture can come up on the screen in our mind's "I-Max Theater" and the older part of our brain doesn't take into account it really isn't in existence. The mind starts "misfiring" -pushing the negative emotion button in a rather indiscriminate and inaccurate way.

Our negative emotions in these cases are all about effort to change that out-of-existence situation, no matter how off-target to what is actually going on.

But here's where it gets interesting. When you put effort into something that doesn't respond to your effort, what you really have done is to prepare the ground for depression. I explain this in terms of the old isometric exercises that TV workout shows used to feature. Nobody does these anymore. Why? Because they are depressing! Imagine going to a gym five days a week and trying to lift a bar bolted to the floor. The intellectual part of our mind wouldn't keep this up more than a minute or two. But the older part of the brain, with its "now" orientation, keeps trying and trying.

Putting effort into something that won't respond to your effort breeds the sense of powerlessness, helplessness and hopelessness that is the perfect recipe for depression. If someone really puts their all into this, their whole heart, telling themselves it is now a need, like air and food, and that their life's happiness rides on producing an outcome, even though it's impossible, you have amplified the possibility of creating a severe depression.

Think about people you know who've spent a substantial part of their lives trying to get someone or something else to change, despite ample evidence to the contrary. They are not exactly bathing in positive energy. It's not the intellectual part of the brain that's at the wheel, but the older part, attempting to pour effort and then more effort into something or someone who doesn't respond.

Some of Jon Connelly's newest thinking on this includes rage. Suppose someone got violated and her brain is flashing the threat signal to do something to take an action about a situation that's no longer in existence. Her mind is using negative emotion to get her to stop a situation. Could be anger, could be fear, or any other negative emotion. So far you have the first part of the problem. Now add to that the human tendency to react with anger when something is perceived as wrong or "shouldn't be", or "unfair". Then secondarily, something else happens - anger kicks in because the thing or event "shouldn't have happened" in the first place.

The moment humans tell themselves something "shouldn't have happened", or is "unfair", anger flashes as if to an actual threat happening here and now. Her mind is screaming at her to go ahead and do something about it-get it to stop and to correct the injustice. The problem now is - she can't do anything about any of it, because it happened 15 years ago. She gets the feedback signal that she hasn't yet got it stopped so she tries harder. Both perceptions are working on her. Or to say it differently, with emotion added to the scene about the thing that "shouldn't have happened", we have a second source of threat. Anger in nature implies a threat, so the secondary anger from "shouldn't have" rides on top of the original threat. As she gets angrier, she feels more threatened which in turn gets her angrier, which begets more threat, and so on and so on. This loop has her pouring in emotional effort from deep reserves to get something to stop or turn out differently, and the fact that it is impossible always leads her back to the same place. This is a desperate place to be and the only word for it is rage.

What happens next is profound. All that rage is hot, like steam in a pipe. Think about a pipe with superheated steam running through it, so hot the pipe itself is glowing red. Now the person has to be shielded from an element of her own system. It's just too hot to be tolerated. She can't get her hands on it to do anything with it and she cannot stay in close contact with it for very long. So her mind wraps the pipe in a thick asbestos batting. That batting is depression. Thicker and deeper than usual to keep it all under wraps. From outside, the rage can now appear quite cool, disguised, hidden & far below the surface. But from inside, the batting is poisoning her with the piling up of threat - a muffled protest, bitterness, hatred, jadedness, giving way to a detachment or numbness that extends out through more and more of the personality. There can be a near total withdrawal from life and things that might bump into or wake up all the rage. We've all known people wrapped tight like this.

Just putting these concepts out there is part of the whole approach. Through my seemingly limitless use of metaphors and shifting of perspectives provides my clients more and more ways to language things.

We are now able to see more clearly what to clear and how to work with people to have the effect we intend for them. It makes sense now, to think and see that eliminating life's "should or shouldn't have's", "unfairness" or any other distorted meaning paves the way to eliminate rage because that way of thinking has her trapped. There's plenty in life we could think of as "wrong" but how much rage do we want to swallow? I'm thinking life's knocks are tough enough without all the distortion. I want to blow away rage by shifting mind into "done and finished" with that and the realization that whatever tough thing happened, "it couldn't not have happened or been done any other way". We can then see the client free from her thick casing, content, at peace, totally in alignment with what is beneficial and possible for her now.

There is a sense of competence and capability and there is no distraction to other useless ways of thinking. Clear, capable, focused on things that are beneficial and possible. Did I mention it happens quickly?