Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression Chapter 5

Written by Julian L. Simon

The Hand of the Past In Depression

Skip this chapter about the effect of your history upon your depressive tendencies if you are impatient to get on to practical methods for overcoming your sadness. But come back later if you do skip now; this material should help you understand yourself better, and therefore help you deal with yourself better.

Childhood experiences are the colors with which the adult draws pictures of life. A typical case: M.'s father gave M. the impression that he never expected much of M. So M. spent the years until age 50 so hungry for achievement that he kept learning new occupations, and giving chunks of himself to the needy, while at the same time deriding all his achievements as those of an "overachiever".

The child builds patterns of behavior on her experiences as she lives them, even if the childhood experiences are not relevant to adult life. In the lingo of scientific research, the adult sees her latest experience as one observation in her lifetime sample of experiences.

A single traumatic childhood experience can leave a lasting imprint and predispose a person to adult depression. Or, none of the experiences may be traumatic yet their effect may be cumulative.

The early experiences may influence the adult's perceptions and interpretations of the adult's actual situation. Or they may work directly upon the self-comparison mechanism. They may also affect the adult's sense of being competent or helpless to improve her life situation.

Non-traumatic experiences which gain their force by accumulation can be repeated punishments, or parental directions about which self-comparisons the child should make, or which companions to associate with, or--perhaps most deeply rooted in the adult--goals and values implanted in the young child by the parent or other persons, or by his own reactions to people and environment. These matters will now be discussed one by one.

Childhood Experiences

Death or Loss of a Parent

The classical Freudian explanation of depression is the death or disappearance of a parent, or the lack of parental love. Though it is probably incorrect that such an event has occurred to all depressives, it is likely that children who have suffered the loss of a parent are especially predisposed to depression.1

There are several ways that loss of a parent can cause depression. Children whose parents die often believe that they themselves caused the parents to die by some bad behavior or failure. Therefore, bad behavior or failure as an adult brings back the depressing feelings associated with great loss.

A child who loses a parent to death or divorce may re- experience the pain and sadness whenever, as an adult, the person suffers a loss in the widest sense--loss of job, loss of a lover, and so on.

Still another way in which loss of a parent may predispose a person toward depression is by simply making the person sad for a prolonged time after the event. That is, the child continually makes a negative comparison between (a) his present parentless situation, and (b) his former situation when the parent was alive (or to the situation of other children who still have parents.) In this way the child develops a pattern of making neg-comps, and being depressed from time to time, which may simply continue into adulthood.

Another theory of why early separation can cause depression is that attachment to the mother is biologically programmed just as are mating behavior and parenting behavior in animals. If the bond is absent, pain is caused, says this theory.(2)

What at important for us is that if the attachment is broken by separation, temporary depression may occur immediately, and the chance of adult depression goes up.

Punishment for Failure as a Child

Some parents punish their children severely for actions inside or outside the home which the parents do not approve. The punishment may be straightforward, such as spanking or loss of rights; or the punishment may be more subtle, such as withdrawal of the parent's love. Many children who are severely punished by their parents learn to punish themselves for lack of achievement, and they continue to do so in adulthood. This self-punishment increases the pain suffered from a negative self-comparison, and hence it intensifies a depression. This was my case until I realized what was happening and decided to change: When I was a child my mother would say to me, no matter how well I did in school or other test situations: "That's fine, but you can do better." I then felt (rightly or wrongly) that I was being reprimanded for not doing well enough. And as an adult, I cursed myself for each minor fault, feeling painful sadness at my perennial failure to reach perfection.

It was this pattern which -- after a precipitating event -- kept me in constant depression for thirteen years. One day I realized that there was no good reason why I should punish myself on my mother's behalf, no reason why I should speak her reprimands to myself. This was a major breakthrough in lifting my thirteen-year depression.