Comprehending the sadness, fear, and anger in depression

This is no precise synopsis to explain depression, but it is an attempt to explain how much of it occurs.  It can help us understand and empathise with those who suffer or who have suffered.

Depression has little to do with how much we have or how blessed we’ve been, so therefore it’s a spiritual phenomenon with few neat answers, there is much enigma about it.

Indeed, it could easily be argued that the more “blessed” we are, the more we may struggle.  What’s often missing is what we feel we’ve lost—loss is a phenomenon that confounds materiality.  Loss is demonstrative in the fact that nothing on earth can make up for what’s missing and now in the heavens.

A lot of the normality in depression is due to a cycle where uncontainable sorrows well up into fear because we don’t know how to control it, and that fear causes anger at the felt injustice of it all.

I didn’t fully understand the role of people’s fear for sadness until a few days ago my wife said, “A lot of people fear being sad.”  I know many people have said to me that they worry (fear) opening the door to the true level of sadness in their hearts because they worry (fear) they’ll plummet in a way that they can neither control nor retrieve.

When we sense we have a lack of control over our emotions it increases our stress, and our unconscious and conscious anxiety compounds.  The typical response is one of frustration and agitation that we can’t control ourselves or the passage of our emotions.

But it’s not just the anger within frustration and agitation.  It’s an authentic fear that our truth is a very sad one, not just the situations of our lives that we cannot change, but that we can’t shift our responses 1) to be happier, and 2) to be more in control of ourselves, especially socially.

This is about understanding the predicament.

Depression is a very real thing, and perhaps the first time we realise this is when we’re first impaled in a season we can’t get out of.

In the season we can’t get out of we realise just how little control we have over our lives at times of loss.  Anyone might see that there are a range of emotions in that state of being, and like grief, those emotions are a mishmash of experience; a bit of fear, then a bit of anger, then some deep sadness, and then a clash of fear-produced-anger, and so on.

When it’s sadness that cannot be reconciled, fear that cannot be controlled, anger that has no justice, there’s little wonder we find ourselves—at least in a season—despairing and depressed.

Comprehending the sadness, fear, and anger in depression is complex, and perhaps the only real understanding we need to achieve is that it’s complicated, and that compassion is the only valid response.