Dear noname:

I woke up this very early morning thinking about your post of yesterday. I asked myself what happened since two weeks ago when you felt pretty good. I thought that maybe you started feeling bad then panicked and felt worse. I thought that “Being better at accepting depression” may be about accepting the bad, sort of holding it in your hands, before it grows bigger, before it escalates into depression. Much like one is to do when feeling fear, before it escalates into a panic attack.

Following these thoughts I turned on the computer and spotted the word panic in your 8/27 post. Here it is italicized: “I’m doing well right now… more confident than ever.. I feel or the first time in my life that I love myself… I’m not panicking in the absence of intimacy as I have in the past.. Before when I disliked myself, the panic to find some kind of love and approval felt unbearable, as if I was separated from the pack and left to die. Now … I’m not panicking as much”

Notice your fear, “as if I was separated from the pack and let to die“- fear is very much part of your depression, sort of the primary feeling, the root feeling underneath the depression and it is the force that escalates the sadness/beginning depression into an overwhelming depression.

Yesterday you wrote: “Without any particular reason or event, I find myself slipping back into depression.. I have been feeling disconnected from people again… Specifically the friend I see the most I’ve come to realize  doesn’t ever ask about my life…he doesn’t even ask me how I’m doing when he sees me.”

I think the particular event that happened is that you had a thought about that friend, something like: he-doesn’t-ask-me-about-my-life, and that thought was associated with the fear of being separated from the pack and left to die. This fear was in  the center of the new storm.

Next came other thoughts and the escalation took place: “I think it’s exhausting for me pretending to be in a good mood for people… could mean I get kicked out of my program, so I have to be on guard….not raise any red flags about my ‘questionable character’ since I’m on thin ice .. for cussing out my supervisor twice”

See the escalation? It all started from a thought about your friend that activated your fear of being alone, of being separated from the pack and left to die (your dominant feeling-experience in childhood, the pack being your family).

As the escalation continued, thoughts about your work with the traumatized kids came into the storm and then you went back to the eye of the storm: “Lastly I’m just lonely”, the feeling-experience of separation.

I think that you need to learn to pay attention to separation-from-the-pack/loneliness thoughts occurring in your brain and hold them in awareness before they escalate into panic, before other thoughts rush in and are added to the mix with more fear, sadness, anger, desperation and so forth.

This is a separate issue from your obvious need for meaningful interactions. “interactions which reciprocate care and intimacy” on a regular basis for you, having such a reliable relationship is a long term goal, as I see it. The short term goal, what you can make progress at today and every day, is to avoid the escalation, as I suggested in the paragraph above.

anita