I was recently asked: “Is it common to have waves of sadness and feelings of depression even though I am mostly dealing with anxiety?” The answer is: “Absolutely”. Anxiety and depression are closely linked. While each can occur on their own, they often co-exist. Prolonged tension and anxiety can lead to exhaustion, despair and depression. Prolonged depression in turn can make us worried and anxious about our inability to turn it around.
A significant cause of both anxiety and depression is the suppression of feelings & emotions. We don’t like feeling angry, sad, anxious, miserable etc., and seek to change or suppress them, or distract ourselves from those feelings.
Our Behavior Makes it Worse
As a society, we have become accustomed to seeking only pleasant feelings and rejecting unpleasant or painful feelings. A significant part of medicine seeks to “help us” avoid these unpleasant feelings, but there is a hidden cost.
If we experience unpleasant feelings that are frequent, intense or stick around a long time, then the temptation to suppress them is great. But while this suppression of our feelings (if we are even able to) may give us the short-term benefit of feeling better, it distorts reality and denies the expression of our true selves.
Those parts of us that are sad, angry, anxious etc. are equally valid, and need to be honored. We do this by letting them see the light of day. Any attempt to filter or control our thoughts doesn’t work. We can’t pick and choose which feelings we want to be rid of, and which ones we keep. If we deny expression of the feelings we don’t want to face, then these build up below the surface only to erupt some time in the future. And when we suppress our “unwanted” feelings we also suppress “good” feelings.
I believe it is this attempt to keep a lid on our feelings that leads to our sense of numbness, dissociation, depersonalization and depression.
When we deny any of our feelings we lose the subtleties and color that these different emotions bring to our life. We lose the freeness and the openness to life, which is replaced with stiffness, caution, resistance, and an attempt to control how we feel.
To regain our freedom, flexibility and the joy to be alive, we must be able to allow ourselves to feel the whole spectrum of natural human emotions. That includes ones we might wish to avoid, such as: fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, frustration, impatience, disappointment, regret, grief, loss, etc. etc.
My Anxiety and Depression
I experienced both anxiety and depression for much of my adult life. It started with the development of the anxiety state, and over time the frustration and despair grew as I failed time and again to find a way out.
I put enormous effort into suppressing my anxiety (to no avail) and it just kept building and building. It refused to be ignored. It would burst through my barriers with great intensity, and as a result I learned to fear it, which in turn caused even greater anxiety. At the same time, any feelings of joy, love, peace and acceptance were muted to the point where other than my anxiety I felt emotionally flat. I didn’t know what to do about it all and fell into despair and depression.
My doctor diagnosed this as clinical depression, and prescribed antidepressant medication. I didn’t like the way they made me feel, and I didn’t want to be reliant on these for the rest of my life. At the time though, I had no idea how to deal with my depression, so I just tolerated it with resentment, anger and frustration.
I struggled for so long with anxiety that I became tired and exhausted. By that I don’t mean the type of tiredness that comes from a hard day or hard week at work, or the exhaustion you might experience from a workout. I mean a deep fatigue, right to the core of my body and soul. The type that took months and years to form, and was not going to lift in a day or a week. It was a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual fatigue. I talk more about these different types of fatigue in my book.
My Attempts to Recover
Every few days or weeks I went round and round the same loop of anxiety, anger, fighting, failing to resolve things, despair, sadness and shame. This continued for decades. I was in some sort of “anxiety groundhog day” destined to repeat the almost identical miserable cycle over and over and over again.
However, I felt I couldn’t give up. My situation was intolerable, but at the same time it proved futile to keep trying to change it. I was unable to get myself out of the anxiety state, and it seemed no-one else could help me to either.
The sense of hopelessness spilled over into every aspect of my life. It felt like I was just existing, barely, without any joy, purpose, or reason to go on. Much of the time I just robotically moved from one day to the next.
It was a monotonous existence, but at the same time it required herculean efforts to cope with my anxiety and still function in life. That struggle to keep going, along with my constant efforts to repress the feelings of anxiety and depression, just exhausted me.
Each time I hit rock bottom I picked myself up and started over, but inevitably wound up at the same dead end. From time to time, I would try a new “cure” but each time I slid back into the old pattern again, a bit more sensitized, a bit more exhausted, and a bit more depressed.
This combination of exhaustion and despair, with no end in sight led to my depression.
My Treatment Experiences
Any form of medication, whether it is prescribed by a doctor or is self-medication through alcohol or drugs, in my view attempts to provide relief from anxiety and depression in one of three ways. It either seeks (1) to numb or suppress the unwanted feelings, (2) artificially boost “feel good” chemicals such as serotonin, or (3) temporarily distract us from our suffering. None of these address the underlying issue, however – our unwillingness or inability to face our demons.
“The cave we fear to enter holds the treasure we seek.” _Joseph Campbell
Most treatment options just help us cope with life, and eventually our feelings bleed through anyway, and we will either have to take a higher dosage or change medications to maintain the suppression of our unwanted feelings.
Counseling that focuses on ways to change our mood in my opinion dishonors the feelings we currently have. We can’t force a laugh or paint a smile on our face and expect to feel happy. I also don’t believe it is necessary to uncover all our past traumas or try to trace our lives back to the apparent root of our anxiety. At least in my experience this had very little effect on my anxiety.
The Bottom Line
If you have read any of my writings or are familiar with the teachings of Dr. Claire Weekes, then you will know that I found her acceptance-based approach to be the only truly effective path to recovery. This taught me how to face and accept my anxiety and associated feelings.
“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” _Rilke
All I had to do was to change how I thought about and responded to those feelings I had been suppressing. I just needed to face & experience them instead of pushing them away; accept them instead of hating and rejecting them.
There is no such thing as a life with only “desirable” feelings, so any attempt to achieve that is destined to fail and bring us disappointment and misery. And such efforts will create added tension and anxiety.
Simply put: Recovery involves accepting all our natural feelings as legitimate, and being prepared to experience them fully and unconditionally.
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(Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay)
