SELF OSTRACISM

If you’ve ever suffered from depression, mental illness or low self-esteem, you know what I mean by self ostracism. This is another difficult symptom of depression that I personally struggle with every time I go through a bout of depression. Again, it begins very insidiously, with whispers in the brain that convince me that everyone would be better off if I just crept into a hole somewhere and disappeared. So I begin to make myself “invisible”. I push people away, make excuses not to go out to social gatherings and gradually stop going out altogether.

The problem with self-ostracism is that it’s very difficult to come back out. Over and over again, I emerge from my self-imprisonment to find that most of my friends have given up on me, not because they didn’t care, but because they just didn’t understand. Many friendships are lost forever, but some have returned once I’ve explained the mangled thinking behind that self-ostracism.

So what is behind that urge to hide ourselves away, to banish ourselves from society? Again, I’m only speaking from my own experience, and have come up with four rationales, or thinking patterns, behind my own disappearance:

1. SHAME – Normally I’m a strong, self-sufficient, intelligent woman. Depression reduces me to a writhing mass of weeping agony. I cry if someone looks at me the wrong way. I sob uncontrollably in the middle of lineup in the store over the most insignificant problem. I’m overwhelmed by an inexplicable sadness, my mind is full of dark thoughts, I am unable to see any positive spin on anything, and am powerless against the tide of darkness that’s taking over my mind. I’m deeply ashamed to be in this condition and simply don’t want anyone to see me like this.

2. GUILT – My life is good. I have a great husband and a beautiful life. We’re not rich, but we’re not hungry. We travel. I have everything I could ever want out of life. And still I suffer from this overwhelming sadness and feeling of failure. It doesn’t make sense to me (because I forget that it’s a bona fide illness!) and so I feel guilty for feeling so sad when my life is so good. I feel like a total failure for not being able to “snap out of it” or find ways to get myself out of these “blues”. So I retreat in confused guilt for feeling so inept and useless.

3. INABILITY TO COPE – My own sadness becomes overwhelming. I begin to feel everybody’s pain as acutely as if it’s my own. It’s as if I’m walking around with my skin inside out. Every hurt, every wound, every sadness, every pain in the world becomes a part of me. I rage with guilt for my role in the agony in the world. I feel anger in the lineup, I feel pain in the bus, I feel EVERYTHING from everyone around me. I simply cannot cope with the tide of emotions that I feel coming at me from every direction. I have to shut down. I have to pull away because it hurts so badly. It feels like the pain is going to swallow me whole. For me, this is a huge problem when I’m depressed –very difficult to explain to anyone - and it’s probably my number one reason for withdrawing from everyone when I’m clinically depressed.

4. FEAR – Panic attacks. Fear of rejection. Heightened sensitivity to criticism. And wide open to what I call “cruelty of kind intentions”. I’m going to talk about “cruelty of kind intentions” later. But to quickly explain it, I’ll use one example from my own experience. I’ve been told too many times that I’m depressed because I don’t pray enough. That’s a kindly intentioned bit of advice from well-meaning people, but it’s actually a very cruel thing to say to someone who’s depressed. It devastated me beyond description to hear that the God whom I had loved so deeply (and believed for so long that He loved me unconditionally) might be using this horrible depression to punish me for not praying enough. IT’S NOT TRUE. God doesn’t work that way. And we’ll talk about that later. But in the depths of my despair and depression, I couldn’t remember the Truth. So I believed those words. My memory of that experience now makes me very afraid to be in contact with people when I’m depressed, for fear of being hit with more of that inadvertent-but-nevertheless-painful “cruelty of kind intentions”.

This has been another long post, so I’ll leave it at this for now. Maybe you recognize some of these thought patterns in your own self. Maybe you know someone who’s depressed who has ostracized him/herself. Maybe this will give you a glimpse into the “why” behind that disappearing act.

[ September 03, 2005, 11:13 AM: Message edited by: Eagle Heart ]