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I’ve always had trouble talking honestly about depression, in therapy or out. Even though much of its influence is gone, this remnant of depression is still holding on. I was always able to report the latest news to a therapist – I’m down at level 2 instead of up at level 8 (or whatever other shorthand you might use). And talking about history was not the problem. I could summon up all the turbulence and pain I’d gone through long ago from the safe distance of time.

It was the here and now that stopped me. Telling anyone the full emotional truth of the present, as I was feeling it – especially the intense stuff – was next to impossible. The fear was that the words could not be formed without the emotions flowing with them, and it was the spontaneous rush of feeling that had to be prevented. Something in me always reacted faster than thought. It was more than a censor, it was a builder of strong barriers that walled the feelings in and me with them.

That autopilot response hard to stop, and it worked with cold efficiency most of the time, especially in therapy. That’s supposed to be a refuge for healing as old poisons are purged from my present life. How much emotional truth of the moment was I able to get out? Let’s put it this way. If there had been a buzzer going off at every half-truth, that would have been the loudest and most frequent sound of the hour.

It’s amazing that therapy has done me any good at all, but it has. I’ve always been able to talk about the past, even the worst moments, or about powerful dreams that force something into my awareness. These things provoked strong feeling, but however bad they’d been, they weren’t here and they weren’t now. If I did feel overwhelmed, about to cry – the door slammed shut at once.

It wasn’t just the talking, it was letting the feelings roll through and find whatever physical expression they were after. Emotions need the outlet of the body to be complete and serve their purpose. Not so hard to do in private, though I can have plenty of trouble with that too. (Remember that Real Depressed Men Don’t Cry!) But facing a live person – the resistance was like biting into splintered wood to shut my mouth and crush the feeling into manageable size. That hurts!

That wasn’t the end of it, for then I’d have this crowd of ticked-off feelings pounding in me to get out. There must be a law of physics about the conservation of emotional energy. It’s never destroyed but takes on different, more ghostly forms. I could never recognize them, but I’d always feel something strange happening. Each moment of denial put another to-do on the list of things I’d have to deal with later – that is, talk through. In the meantime, I had no clue when or how the stunted feeling would finally kick its way to the surface.

Emotions like to be sociable. They need to get out there and be seen and heard by the people I’m closest to, most of all, of course, my wife. Letting the feeling be itself can only deepen those essential bonds. Whenever they did get through the walls, as happened every now and then, my wife and I would feel the intimate connection all over again. How else, except by that emotional presence, could anyone get to know who I am and trust the relationship we’ve formed together? If I stomp out fear or grief, I’m also refusing to reach out for help, not to mention love, and refusing to accept it.

But all this holding back never had anything to do with common sense. It was about the deepest fear I’ve known, courtesy of severe depression. It was a soul-deep dread that intense feelings on the loose would release a terrifying force I’d been keeping in check. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but eventually I gave it a recognizable face. My own hideous and violent Mr. Hyde was waiting to spring free, and that I could not allow.

Of course, I knew that was a crazy thing to believe – especially after all sorts of therapy and self-probing – but on a depressed and primitive level it felt like truth for many years. He was everything half human and monstrous that my depressed mind told me I must be. Chains and shackles were all that held him, not to mention round-the-clock surveillance.

He’s not really there anymore, but the habit of holding him and every intense feeling in check hasn’t gone away completely.

So talking about depression, which bundled this dread together with all the other symptoms, has never been easy. Nevertheless, I was able very slowly to learn the skills that let me see clearly what I was doing and stop the weirdness, on most days.

So how’s your emotional truth level with a therapist or whoever you try to talk to about depression? On a scale of 1 to 10, you usually come in at … ?

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In the midst of writing about moments of spiritual insight, I realized I had to draw the other half of that picture. The lost side of spirit is emptiness. I don’t mean the emptying that can be a stage in recovery and spiritual growth. That kind of emptiness is a good thing. It means the stopping of daily noise, the frenetic pace or the addictions that keep me riding on the surface of things and avoiding whatever I can’t face. The good emptiness drains all that out of my system. Once rid of the mind-buzz and the anxiety that goes with it, I can participate in an active silence, and things become clearer.

No, I’m talking about the opposite of that rich experience. It is the empty feeling that leads to panic and what I’d have to call dread. It comes in a flash of perverse insight when I feel again at one with the world around me, but everything in that world, including me, seems false, an empty shell about to crack open, revealing a void. And I’m going to drop in a free fall as the ground cracks under me. That used to be a regular part of my life before I could grasp that it was one face of depression.

When the panic used to strike, I’d have to react fast and leap into any activity that filled the emptiness with crowds, or, better yet, helped me believe for a time that I had never been empty to begin with. I had to hold onto a structure, a purpose, a job, something that sealed the cracking world up again and filled my days with action that was useful and important. That took me completely out of my inner self and whatever I may have really wanted and put me securely in a role or function that had value in the eyes of the world. That is how in the past I ran from the dread of emptiness and the fear of breaking and falling like part of an earthquake-stricken city.

The remarkable TV series, Mad Men begins with an animation that captures just that sense of living in a world that could at any time break apart and drop you into free fall.

Mad Men is a drama about advertising executives in the New York of 1960. Its central character creates a false self to build a career devoted to masking a reality he is afraid to reveal. Dan Draper is a “nobody” from a poor family so desperate to separate himself from his origins that he adopts the identity of a dead man to place himself in a completely different world. With his false name and false biography he becomes a brilliant and successful advertising executive, but the fear that this world could collapse never leaves him. The opening animation shows a man ascending to his skyscraper office only to see it break completely apart. It’s just a collection of lines that are falling, and the man falls with them, his world collapsed. Draper is all self-confidence, brilliance and success on the surface but also lost and searching for a kind of life he can’t get clear about.

In my teens and early twenties I was often gripped by that sudden panic at the sense of emptiness just behind the fragile appearance of things. That was one of the most terrifying symptoms of depression I had at that time, and yet it happened so often I took it as part of me, an inescapable dimension not just of my nature but of the world itself. Nothing looked stable, trustworthy, solid. It could all disappear and show itself to be as empty as I felt. That was a terrifying and perverse way of seeing myself as part of a whole, but a whole that broke into dust at a touch. Everyone seemed to be talking then about “meaning” and man’s search for it, the remoteness of God, not to mention his “death.” To see the world as meaningless was, if anything, quite fashionable. But this was no intellectual exercise for me. It was despair and panic. I didn’t think my into that state – it was simply the way I experienced things. It was what I believed to be true.

Later I lived in many places where I felt good about being alive, simply by looking around me at the absorbing beauty of what I saw. Something powerful and deep had changed, and it had to with finding a spiritual connection to life and also seeing around the edges of depression. I’ve never completely lost touch, though, with that other fearful side of emptiness. When in a depressive swing, I get those jolts of deep panic, I remember how I used to live with the feeling most of the time. It was something I had to run from to stay alive. I had to cover myself and the world I lived in with a sense of importance, purpose, direction, fulfillment. That usually meant a driven activity that took me far away from looking closely at what was going on inside me. As I learned more about depression, I could see that the feelings of bleakness, worthlessness, despair that are part of that condition were not the truth of my life but something I could recover from.

I will keep writing about the spiritual dimension to recovery, but I also have to point out this dark side that I still fear – despite new knowledge and belief.