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Lately, I’ve come across a number of questions online by plainly anguished people, asking: Why do I have no friends, no life? The first time I saw one this blunt, I reacted almost defensively, laughing as I recalled an old film in which a man hires a private detective to find out why he has no friends. Isn’t it obvious? But I knew so well how much the question implied. Lonely and depressed, I had often asked that same question, or at least felt the need to ask it.

I wrote an earlier post about the difference  I experience between loneliness and depression. Loneliness is a sadness at the loss of close relationships. It drives me to reach out to people. Depression pushes me away from them. When I feel these two at the same time – as I can if the depression is not too severe – the tension of these opposing forces makes it all the harder to find the help I need.

Thinking back over many years of living with depression, I can quickly find many reasons why I had such trouble finding a friend to talk to when I most needed one. (I’ll set aside the much worse problem of not talking to my wife. I’ve said a lot about the reasons behind that, especially in this post.) Here are some of the problems from my experience. I can’t say how true they might be for others.

1. Sometimes it wasn’t I who had an issue with reaching out but friends who had trouble opening themselves to listen. Many people refuse to talk about depression or other serious illnesses. I first found that out when I had cancer. It was stunning to me that a few people I had known quite well simply disappeared from my life. Though I never heard any explanation from them, my wife and I believed they couldn’t face the risk of emotional involvement and possible loss.

   Depression adds another dimension. Many may feel helpless in the face of a friend’s pain and despairing mood. When I reached out for support, some friends were sympathetic but at a loss as to what they could do to help. And, of course, some friends are not in the habit of probing their own emotional lives and run from the idea of listening to someone else trying to go deeply into feelings. That’s a language they haven’t learned and never want to know.

2. One habit of my own depressed thinking was to assume that everyone I met had the same negative and contemptuous view of me that I did of myself. I projected my own shame into their minds and then retreated before the dislike I was sure they felt. It’s so strange to imagine that this could have been such a common occurrence, but it was. I stopped myself from reaching out because I “knew” these friends wanted to have nothing to do with me.

3. Then there was the isolating drive of depression, the belief that I was in too much pain to face anyone – too lost in despair to move. I believed I could survive only by cutting myself off from everyone, yet that only intensified the feeling of having nowhere to turn. I ruled out the possibility that anyone could break through the wall I’d put up around me. The result was that I went more deeply into despair. Eventually, the crisis passed, but it wasn’t the isolation that had helped me survive. That only increased the likelihood that I might push myself over the edge.

4. When feeling more numb than despairing, I could often get out and talk to people, even at social gatherings. But I became very nervous at what I might say. It wasn’t uncommon for me to make an attempt at getting to know someone or to get into a personal issue with a friend. But the words I found myself speaking were not at all what I intended. They had an edge to them, putting a jab into each pleasantry, souring a compliment with a sarcastic tone, or pouring out so much so fast that I sounded impossibly egocentric and uninterested in anyone but myself. I acted like someone I would never want to know. Of course, people could tell at once that I had “issues” and walked the other way.

5. So often, I had to mix with people when I wanted only to hide. I made it hard for anyone to find me, no matter how many people might be in the room or how prominent my role was supposed to be. Emotionally, I lost connection with what was happening and just watched it go by. I felt so small and tried to be invisible. If anyone asked me a question, I’d become tongue-tied, or, if I tried to say much, the words and thoughts came with painful slowness. It was impossible for anyone to talk to me.

6. At other times, anxiety and fear could hold me back from talking freely. Taking part in conversation was hard because I had to double-think everything I wanted to say. There was a danger in the simple spontaneity of conversation among friends – a danger for me of any uncontrolled talking. I had to reflect to get the words just so, and then would miss the right moment as talk flowed on to something different. It’s hard to imagine now, but talking freely felt risky, as if an inner violence might escape my control.

7. Apart from all this, there was the natural reaction anyone might have at suddenly hearing from me when I was in need of someone to talk to. Wrapped up in myself and in depression, as I was, my reaching out was an attempt to meet my own need in a one-sided way. Not only that, but my friends would not find me at all even if they wanted to listen and offer support. I wasn’t the same person because I was driven by the strange, isolating rules of depression. Even if I didn’t want to be hidden, I was nowhere to be found.

All this added up to a comprehensive strategy for remaining friendless. And that’s what it was – a series of my own actions to keep me isolated from the help that friends might offer and pull me out of the life I’d had with them. This hit me one day when I was the one who was asked to listen to a friend in the midst of a terrible depression.

I met him at a restaurant for lunch one day, and I could tell at once that he had changed in a way that made him hard to recognize. Of course, he looked and sounded the same, but there was nothing in his words or reactions that was like my friend. He was lost, partly in rage, partly in despair.

When I tried to tell him the deep sympathy I felt for what he was going through, that only made him angry. More than that, I felt a deep rage boiling inside him as his eyes stared through me with steel intensity.

It was especially hard to see him this way since I knew I was looking at myself.

What has your experience been in trying to reach out to friends when deeply troubled?

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The risk of being changed is one of the most frightening experiences we can face. — Carl Rogers: Breakdowns in Communication in On Becoming a Person

Accepting the risk of change has been a big step in recovery: risks are hard to take because of the fear they trigger. I’m still stumbling around with the acceptance of risk – one minute eager for anything new, the next minute fearful of every change.

I mentioned the analogy of prison when describing my rejection of the idea that depression was permanent and that I would always be in recovery. But ending the isolation of that prison brings up exactly that fear of change.

The prison constructed in my mind for self-confinement was a special place. It took care of many problems, especially involvement in the unpredictability of life:

• No way out, no struggle to escape because that choice didn’t exist.
• The cell might be scrappy in appearance but there was plenty of room for the limited movement I made from time to time.
• No colors visible in the dim light, no distracting associations to interrupt this solitude.
• All my simple needs were met. Mysteriously, I needed little food or exercise and could sleep as much or as little as I wished.
• No place to go, no person to meet, no anxiety or fear about new encounters.
• My feelings were so muted, I had no need to stir them up.
• Nothing to do, no need to self-evaluate or to dwell on my inadequacy to get that nothing done.
• No time, only a futureless, pastless present, hence nothing to regret about the past, nothing in the future to plan or feel anxious about. The future would never come.

Life was simpler, safe, predictable – even in the misery of depression. I knew what that was, and, at the time, that’s all I wanted to know. In my case, I never opened any door to get out of that isolation. The perverse comfort of confinement seemed impossible to leave when I was there. But one morning I would wake and find it was gone and knew I never wanted to go back. I kept working against a return, but then on another morning I would wake, or try to wake, and realize I was locked up again. There was no why for falling back into it and no why for getting out.

As I’ve described elsewhere, after the last five years of sustained, intense effort to get out of severe depression without going back, another sudden change has occurred. I feel again like a whole person, not the half-person who gets better for a time alongside the other half-person who is ready to take over my life without notice. This time I feel different, more fully alive. But I still have a long way to go.

There are many risks in going more deeply into the full reality of who I am. Primary among them is the risk of letting my feelings express themselves as they occur without the filtering and restraining that has kept them from others and even from myself.

Equally difficult, though, is the fear of experiencing other people for who they are, instead of the projections I read into their voices, words, eyes. Strangely, those projections always made the other person mine in a way. Disguising them in judgments of myself pulled them into depression. That helped to confirm what depression told me was true, at the cost of never seeing who was really talking to me. There was no other person, only me with a different face.

Breaking out of that wrapped up self, not only to let my own feelings flow spontaneously but also to experience fully the other person before me, continues to stir up the fears that were part of a life with depression.

There is the emotional vulnerability of being present, taking the good and bad as they come. That is no problem at all in a weirdly comfortable prison cell. Complete isolation, seeing the world only as it can be seen in the dark, removes the possibility of real interaction – and risk.

I’m reminded of a scene in a film version of Dickens’ Little Dorrit. The elderly Mr. Dorrit, having spent most of his life in debtor’s prison, is offered a chance to step through the prison door for a brief walk in the noisy, bustling London street. He looks out fearfully and then pulls back, politely declining the offer, and quickly flees back to his room.

I have yet to feel completely comfortable in a world with people and feelings I must accept just as they are. Now I’m doing that far more often than before, but old habits die hard.

Some words of Carl Rogers in A Way of Being
keep me thinking about what I’m trying to achieve and how difficult it is to sustain.

To really know what I am experiencing in the moment is by no means an easy thing, but I feel somewhat encouraged because I think that over the years I have been improving at it. I am convinced, however, that it is a lifelong task and that none of us ever is totally able to be comfortably close to all that is going on within our own experience.

Do these words resonate with you? Is this kind of struggle a part of what you’re going through now?

Photo Credit: Yakobchuk – Stockxpert

It can be so hard to get work done when a depressed mind is guiding you into a maze of mirrors. At each moment you seem to see clearly, but what you see is only your own image staring right back at you. I remember an incident, from quite a few years ago, when I was managing a board meeting of a group I had set up and run for some time. In a months’ long depression, I had been isolating myself from the other staff and neglecting key issues that needed to be addressed. That didn’t keep me, though, from imagining that everything was fine. Toward the end of the afternoon session, I suddenly felt the tone of the meeting changing. I became convinced that my fellow staff members – we’d been friends for years as well as colleagues – were turning things against me. Each of the three of them went out of their way to insert one-liners about this or that problem, and each comment seemed a needle of accusation that took me by surprise.

After trying to brush those barbs aside – though they were unsettling me deeply, I brought up a sensitive financial issue. One of the board members at once proposed something that shocked me – that the next step in dealing with that problem should require a detailed board review at the next meeting. I felt that like a total repudiation – they were telling me I was incompetent and needed to be managed by them! I shot back something about that not being a board function, it was strictly a matter the staff had to deal with. At that point I could feel the silent hostility around the table and was convinced my friends had betrayed me by trying to stage a board takeover of my job. Inside, I was crumbling, near tears and deeply wounded. But I brought the meeting to a close and tried to maintain a friendly atmosphere.

At the end of that day, I was on fire with hurt and anger. How could I work in the same office with these people? They had just stabbed me in the back. I kept going over details of the meeting, reliving what I felt were my worst moments of shame, listening again to the biting words that had cut me so deeply. I told my wife what had happened, but that didn’t end it. I couldn’t sleep – I relived each moment again and again, each hostile stare, each silent judgment. The next day I was desperate about going to the office but finally decided I had to confront my colleagues and demand an explanation for the humiliation they had engineered. When I got there I tried to get them together in a meeting right away, but they had already scattered out of the office on different projects. Given our schedules, we couldn’t meet for another two days. Two days! It was a tortured time. I couldn’t concentrate on work, I couldn’t sleep, I was burning with a sense of betrayal and unsure what they would try next.

At last, we had our meeting, and my three friends walked in all smiles and in their usual joking mood. I could hardly get myself to refer to the disaster of that board meeting, but I managed to get the words out. I couldn’t believe what had happened, I told them, it was one of the worst things I’d ever been through. What was that all about?

Each of them was silent for a moment, thinking. And then, one after another, they said:

“I’m not sure what you mean – what exactly happened?”

“Yeah, I was just trying to think back through the meeting – nothing jumps out at me.”

“I thought it was pretty positive. It’s always good to hash things through with them.”

For the first time since that day I began to have doubts.

“You know,” I said, “when X tried to set up that board review…”

“Oh – that. Well, I did think he took that pretty hard.”

“He took it hard? What do you mean?”

“Well, you kind of slapped him down, and I think he got upset about that.”

“Upset?” I said weakly – and then I could see X again quite clearly when we had both been standing in a buffet line after the meeting. He was busying himself with his plate and uncomfortable about looking at me. I could see a pained look in his eyes. Of course, I thought now, he had been embarrassed, even hurt.

I couldn’t believe it – and yet suddenly the huge emotional charge of that meeting just evaporated. I replayed the key moments of that afternoon again in my mind, and I could see what had really been happening. There had been no conspiracy, no betrayal, no vicious attack. My days of torture had been nothing but my obsession, my self-focused imagining and projection. And my mind has done this over and over again.

A depressed mind at work can be a disruptive thing. A straightforward business meeting can become a poisoned experience. I can hear or see only harsh judgment and condemnation all around the table, a perverse affirmation of my own sense of failure. I can make every encounter a judgment on myself instead of the real interaction of a number of people, all with their own issues that preoccupy their minds and feelings. No, it doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s hard to trust my own thoughts to process the world as it might be out there – because my work world may no longer be out there. It may be inside my mind and little more than a projection of shame and self-hatred. I struggle to catch myself when my assumptions about what’s happening start turning impossibly dark. The number of good days is growing, but it doesn’t take many bad ones to turn me inside out.

And what are your mental traps at work? What do you do to get out of them?