September 2018 – Trained or Untrained: Depression Changes by Our Work
The article for this month’s newsletter was prompted by a remarkably wise quote from an old action film, which asserts that we are only “tough” by virtue of training. It’s an insight that is true of so many areas in life, that our brilliance is a small part talent and a large part hard and diligent and intelligent work. The same is true of depression, which doesn’t get healed by grace or by hope, but rather by training in particular skills (I define four) to build up a self which supplants depression with aliveness. This might sound like a downer bit of wisdom, but the more we embrace it, the more we heal, and the more stable that healing becomes going through our lives.
Trained or Untrained: Depression Changes by Our Work
You find wisdom in the oddest places. In the brutal 2004 action film, “Man on Fire”, Denzel Washington plays John Creasy, a burnt-out ex-CIA operative, hired as a bodyguard to protect a 9-year-old girl (Dakota Fanning) in kidnap-prone Mexico City. She lures him out of his nihilism with her vivaciousness, ability to be kind, and willingness to learn from him. He begins to train her in swimming, and after a montage of him showing her how to have no fear of the starting pistol, elated at having her best time, she says, “I’m tough, Creasy!” He smiles but says, “There is no such thing as tough. There is trained and untrained. Now, which are you?”
What a thing for a dark shoot-em-up to say. We can be prone to such ideas as luck, or fortune, or inherent immutable qualities, but what Creasy is saying is that what we might try to own as a quality of being is actually a quality of practice. Or, more precisely, of work. If you have mastered some skill in your life, you know by your experience that it came through training: diligent, dedicated, disciplined repetition of an activity, with a willingness to pay attention to and tolerate mistakes, and use them as feedback to correct our next practice and continue on. Although talent may be native, mastery is earned.
The same idea is equally true when addressing the healing from depression. For mild, situational depression—say, the loss of a wished-for promotion that doesn’t crush our sense of self or the world—it does basically pass like a common cold. But for more serious and entrenched depression, none of us are “tough”, and all of us must “train” to heal.
What is training, then, when it comes to depression?
Training for “non-depression”, which can best be named as “aliveness”, is composed of a few core skills, being: accurate mapping, mindfulness, dynamic balancing, and faith. These are the essential collection of skills that make up a “trained” human who is learning this aliveness, which entwine with each other that, similar to the combined skills the girl needs to be a trained simmer, come together synergistically to enact that aliveness.
Mapping: This is a cognitive or analytic skill, a developed ability to situate oneself and one’s experience within a larger field of experience. Depression maps the world in a particular, defined way: connections are impossible, resources are absent, the self is powerless, and the future is empty. But that is not a map drawn from actual surveying work; rather, it is a dogmatic assertion of reality. We have to learn to spot that “Well, it just is!” mapping of depression, and look into the world and ourselves to discern where we actually are, given what we observe around us.
Mindfulness: Mapping requires mindfulness, though, because without the capacity to actually look objectively around us, we are confused by the “Just ‘cuz!” assertions of depression. Mindfulness is essentially the skill that is developed through mindfulness practice (meditation) that allows us to, more and more (lap by lap), hold a clear, objective sense of the world around and within us. Without this skill, we cannot see the depressed world with enough clarity to be able to discover where it is phony, and therefore what the real world actually is.
Dynamic Balance: But to practice and develop in mindfulness, we must be able to dynamically (ongoingly, not simply a one-time act) balance our own nervous systems so that we’ll not be so overwhelmed that we can’t pay attention. So, we have to practice and learn skills of self-regulation, of spotting when we are out of balance and then return to a balanced state. If we are scared and frozen, we must train to use tools (e.g., contact with friends, exercise of the body, art, etc.) to return our systems to a flexible and buoyant state.
Faith: All of which requires faith, but faith understood as a willingness to be open to the possibilities of goodness and growth, in areas where there is no proof one way or another. We might think that faith (especially because it is so often phrased religiously, as in, “He’s a man of faith”) is simply a given quality, like the girl’s conception of “toughness”. But faith in the sense I’m using it, is something that is developed through practice, through training, as a volitional choice to stay open to possibilities, rather than to close up in despair. Without that skill, the other three are all but impossible, because our minds will keep shutting them down (like the girl if she held the anti-faith of, “I’ll never learn to be a good swimmer”) as futile.
So, these are the core skills that we must develop to supplant “depression” with “aliveness”, and as far as I’ve found, they are non-negotiable. Like the girl learning swimming doesn’t have the choice to not practice, say, breath control, we depressives don’t have the choice to not work on these four skills. And as you know, if you’ve come a ways with your own depression, this is work, and whatever we’ve gained in our recovery from depression is earned, not a matter of luck. The more and more we embrace this kind of workist attitude towards depression, the more effective our therapeutic work will be, and the more depression will be healed, and denied recurrence, by dint of our training.
