Understanding the Depressions. Wyn Bramley
spent the entire morning at the window gazing out at it. I stood very still, afraid that to move or breathe might disturb this vision of loveliness that I was encountering for the first time. Mum kept calling me away but gave up in the end.
Finally we were called to the table to eat. I tore myself from paradise, to find myself literally blind! I screamed for help while Mum fiddled with pans and plates. I screamed again: “I can’t see!” Continuing to serve up, mum said crossly “It’s just the snow. Stop being so highly strung about it.” I was terrified, had never heard of snow blindness, and assumed it was permanent. And no one seemed to care! Panic stricken, I protested but was sent to my room to lie down in the dark, purportedly to cure me, but I knew I was not believed (I was being a drama queen).
My terror in that dark room was twofold; one that I might never see again so could not survive alone, and two that my adored mother whom I trusted totally and on whom my whole life depended did not believe me. She had not calmed and comforted me: instead she’d mocked and scolded, sent me stumbling blindly to my room. I was utterly alone, cast out, and everyone thought I was just making it up. How could such things be possible? Without my mum, centre of my universe, there was no hope of rescue. The world was now as black inside as it was outside. I could only conclude that I had failed her in some monstrous way, let her down. It could not be down to her: she, the embodiment of perfection. The whole thing must be my fault for being highly strung.
It never occurred to me then that there might have been a failure of empathy on her part – or on my husband’s when the ten o’clock news proved more important than my feelings of abandonment when he was so late. Once again I was condemned for being highly strung, a drama queen. The pain was unbearable. Was I never to be forgiven?
My sight gradually recovered over the next couple of days, but my faith in my previously sainted mother, and the husbands for whom she was the template, did not. Hence my rage at the casual lateness that had started the row in the first place.
Would the acute Depression have happened had my husband been more understanding or said he was sorry for causing me distress? Was it healing of an old wound that I was looking for, not a grovelling apology, as he’d assumed? Or were my memories associated with the snow blindness – being banished, extinguished – just looking for an excuse to burst out? Was I yelling at my mother – “Understand me! Rescue me! Believe me!” – as much as at my husband? Staying late at the pub certainly provided a golden opportunity for such a re-enactment to occur.
Perhaps without knowing it I had hoped for a better outcome this time, and when I didn’t get it the old despair took over. Whichever way round it was, I could now see the join-up between present and past. Having come to an understanding of my acute little ‘d’, I gave that poor kid a great big hug before leaving her behind.
Personal History
Look at the diagram again. As year by year you grow into your teens, then young adulthood, your genetic propensities (dotted line) combine with your early formative experiences plus that acquired memory store and its effects on you, to shape what sort of decisions and relationships you are going to persevere with and which ones you will let go of. Accordingly a unique personal history accumulates. Your educational and job choices, love affairs, how you spend your money, whether and where you travel, what hobbies you adopt, will all be largely determined by those background factors. They’re not down to mere chance. You continue building up a unique history, a set of attitudes, aspirations, fears and so forth that will shape the outcome whenever you have to choose a direction, major or minor, along life’s journey.
Whilst your memory store is relegated to the past, its contents kept behind closed doors, this Personal History layer is always readily available to you (unless you suppress it). It’s a chronicle comprising your mistakes and successes; situations you ran from or faced; situations that you learned from or let hurt you, that you never want to encounter again or can’t wait to have a re-run of and do it better this time. The items in this your personal file mould your dreams of a future way of life. You will seek something already designed in your head as a result of your historical choices and reactions to events. You will draw yourself a picture of just what kind of life in the future is going to make you happy, and which kind you wish at all costs to avoid.
As a young adult, more experienced and reflective, you may recognise some uncomfortable patterns in that history. When you look back, you see how some modes of relating or behaving kept repeating, bringing about unwanted consequences, despite your feeling good about other areas of your life. Perhaps you seek help to investigate their origins. The insight so gained enables you not only to straighten out some things but also to sharpen up the picture of how you want to live and relate to others in the next period of your life, how you visualise permanence, maturity, your mid and later years. This personal history can be a treasure or a curse. It can be deployed by you as an aid to wise decision making or you can choose to just ignore it and blame external life events as the sole cause of any unpleasant situation in your current life. To make constructive use of your Personal History layer rather than letting it make use of you, requires you to be highly conscious of it. For this onion layer can be an aid or a saboteur, depending on whether it is owned and used constructively or denied and left to come back and haunt you when you least expect it.
Present Life
And so you set about designing your future settled life, and how to make it happen. If and when it does, this precious, hard won way of life needs to be actively maintained in order to protect it from being intruded into or sabotaged by any remaining “issues” from your Personal History, Memory Store or Upbringing layers. The insulation and preservation job of this layer – what in the diagram is labelled “Present Life” – is therefore represented in the diagram by a thick dividing line. This layer covers over and separates itself off from old scars or unhealed wounds, just as the real onion generates a thicker layer to protect itself from interior infection or damage. In an emergency, should the outer skin be ruptured, this layer has also to take over its vital protective operations in safely holding in the entire organism, so it has to be tough. The more turbulent your personal history the tougher this protective layer will need to be, for fear of further internal events spoiling your hard won stability – say marriage, children and job satisfaction.
The space between inner and outer skin
On the other hand, someone with a relatively untroubled background may seek something more exciting, risky even, in adult domestic life. They are more open to and interested in their past life, may even wish to continue with it. They may also long for life right outside their “onion”, seeing all the chances and choices afforded by the external environment. They have little need of rigid boundaries, feel them as prison walls. Their partner sees in all this nothing but threats to hard won happiness. Much difficulty and even episodes of Depression can arise in the home when two contrasting Personal History layers have wrought very different attitudes and expectations about coupledom, children, money and the rest. Despite long association, the pair may have been unable to come to a compromise about the thickness of that Present Life boundary. Instead of blaming one another for their differences, it might help if both parties inspected one another’s personal chronicle to enable them to understand why their partner is so recalcitrant, why one doggedly pursues a sense of security while the other hankers after more adventure, looking fearfully outward toward the barrier posed by the thickest layer of all, the outer onion skin.
The Outer Onion Skin
The outer skin of a real onion is the tough boundary between the onion’s entire interior and the outside, dangerous as well as nurturing, world. In human terms the outer skin represents the individual’s public “face”, the big chunk of them that other people first meet, oblivious to the deeper not so “tidied up” chunks inside. In both cases the “face”/skin has the responsibility for stopping any “untidy” material that will make them “look bad” from seeping out, and to prevent any external assault from the environment from breaking in and damaging vulnerable internal structures.
Let’s take an example. An otherwise contented adult is destabilised by a brother’s death. The brother had been someone with whom our subject had been in rivalry for years and whom they hated and loved in equal measure. The impact of this event from the outer