Understanding the Depressions. Wyn Bramley
and break into the memory store, reviving all the dormant conflicts safely locked there till now. Should the subject’s tough outside skin and the next “Present Life” layer beneath it not be robust enough to act as a buffer between the outside world and the deeper inner layers, our subject’s sense of a coherent Self is compromised and the chances of an episode of Depression or other mental health problem is increased.
Outside the onion
Our daily lives are full of pressures from every quarter. We have money worries, career demands, tricky relationships to negotiate, exams to pass, illnesses to battle with, elderly parents to care for, the question of what to get for dinner tonight, finding time to exercise. The list is endless. The pressures of themselves don’t cause the Depressions but they can weaken our resistance to it. It’s noticeable that some people appear to withstand enormous pressure and others can bear very little. Why?
You need to imagine the usual tumult going on inside the onion (fragile relations with the Self, memories threatening their return, problematic residues of childhood, unstable personal history, unhelpful genes) pushing outward, demanding expression and resolution in the external world. Simultaneous real life issues are hammering at that onion from the outside causing reactions from within. No wonder we sometimes need to grow a thicker skin!
More external pressure can be borne by the individual with strong onion layers – good current emotional attachments, a reasonably happy childhood, a relatively peaceful and secure memory store and lucky genes. Less fortunate folk appear more vulnerable to an outside observer because they’re necessarily working so hard at their inner, unresolved agendas most of the time that there’s little energy left over for handling external crises or day to day domestic ones. These remain low on their psychological “to do” list. Yet other people ignore a rumbling inner world (its origins too frightening to contemplate) so long as their present day relationships and social lives compensate for earlier deficits, deprivations and conflicts. Thus their energies are invested outside their onion or in the area between the two thick layers (The Present Life layer and the Outer Skin), in order to keep this state of affairs going. They appear more adept at dealing with the outside world, but who knows what’s going on inside that’s being so efficiently defended?
The Outer Skin and the second Present Life layer regulate the exchange of all these forces across their boundaries, in whichever direction they flow, trying to maintain sufficient equilibrium to keep the whole human onion intact, in other words mentally healthy. In a real onion the outer skin protects the inner layers from getting bruised and possibly dying, while stopping delicate internal structures that are trying to grow or heal, or infections wanting to spread, from spilling out. All living things and systems share this structure in varying degrees of complexity and we humans are no different.
It’s important not to see the concentric circles of the diagram as rigid impermeable walls. They are drawn this way solely for clarity and convenience. The contents of the spaces between the circles (see labels) flow into one another, competing or combining with each other, boosting or diminishing the effect of one another upon the “onion” as a whole. Even if you have a fairly contented life now and it seems unremarkable to you, a closer inspection of your “onion” is almost certain to reveal earlier tensions between the various forces crossing and re-crossing its layers, before that way of life got bedded in. Mira just could not see that all this onion stuff had any relevance for her.
Mira’s “boring” story
Some years ago I had a therapist friend who was rather rich and enjoyed the benefit of a live-in nanny whose multi-talented husband was the gardener and odd jobs man. The three of us women often met for coffee at my friend’s home. Mira liked to tease us, rolling her eyes and yawning ostentatiously whenever we talked about psychology and therapy. One day she challenged us. “Look here, I’m perfectly ordinary, happily married, got a nice job and lovely flat, no hang ups. All that stuff about childhood things forming you, it’s rubbish. Life is just luck, accident. I tell you what, ask me anything, go on, anything. You won’t find a single thing that influenced my journey through life. I’m psychologically the most boring but happy person you’ve ever met. My background is irrelevant to how I turned out.”
My friend, her employer and pal, picked up the gauntlet and this is what materialised.
Mira came from a big family, which she chuckled about. They were a superstitious lot, going back at least three generations. To my friend and I these family tales amounted to accounts of obsessive compulsive behaviours and they seemed rife. Aunts, uncles, cousins, all seemed affected though only one ever had a diagnosis and treatment. Learned responses or genes? These behaviours were regarded as dotty and tolerated by all, frequently joked about. Mira too found them amusing, not at all worrying. A typical story was the one about Auntie Iris who was summoned for jury duty and refused to enter the courtroom before she’d polished all the brass door knobs. As he left the court the judge was alleged to have commented approvingly on their shine!
Mira grew up with several brothers and sisters in a warm household, her parents happy together though Dad was always jittery, worrying all the time about his job running his lordship’s stables. Eventually he took early retirement and devoted himself to his garden and his own horse. Mira adored him and admitted it upset her whenever he “fussed and bothered over every detail, getting more and more wound up”. Nevertheless she felt obliged to go along with the family myth, at least outwardly, that this was just a bit of eccentricity. Like everyone else she tried to jolly him out of it. Her siblings were happy, but “fusspots” as well. Her mother was the only really calm one and she and Mira got on well.
No obsessional thoughts or behaviours (as defined by my friend and I, not Mira) troubled Mira until she reached her teens and school exams. She was bright so was encouraged (pressured?) to try for a prestigious university but she’d never felt herself to be intellectually inclined. Boyfriends and the social world into which she was pitched at the same time all conspired to stress her. Only home and family felt safe. Each time she made forays into the wider adolescent world, tried to compete, as she put it, she felt anxious and miserable and began using ritualistic (she called them “peculiar and daft”) behaviours to relieve her tension. Having subliminally learned from years of watching her dad, she must have recognised the link between the pressures of conventional achievement and her “weird” rituals, for she found herself withdrawing from all the expectations placed upon her. She preferred to live quietly, tending and riding the family horse, and baby-sitting for pocket money.
In time she took a childcare course which she loved. She didn’t date until she met her husband through her church, and they went to live in a quiet village away from the hurly burly of the market town where she grew up. All her rituals vanished.
“You see, I told you, boring story,” Mira triumphantly proclaimed.
My therapist friend would not give up. “OK, so your life has turned out nicely, just the way you wanted it, but have you asked yourself why? Given what you’ve just told us, think of the different ways your life might have gone. What if your genetic proclivity to “fussing” had been stronger, or your childrearing less loving and supportive? What if your mum hadn’t offset the model laid down by your dad? Can’t you see that your nice family provided the conditions for you to grow into someone decisive, someone with the confidence to contravene the plan laid down for you by school and your peers? You broke the mould without feeling a failure – how many people can do that? That choice says a lot about your good relationship with your Self. And that in turn is down to your folks and your capacity to make good use of them, not luck!”
Mira pulled a face and my friend, a professional lecturer as well as a therapist, pushed on.
“Think about becoming a teenager, Mira. Without being consciously aware of it at the time, you must have been affected by all those memories of your dad’s sufferings, how as a kid you couldn’t really help; but you were here for him now and needed things to stay like that. At the same time some part of you recognised your propensity for reacting to stress the same way he did, and what it had cost him. Rather than label yourself a misfit, a failure, as he had, you confidently rejected the ambitious future others expected of you. Also, of course, not leaving for university or getting married early meant you could stay with