The Other 167 Hours

Finding Hope Through Humility

I think I’ve learned something about depression, something that surprises me.  When we are depressed, although we may report low self-confidence, there is one area in which we all are very confident. We are very confident that our depressive view of the world, self, and future is The Truth.

Yes, we may depress ourselves more by telling ourselves we have no reason to be depressed, but our mood indicates otherwise. On some level, somewhere, among all those lightening fast interpretations our brain is making from the data around us, we have a strongly held belief that feeling depressed is the right conclusion given all that we know (a key phrase I’ll come back to.) It seems so true that to not believe it and feel happy would be kind of… crazy. Who would deny reality that much?

That is what makes depression such a formidable foe. We have built into us a strong drive to feel as though we are living in a way that is consistent with reality. To do less threatens our sense of integrity. When we do not integrate the data around us, we lose integrity.

The same drive to keep ourselves sane also keeps us stuck in the depression we experience.

Here is how the experience is perpetuated and grows more intractable. All of our memories are emotionally indexed. We feel an emotion and all of the file drawers with experiences of that emotion come flying open, readily accessible for us to peruse. The emotion also impacts which piece of data in a complex environment we pay attention to. It affects our interpretation of events. So in multiple ways, our depression, like a political party, once in power, uses all its resources to stay in power. It selects what we remember, what we notice, what doesn’t count as evidence and what does, and which interpretation to adopt.

The answer: we have to be willing to doubt what is so evidently true. Everything around us seems to scream that depression is the true and fitting emotion, given all the data. And maybe it is right, given all that we know at that moment. But, all that we know is not all that there is. Our brains will always be working with incomplete information. Realizing the inescapable ignorance we live and breathe in, being willing to doubt our interpretations, surprisingly, provides a path to hope.

Here is the script.

“It really feels like this mood is true, my interpretations are true and so depression follows logically. But, wait a minute… I don’t know everything. I don’t know that this is the complete picture. So I am going to be willing to doubt my depressive conclusions. I am going to be open to the idea that depressed interpretations and data are not all that is out there, other information and interpretations I can’t manage to grasp at the moment are never-the-less out there. Some of those alternatives are actually hopeful. As crazy, as it feels, I am going to doubt my depressive conclusions.“

I like to think of this doubting of my own interpretations as practicing a special type of humility, maybe the type of humility from Psalm 147.

The Lord sustains the humble but casts the wicked to the ground.

I, for one, do not think I would like being cast to the ground. Come to think of it, being cast to the ground is a pretty good description of what depression feels like. Yeah, I want to pick humility over that.