Does Our Depression Come From Feeling Unloved / Shame ?

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A New York Times article by a psychologist today was on how some people who are depressed don't respond to medication because they actually are dealing with profound feelings of shame from feeling ostracized and unloved from an early age.

The article is interesting for a number of other reasons: an unconventional therapy session that focuses on playing catch while talking and a theory of how some "secondary" emotions (like depression and anxiety) impede our ability to feel "primary" emotions (like anger and fear).

Here is the article:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/its-not-always-depression/?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad

How this resonated with me (just to give some personal examples):

I grew up in a household where I felt loved, but I definitely felt rejected by almost everyone else I encountered, in school and on the playground. I felt different and I had a lot of depression from an early age. Since discovering I have aspergers, I have lost some of my anxiety and found my anger again (and that's a whole different set of problems!)

Actually, this led me to think more about my anxiety, too. My anxiety (and mutism) has grown as I have become more aware of social cues, too, like my anxiety is really performance anxiety. When I just felt different but didn't know why, I was less anxious in social situations -- just oblivious and more scared of loud noises and the dark. But now I am no longer scared of the boogeyman but get scared when I see people I know are very talkative and who tell a lot of jokes walking toward me. It's seems to be because I know I am about to be given a very difficult test, one I may not be ready for at that moment.

Thank you very much for posting this link. I know people who have experienced exactly what this psychotherapist describes, and standard anti-depressants numb their lost/suppressed capacity to feel even more. Neglect and shame are powerful experiences for children, just as harmful as other forms of abuse, but often harder to recover from in therapeutic situations.

I'm glad this resonated. I feel like this may be a common experience for ASD folks, but I haven't seen anyone talk about it in the scientific literature in this way.

I'd be interested in hearing if this makes sense to other people, or if they feel that it doesn't really address their experience. I kind of feel like we need to reclaim how our experience is described and redefine the standard treatments. As adults, we need different things than children do and different things than most NTs do, too. But I only have my own experience to draw on, and I don't want to generalize based on myself.

This article resonated with me too as my father was absent and my mother preoccupied. I wouldn't have described it as shame, but upon reflection that is what I feel. Ashamed to be me. Because there is something unwanted about me.
It has always seemed obvious to me that I am depressed because my life is depressing.
I'm not sure about the treatment suggested in the article as it doesn't seem to be particularly effective.
I'll stick with the mind numbing chemical cocktail.

I was actually noted as showing signs of depression when I initially was diagnosed with ADHD in the second grade. I'm not sure if it was from underlying feelings of rejection and shame. I've always felt loved by mother mother, but my father was always traveling when I was younger. Beyond that, we've never been able to bond much and I've always felt a general uneasiness around him. When it came to peers, yeah I consistently felt rejected throughout elementary. I wouldn't consider myself depressed at this point, but I definitely do carry a considerable amount of shame.

Most of my 'depression' finds its roots in ostracism from others. Being treated as if I don't matter doesn't exactly inspire me to break into a spontaneous Happy Dance.

[quote="dryope"]

I grew up in a household where I felt loved, but I definitely felt rejected by almost everyone else I encountered, in school and on the playground. I felt different and I had a lot of depression from an early age. Since discovering I have aspergers, I have lost some of my anxiety and found my anger again (and that's a whole different set of problems!)
/quote]

That is my experience exactly! Right down to the getting angry over having Asperger's for how it has affected my life and the things it kept me from doing or getting. I need to read the article. My depression isn't crushing to where I can't get out of bed in the morning or function during the day at all, but it does leave me feeling bummed out and I am functioning at less than 100 percent.

Some of my anger and depression right now I think come from the midlife crisis. Even though I am married, my marriage doesn't have a lot of physical intimacy (it is below average) and I realize that my chances of ever having a normal sex life are pretty much gone, unless somehow I end up divorced, and I love my wife and daughter too much to be the one to instigate that.

Forget about the "below average"--is your intimacy satisfying to YOU? I hope it is. Is the "lack of intimacy" a result of busy schedules? You don't have to make love 3.4 times a week in order to fulfill society's conception of "average."

Forget about what Dr. Kinsey and Masters and Johnson say--we're individuals, not statistics. This is from a man who was absolutely fascinated with Dr. Kinsey's books at one time.

I once had a girlfriend who wanted me to make love to her six times a week!

I'm a normally horny guy--but when someone puts me on a schedule like that, my desire for intimacy declines!

I actually took anti-depressants last year after an ER visit and even though all the experts said they usually work, I just felt MUCH MUCH worse on them. I actually stopped because I had an uncontrollable crying fit in public followed by several more private ones.

I believe (OK, I pretty much know for sure) my depression is the result of a lifetime or not only bullying but ostracization. I was always the black sheep of my family (both sides) and was frequently told privately and publically that I was an as*hole, waste of oxygen, didn't deserve to live from kids, many who BARELY KNEW ME. Add to that my Aspie photographic memory and my literal thinking and I must have internalized those feelings: why else would they say it. This continues onto adulthood. Despite being well liked it seems every friend I make runs away suddenly and without warning even though I am careful not to show my obsessions. Everyone tells me "it's their loss" but I am only human and desire companionship and love like everyone else. My mother became my "friend" as a child because she was heartbroken at how nearly every kid I met was so cruel to me.

It's almost scary reading this thread and how it seemingly plagiarizes my internal thoughts. I should also mention how it explains why until recently I had a very nasty temper: it was my way of feeling "good".

I have felt unloved since at least 1974. I feel I have never had friends after 1977 but I had plenty of freeloaders who only wanted me around if I had things and resources that they wanted. Who are they? That would be the allistics I was surrounded by. My family was useless my father was a violent alcoholic and my mum had issues with her borderline personality disorder and my two brothers who never had a beating and my sister who my mum preferred along with my eldest brother. I thought I was hated. I even went 14 years without any intimacy as such but my mum did take me to see Grease in 1978 because I had a liking for the music of the 1950s such as Elvis, Buddy Holly etc and Rock n Roll revivalist subculture but that was about it. My dad would beat me for the most stupid things which of most these traumatic experiences were denied and my mum still denies threatening to kick me out of my home in 1979. Even during the'best of times' my mum used to say she only wanted me to live like I had some terminal illness or something like that as though she had Munchausers syndrome by proxy so I never developed self esteem and that is an alien concept.

I was and still am ostracised and excluded and most others still think that those with visible conditions and people with IQ below 70 and have not experienced such horrors as worse off and have been bullied by allistics for a long time even at school to the point I will never willingly let an allistic person who I don't know sit next to me on a bus or train or plane but at times it can't be helped when such a vehicle is packed with people. Schoolm life from 1977-83 was more like bear bating rather than an education and my exam results were predetermined and so were the classes as well. My mum and dad thought that I was a 'good school' better than the special needs system from whence I came from after being assessed by an educational psychologist as having an IQ of 137 on the Ravens Progressive Matix IQ test which was promptly ignored and I was put into the lowest 'sets' for school lessons so there I never had the opportunity to develop a self esteem and at the same time experiencing emotional abuse athome and witnessing my dad beating the s**t out of my mum and sister which has been described as trivial 36 years later. That secondary school was a failing comprehensive school just a stupid allistic school

I have also been told anything which can make me happy is out of the question because it is inappropriate back in 1987 -88 and after that another six years emotional abuse in a place that was called Reading Industrial Therapy Organisation in which If you had allistic levels of intelligence then you were not treated as a full human being but as an object and also taken for granted. I was even told I conteminated the place and this lead me to think incorrectly that I had radiation poisoning. The place which refferred me ther I only went there because I was experiencing psychotic symtoms which turned out to be temporal lobe epilepsy and the psychiatrist did say I was too old to receive affection from my family and had a too low emotional intelligence for a relationship so that meant I had to be treated like an object no one would tolerate an allistic person being treated like that so if I had and still have an EIQ of 27 which is well below the allistic level I shouldn't have been treated that badly nor put into the brutal place RITO which a mamber of staff threateened to sue me and I have had nightmares on and off for years due to the experiences I had experienced there. But I did have relationships of which the first one was inappropriate because I did not know how to say no as the woman was not really my type. The last one I met there only used me for the development of confidence and independence and she had stalker parents 'eww really creepy'.

I have never been put on psychiatric medications such as prozac but had so called talking theraies which were completely inappropriate and this was really bear baiting the aspie and I was not wanted there but was treated in a way which no one would have tolerated if it was an allistic using 'tough love' methods there was no love the staff, the psychotherapists and psychiatrist did not care just pretended and I did not see how paedophile-like grooming techniques work since society is so bad and afterwards there you would end up so what was the point? I didn't receive a diagnosis of anything mental heath related but they did my mum but she was not there. It was mainly group therapy which I was the only non allistic there and a lot of them tried to make me feel that I couldn't do any right and the psychiatrist had the cheek to say that I had fixed ideas so is it any wonder I feel about allistic people the way I do. I also have no faith in human nature.

http://autism.answers.com/autism-awaren ... ifferently

I do not know if anybody else here relates to this.

Depression for me results primarily from feeling like I don't have an outlet for things, feeling unable to communicate clearly or be heard, especially about things that are frustrating. Like in my job, we get a lot of mixed messages and contradictory expectations, and most of the time the communication only goes one way (mostly via email). Oh I can send emails back and address things but probably won't get a satisfactory response and nothing ever really changes. So the frustration just builds and builds and it weighs me down. I get really down from it, and so do my coworkers, so I've come to see it as a natural reaction to the culture of the company. At times when I finally get a chance to be heard about something, it invigorates me.

Strongly relate. Thanks for that link!

I guess I get caught up in statistics a lot because I want to believe that I am now as good as everyone else, since I wasn't for so much of my life. It seems to be the easiest way to measure if I have really overcome and become as good as others.

Thanks for sharing that link. I feel that this, while accurate, has a very NT-perspective. It lists the aspie traits the scientific literature is aware of and explains how they relate to depression. That is indeed helpful, but I feel like some key element is missing.

I'm not saying the "unloved/shame" element from the NYT article is it, though. I'm just not sure *what* it is. It's interesting to read different people's perspectives here to get a sense of how we think through these problems and what resonates with us, and what helps us. I do agree we will have different answers, but I like that we are exploring these issues together so we can see where we overlap.



Just speaking for myself, this seems to sum up a lot of how I felt as a child, and still feel. Now that I know why, I have a framework to put it in instead of trying to change myself to fit.

I'm not the problem: that's a freeing realization.

No, our depression comes from people posting idiotic counting threads on this website .....