V The important Question: What Are You All About?

(This is part 5/5 and a continuation of the blog post “Why Some People Never Get Depressed,” a comment on Geoff Watts’  article of 1/31/12 in the BBC Online Magazine. The last sentence of part four was:

… I suggest that no cause has been found because no one has thought to investigate whether these people lack a healthy Sense of Self!

Yes resilience is an important factor. But to be resilient, you need a strong inner “home” or “haven” to go into and bounce back from. A solid, stable inner core of self-hood.

People can live without a Sense of Self for as long as their whole life. Then, as they get older, their physical and mental system begins to fail due to a constant abuse of their strength for the need to keep up appearances. Their lack of Sense of Self finally takes its toll, and the weak spots show. This is where people get Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and similar diseases: they have become too weak to keep up the level of performance that used to cover up their real quest. They break down to their original emptiness inside as there is no strong Sense of Self to catch them.

This and many more ailments are partly the result of a lack of Sense of Self. I believe we can no longer say that we ’do not know’ because the reason is here before you.

Peering into the brain is one way to look at things, and it has brought us great knowledge, but we must not forget the bigger picture. A person’s degree of susceptibility to depression depends on the way she deals with her daily circumstances. What are we all about, is the ultimate question. What is our motivation with the seemingly trivial goals we have. Are we just satisfied with a good result or do we experience an extreme exaltation; are we just disappointed when the result of our actions is negative or do we experience the defeat on an existential level? These personal circumstances, this personal history are hard to map out and therefore hard to recognize as all having a similar function. But once we can label their functionality they become recognizable and once they can be identified they can be managed.

This is what my method does for people, label that what so far has not had a name.

In order to help a person with depression, we need to look at the whole person and ask “What is he or she all about? What ultimately motivates this person? Is this person seeking a Sense of Self which, at the crucial moment, never developed in a healthy way so there is a never-ending quest to fill that void? And is this person depressed because of feeling there is no hope for even be working on that quest?”

This concludes the series of 5 Blog posts on Why Some People Never Get Depressed.
I invite you to read more about the background of this view on Depression at www.healthysenseofself.com