Why feeling misunderstood is normal in depression

I love R U OK Day.  I love the theme, and I also love that days like this are about changing the culture within our culture to be more compassionate towards the many who struggle.

But there is something that the world just doesn’t get when it comes to a person suffering a mental health dilemma.  When we’re anxious or depressed, from our own internal viewpoint, we see no empathy, we see no connection, and we see no interest in our world helping us.  We truly feel either somewhat or very unloved and abandoned.

Immediately we are in a depression, and sometimes it can be spiritual attack that takes right there in an instant, or a triggering of some kind, THEN we know this.  It’s profound how isolated and foreign to the world we feel when we’re struggling.  And it doesn’t really matter a great deal if our environment is supportive or not at that point.  In many ways, we’re unreachable.

This is something as clinicians we’re very clear about.  You cannot assume that you have the faintest chance of understanding someone until, by chance, they say to you that they feel understood.  Until then, you’re in the dark.

When you feel a blend of confusion, overwhelm, and that you’re misunderstood, especially if your hope has evaporated, and all joy and peace has gone out the window, you feel as if you are beyond help and a complete burden on anyone who would try to help.  This is a huge barrier to overcome, but those who do help aren’t daunted by this sort of barrier, because they themselves have been there before.  Those who do help are the wounded healers in the Henri Nouwen tradition of practice.

But what the world needs to know and understand and accept, is feeling understood is the primary unconscious hope of the person who’s struggling.  But their default is, “How on earth can my world understand me, when I don’t understand me, what’s going on, and what to do about it?”

When we’re depressed, we feel shut in.  We feel cornered and isolated.  All energy has been drained and despair fills the void hope left behind.  You suspect you’ve been running ‘strong’ for too long, you fear you’ve run out of steam, and worries for burnout are real, and worst of all, you just don’t know how you’re going to get the time and space to recover.

Fear runs deep in the overwhelm.  And sorrow for hopes that seem impossibly far off.

You dare not hope that your world, or important people in your world would understand, but you desperately need them to, so that leaves you in a place of expecting someone to reach out and be your miracle.  This is a desperately sad reality destined for disappointment.

Whether your world or those within your sphere understand or not, again, is irrelevant.  Until the person with depression is themselves convinced that they’re understood, the default is that you don’t understand.

It’s important for those helping, for those wounded healers, to know this, and to operate with this knowledge front of mind—not as a put off, but as the very angle of approach that’s needed.  To hear something like this:

“Hey, I know that you must feel that I can’t possibly understand you right now, and I accept that I can’t really know, but I am interested, and I do want to be there for you as you may need.  Please know that I’m not forcing my way in, but I’m here for you to sit with you, to help you, and if I could, to offer some words of encouragement and love.  Would that be okay?”