Clinical Depression and the Loss of Love
Most of us would agree that the emotion of love is an essential ingredient for healthy development. When love is absent or distorted in the context of unhealthy relationships, unhealthy personality and interpersonal consequences are for certain. The unfortunate reality is there are many parents raising children who have been exposed to unhealthy loving in their own lives. Without consciousness, in many cases, they replicate with their children the conditions they themselves have experienced. This is how unhealthy personality and interpersonal pathology is passed on from generation to generation.
When a person, deprived of adequate healthy loving, makes it to adulthood they are subject to depression as the emotional expression of their loss. Of course, this expression of loss is not usually conscious in its particulars to the depressed individual. Adulthood depressive illness masks the underlying hurt and resentment at having been deprived of adequate loving in their earlier lives. Now as an adult, the depressed person resorts to a myriad of efforts to obtain what has been lost in the context of current adult relationships.
The immediate and most pervasive problem for the depressed person is the impossibility of obtaining the devoted loving that was lost in childhood and adolescence now in adulthood. Plainly put, other adults are generally not forthcoming. Some because of their own unhealthy experiences of early loving. Others expect adulthood loving to be an exchange of giving and receiving rather than a devoted one-way offering. Among depressive persons, the disappointments this failure to procure adulthood loving devotion from others creates is common and emotionally painful. The end result is a depressive lifestyle where efforts to procure the love lost are now in the form of manipulations and attempts to control other potentially giving adults. Regardless of the efforts made, it is inevitable that the depressed adult will compile more and more hurt, disappointment, frustration, and anger.
When the depressed person finally makes it to psychotherapy after distractions of life, compulsive behaviors, antidepressant medications, and failed love relationships have left them dissatisfied and hopeless, the prospect of an honest examination of how they’ve been living is possible. The first step in the depressed person’s emotional recovery is to understand the impossibility of getting what was lost earlier in life. More specifically, the love they were supposed to get growing up. This realization, if permitted, will induce a grief response. At this point in the depressed patient’s psychological treatment, helping the patient tolerate this realization and working-through the resulting grief is the primary responsibility of the psychotherapist. Efforts to avoid, evade, distort or deny the importance of this experience should be compassionately confronted. There will be plenty of opportunities to listen to and understand the unhappiness and unfairness of earlier losses of love in the patent’s life.
At some point when the grief subsides and the possibility of change emerges, the formerly depressed patient will have an opportunity to consider an alternate way of life. Developing the ability to emotionally take care of themselves instead of dependent frustrated demands on others to fulfill lost love is a realistic alternative with important future benefits. When the psychotherapy moves in that direction, formerly depressed patients learn the importance of identifying internal resources and releasing their innate ability to provide for themselves and create an adult life that is fundamentally loving. Released from the tragic burden of lost love, it is quite gratifying to witness this transformation in patients.
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Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst, author of Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Love Life Consultations 212-875-0154 or drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com.
