Of all the clinical issues addressed here, depression is the most common, well-known, and talked about.
It is extremely easy to identify and diagnose. If you go to a psychologist and tell them you lack motivation, feel lethargic, have a loss of interest in fun activities, and just want to be at home in the dark to feel bad, they will begin scratching out a diagnosis for depression.
Longer than two weeks? “Major Depression.” Longer than two years? “Persistent Depressive Disorder.” Due to events in the last three months? “Adjustment Disorder with Depressive Features.” The treatment will invariably include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a referral for medication, and life-skills management.
Depression is different for everyone, but for codependents, it is like emotional hypochondria. Keeping yourself stuck in it is how you stay in control.
Knowing that you have the full support and attention of people who will never leave your side, saying things like “Nothing works”, “Nothing helps”, and “Go on without me” are all emotional boomerangs. They dramatically reject support knowing full well it will come flying back with a fury.
In certain abusive households, depression can be used as a weapon to control interactions and exact epic guilting campaigns against offenders. This provokes those who “truly love” them to jump through any hoop they can find to please, impress, amuse, and uplift the attachment figure who has nothing to feel good about. This kind of depression becomes an extremely comfortable basis for a personality.
Getting better would require the horrific loss of power over others to be affectionate on command. This is hard codependency, and reminiscent of the waif described in Understanding the Borderline Mother.
How did they get that way? Sometimes, children of more aggressive abuse learn that depression can bring out the nurturing side of their caretaker. If they dare raise their head in joy, excitement, self-confidence, or externalize any positive experience their abuser cannot identify with, they will immediately be knocked back down with sniping criticisms, arbitrary housework, beatings, and condescending behavior.
If they instead slump their shoulders and never say anything at all, they can become intermittently invisible. When they complain about feeling horrible, the abuser sometimes identifies with them and expresses warmth. Depression is a shield before it becomes a sword.
It doesn’t take much for the depressive survival strategy to sink into your bones. It becomes real. Low energy and low self-esteem are fully supported by how your codependency makes you feel about yourself. Your inability to soothe or stabilize your caretaker is internalized.
You believe you are a failure, are ashamed, and sink ever deeper into a bottomless hole of self-loathing. You were trained to believe that feeling happy is dangerous. Even if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t dare be happy. It would be an affront to the person you love but cannot help, save, or please. Depression simply becomes who you are.
This short section does nothing to give depression the full attention it deserves, but instead seeks to offer a novel insight unique to codependents. A soft codependent can sometimes discover a complete, undiscovered personality underneath all the darkness. The most powerful thing they can do is get away from the people and places that make depression the most reasonable state to be in, and start over.
————Treatment————
If you are interested in attacking depressive thoughts and beliefs head-on, you will do no better than to get a copy of Feeling Good by David Burns. His smile hasn’t faded since the first edition. If you do the exercises, you will understand why. Another outstanding classic is Mind Over Mood by Dennis Greenberger.
Start engaging in physical actions that resemble strength. Just sitting up straight and walking with good posture (chin up, shoulders back) can improve symptoms of depression. You can start right now.
You can also get yourself to the gym, yoga class, or start walking. Anything that counts as exercise will improve symptoms of depression. Mindfulness meditation is another free depression management strategy you can employ immediately. You are already sitting and staring at stuff half the time anyway, might as well let it work for you.
If you are codependent and depressed, you may benefit from asking yourself, “What does being depressed protect me from?”