Therapy day. Angst day. Hip hip hooray.

One thing we talked about was my theory that depression comes from the mind responding to trauma by flooding itself with the equivalent of a psychic anesthetic. This is not the warm happy everything is okay and I am so relaxed kind of anesthetic. (Trust me, I’ve had that, and it’s marvelous.) This is the cold, numbing, paralyzing kind of anesthetic that you dentist might use so he can take out your wisdom teeth.

And it does its immediate job : it numbs you from the pain so you can function. And in the normal course of events, your mind would heal over time, just like a broken leg. And like said leg, there would be times where there was pain, but the pain would be manageable and eventually you would be back to normal, healthy again.

But what happens when the trauma is so severe, the mind simple can’t heal itself without help? If, for whatever reason, help never comes (like, say, it happened when you were so young, you didn’t have the words to ask for help, let alone know how), then your mind copes whatever way it can and, like an untreated broken limb, puts itself back together in random, unhealthy, even disabling ways that leave you crippled for life.

And all the while, the brain keeps itself going by keeping itself numb.

And this numbness makes it hard to cope with life. You can’t feel your way through things like other people do. You can’t rely on your reflexes, your instincts, or your intuition. They are too distant to be trusted.

Instead, you develop what you do have access to : your abstract reasoning mind. You learn to think, learn, understand, and retain. If you’re like me, you also learn to examine, compare, analyze, and synthesize. Or you might learn to try to contact the alien planet where your emotions live through art.(Yo. ) Whatever form it takes, you are like a blind person developing their other senses in order to compensate for the one they are missing. You become, for lack of a better term, intelligent.

But you are still numb. Life is still harder for you than it is for others in ways that defy articulation. Things that come naturally to people with a more balanced and functional emotional array need to be explained to you. Everything has to be made to work with your remaining faculties.

This furthers your intellectualism. When all you have is a hammer, the whole world starts to look like a nail, and when all you have is your intellect, the whole world looks like a puzzle to be solved.

But it isn’t. It’s the approach you are forced to take given your limitations. You have to keep going through life as though your intellect is all you need, but it’s not enough. So you keep falling down and running into things.

You are physically clumsy because you do not have access to the kinesthetic instincts and hardwired programmed needed to be physically adept. You are socially awkward because you don’t have access to your social instincts either. You try to understand everything via that excellent mind of yours, but the world is not school, and you need so much more.

All this leads to further psychic trauma. And how does your mind handle that?

You get even more numb.

This is what “retreating into your mind” really means. The world gets further away from you as you become more numb. You withdraw from the world by withdrawing into yourself and your cloak of ice. This numbs you from the pain and lets you function a little, but when that numbness gets too much, you find even the simplest things hard to do and you are, officially, depressed.

But it’s worse than that. All that numbness leaves you feeling very, very cold inside. Without access to the positive, motivating inputs of life, your unmet emotional needs grow until they are a vast void within you. The warmth can’t get in. Nothing can penetrate that numbness. The light and warmth of the world are out there, waiting to be experienced, but the deep bone numbness keeps you from feeling it at all.

And so you feel very, very alone. Doesn’t matter what it out there or who would love a chance to get close to you and bring you the warmth you need so badly but cannot receive. You tell yourself that nobody loves you, nobody cares about you, everyone hates you, and so on because that is what is feels like. That’s the only interpretation of your emotional state that makes sense.

Because you don’t know you are numb. So if you do not feel it, it must not be there.

And being numb has another effect : stimulation hurts. Like slapping your foot when it’s gone to sleep. Anything but very low levels of physical stimulation is interpreted as pain by your numbed out brain. This alone is enough to make us withdraw from everyday life. The world is a House of Usher nightmare when you are numb.

That’s why all depressives self-medicate. For some it’s the obvious stuff, like drugs, liquor, sex, or food. But for others it is things like obsessing over a particular topic so deeply that it shuts out everything else (I call this ‘falling down the microscope”). Or it might be obsessively exercising, or burning through short term relationships for the “falling in love” high, or if you are me, obsessively exercising your brain.

Feed your gut and feed your mind, and don’t you dare tell me you are full.

So that’s us… the numb people. The people with the busted antennas. The depressives, all of us, from those who use to those who drink to those who eat to those who cut to those who just stay angry all the time.

Whatever your poison, we are all addicts, and we are all numb.

And the only cure for that is opening the door to let the sunshine in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.