Turns out Doctor K and I have similar thoughts on this subject.
And trust me, I’ve tried
I’m not even faintly surprised to hear him say there is a direct correlation between IQ and depression. That sure as fuck tracks for me.
And as patient readers know, I agree that the problem is that we high IQ types have a strong tendency to try to use our powerful brains to do everything, even things for which they are the wrong tool entirely.
It’s like, I am not saying that isn’t a really great hammer you have there. I am just saying there are way easier ways to toast a sandwich.
Personally, I think there might be a correlation between high IQ and this ability he mentions to shut your emotions off and/or shunt them to the side.
Perhaps that is the very thing that allows for the sort of mental clarity needed to focus in on the symbolic logic that is the foundation of modern intelligence and get good at thinking in those sorts of abstractions.
Maybe too good at it, in fact.
Because being able to shut off your emotions can mean never having to deal with them. And over time you accumulate this vast trove of unprocessed emotions, each of which costs a tiny bit of your mental resources to keep frozen and therefore each of which slows down and drains your mind your mind just a little.
Not hard to see how a habit of doing that with your emotions leads to a mind increasingly burdened with all this dead weight until eventually it can’t even maintain mood any more and depression sets in.
This is also the root cause of depression’s sense of numbness. When you get into the habit of deep-freezing your emotions, it starts cutting you off from the emotional reality of the world and you can no longer receive the inputs of love, pleasure, acceptance, warmth, and so on that the human mind needs to survive.
It isolates you from your very humanity, and thus, the humanity of others. You are severely dissociating and you don’t even know it. It’s been so long since you felt things fully that you’ve forgotten that it’s even a thing.
And that’s pretty fucking depressing.
For me, it all started with dissociation and the trauma that was causing it. When I was being raped I escaped the situation by fleeing in the only direction open to me – inward. I dissociated from what was happening HARD and to tell you the truth, I have never fully left that place I fled to way back then.
I guess that deep down, my primitive mind is not convinced that it’s safe yet.
Not sure what I can do to convince it. I suppose a very strong source of emotional warmth could do it, if it was reliable.
But it’s not like I can just buy an emotional space heater.
I suppose that’s what religion is for. But that’s not an option for me.
Unless I invent my own….
More after the break.
Still more from Doctor K
Another thing Doctor K says in the video I embedded in part 1 is that us high IQ types with depression end up making things worse for ourselves because we think that we should be able to solve our depression ourselves.
And if you think you should be able to do something but can’t, then like Doctor K says, you think that you are a failure.
And that resonates so hard with me. I have felt that way for so long. Like I should have been able to get over my depression by now.
Based on what, though? Nothing rational, let alone scientific, that’s for sure.
Take it down to its essence and you find it’s based on nothing but the cock-eyed self-confidence that comes from being able to overcome so many things quite easily with this giant overcharged brain of mine.
As if my depression was an academic question that would crumble when faced with the almighty power of my towering intellect.
Um no. And I wasted a lot of years of my life in an irrational attempt to out-think my mental illness instead of realizing that I was going about it the wrong way from the very beginning and that I had to stop thinking about it and start feeling about it.
Ever since I fully accepted that truth, I have been doing much better. I am concentrating on strengthening and expanding my capacity for feeling my emotions in realtime, and that is also unlocking a lot of those old emotions…
…AHEM…. those old emotions that I have stored up over the years.
And every one of those I can thaw out and experience and release gives me back the mental resources it was using, plus the little bit of myself that was cut off from the rest of me when the chill set in.
But back to feeling like a failure. As patient readers know, I struggle with a massive amount of guilt over how my life has turned out versus all that “potential” that has always been hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles.
Because you see, the greater your potential is, the bigger a loser you are when your life turns out to be a great big nothing!
It’s the subtle oppression of high expectations.
And while I am over the big hurdle when it comes to negating my self-loathing and opening myself up to the much healthier self-pity, those old emotions (NOT DO SONG AGAIN) are still there, struggling against their bonds.
I may not believe them any more, and I don’t let them wreck my self worth any more, but they are still there, straining at the bars of their cages.
I still want to find a good way to handle the part I am left with, which is the feeling of intense grief bordering on stark horror that I feel when I try to process all those empty years and where they have left me now.
I am trying to see them differently. Not as lost years, but as the long larval stage of what I will become when I finally emerge from my chrysalis.
I don’t know what I will be when I am done.
But I know it will be amazing.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.