I caught my depression and/or bad wiring in action today, and I figured it would write about it and thus catch it and put it in a jar (with airholes, natch) and then, of course, analyze the fuck out of it.

Look, you have your definition of fun, and I have mine. Mine just happens to include applying my vast and awe-inspiring powers of analysis to a new and interesting and potentially even fruitful topic.

I also really enjoy sorting things for some reason. I am not sure that fact is related but I decided to include it just in case.

Anyhow, fresh to my miscroscope today is the phenonemon from the title : scrunch and repress. That when an unpleasant or otherwise unweclome thoughts happens in my head and instead of dealing with it I just scrunch it down and push it into the background of my mind via my psychological oubliette.

Now it’s been more than a century since Freud, so the repression part of it is a well known phenomenon. And we all know it’s bad. We know that it is better to deal with things in the here and now and keep the amount we repress to an absolute minimum.

But we all do it any way because it’s the only way to cope.

More interesting, then, is the scrunch. That’s when my mind squeezes the unwanted emotion into a tiny ball so it will more easily fit down that oubliette.

There is definitely anger going on during the process. The anger comes from the act of defending myself from the emotion, like the emotion showed up at the front door and said “Deal with me!” and my mind screamed “NO!”, bashed it over the head, and through the body into the wood chipper.

Hey, remember Fargo? Great film.

And the thing is, this happens a lot.  The amount of things in my environment and my life that I actually can deal with like a functionally intact grownup is a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of life and absolutely everything else gets violently and vehemently shoved out of my mind by the force we will call The Bouncer.

Well, techincally, The Doorman. But The Bouncer is a cooler name.

And because I am a highly intelligent person and therefore have a very strong emotional suppression circuit, The Bouncer has plenty of muscle to use to keep all the bad thoughts and emotions out.

He is assisted in this by my vigorous program of distraction. As long as I keep my mind absorbed in something, the bad thoughts have no way of getting past my Bouncer and forcing me to deal with them and maybe even resolve them.

Why, it’s the percfect system!

Unless you want to have a life or by happy or anything like that.

Because the thing is, that Bouncer of mine doesn’t let the good stuff in either. Turns out that when you have depression, your Bouncer is set to reject absolutely everything except for a very smaller number of things that provide such a strong stimulus to the reward center of the brain that they are considered “safe”.

But it’s not enough. These strong reward stimuli get you through the day and help you cope, but for the most. part, you are starving to death due to lack of emotional nutrition.

Human being have a lot of highly complex needs (thanks, OBAMA) and these captured sources of reward can only fulfill a few of them. They are  (sometimes literally) junk food. They are packed with the calories we need to survive but lack all the other nutrients needed to be healthy.

Things like love, affection, acceptance, respect, dignity, a sense of belonging, a sense of community, sex, intimacy, a path for one’s ambitions, a sense of safety, a sense of competence, and of course, cookies from Mama.

And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. ^[1]

Back to the scrunch. I glibly called it compression for the oubliette, but the truth is, I don’t know exactly what is going on there. At least on the sruface, you would think you could go right to suppresion and, ya know, skip a step.

I think what the scrunch phase accomplishes is that it kills the energy of the emotion. Stops it in its tracks. Maybe roughs it up a little. It really is that primal rejection, that id based “NO!” that comes from the deepest and most primitive part of the mind.

That makes it self-directed anger. although subjectively, it doesn’t feel that way. But those negative emotions are as much a part of me as the Bouncer is, and so when he clubs my legit emotions into senselessness, it’s only me who he is hurting.

And to exit my metaphor for once, there are a lot of things that have to be dealt with, like it or not. You can’t ignore your “bills” forever. Sooner or later, you have to pay, and the more you delay, the more you pay.

Sadly, that means that dealing with your emotions and seeing them through is one of those things that only gets harder with time. It’s the classic crunch between the desire to avoid pain and your long term best interests.

And unlike in the real world, these “bills” cannot be paid by anyone but you. The only way to pay is to feel the damned feelings already and be rid of them, and that requires a certain kind of spiritual evolution.

You have to have evolved to the point where you can choose temporary pain for future reward. That sounds simply but it ain’t.

Modern society has become so immediate and convenient that even highly intelligent people (ahem) find it hard to consciously choose that which they know will hurt, even if they are one hundred percent sure it will be worth it.

But that’s a subject for another day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.