are complex combinations of Nature and Nurture operating here that can’t be judged by simple arithmetic.
We should also remember that we inherit “positive” tendencies too: curiosity, optimism, gregariousness for instance (though these can work as much against us as for us, depending on how we deploy them). Some of these qualities may offset or compensate for the “negatives”, but at birth all exist as merely potential, not actual, characteristics of the developing individual. They lie dormant. They are yet to be shaped by lived experience (upbringing) and of course the later learning/ unlearning/relearning process. Some children engage eagerly in learning about relationships whilst some are too sluggish and afraid to experiment – early conditioning or genetic predestination? Research cannot yet accurately quantify or map these determinants. We can only rely on educated guesses accrued from long clinical experience.
Upbringing 2
The consequences: relations with your Self
Your attitude to your own Self has a bearing on mood. The more you like, enjoy, feel proud of your own Self, the more your mood will hold up, whatever is occurring in your life. The more you doubt, disapprove of, are ashamed of your Self, the more readily undermined will be your mood. You can act confident, unafraid, anxiety free, but acting doesn’t make it so. If you have a pretty unfavourable secret attitude to and beliefs about your own worth and attractiveness to others, you’re clearly vulnerable when something bad happens. A job loss or ending of a relationship may confirm long held suspicions that you are a hopeless failure, that it must be your fault, and your mood collapses. Lack of self-esteem is learned, not genetic, and is a huge risk factor for many. It has to have arisen from early family “messages”, overt or unspoken, deliberate or not, sent to you and absorbed by you as a child, aided and abetted by your self-critical interpretations of them. But don’t forget that messages can to some extent be decoded and rewritten later on.
What is it then, that determines which of three people who lose their job becomes a) merely unhappy, b) little ‘d’ depressed, and c) big ‘D’ Depressed? The one who reacts with ordinary unhappiness is the one who, in the struggle we all go through to manage and learn from the early interpersonal forces around us, has grown a sense of Self that’s sturdy enough to withstand minor knocks. On being dismissed – a rather big knock – they’re disappointed, angry; they may be tearful, may shout at their partner, get drunk and maudlin, temporarily doubt their abilities. But there’s no black cloud of self-loathing, no click clunk of that seat belt trapping them in forever. They don’t hear hope scuttling away into infinity. (These descriptions are not inventions, hyperbole. They are how Depressed people really experience their temporarily disordered mood.)
The second person’s usual relations with their Self aren’t that good, due to early experiences where affirmation and encouragement were absent or where there were many separations from the family. They try to bolster their wavering self-esteem by being competent and dependable at work. Outward reassurance of their worth makes up for the lack of it inside. If that individual’s personality is also genetically loaded with a proneness to low mood and then they are sacked, it’s likely they’ll become small ‘d’ depressed.
If our third person is also self-doubting and under confident, whilst being genetically subject to big ‘D’ from time to time, this job loss risks triggering another period of their illness. We still don’t know to what degree, if any, a secure childhood reduces the likelihood of relapse or recurrence in big ‘D’ depression.
We may not be able to alter our genes, but quality therapy can certainly help with issues of poor or negative regard for our Self, thereby increasing our resilience to Depression. There are no fast fixes in this area, despite many false assurances to the contrary. Tracing your own development, looking through a more adult and compassionate lens at those early formative years, can be as painful as it is illuminating. But for many, such a demanding project proves healing and mood-lifting in the end. Many derive emotional nourishment from their counselling encounter, of a quality rarely if ever received as a child, providing a miniature model of what good relationships outside the counselling room could be. As hope walks in, low mood walks out, though there may still be much work to do.
The Memory Store
Progressing outward from the deep core of our onion, through the area of upbringing, we next come to the memory store. As we have seen, our temperament has some genetic basis though the experts aren’t sure yet to what degree. This is over-layered by the effects upon us of all those early relationships in the family (or other unit) that drew out, inhibited or even created a counterweight to those built-in propensities. We can’t change what happened or failed to happen. We can’t put the clock back, re-configure our very origins, though with therapeutic help we might learn to make peace with our early history. As we grew up we accumulated a rich chronicle of memories, documenting the vast amount of day to day interactions between ourself and our early attachment figures. Many of those memories and the feelings associated with them faded, whilst others were laid to rest yet refused to disappear completely. As we shall see, some were deeply buried, but proved capable of resurrection given auspicious circumstances.
Also recorded in our memory store are subsequent influential relationships with teachers, relatives, club leaders, tutors, and of course lovers and close friends. These newer figures functioned as moderators, reinforcers, growth or destruction agents for the already established but still adapting Self. Our emotional ties with these significant people profoundly affected the way we perceived and evaluated that Self, allowing it to further develop, repair old wounds even, or in sad cases to shrink into the shadows.
Though genes may impose some limitations, it’s relations with others, good and bad, past and present, that determine whether or not we are in good odour with our Self, and hence how vulnerable we might be to mood imbalance. Because we are a living organism, our capabilities are always available for expansion or fine-tuning as well as injury and deterioration. Thus our relational abilities – to ourselves and to others – have a future as well as a past and the one does not have to repeat the other. This hopeful belief is what brings many into counselling, or into becoming counsellors themselves.
We are usually too busy or too wary to wander about the memory store, but its contents can unexpectedly jump out at us, more than once and in completely different settings. In thinking about memory in relation to the Depressions, I’m not referring to nostalgia, reminiscences, photo album memories, to be taken out and enjoyed. Rather do I mean scraps of long forgotten conversations, barely registered at the time. Or they could be complete mini-dramas suddenly recalled as they are eerily repeated in the present. A musical refrain from a distant radio might flood the unprepared mind with the memory of an entire relationship; not so much actual events as the conflicting, unresolved feelings linked to that attachment. A cupboard in a friend’s kitchen unaccountably disturbs, till one day the wood grain is recognised as similar to a father’s coffin twenty years ago. This then is a secret store, the memories not normally sought, or even retrievable, though in therapy some are more retrievable than others. Many memories are themselves beyond recall but the pain, anxiety or sensitivity connected to them remain in that store, and are provoked once more in certain present circumstances, as I show below.
Which comes first? Does heavy mood pile up outside the door of the memory store, eventually so weakening it that memories leak out? Or are those memories so powerful that they fight against their confines and erupt into awareness given the least opportunity, so precipitating low mood? For if memories have been put to sleep, locked away, surely they must be upsetting ones, capable of wounding the Self? As with the nature versus nurture debate we can’t know for sure; we can only make educated guesses on a case by case basis. Here is an example from my own life. Did the lingering effects of my past, safely stored away for decades, determine the way I handled the present moment, or did the current situation so re-enact the past that my memory store’s security was abruptly breached? Either way, a short little ‘d’ depression followed.
A marital
