took early retirement and devoted himself to his garden and his own horse. Mira adored him and admitted it upset her whenever he “fussed and bothered over every detail, getting more and more wound up”. Nevertheless she felt obliged to go along with the family myth, at least outwardly, that this was just a bit of eccentricity. Like everyone else she tried to jolly him out of it. Her siblings were happy, but “fusspots” as well. Her mother was the only really calm one and she and Mira got on well.
No obsessional thoughts or behaviours (as defined by my friend and I, not Mira) troubled Mira until she reached her teens and school exams. She was bright so was encouraged (pressured?) to try for a prestigious university but she’d never felt herself to be intellectually inclined. Boyfriends and the social world into which she was pitched at the same time all conspired to stress her. Only home and family felt safe. Each time she made forays into the wider adolescent world, tried to compete, as she put it, she felt anxious and miserable and began using ritualistic (she called them “peculiar and daft”) behaviours to relieve her tension. Having subliminally learned from years of watching her dad, she must have recognised the link between the pressures of conventional achievement and her “weird” rituals, for she found herself withdrawing from all the expectations placed upon her. She preferred to live quietly, tending and riding the family horse, and baby-sitting for pocket money.
In time she took a childcare course which she loved. She didn’t date until she met her husband through her church, and they went to live in a quiet village away from the hurly burly of the market town where she grew up. All her rituals vanished.
“You see, I told you, boring story,” Mira triumphantly proclaimed.
My therapist friend would not give up. “OK, so your life has turned out nicely, just the way you wanted it, but have you asked yourself why? Given what you’ve just told us, think of the different ways your life might have gone. What if your genetic proclivity to “fussing” had been stronger, or your childrearing less loving and supportive? What if your mum hadn’t offset the model laid down by your dad? Can’t you see that your nice family provided the conditions for you to grow into someone decisive, someone with the confidence to contravene the plan laid down for you by school and your peers? You broke the mould without feeling a failure – how many people can do that? That choice says a lot about your good relationship with your Self. And that in turn is down to your folks and your capacity to make good use of them, not luck!”
Mira pulled a face and my friend, a professional lecturer as well as a therapist, pushed on.
“Think about becoming a teenager, Mira. Without being consciously aware of it at the time, you must have been affected by all those memories of your dad’s sufferings, how as a kid you couldn’t really help; but you were here for him now and needed things to stay like that. At the same time some part of you recognised your propensity for reacting to stress the same way he did, and what it had cost him. Rather than label yourself a misfit, a failure, as he had, you confidently rejected the ambitious future others expected of you. Also, of course, not leaving for university or getting married early meant you could stay with him till you were ready to go in your own time. Heavens Mira, without that positive start in your family you may have gone along with those external demands on you. You might have got depressed at losing your family long before you were ready, grieved over abandoning your lovely dad. You might have been pushed into a career and failed at it, the stress of it all making you ill with those rituals you seem to find so funny. Your contentment isn’t just happenstance: you were enabled to shape your own life and you seized the chance.”
“Codswallop!” declared Mira, all the same looking a bit shaken. I banged the table and demanded a truce. We all laughed, helping ourselves to another slice of Mira’s excellent lemon drizzle cake.
This is a clear case of Nurture winning out over Nature (assuming that the family trait was a genetic predisposition and not behaviours learned via unconscious imitation). Despite a pronounced family history, sound relationships in Mira’s home appeared to operate as an antidote. Mira’s denial of the seriousness of the family members’ symptoms helped her normalise her family’s traits so she didn’t have to worry about them until she was old enough to shape her own future and deal with them in herself; but the denial was only partial, as her self-preserving decisions about her future confirms.
Whatever you make of your childhood and the key relationships that followed, however valiantly you fought, Nature sometimes wins out anyway. You will have met people who seem mature, fulfilled, get on very well with themselves and others, show all signs of being well-adjusted, even happy. Still the axe of Depressive illness falls, sometimes repeatedly, and apparently unrelated to especial life events. They shouldn’t be blamed or blame themselves, nor subject themselves or be subjected to interminable therapy as if there is some elusive mystery to be dug up that will solve everything. This happens all too often however and only makes matters worse. Geneticists, neurobiologists and chemists are all working assiduously to relieve cases like this, but our knowledge remains patchy and inconclusive. Even if there were a mystery to be exhumed, some kinds of personality (Mira’s, for example) are fundamentally and resolutely opposed to looking inward and backwards. As the saying goes, they can be taken to the water (of therapy) but they can’t be made to drink!
Benevolent, enlightened childrearing doesn’t automatically guarantee you a Depression-free life in the future, though the odds may be weighted in your favour. Neither does a background of Depressions in the family, an unhappy childhood, and some awful memories lurking about in your store, necessarily prevent you from enjoying a happy life in the present. Indeed, strong loving attachments to others in the present can go a long way to reducing, neutralising or even countermanding negative past experiences while preventing the burgeoning of genetic leanings into Depression proper.
However, reliance on just one onion layer (say a contented present life) is risky. Should current secure ties be broken, due to divorce, say, or a loved one’s death, an extramarital affair or a business failure, then that protective Present Life layer can collapse, leaving the underlying layers exposed. If these are in a sufficiently robust condition they will hold firm and even temporarily take over the function of showing a reasonably okay “face” to the world until that layer can regenerate (till new affirming relationships are made in other words). But if a crammed memory store is now laid open, the delicacy of your relations with your Self uncovered, your questionable personal history laid bare such that all signs now point to a repetition of old mistakes, what chance is there of you staying well, especially if there are no replacement options on the horizon?
An individual’s apparent toleration of stress and misfortune is not proof of moral fibre, or even mental health. Neither is the temporary inability to bear it a sign of weakness: you can be strong and resilient on the inside and not on the outside, and vice versa. These are purely psychodynamic (literally “mind movement”) matters, as I hope this chapter has shown. All our onions have the same layers but are configured in endless combinations.
Chapter 3
Two Stories, Big ‘D’ and Little ‘d’
In this chapter I will discuss two Depressions: a very serious mid-life one which came apparently out of the blue, and another where an otherwise happy man failed to keep his childhood trauma locked away. In both cases I illustrate the significance of family involvement, both in causation and in healing.
Penny’s story
Back in the sixties, barely out of our teens, my best friend Val and I were training as mental nurses (as they were called then) in a massive Victorian hospital on the Eastern edges of London. We were keen students, in our second year now, and we arrogantly assumed that we’d seen it all. Penny was to teach us some humility.
Val had recently met Brian at a jazz club and regaled me endlessly with his wonderful qualities. Soon she was invited to
