Another drama-queenish article that blames people who are not 100% willing to be co-dependent with depressives:
But my story isn’t just for them. It’s for the father who doesn’t understand why his daughter is so miserable. Why won’t she just snap out of it? Her kids are healthy, she’s got a roof over her head, she’s got friends. What reason does she have for being so sad? She’s being ridiculous.
No, not ridiculous. She is being horribly and cruelly abusive to her helpless children who are convinced they are to blame for Mommy’s incapacitated state. The father should call the social services immediately and sue for custody.
It’s for the son who gets together with his friends and tells stories about his crazy mother. She’s never happy and sleeps all day. She hasn’t showered in a week. He’s tired of her bullshit. Doesn’t she know how embarrassing she is? Pull it together already.
It’s a great thing that the son is healthy enough not to feel guilty for Mommy’s drama and doesn’t let her manipulate himself into feeling responsible for this. Unfortunately, most children of these manipulators are too damaged to call their bullshit.
It’s for the husband who comes home from work and finds his wife curled up on the couch unable to speak, unable to unwind her body from the fetal position. All she has to do is look after the kids all day. It’s not like she has to meet a deadline at the office. If she had to sit through his commute then maybe he could understand. What is it with her?
She’s just bored and needs to be put to work immediately. The husband would be well-served by telling her to start working at a job immediately or he would call the social services and sue for custody. Adults can play these co-dependent games all they want but doing this to children is simply disgusting.
I’ve written about my struggle so that maybe you will understand that your daughter, your mother, your wife… they aren’t being ridiculous.
No, not ridiculous. Just manipulative.
They are suffering. They are in pain.
That’s no reason to make others suffer. “Lookee here, I’ve got a boo-boo, now forget your own needs and tend to mine” is not a position worthy of respect in n adult.
They are struggling with a sense of doom so overwhelming that they cannot see anything beyond it. It is real and it is awful.
This lack of self-awareness is really shocking. You can’t see anything beyond the doom, yet you manage to notice everybody who dares not to worship at the altar of your all-important drama.
And they need help.
The delusion that anybody other than a qualified specialist can “help” is both dangerous and really ridiculous.
In case people are wondering why this bugs me so much, I’m willing to share that somebody tried manipulating me into being his depression co-dependent in precisely this manner. I was young and foolish, and I even bought this spiel for a while. This is why I can tell you today: don’t buy into this performance. It will continue only for as long as there are spectators. Don’t be one of them.
Also, there is something very curious in this article. Please note the gender of the depressives in all of these stories and the gender of the people who refuse to play their co-dependent game. In case you are wondering who constructs womanhood as always equal to victimhood, here is your answer.
To answer the post’s title question, the only way you can help a depressed person if you are not a qualified healthcare provider is by refusing to participate in this kind of self-manifestation. Co-dependence might feel sweet at first but it will destroy you. So just say no.
Clarissa's Blog 
I agree that we should refuse that kind of co-dependence (even though this is actually the case in the vast majority of married non-depressive couples) and, moreover, that children should not suffer because of that kind of situation. But you said this:
“She’s just bored and needs to be put to work immediately. The husband would be well-served by telling her to start working at a job immediately”
First, nobody should force somebody else to be “put to work”. Second, it may be a good thing that she returns to work but I’m not sure that this women is really employable, especially in her situation.
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“First, nobody should force somebody else to be “put to work”. ”
– Nobody should be forced to keep an adult person.
It’s true that most of these people are unemployable. But there is always volunteering, charitable work, anything to get them out of the house.
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Good reply! You’re right, the father should do at least something to try to get children out of this mess.
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I’m not so sure about the “tough love” approach. This is exactly what was used on me to silence me about the real issues in our family and the struggles I was having as a migrant. I became the one scapegoated for my father’s emotional problems in particular. These were more extreme than mine, but he put up such an act and made it so convenient for everybody else to treat me as if I were the problem. Interestingly, my father chose to view my interest in reading as a sign of depression. Actually, it was my lifeline — my means to try to find a way out of the idiotic situation. Lying in bed late to recover from the ‘flu was also viewed by his as depression. Yes, indeed, he was making me depressed — but so was my inability to rise above the situation whilst others continued not to listen to me.
Tough love may seem like a really clever solution in all circumstances, but usually it’s just an excuse for others to pile on and express their particular immature states and barely disguised malice. I’m not conforming. I’m reading too much. I’m trying to engage in self-care when I’ve been knocked down hard. It actually takes an extreme amount of mental and emotional discipline to follow the golden thread that will lead you out of a cave, when others want you simply to conform and justify their own views, values and perspectives. To me it was a matter of life and death to stick to my own path, as my health had become extremely eroded by being obedient to others’ needs and suggestions. It’s not that I hadn’t tried conformity, but it clearly had not worked out for me. I’d developed chronic fatigue syndrome and a digestive system that did not easily tolerate solids, and made this known by developing huge and painful air bubbles. I was in a bad way, since all my repressed rage had been turned inwards. I’d been directing it inwards for a number of years.
Instinctively I guess I knew that accepting more of others rage and then repressing it would have pushed me over the edge. I had to develop other ways to see the world, which would give me other methods of coping. Hence, I had my nose in a philosophy book much of the time. I wasn’t doing this to waste time, but to save myself. It was vitally important that I find the means to get out of the Christian indoctrination that had held me to a standard of perfection whilst telling me that as a woman I was worthless. These were, indeed, my father’s views of me and consequently I had to draw together all my mental and emotional energy to defeat him.
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Another interesting thing is I did not get any feminists on my side during this long drawn out psychological battle. I know why. A battle is an ugly thing. There are no clear marks defining good and evil. One has to do combat just with what one has at the time and sometimes one is poorly prepared, one’s weapons are not sharp or effective and one is immersed in a lot of ignorance. It would have been nice to have feminists on my side during this time, but I can’t say they were. Even with feminists, the tendency is to side with the person who seems to represent the neatest solution to the problem, even if that person is a patriarch.
Many feminists prefer neatness to reality and they like to be one the side of what society defines as “good” — that is, they prefer a posture of moral conformity over understanding a complex issue.
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On the other hand, my solutions, although they did not involve socially condoned productivity, involved pushing myself into my discomfort zones, with regard to expressing emotions, especially those that were not socially acceptable — for I had a lot of socially unacceptable emotions during that time. Consider it. My father had been engaged in an actual war for fifteen years and he had repressed all those emotions, including the ultimate humiliation of defeat. Then he’d taken it out on me. So I had some extremely warlike emotions in me. These were not civilized emotions by any means, but those that had been born via war, so I had to find a way to let them out. Martial arts was very useful to me — as was Georges Bataille, Nietzsche, Marechera — …all good for letting out warlike emotions. But not so easily comprehensive to feminists.
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There is a dramatic difference between the situation you are describing and the situations described in this post. An abused child is never to blame for anything because s/he is living a situationof somebody else’s making. An abusive parent or spouse – like the ones described in the linked post – are in a completely different situation. They have the power, all of the power, and they wield it to break down other people.
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Yes, I agree, the parent is the responsible one, but you would be surprised how many people tried the “tough love” approach on me. I think basically they did not want to have to deal with something very intense and complex. As I said, I had bottled up in me some very warlike emotions — which had come from an actual war, via my father. So people, instead of trying to understand the cultural context of this, although it was clear there was one, went to town on pathologising me. After all, if they had not experienced similar sensations, then what I was experiencing must be wrong….evil…. intrinsically pathological. I must be a damaged or evil person, etc. And yet I was not so damaged or so evil that I could not see a way out of the situation and stick to it will all of my integrity.
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“So people, instead of trying to understand the cultural context of this, although it was clear there was one, went to town on pathologising me. ”
– But were these people dependent on you? This is the central issue here. If one can’t escape and is dependent, it is completely wrong to do this to a person.
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I don’t disagree with your original statement in the limited sense that children are not to blame and that the dependency issue is important. I think it’s more complicated than drawing a simple moral line in some instances, since the adult themselves may be weakened by overwhelming circumstances. In any case, pathologizing people, which is often what happens in the case of “tough love” can reveal what is weak and wrong about the pathologizer. I don’t mean it in your case, but in most cases, people don’t want to know the reasons why others don’t or won’t conform, they just feel like a lack of conformity invalidates their own choices.
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Well, in the examples cited all need to get out of the house, true, and should not be dragging others with them, true. But, I think depression is real and is not that easy to just snap out of — if it were, more people would just do it, since it is not fun to be depressed. And I have found that non professionals help a lot, although this can be inadvertent. They might have some brilliant angle on the situation you haven’t thought of, or they might just be fun people who are interested in your fun side and sort of bring it out.
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What I learned from my experiences is that what religious people come to understand as “female nature” or femininity and often what feminists and others have taken for such is just a depressive state brought on by accepting artificially defined limits to what one is or what one can do, or indeed the emotions one can be allowed to express. I notice the ape whose blog Clarissa quotes from lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, so perhaps enough said.
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Yes, and one of these repressed emotions that cause a depressed state is anger. When you feel that you are not allowed to feel anger or even acknowledge that you might be angry, this is the result. Another such depression-producing emotion is guilt.
There is a lot of guilt women who are socialized in traditional ways experience. I have heard from women that they feel guilty, for instance, when the house is not clean or there are dirty dishes. Men, in general, are less likely to feel guilty about such things. The only way out of these feelings of guilt is to ask yourself who is the imagined authority one feels it important to render accounts to about the dishes and the cleaning. That imagined entity needs to be identified and removed from one’s life. This is hard work but it’s a lot more helpful to a depressed person than any fake compassionate moanings of “I know you must be suffering a lot. . .”
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I had the repressed anger (actually rage) big time — and guilt. The way I got out of it was not so much by analyzing this, but by learning to break the narrow rules I’d set for myself. Nietzsche said somewhere that a lot of morality is founded in fear, rather than in bravery. “Too timid to lie!” he said. It’s not that one should feel encourage to lie for its own sake, but that one realizes that one often conforms inwardly because one is stuck in a rut of one’s own making. One must break out from it and form new possibilities for behavior.
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“What I learned from my experiences is that what religious people come to understand as “female nature” or femininity and often what feminists and others have taken for such is just a depressive state brought on by accepting artificially defined limits to what one is or what one can do, or indeed the emotions one can be allowed to express.”
This is absolutely true and it did not use to be so non self evident. When they brought cultural feminism in in the 80s, from about Carol Gilligan forward, things started to get murky and I could swear, it is as though it were the first step in a marketing strategy for Prozac (which came in after everyone got good and depressed from the antifeminist backlash and the Reagan years, very interesting).
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“When they brought cultural feminism in in the 80s, from about Carol Gilligan forward, things started to get murky and I could swear, it is as though it were the first step in a marketing strategy for Prozac (which came in after everyone got good and depressed from the antifeminist backlash and the Reagan years, very interesting).”
– Yes, this is fascinating. I think that the ubiquitous nature of anti-depressants made the response to the horrible policies of the era so much more muted. People are too dazed to care.
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Gilligan introduced the idea that I can only reason ethically in relation to myself. This is absolutely not true and not true for many women, depending on the levels of discipline they choose to develop. I love watching Aircrash Investigations, which is called Mayday in Japan. In one show a female pilot takes a cargo plane up, but the wires that connect the tail to the body of the aeroplane have been tightened too much — a maintenance error. This means the plane cannot ascend naturally, but shoots up into the sky at a very steep angle, almost on the trajectory of a rocket. Naturally this destabilizes the plane and it starts to nosedive into a crash. Interestingly the female pilot directed the doomed aircraft into the side of hangar, where it had the least chance of harming anybody on the ground.
See, that is ethical reasoning at work. She wasn’t thinking, “How can I work this out in relation to me, and where would be a good spot for me to meet my final demise?”
Now, apparently, we have learned that women do not do that. As Theodor Adorno intimated, it is pointless looking at empirical evidence because ideology already determines what we can or cannot see.
I am a refugee from Western culture because I do believe it has gone insane.
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I agree with the statement about the descent into insanity of our civilization wholeheartedly. There are many very crazy things I’m observing.
“Don’t be so critical of essentialism,” a senior scholar told me. “It has made a comeback. Today’s feminist thought no longer rejects it.”
This statement makes no sense to me even on the basic level of grammar. How can feminism not reject essentialism? This is insane.
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I think many people misread Luce Irigaray as if she were a gender essentialist. I’ve heard this recently. I think it’s because irony is falling into disrepute as something elitist or hard to grasp. She is, however, an ironist. How could one take a book entitled, Speculum of the other Woman” as anything but ironic? (Apparently, there was meant to be a comma after “other”, but the publishers left it out.)
Irigaray is heavily influenced by Nietzsche, who is an ironist. Consider THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA – written in florid Bibilical language, whilst actually condemning religiosity and a metaphysical outlook.
Irigaray is doing the same with Lacan as Nietzsche does with the Bible. She is making fun of his portentous patriarchal attitudes by showing what he has left out of his paradigm — the possibility of an actual, living woman. She is showing that the space he has left for women is null and void. This is supposed to be funny — but these days people take it as if she were reifying gender.
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I hate most that it has become common sense to essentialize female nature in absurd ways. For instance, recently a Canadian anti-bully activist came here to teach Australian school children how to avert bullying. She said she wanted to focus on girls because they were bitchy and gossipy and employed passive aggression, spurred on by their mothers. Now, fine and good. perhaps this is so. But in my day — and, of course, in a very different culture — that was not “female nature” at all. Rather it was to be naughty, mischievous, cheeky and yet polite. There was no rivalry and we just enjoyed the pleasure of companionship. Actually, you can see the same kinds of attitudes expressed in the British nursing drama, Call the Midwife.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_the_Midwife
So, as late as the 1980s in Zimbabwe and the 1950s in Britain, female nature was not petty, bitchy or malicious.
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So, as late as the 1980s in Zimbabwe and the 1950s in Britain, female nature was not petty, bitchy or malicious.(Muster)
Oh, how times have changed. 😉
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I’m sorry if I hurt you in any way. We have not spoken really, but if anything I’ve done in life or in general has hurt your feelings, you have my deepest condolences. If you want to take that in a particular way, please do so. I would hate to railroad you in any direction. Your life is your own. I step aside and plan not to offend.
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I think titfortat really likes you, Jennifer.
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He may be in love, it is hard to say.
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