Depression: Anger Turned Inward?
July 31st 2007 09:02 am
Depression may very well be anger turned inward. Take Steve for instance; a 16-year-old who was brought into or clinic by his parents for evaluation. According to his mother, Steve started cutting himself with razors and knives. One-day mother noticed blood on his sleeves when she was doing laundry. She confronted Steve and he admitted what he had been doing. Steve’s parents brought him in the following day.
During the evaluation Steve scored high on a depression test and he also admitted feeling depressed for nearly two years. His parents were astonished to hear this.
Steve is an above average student and is well liked in school. He described himself as a “people pleaser,” always telling others what they want to hear. He rarely says no and always follows his parents’ direction to the letter. Steve’s mother felt ‘blessed” to have a son so well behaved. Unfortunately, this “blessing” led Steve’s self-destructive behavior and to our clinic.
It turns out that Steve has been angry for many years. He feels he can’t communicate with his father and that his mother “runs interference” between them. He blames mom for not allowing him to get close to his dad, yet he doesn’t tell mom because he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. He fears his father, even though his father has never harmed him. Steve’s answer to all this confusion is to hold his anger inside and pretend everything’s okay. This behavior would be more appropriately labeled repression as opposed to depression. However, the results are the same; anger turned inward led Steve into depression and then to self-destructive behavior, his cutting himself.
Our remedy for Steve’s depression was to have him write a list of his unresolved feelings towards his parents, role-play his list of feelings in session with a counselor, and then to sit down with his parents and the counselor and express his feelings directly. Once this was done, we were able to work mom and dad through their own feelings while helping them to understand that although Steve’s resentments are valid, his perception and the resulting feelings were not their fault.
If you believe your teenager designs things just to make you angry, perhaps your right. However, perhaps in a roundabout and unconscious way, your child is trying to help bring out your suppressed anger. Suppressed anger leads to emotional-outbursts. Using anger as a weapon leads to generalized fear in the family.
The end result was that Steve worked through his depression and his parents became willing to listen to his feelings, including his anger, without fighting or blaming himself or herself.
