This is my interview with Dr. James Hollis, a therapist who has written extensively on depression and meaning. He is the author of the best-selling books, “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life,” and “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up.”
Dan: What is depression?
Jim: I think first of all we have to differentiate between “depressions” because it‘s a blanket term used to describe many different experiences, contexts, and internalized experiences. First, there is the kind of depression that is driven by biological factors, and it’s still a mystery as to how that works. We know it profoundly affects a certain number of people. Second, there is reactive depression, which is the experience of a person who has suffered loss. As we invest energy in a relationship or a situation, and for whatever reason that other is taken away from us, that energy attached to them will invert into depression. Reactive depression is actually normal.
We would have to figure out where that fine line is and where it might cross into the realm of something beyond normal. When we say that a person is grieving too long or that it is affecting their lives so profoundly, that’s a judgment call, of course, but we do know people who have been sort of destroyed by reactive depression because they had attached so much of their identity to the other, whatever it might be: a position in life they lost or a relationship that was important.
LIFE IS A SERIES OF ATTACHMENTS AND LOSSES
But I think none of us can avoid occasional reactive depressions because life is a series of attachments and losses. Most commonly, however, when we think about depression, we are really looking at an intrapsychic phenomenon, where we might say there are parts of ourselves contending with one another.
People are continually subject to significant interpersonal strife and conflict over values. For example, there are conflicts of duty, and we have an obligation to many competing values within us. One of the most obvious duties we all live with is that you have to earn a living to support yourself and your family, and on the other hand, the price of the particular way in which you are doing it is psychologically and perhaps physically costly to you. So already, there is a significant conflict there. If the ego continues to override that conflict without addressing it, we could expect the symptoms, including those associated with depression, to show up.
In effect, the good news and the bad news are the same here, in that the psyche is not passive; it’s active, continuously expressing its point of view and manifesting in our body as somatic issues in our emotional life, in our behaviors, and, of course, in our dream life. Those expressions of opinion are often called “symptoms” in the contemporary mindset, and we want to replace them as quickly as possible, which is understandable. At the same time, the real question is why they have come and what our own psyche is trying to say to us. Or, put another way, for what reason is my psyche refusing to cooperate with the agenda that my conscious life has addressed and emerged into?
The withdrawal of energy is often profoundly conflictual and produces significant suffering. The more I might push myself, the more depressed I might get. So from a psychodynamic standpoint, you would say, well, what really is the value conflict here, and how can we learn from the psyche and what we might consider a more appropriate set of choices for you?
THE RECOVERY OF PERSONAL AUTHORITY
Dan: I would like to read a brief passage from your wonderful book, “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life.” In it, you write: “The recovery of personal authority is critical to the reconstruction of the second half of life. If we are a little more than our adaptations, we collude with happenstance and remain prisoners of fate. No matter how sovereign we believe we are, we remain the loneliest of sufferers under the tyrannies of whatever remains unconscious.”
I found one of the things I found interesting, as I read further in the book, to be your notion of psychological adaptations and how they relate to someone who is suffering from depression. Can you elaborate on what role adaptations play in depression?
Jim: Well, the fact that we have survived as individuals and as a species in an often very difficult environment is a function of our capacity for adaptation. Without the ability to adapt, one would be destroyed by the conditions of life. But to some degree, one becomes identified by whatever environmental factors necessitated that adaptation. What happens is that through repetition, or because these adaptations often occur very early in life, I mean adaptations such as avoidance patterns, the way our engagement with others works out, our compliance adaptations, and so forth, these often tend to get replicated a lot and become sort of behavioral systems within each of us.
So that we can fast-forward several decades and find ourselves the creatures of these adaptive patterns: patterns that were once protective but, because they keep being applied to new situations, become constrictive and compel repetition.
Sigmund Freud noted early on that the power of repetition compulsion and the power of programming are within each of us. The problem with the unconscious, of course, is that we can’t definitively say anything about it. Yet these behaviors and their patterns keep emerging from us into the world, so we would have to admit they are coming from us and therefore have some accountability for them.
As a therapist, one of the things we look to discern is the patterns that emerge in this person’s life, where they might come from, and then to make these adaptations more conscious and to see how they get systematized. At a very profound level, we can see that a person who operates in a very powerful position outwardly can, in fact, be enslaved to messages from decades ago. What he believes is his free choice is often his protective mechanisms, and again, they are there for good reasons, but they completely ignore the fact that the individual has grown up.
He now has consciousness, empowerment, and resilience that were absent from the child’s life. Therefore, there is a kind of unconscious regression whenever one of these implicit messages takes over consciousness. Until we can begin to recognize the silent messages to which we are in service, we remain prisoners of history, and the very adaptations that were necessary during our childhoods are now constricting agencies. Working through that and stepping into risk, stepping into an enlargement of vision, and honoring the desires within us that wish to be expressed through us into the world.
Sounds simple in the abstract, but in fact, people often find that their greatest obstacle is their old fear-based adaptations, which were once necessary but now bind us to a disabling past.
ALL OF USE FEEL SHAMED BY LIFE
Dan: Here’s another quote I would like to read from your book, What Matters Most:
“All of us feel shamed by life. All of us consider ourselves failures of some kind, screw-ups in something really important to us. Notice how shame, consciously or unconsciously, pulls us away from risk, ratifies our negative sense of worth through self-sabotage, compels us into frenetic efforts at overcompensation, or leaves us yearning for validation from others that never comes. How much each of us needs to remember one definition of grace as accepting the fact that we are accepted despite the fact that we are unacceptable.”
It is a beautiful passage that I think captures so much. Much of your writing addresses the issues and problems we all face at midlife. Can you talk about that some more? What connection does shame have to all of this, including depression and suffering?
Jim: I would like to respond to two points. Before we reach midlife, we often identify with the adaptations that carry us into our lives and shape our relationships, professions, and life patterns. By midlife, we can typically no longer ignore the protests that may be coming from within us, in our marriages, or in our other behaviors. It is at that point that one might begin to question what is really going on. “Who am I, apart from my history? Who am I, apart from my roles?”
It can lead to a very interesting conversation, which in turn can lead to significant changes and greater freedom in the second half of life. But I think most people feel shame. The difference between shame and guilt is that with guilt, we feel accountable for something we did or failed to do, and that often has a powerful effect on people’s lives. But shame is a feeling that who I am, in itself, is not sufficient or is contaminated in some way.
People can be shamed by the conditions of their birth or family origin, or by events in their lives that leave them feeling they were insufficient or inadequate. The kind of generosity, forgiveness, or acceptance we would give to another is often very hard to extend to ourselves, so we typically either double our work or try to anesthetize our suffering.
But I think shame is often neglected in people’s lives and shows up in two primary ways. One is through patterns of avoidance and hiding out from the life we want to live. The other is grandiosity, an overcompensation that leads to a constant need to prove one’s worth to others and, in the end, results in a growing sense of frustration and emptiness.
Since we are often unaware of any of this, whatever accomplishments there are are never enough. It can drive a person higher and higher and higher in his or her efforts to demonstrate personal worth as a treatment plan for guilt. That person remains very much hooked by that which invariably leads to excess and then to consequences that again feed the shame cycle. I think one of the hardest things in life, in addition to regaining personal authority, is learning to forgive oneself and accept oneself. These are not easy because they must include honest accountability for choices made and not made, and for the consequences that result from those choices.
Dan: Jim, would it be fair to say that many successful people, or those who strive for success, in some way continually overcompensate in their lives and careers? And when they, in some sense, fail to meet these unconscious goals of success, however well or fully defined, they feel shame?That’s right. I think most folks have seen the film Citizen Kane. That whole story was a portrait of overcompensation, of a power-driven person still compensating for the poverty and shame of his childhood. If that secret had been unlocked early, his path in life might have been less destructive and less driven by demons, so to speak.
Frankly, that’s the role of therapy. I believe therapy is an important way to have a conversation with oneself. Too often, people associate therapy with some grand pathology. But if we explore it as a kind of encounter with one’s deepest self, we begin to realize that I myself am a mystery, a complexity, a richness of which I know only a small portion from a conscious standpoint. It is not about self-absorption or narcissism.
Quite the contrary, it is a humble dialogue with a therapist. And then one becomes, frankly, less dangerous to the world. We become a more available partner, spouse, parent, and colleague, and I think we can begin to zero in on what really matters to us and the choices we are making.
LIFE IS A PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED
Dan: One of the things I took away from your book is that most of us, on an unconscious level, believe life is a problem to be solved rather than a mystery to be lived.
I think this insight has helped alleviate a lot of my depression and that of others I know. With depression, there’s so much ruminative thinking. We get caught in a vicious cycle of trying to solve depression. Or, in a broader context, larger issues such as “Why was I born into a family with an alcoholic father?” or “Why am I such a screw-up?” We try to answer these negative questions over and over again. But these are questions with no true answers.
Jim: I think we need to realize that suffering from depression– and I put that in the plural– is actually a normal human experience. Highly functioning and capable people often have what I would call “pockets of depression” and yet are not governed by them.
These pockets of depression stem from real losses they have experienced in their lives or from internal conflicts. The human condition itself involves suffering, and we always have to ask, “Is the way I am experiencing my suffering and my conflict leading me to a larger life or to a smaller life?” “Does it enlarge me or does it diminish me?”
I think we usually know the answer to that question. The flight from suffering leads to an inauthentic, superficial life. So I think it’s important to recognize that in the course of our journey, we will, from time to time, visit what I call “The Swampland of the Soul”. In every swampland, there is a task, and if we can identify that task and address it, it can lead us out of victimhood and into a larger consciousness.
One of them is depression. Again, we have to remember that the word means “to press down.” So we must ask ourselves, “What is being pressed down?” “What energy, what value, what agenda, what desire is being pressed down, and are we the unwitting agents of that oppression, or is it something that has happened to us along the way, with which we identified, and what life wishes to be served?” In many cases, people, by just asking these questions, will be led to a larger life, a change, if not a change of direction or course in life, a change in some of the attitudes with which they address daily life.
James Hollis, Ph.D., was born in Springfield, Illinois. He earned an A.B. from Manchester College in 1962 and a Ph.D. from Drew University in 1967. He taught humanities for 26 years at various colleges and universities before retraining as a Jungian analyst at the Jung Institute of Zurich, Switzerland (1977-82). He is a licensed Jungian analyst in private practice in Houston, Texas, where he served as Executive Director of the Jung Educational Center of Houston from 1997-2008. He is a retired Senior Training Analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, was the first Director of Training at the Philadelphia Jung Institute, and is vice president emeritus of the Philemon Foundation, dedicated to publishing the complete works of Jung. In addition to the book “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life,” he is the author of “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up.”
