DEPRESSIVE PERSONAL STYLE

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

People with a depressed personality style are highly self-critical or self-punishing, they constantly make unrealistic demands on themselves and constantly blame themselves if something went wrong. They fear being abandoned or rejected and feel lonely even when surrounded by people. The all-pervading feeling of such people is associated with the fact that someone or something is lost for them forever. People with a depressed personality style are unaware of their hostility and anger.

There are two types of depressive affect: introjective, which is characterized by self-criticism, self-punishment and guilt, and anaclitic, which is characterized by sensitivity to loss and rejection, a feeling of emptiness, inferiority and shame.

Introjectively depressed people scold themselves for perceived or real blunders and omissions and react to failures, being confident in their badness and guilt. They try their best to be “good,” but are rarely satisfied with themselves.

They lament their greed, selfishness, vanity, pride, anger, envy, or passion. They view the normal aspects of experience as criminal and dangerous, and have anxiety about their inherent destructiveness. They are constantly in a state of willingness to believe the worst about themselves. In any message that communicates their shortcomings, they are able to distinguish only this part of the communication. If the criticism is constructive, they tend to feel so hurt and exposed that they overlook or discount any positive aspects of the message. If they are subjected to really significant attacks, then they cannot consider the following fact: no one deserves to be insulted, even if the attacks are fair.

Anaklitically depressed people are characterized by intense suffering and disorganization in the face of situations of separation and loss. The psychology of these people is organized around the themes of relationship, affection, intimacy, trust, warmth, or lack thereof. Unlike introjectively depressed individuals, they feel empty, inferior and lonely, rather than striving for perfection and overly self-critical. Their main complaint is the sense of meaninglessness and emptiness of life. At the same time, there are individuals who have both introjective and anaclitic traits.

A number of different pathways can lead to a depressive adjustment. Thus, depressive dynamics are associated with early loss, this loss is not necessarily overt, observable, and empirically proven (for example, the death of a parent). It can be internal and psychological (for example, if the child gives in under the pressure of the parents and refuses the addictive behavior until the moment when he is actually emotionally ready for it). But not just an early loss, but its circumstances, which make it difficult for the child to realistically understand what happened and the normal experience of grief, give rise to a depressive dynamic. One of these circumstances arises naturally in the course of a child's development. A two-year-old child is too young to understand that people are dying and why they are dying, and he cannot understand the complex motives that arise, for example, during divorce: "Daddy loves you, but he leaves because he and Mom will no longer live together." In his understanding of things in the rough opposition of good and bad, the child, whose parent is leaving, develops the assumption that he himself is bad and therefore the father left.

Neglect on the part of adults, who are absorbed in their difficulties and do not pay attention to the child's needs, especially affects the emergence of depressive tendencies.

Another potentiating factor in depressive tendencies is the family atmosphere, in which there is a negative attitude towards the experience of grief. When parents try to deny grief or their actions persistently persuade the child to join the family myth that it is better without the lost object, forcing the child to confirm that he is not in pain, the experience of grief becomes hidden and goes deeper.

In some family systems, the belief that overt grief or other forms of self-care is “selfish,” “self-indulgent,” or expressions of “self-pity,” deserves contempt. This kind of suggestion of guilt and the associated persuasion of the parent of the experiencing child to stop crying and cope with the situation dictates the need to hide the hurt aspects of the self due to identification with the criticizing parent, as well as reject these aspects of self.

A significant source of depressive dynamics is characterological depression in parents, especially in the early years of a child's development. Children experience intense anxiety about parental depression. They feel guilty about the natural demands of their age and come to believe that their needs are draining others. The sooner the child begins to experience dependence on someone who is deeply depressed, the greater his emotional loss.