By Andreas Moritz>
Depression afflicts millions of people in the industrialized world today. It impairs the digestive, nervous and circulatory functions in the body and depletes any remnant of joy and happiness. By itself, depression is not an independent emotion but is directly linked to repressed anger.
Traditional rules of social conduct promote the idea that it is better to conform to ‘proper’ behavior than to reveal one’s emotions, particularly anger. Many people have been brought up with the idea that anger is essentially bad and indicates an unbalanced personality. If you feel angry, then you should at least not show it. This unwritten law seems to apply even more to women than to men. It appears to be socially acceptable for a man to rant and rave, hurl objects about, shout at other people, and possibly become violent, but women are considered not ‘feminine’ if they do the same.
Many women have the tendency to become silent and withdrawn when they are angry. Their ‘quiet’ nature, though, is deceiving. Unknowingly playing the victim and allowing men to dominate their lives, they may do whatever their partner or husband wants them to do without asserting themselves. Instead, they feel tremendous rage inside and subsequently suffer from depression, which can lead to a nervous breakdown. There is enough clinical evidence now to show that depression is anger turned inwards. Unless anger is expressed in a positive, active way, it accumulates in a passive way and becomes the ’emotion’ of depression. The effects can be devastating.
Dr. Philip Gold of the American National Institute of Mental Health was able to prove that stress and depression trigger the release of emergency hormones, causing brittle bones, infections and even cancer. Brittle bones are a major cause of death among women today. In many people, these stress hormones are no longer merely triggered occasionally but they are kept at constant ‘hyper-readiness’. When they are turned on and stay on for a long time, they destroy appetite, impair the immune system, block sleep, break down bone and shut down the processes that repair cell tissue. Research shows that chronically depressed women have high levels of stress hormones and enormous loss of bone density.
One particular study conducted at Ohio State University, USA, revealed that routine marital disagreements could trigger such hormonal reactions, especially among women. The stress hormone levels showed that women are more sensitive to negative behavior than men; hence, they are at much greater risk of becoming depressed and falling ill. According to the research, if the hormone levels stay up longer than they should, there is a real risk of infectious disease.
The latest findings in the field of Neuroscience have shown that levels of serotonin, an important neurotransmitter that is linked to the experience of pleasure, are 20-25 percent lower in patients who are at high risk of suicide. Serotonin is particularly active in a part of the brain that controls inhibition, and a lack of the neurotransmitter, or its related chemicals, lowers the amount of control a person has over his actions. This predisposes a person to act on suicidal thoughts.
Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. According to the research, the tendency towards suicide may be aggravated by childhood experiences that can affect serotonin levels in the brain for a lifetime. In fact, people who commit suicide have a high rate of child abuse histories. Laboratory studies confirm that parental deprivation at critical points in childhood can diminish serotonin in an enduring way.
Social conditioning has taught many of us to repress anger right from the beginning of life. When small children don’t get what they want, they throw tantrums and are often told off by an angry parent. All the small instances of withheld anger or frustration build up to a highly explosive inner conflict, creating a strong chemical distortion in the body. Every new instance that triggers an emotional explosion reveals the entire past of unresolved conflicts. Anger, if it is dealt with before it turns into depression, can be a means of learning about the very weaknesses that we tend to project on others. Whenever you feel angry, you are never really angry with somebody else, but you are frustrated over your own inability to fulfill your desires, both past and present.
This is an excerpt from Andreas Moritz‘s book It’s Time to Come Alive.
You may share or republish this article provided you clearly mention the name of Andreas Moritz and paste a hyper link back to the post.