Depression seems to thrive on self-defeat, and that adds to the difficulty of learning how to fight it. Here are a couple of examples of what I mean:

Summoned to a conference room at work, I had to listen to my boss let me have it with a long list of projects I hadn’t finished. I started to defend myself, but inwardly I was already depressed and just felt smaller and smaller. The fact is I agreed with every criticism and took it as the cold truth - guilty as charged. They’ve found me out! This proves how stupid I am! Of course, in depression I had left a lot undone, setting myself up for this moment. It was as if I had planned to fail.

It was a familiar situation because I had treated others the same way myself when I had been on the employer side of the table. I ran an organization for several years and shot down a number of people I’d hired, even when I had little cause. It was another face of depression staring at each person. In that mood, I was big, grandiose, aggressive, angry. Everything was overdone. The result was to alienate talented people and undermine the work we had all been doing.

The same thing often happened at home. That was the worst - turning love and closeness to anger and distance - and then blaming my family for causing my own inner problem. I’d stomp into the house and at once explode at the kids: Stop that racket! Clean that up right now! Go to your room! And for good measure, cuss out my wife for letting everything go to hell.

I wanted so much to have a loving family life. Yet I was doing my best to lose it. More self-defeat. 

Whether depression left me “small” and shamed or “big” and angry, I'd become worn out with these distorted feelings. Finally I had to ask myself: What am I doing? How can I act this way? I’m hurting my family and myself. I’ve got to stop! Usually, though, the next step took me into a full blown depression. I’d get lost in that deadly mood and withdraw even more.

How did I learn to start turning this around? In another post, I talked about a first step toward healing - getting just enough distance from depression to understand that all the misery and self-doubt were parts of an illness, not the reality of who I was. Then I’d list out all the symptoms, break depression into more manageable chunks - confused thinking here, self-hate there, despairing mood, cutting myself off from everyone. Describing them in detail helped to keep me from being overwhelmed and swept away.

It wasn’t easy to do that. For a long time, I’d write lots of journal entries describing what I was going through, but the way I did it was no help at all. I wrote in exasperation that I was yet again going through the same hell. I used that as a reason to bash myself for not being able to will it away without any help. If I weren’t so inadequate, worthless, incapable of doing anything right, I could take this on and beat it.