Chapter Four
“These persistent feelings [of guilt] were compounded by the fact that there seemed to be no apparent reason for my depression. When the reason for depression is well-defined and clearly understood, there is little cause for confusion. But my ‘moments’ would come without any advance warning and oftentimes during periods of great happiness.”
~ Don Baker, Depression
As I’ve mentioned before, I could not figure out the cause of my depression, the reason I was going through all of this, the justification for my pain. It was quite clear that this was not just some emotional response. These feelings—hopelessness, longing, guilt—did not depend on external circumstances. They came and went as they pleased. One minute, I would be happy, laughing at a joke. The next, I would be in my room thinking about how I didn’t deserve any of this. I didn’t deserve to be having a good time; there was too much wrong with me.
Really, that’s what being depressed felt like—that there was something unchangeably wrong with me. Being depressed went completely against all the things I knew about choosing to have a positive attitude and knowing about God’s love—Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, His experiencing my pain in my place. My being depressed seemed a seriously irrational concept. In fact, when I was around other people I knew to be depressed, I would do all I could to suggest to them how they could get through it, reminding them of reasons they had for not being depressed. But it was hard, basically impossible, to think about any reasons why I shouldn’t be depressed.
It’s a vicious cycle, guilt. Especially when it surrounds depression. (And I’ve read that guilt is often a cause of depression.) Guilt, in itself, is not a bad thing. It’s one of God’s ingenious ways of keeping us on the right path, making sure we stay righteous. When do you feel guilty? When you are doing something you perceive as being wrong. When we knowingly break a rule, we feel guilty about it, and we don’t like to feel guilty—it’s not pleasant—so we tend not to break rules. It works to drive us away from sin (which separates us from God). In fact, when looked at this way, guilt (in the sense of conviction) could almost be seen as one of God’s greatest gifts. He designed us to be with Him, so how great is it that we have a built in device that makes us want to avoid things that separate us!
That, I believe, is how guilt (conviction) was designed to work. But in my depression, I found myself feeling guilty for things that were not sinful—things like being happy or having a good time. Underneath the happiness I would experience from time to time, I felt like there was something wrong with me because the laughter didn’t cover up the darkness I was still carrying around. I still couldn’t figure out the cause, but I was convinced that it was something I wasn’t doing right. So I would feel guilty about having joy in my life because I knew I didn’t deserve it.
Then I would start to think about all those same things I had going for me. “Why should I feel this way?” I would ask myself. “I mean, there are starving kids in Africa, right? People in Ghana drink the same water they bathe in. So what was my problem?” I would feel guilty about feeling down when I knew for a fact I still had it better than many people in the world. No matter what I did, I could not escape this self-condemnation. I was always on myself about something. Thus, I was watching myself spin slowly out of control; I knew that the way I was thinking didn’t make any sense. I knew that I should just follow the advice I kept giving other people in the same position. But I still felt trapped, and I still felt powerless to do anything about it. I was losing hope.
