SELF-LOVE AND DEPRESSION A friend of mine has shared a post containing a passage from St.Francies de Sales which set me thinking. St Francis first estabilishes a link between mental distress and self love: Nothing writes St.Francis, troubles us so much as self-love and self-regard The connection, at first, seems an odd one. In what sense can we really be said to be troubled by self love and self-regard? The world often seems to tell us that self-love and self-regard are not troubling at all, but states to which we should aspire. But we will soon realise what St.Francies is talking about if we translate the words he uses into the forms in which they are now generally expressed. So people will not talk about distress, but will talk about depression. They do no see depression as a symptom of self-love, but it may, in certain circumstances, be possible to suggest them that what is involved is, indeed, an unhealthy form of self-obsession. St Francis develops the idea of connection between our aims and the feeling of satisfaction that we expect to derive from them, both in the life of prayer and meditation, and in the life of practical charity when he writes: Should our hearts not grow soft with the sentiment we desire when we pray and with the interior sweetness we expect when we meditate, we are sorrowful; should we find some difficulty in doing good deeds, should some obstacle oppose our plans, we are in a dither to overcome it, and we labour anxiously. This, too, seems a very common phenomenon: many of us are inclined to look, in all these things, for a form of immediate and emotional pay-off so that the end of prayer becomes not contrition, praise, petition, and receptivity, but a kind of meditative mood in which we are elated, and if we do not experience that elation, we are inclined, not to question our aims, our object and our methods, but to question, and even to dramatise ourselves, and to whip up a mood of our own, so that prayer can degenerate into a form of self-love, self-punishment, and self-depression. Similarly, in action, we expect our motives and the mere fact that we have put ourselves for the benefit of others to yield immediate satisfactions in terms of praise, and feelings of self-satisfaction in our own vision of ourselves: we can resent the unreasonable way in which we seem to be misunderstood, obstructed, or frustrated - or taken for granted, and this too, introduces a harsh note into the sweet music of the self-regard in which we may have been seeing ourselves. Why is this?, asks St Francies, and immediately replies Doubtless because we love our consolations, ease, and comfort. We want to pray as though we were bathing in comfort and to be virtuous as though we were eating dessert. Here, too, St Francis reiterates the link between self-regard and self-doubt, between our desire for satisfaction, and our feelings of frustration when those satisfactions do not become manifest. And then, St Francis reaches what is, perhaps, the least palatable conclusion to those of us who have fallen into this double-minded state of self-regard: he takes our heads in his hands, and he turns them firmly towards Christ, reminding us that in the state in which we have been praying or acting, we have actually failed to look upon our sweet Jesus, who, prostrate on the ground, sweated blood and water from the distress from the extreme interior combat he underwent (Mark 14:35; Luke 22:44). And to get the point of this, we need to think of a context in which Jesus, whose humanity admitted all the agonies to which we are subject, found himself faced with a trial in which he, the maker of man, was of be faced with perverse misunderstanding, or knowing, and outright rejection of his chosen people, and the full manifestation of hatred and spite in insult, torture, humiliation and and an agonising death while the men at the bottom of the cross diced for the clothing which were the only possessions that he had in the world. We should, I think, be somewhat shocked by this, for we can hardly imagine that Our Lords state of mind was adequately summed up by the words depression or fulfilment.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 06:34:11 +0000
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