From Where I Sit

David came to counselling looking for ways to get through the dark periods of depression that had recently become a feature of his life. David wasn’t entirely sure why the blight of depression had suddenly descended on his life, but it was having a severe impact on his ability to function let alone his ability to derive joy from life.

Over the last four months the pattern of depression in David’s life was such that it was not uniformly black. Some days were better, brighter and lighter than others. He would have periods of a few days in a row where he felt like depression wasn’t touching his life so heavily, before it descended on him again and swamped his life all over again. At other periods it was day after day of unrelenting darkness. David still had hope of getting through and reclaiming his life from depression, but he wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Over the course of David’s tussle with depression there were several strategies he used, including medication, however this post will look specifically at one he found quite useful.

The idea that David found most useful in his battle with (and against) depression was that of comparing the experience of depression to sitting on a train while travelling through a tunnel. Imagining a journey on a train that suddenly enters a tunnel, David described how all the senses get overtaken by the tunnel experience.
-Vision is immediately affected by the darkness that envelopes you.
-The darkness cuts you off and isolates you from anyone who was close to you.
-The noise of the tunnel fills your head and overwhelms your connection to the world further isolating you.
-It’s just you in the darkness.

These were quite vivid descriptions for the experience of depression as well. So for David the tunnel metaphor captured some of his experience of bouts of depression, however, the real value of the metaphor came to bear when he used it against depression.

Tunnels have a beginning and an end. Even if you can only see darkness, you can know and remember that they do eventually end and you re-emerge once again into the lightness of the familiar world. The tunnel is the aberration to the normal experience of life and it always ends. Tunnels don’t go on forever, they are finite. Even when David was in the midst of a dark bout of depression he would try and hang onto the knowledge that “this will end, and I will come out of it OK. Even if I can’t see the end of the tunnel from here, that could be because it’s just around a bend up ahead. It will end, and I will come out the other side”

This idea was powerful because the experience of depression robs people of perspective and it changes how we feel about the past present and future. Depression tried to convince David that it would not end, but David just kept reminding himself that tunnels do end.

David added to this idea and made it even more powerful by considering that everyone close to him aware of the depression might not have been there in the tunnel with him, but they were waiting for him to emerge at the other end. They couldn’t be there with him in the tunnel, in the darkness, as depression is a single person experience that isolates, however they were all at the tunnel exit, watching and waiting, maybe even reaching into the darkness to guide the way. They would all be reunited as soon as he emerged from the tunnel. All he needed to do was keep moving forward. If he just kept moving forward then he would inevitably get there.

David did keep moving forward, he did emerge, and the metaphor of the tunnel is his offering to others who also find themselves in the darkness of the tunnel of depression.

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