One hallmark of a depressive episode is how impossible it is to understand that depression always passes. This is impossible to imagine when you are depressed. Depression removes all hope, closes off all creativity, every possibility for overcoming it. Depression is rage turned inward, against the self.

I speak from experience. I was in the dark pit of what felt like a major and endless depression around the time I turned thirty. I could see no possibility for moving forward. I spent months in therapy, walking, avoiding people and falling asleep on a friend’s couch when I went to visit him after therapy.

Depression removes all options for action, preemptively torepedoing any thought that might lead you away from self-torment.

Though it feels impossible, reach out to people who can listen to you and help. Your support group is very concerned but not often up to the task of offering you perspective or relief from the burden of other people’s harsh judgments that have led you to the dark abyss you find yourself at the bottom of. You lose all sense of your own value, and decency, all sensitivity turned against yourself for disappointing those who love you.

Though it feels impossible, and I understand why, reach out to people who have made you feel loved. They are the only ones who can help you up and out.

And know this. While it sounds impossible, this depressive episode will pass, depression always does. You could look it up.

Nobody can teach you something they have no ability to do and no understanding of. Our first teachers, from before we can do anything but imbibe lessons we don’t understand, are our parents. If our parents don’t know how to compromise, how to resolve conflict, how not to become frustrated and enraged at others, how to forgive — we have a hard time unlearning whatever they demonstrated for us everyday so we can learn those crucial skills.

Rage is hard, fear of shame is devastating, the need to be right, no matter what, is crippling. The best some people can do, with every intention of being loving and teaching those they love by their example, is not very good. It is very bad. They will teach their children to take the blame for their parents’ shortcomings. The child grows to be an adult with deep cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, their parents are great people. On the other hand, they find themselves always in pain, especially around their parents, who love them, but are exhausting to be around.

My father lamented just before he died that in a challenging world with so many obstacles in everyone’s path that he placed additional obstacles in the path of his son and daughter, the two people, beside his wife, who he loved the most in the world. I’d have followed up on it, but he was dead.

If you work hard and have some luck, you can figure out how to become the parent to yourself that your disabled parents weren’t capable of being. Clearly, if we got to choose, it is much better never to have had this kind of asshole parenting. Parenting is in large part based on authority, but when the respect isn’t mutual, you wind up having to accommodate yourself to tyranny that may cause your brain to explode, unless you can come to see it for what it actually is. As Robin Williams’s character, the shrink in Goodwill Hunting, told Matt Damon’s, his super vulnerable tough guy patient, “it’s not your fault.”

It’s not your fault.

There is no greater love, believes the group, than undeviating antipathy toward a hated betrayer of the group. This principle seems to operate everywhere, throughout history. If you can show someone is disloyal, a traitor, has betrayed a loving group, well, whatever is coming to such a person is well deserved, in the eyes of the loyal, loving group.

We see it daily with MAGA. We see it with groups like the Klan, Nazis, all those fine people, in every insular group. We see it on the left and on the right, though it is most conspicuous lately on the right. There is nothing a beloved member of the far right can do that will cause other members to condemn the behavior. Loyalty über alles. On the other hand, criticize the beloved member and you will be promptly vilified and tossed out of the group. MAGA has a great term for traitors like Bill Barr, lately come to a realistic assessment of his former master: RINO. Republican in name only, like Liz Cheney and her filthy ilk.

Having experienced this ostracism recently in my personal life – a minor conflict with two people who can never be wrong, a series of threats and long periods of silence, lies about my behavior, unanimous judgment by old friends insisting they love me but won’t talk about what they already know I did and am now lying about — I understand that the evil involved in this human reflex is almost incidental. Going along with the group is as natural as taking the underdog’s side in a fight.

At the same time, the person who tells the initial lies, no matter how desperate they feel when they assassinate the good name of an old friend, has no right to do that. The group, if they take her side, is acknowledging that truth and falsehood are trifles when it comes to the seriously hurt feelings of an overwhelmed, beloved member of the group. You could also call those reputation killing lies evil, I would, but, fuck, I’m judgmental enough without bringing good and evil into it. Ask any of my former close friends.

If your parent, whenever you were upset and needed comfort, told you that you were weak, cowardly, needy — well, that is a gift that keeps on giving. If they alternated between merciless blaming and name calling and silence, well, silence by way of response will take on a magically painful quality for the rest of your days.

It’s very easy while waiting for a reply, if you’ve been subjected to cruel, strategic silence, to imagine, just because somebody is being silent (they could, of course, be busy, preoccupied, forgetful, distracted, ill, in a crisis, taking care of someone else), that they are silently seething at you. You can picture them glaring, arms folded, in a hostile posture of complete opposition and denial. Whatever you say their answer is ready – a silent glare of negation and blame.

Silence, to which you have been morbidly sensitized from before you can do anything to defend yourself against it, will be your kryptonite. Loved ones who know this about you, when smarting over their own issues, may deploy it from time to time, as blamelessly as the parent who simply kept quiet when you most needed a few sympathetic words.

The emotional mind is literally like a bucking bronco sometimes. When it starts to kick all you can do is take a few deep breaths and use your rational mind to try to rein it in. “This steep path is very rocky, “ you might say calmly to your bucking bronco mind, trying to recall it to reason. “There’s a long drop down the side, maybe a thousand feet… OK, OK … there you go… there you go, good mind, good mind!”

Imagine you had a relatively minor conflict with two of your oldest friends. Afterwards, as they withdrew from you, you remained patient, reassuring when they threatened you, or told you they were unsure that they could ever forgive you, or were angry at you. Imagine you extended friendship to them, no matter how wildly they attacked you.

Now imagine that after a year of this they told all of your friends in common, and everyone in their family, that you were implacably enraged, unforgiving, bent on being right at all costs, sadistic, harshly judgmental and totally unloving.

Then imagine that all of your friends embraced this series of lies, this character assassination. The only problem, everybody agrees, is your immature paralysis, the result of a painful childhood that left you incapable of dealing with your rage.

Now the thought experiment is not imagining how to get through or make peace with these people who, there’s a very strong case, were never really very good friends in the first place, but how do you move on with your fucking life?

$64,000 question, doc.

Hard to swallow as a bone crosswise in the old craw, no doubt, but in the end not that hard to understand how people can believe an inflammatory lie about you if it is confided with passion and great sorrow.

picture the story that destroys your good name among a group of old mutual friends:

“You know how much we all love him, and how long we’ve been close, like family, but something happened to him, something we can’t understand. We’ve told him over and over how sorry we are that he seemed to have been hurt but nothing we say is ever enough to reassure him of our love. He seems determined to fight, to never forgive something that happened TWO YEARS AGO. He remains stuck in his abusive childhood, he’s never been able to trust anybody, or make himself vulnerable enough to accept love. We can’t tell you how many times we tried to make him understand how much we love him. but it’s like talking to a wall. It’s so painful and frustrating, nothing we say or do can get through to him. He insists we’re not listening to him and he’s already told us all this dozens of times. Not once, not twice, believe us if we say many, many times. But it’s never enough, because his father abused him and he can’t recover from that. We even offered to hire a mediator to help him realize how much we love him, but after pretending to be on board, he fought us on this, and you know how he loves to argue, and in the end told us to fuck off. It is one of the most painful things we have ever gone through, to have a friend we’ve loved so long, unfairly treat us like we are dead.”