You know the team well. They all travel together. One feeds into and strengthens the next. And getting away from them feels inescapable. It’s a Traumatized Motherfucker’s worst friends; rumination, shame, and depression. Which cognitive hellhole comes first? Current models aren’t certain. All we know is, this horrible-thought-horrible-feeling cycle is one hell of a ride.  

“The end result of trying to “put ourselves in our maggoty, scum-filled place” is sitting at home alone, isolating ourselves, and engaging in self-destructive behaviors while we try to pass the excruciating hours of the day, which are broken into even more terrorizing individual seconds of the day spent with our least favorite person on the earth.” 

Today, we’re taking the neuro-psychological view of clinical depression… and discussing how their common “low energy vibe” might be the best tool for noticing, naming, and not-falling-for-their-shit next time.  

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In this public podcast miniseries, we’re describing what’s understood about CPTSD from our research and real-life ventures so far. And by “we,” I guess I mean, “me” and my multiple personalities.

To dive into the concise series covering the CPTSD basics, hit up that public stream wherever you podcast.

To get real wet, consider hopping into the TMFR private community and podcast stream, where we’ve been talking about these topics for a while now. Get into the 200-ish backlogged episodes, the patreon community, and maybe even the private Discord server. Dealer’s choice.

See you here next time when we talk Anxiety, Obsession, and ADHD.

Cheers, Fuckers.

Jess

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Blogged and visually rich version of this episode:

What comes first, the chicken, the egg, or the biological preoccupation with procreating for genetic survival?

I don’t know!

And that’s exactly where research has landed on the shame, depression, rumination pathway, too.

What leads to what? No clue. Can’t tell where this life fuckfest starts or stops, but my opinion is… it’s a neuro-psychological issue.

“Isn’t depression just a biochemical imbalance,” you say? No, in most cases I really think it is not, and I really hate that perspective, I answer.

As we’ve touched on briefly, that’s increasingly acknowledged as a narrative injected into our society by pharmaceutical companies to make antidepressants a viable source of income. But I could be wrong, current models could be wrong. You decide yourself, you’re responsible for your own opinions.

Anyways.

Depression, shame, and rumination all travel together in one pack around here because it’s pretty difficult to isolate a single one of them. They’re more like a gang that works together to produce the final outcome that most of us with clinical or major depression have experienced.

You’ve got shame, the evolutionary emotional mechanism to tell you “oh, you done fucked up, and now you’re at risk in the safety of the herd.” This is a self-managed punishment system to keep yourself in line with social norms so you can socially exist. Biology is cool. Long term, persistent, cyclical shame is not.

Then you’ve got rumination, which I’m prettttty sure is the brain mechanism of trying to align mismatching information in your own head. As in, “we were always patterned to expect things to go to the left, but these new events skew hard to the right. Now we have to try to process this information together, but the connections aren’t coming easily so I’ll just serpentine for a few years between both neural patches.”

And finally, you have depression, which is the negative, freaked out assessment of the situation so far, as it relates to the ways that you’re the root of the problem and things will never improve because… they haven’t yet. So let’s shut down any accessory brain processes – deactivate half of our head – and just get through this with the least external distress possible, since internally we are doing great with that already.

So, putting it together, it goes a little something like this.

You have a series of shitty events. Your brain doesn’t know how to match up this latest chapter of life with the rest of the novel so far. When it tries to figure out the plotline, it keeps arriving at a shocking new story development that no one had anticipated – the main character fucking sucks. They’ve created this whole mess. They’re unsuitable in some way or another. They’re fatally flawed. How did we not notice this before? Let’s go back and recheck all the prior pages for more evidence. Let’s read between the lines to find clues about all the times they were actually a villain, or a failure, or a disgusting, unacceptable mess. Now let’s positively state that this is how things will always be, and that’s what we deserve as sweaty little fat boys, anyways.

And then, you know, just live in that state of mind for the next few days, weeks, or years… and, hey, you’ve described well over half of my life.

The end result of trying to “put ourselves in our maggoty, scum-filled place” is sitting at home alone, isolating ourselves, and engaging in self-destructive behaviors while we try to pass the excruciating hours of the day, which are broken into even more terrorizing individual seconds of the day spent with our least favorite person on the earth, during which our heads have nothing but ample time to consider all the ways we blow and don’t deserve nice people, places, things, or experiences. Alternatively, all the ways we DO deserve nice people, places, things, or experiences, but unquestionably know that we will never get any of them.

Take your pick. No matter what, depressive spells are some of our most trying times. Especially when, it turns out, that we have a lifetime of re-reckoning to do as we trigger ourselves into flashing back to a catalog of now questionable events we sortof forgot about on purpose. Enjoy the deep cuts into your highlight reel of perceived personal failures.

“Just feel better,” your friends say…

“look on the bright side”…

“try to see yourself the way we all do.”

Well, you literally can’t, because you’re in too much distress from your survival system in the hindbrain and limbic system in the midbrain being overactivated while your higher-thinking human brain is absolutely being hijacked by both.

There’s no ability to “regulate your perceptions” when your prefrontal cortex is being kicked in the mouth by your freaked out lizard brain, fragmented and poorly encoding memory system, and all those looping emotional-cognitive circuits that keep re-depressing you every time you get one fucking gasp of relief.

Did you feel better today? Not for long, here’s a new reminder of why you’re the worst and all the feelings that will keep your head trapped in similar thought patterns, feeding back to create a vicious cycle of (you wish) death.

In a nutshell, I would say this adequately explains some of the worst experiences of life, without having to get too far down into the weeds and actively depressing ourselves.

The only other thing I would like to add? Your Inner Critic falls into place here. That’s the voice in your head, built on other people’s actual voices in your ears over a lifetime, that tells you all the ways you’re unacceptable. Why everything is your fault. Why you always “should” have done something differently.

And this Inner Critic thing – that’s the primary associate you’ll have during periods of depression. This construct of other people’s value judgments that always looks for a way to throw you under the bus. The number one imparter of shame, I would say, because its created by the transient shit-ceptions of others.

And one of the hardest hurdles to get over in trauma recovery, since, you know, it takes self-investment to do the rewiring work… and meanwhile you have a narrative in your head telling you that you aren’t worth it, it isn’t possible, and you have no value anyways.

Many people find that they take a step forward in recovery, hit an inner critic wall, and fall three steps back. They just can’t find the motivation to care about themselves, when they’ve been so thoroughly trained to hate on themselves and put their own care at the bottom of the list, by default, because that’s the “right” thing to do.

It sucks to witness. One of the biggest conversations, continually ongoing in the TMFRs community, is how to feel like you have inherent value. How to forgive yourself. How to stop despising every single thing your trash existence represents.

And the truth is? You’re going to have to get the prefrontal cortex control to get clear about the basis of reality surrounding how you’re feeling, get pissed that your own brain is holding back your own life, and get desperate enough to make a real trauma- leap.

As in…. Trust that you’re not doomed, damaged, or better off dead already, and take the plunge to do new things that feel terrifying and exhausting. New behaviors, new thoughts, new feelings, new chance at resetting this trap.

If you start making moves for your self, you can break out of this destructive thinking pattern that’s only holding you back. Believe you can put an end to the automatic brain patterns you’re running on and that it’s worth trying. And then see how the internal system of thoughts, feelings, and actions all affect each other for better or for worse, so you know how to help and how to hurt more effectively.

And also, I think it helps to try to believe that everyone on this planet has just as many self-doubts as you do, so why not join the crowd of folks who say “fuck it” and try their hardest in the face of failure, anyways?

You might feel like you’re stuck with a deplorable identity or life assignment, but realize that we’re all capable of flipping into this self-evaluative nightmare. It just requires an unhealthy preoccupation with feeling unacceptable, as defined by… someone. Getting to the root of those impressions might be helpful. Or, just realizing that you can choose how you want to feel about yourself – no matter what’s happening on the outside, completely independent of external events – but those feelings will circle back to dictate EVERYTHING that happens on the outside.

Because when you feel like shit, you treat yourself like shit. And when you treat yourself like shit, you don’t run into amazing opportunities in life. And if you do run into amazing opportunities, you won’t feel like you deserve them or are prepared for them… because you already spent so much time feeling like shit. And so, you’ll never escape. It’s a self-defeating cycle.

So. Let’s not do that anymore.

Let’s try to realize how much of our mental struggle is actually coming from within, and feeding into other systems that will keep us defeated when they’re working in an endless loop of lamentful self-blaming.

We can choose to use our brains to analyse all the ways we’re responsible for the misery of our whole lives. Or we can choose to be realistic in our assessments, shame-punish ourselves exactly as much as we need to to get the point across (which is, roughly, once. Not an ongoing self-flagellation for the next 30 years), and move on with realistic views about what to do the same or differently for the results we’re aiming for.

Shut your inner critic up when it starts cunting at you. Your life will immediately start looking brighter.

How? Well, I’d start with catching the depression-shame-rumination-inner critic spiral as soon as it starts, before you’ve gotten completely sucked under.

Learn to notice and name the sensation of shame. The mechanism of rumination. The voice or keywords used by your inner critic. And the sensations of a looming depression. You’ll see that they all travel as an in-crowd. You’ll also start to better understand how to moderate them.

And you might even notice… you don’t need to keep an eye out for ALL of these individual issues rearing up. Actually, they come with a major shift that will immediately let you know you’re slipping into danger territory and have some thoughts to dispel ASAP before the whole loop begins. And that shift is… energetic. You feel that low, draining vibe too, right? Well, it’ll keep your brain cycling in low and draining places, as well.

So if you can manage the low, crappy feeling energy, maybe you can manage or avoid the full onslaught of self-berating mental hangups that it goes hand in hand with….

And, actually, the same goes for all your anxiety issues, too. Only, it’ll be the opposite energy.

That’s what we’re talking about next time, when we pick back up here to discuss the other end of the stick – neuroticism-based trauma trends, as I see them. Anxiety, obsession, and ADHD. The high-energy reasons why you want to die most days of the week.

Note: no you don’t, this is manageable, and that’s coming from someone who used to be too anxious to leave the house, sleep at night, or go a single day without fifty tums to balance out my angsty acid reflux. No meds, no more anxiety, and depression that barely registers compared to the old ways of life.

Meaning. You can figure this out too.

If this is all making some sense to you so far, you might want to check out the full episodes already written and recorded on everything we talked about here today on depression, shame, and rumination. Get the full details, including research paper excerpts and interpretations, in the backlog of TMFR episodes from chapter one.

Reminder, chapter one of TMFRs is the first 18 months of this project, during which we started with very basic trauma experiential learning and then gradually dove deeper and deeper into the tiny details of understanding our strangely patterned brains… especially focused on family-programming, as this Motherfucker slowly lost her grip on parts integration under the influence of an abusive and chaotic home environment.

If you’re wondering about anything we’ve covered here in this miniseries, you can find more information in the catalog of full episodes from our adventures together so far.

How many episodes HAVE been done on depression already? Enough. Let’s just say, if you’re looking for more proof that you’re not alone in any of this shittery, there’s plenty of evidence from both academic and experiential standpoints. You are not alone, even in your most miserable, isolated, shameful, and secondarily-traumatizing times. As in, I think going through a major depressive spell can be a trauma all its own when you lose years of your life and your self-respect.

You’re not the only one.

Find evidence at patreon.com/traumatizedmotherfuckers. You can also jump into the private trauma recovery community through the Patreon OR Discord server from there, if you’re looking for more people who are going through the same realizations and relatable daily struggles. Get in the group, they’re great.

And, uh, that’s it for today. Let’s get out of depression and into the next round of trauma shenanigans, talking about our other arch nemesis… anxiety.

Cheers Fuckers.

Jess