Good question. It could be for many reasons. It might have fleas. It might have gotten hurt in some way. It itches. The reasons can go on and on.

I  suggest that one of the reasons may be that the dog is unaware that its  tail is part of the dog. It is an attachment which comes with the dog. However, no matter how fast and furious the dog chases its tail the dog will never get hold of it. I gather it soon discovers this important fact!Anyway, why think about this fact here?  What has this to do with the information we normally share here at our Depressed Anonymous website.

So often as a   therapist  I have  heard  how some persons believe that their depression just came out of the blue.  You know, like the rain, snow, and stormy weather.  And ironically, I felt the same way. I just couldn’t understand how  it was that I felt so bad with no prior  warning.

In our manual Depressed Anonymous I give the reader a brief account of my own experiences with depression and how I always felt that this plague of the spirit just happened. I too felt that It just came out of the blue for no apparent reason.

Here is a little bit of what I wrote in the introduction to Depressed Anonymous and I want to share this with you now.

“What it was like. More than ten years ago, I began to notice that something was very wrong with the way I was feeling. I can tell you exactly the place and the time when this terrible sadness began to swallow me up;. I felt myself, without warning, sliding down and into the dark pit from which I was not able to climb out for a year of painful months. Feelings of inner pain and numbness descended upon me, and began to rule my life.

At the time, I thought that this descent into hell came from “out of the blue” but, like all feelings we experience, I knew that because of situations in my personal past, my emotional reservoir was overdrawn. My reactions to these situations had allowed thoughts and feelings to accumulate a wealth of debt whose note had come due.

“…Looking back over my life and experiences, I discovered that my thoughts produced the feelings, the feelings produced moods and the moods produced my behaviors. The mind-body connection is never as much in evidence as it is in the human experience that we label  depression.”

In another chapter of the Depressed Anonymous book we hear Mary tell us how  she felt about her own depression experience:

“…Because of shame, Mary was never able to share her story with any of  her friends. In time, she began to think that  her feelings were disloyal to her parents, whom she felt she had to love because they were her parents.  She said she got confused because they seemed to want her around sometimes but at other times they told her what a worthless and lazy girl she was. The thing that hurt most, she said, is that she believed them. So now she wonders how this Fifth Step  applies to her when it’s her parents who need to admit their wrongs to her. Mary was puzzled. All she wants to do is to get over some of the anger that she still holds for the way her parents neglected her when she was growing up. She says that every time  she goes back home a sadness just seems to come over her -as though out of the blue -and for no apparent reason. She also says that her stomach gets all  knotted up.”

And now, why do we seem to have a mental disconnect between our  life losses and the depth of pain that we are presently suffering?

The author gives an explanation here:

“To have lost a parent  early in life, either through death or divorce can have a serious effect on the life of  a young child. Early losses in life cause a lot of hurt later on in life and many people  think that their depression just happens, out of the blue without rhyme or reason, but usually there IS  a reason and most probably it is buried deep in the unconscious because it has been too painful to look at.  It is in sharing with a trusted friend, group member or therapist that you can gradually let out the bits of the secret that has been under lock and key for years. It is also when we can be in contact with persons we trust that the hurts of the past can be revealed.”

And finally to answer our questions: why does the dog chase his tail? I honestly don’t have a clue. But what I do know that when I was depressed   I could sit and think for hours about why I   felt so miserable –but   never coming up  with the reason. No matter what avenue I went down trying to understand my present pain, I really  couldn’t stop chasing false leads and dead ends of why I was so despairing of relief.

Later, with a mind cleared of the fog of sadness, and with a new ability to process where I had been in my life, I finally began to see that nothing just  comes out of the blue. There is always a reason.

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If you would like to read more of how other members of Depressed Anonymous share their stories of recovery  in our Depressed Anonymous manual  and how they found their way out of depression.  They all discovered how their symptoms of depression didn’t just  come out of the blue.

SOURCE: Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville. Pages 20,67, 79.

Visit The Depressed Anonymous Publications Bookstore here at this site depressedanon.com.  One may order online.