The depressive personality type

There are good people in this world! Devilishly caring ones. And they really are very good, they will give a stranger in need the shirt off their back — but only strangers. At home they are “tyrants in slippers”, and the last shirt given away will be the husband’s or the children’s. Do sayings like these sound familiar to you:

Familiar, isn’t it? These are the sayings we hear all the time in Russia. “Russia cannot be grasped by the mind, nor measured by a common yardstick. She has a form all her own...” Nothing of the sort. Here we are going to carry out a deep psychoanalysis of Mother Russia, whose population is depressive at its core. And since the people living in Rus are kind souls, ready to give a stranger everything they have down to the last shirt, let us give them a kind name: “the Caring Ones»

Do you remember Auntie Lina from “Good Night, Little Ones”? Do you like Orlando Bloom? Have you seen Lyudmila Putina, Vladimir Putin’s wife? Watched Justin Timberlake’s videos? Perhaps you recall the sorrowful faces of Nicolas Cage in his films? That is exactly who our Caring Ones are.

It matters enormously to the Caring Ones what people will think of them: “What will the neighbours think? And have you given a thought to your grandmother? And my own heart is aching: you never think about your mother at all!”. If the neighbours cannot see (there is no outside observer), these people are harshly tyrannical towards those closest to them. But the moment guests appear, they turn into a sweetheart, all soft and fluffy, everything is lovely.

Depressives, that is “the Caring Ones”, are Extraverts in a Passive life position, with the Ego type “Contact with Reality” and a violated right to independence.

• Extraverts — meaning they desperately need people to care for, so that those people will praise them
• Passive — meaning they are “good”, they will not argue or make war. Although if you do push them over the edge, a “revolt, senseless and merciless” begins
• The Ego type of the Caring Ones is Contact with Reality. Put simply, they are tuned to the processes of inner excitation and inhibition. Praise them and they calm down on the outside, but tense up inside at the approaching threat of happiness. To relax on the inside, they “get excited” and throw a “feast of life”. Then they start repenting, working off their “sins”, receiving praise — and round it goes again
• And the violated right to independence is about the ban on having an opinion of your own. Whether depressives are good or not is not for them to decide, but for you and me, dear readers))) That is exactly what dependence on other people’s opinion consists of

They also tend to believe that happiness has to be earned by a long road, and moreover that if happiness does appear in your life, it cannot last. Suffering, on the other hand, perfects the soul, so the suffering is long, drawn out and constant.

The passive voice is everywhere in their speech — the voice of the one being acted upon. They carry that earthly burden the whole time; there is always a faint film of guilt about them. They feel guilty, and they will always find reasons to feel guilty.

So it turns out that all their decisions are subordinated to proving their own “goodness” through outside appraisal. They are also marked by:

• A lack of belief in themselves.
• A pessimistic outlook.
• A love of overcoming difficulties.
• A whole life, all their strength, spent “for others”, because loving yourself and doing something for yourself is “selfish” and “not nice”.

The strengths of the depressive personality type

They will always share their roof, their food, their clothes and even their money. They put their soul into their work and make wonderful community organisers. Remember Shurochka from the accounts department in the film “Office Romance”, who could not recall the last time she had been at her own desk? Shurochka genuinely does her community work from the heart, she really does try and really does worry about the team. Incidentally, Nemolyaeva, the actress who played Shurochka, is an epileptoid personality type — which takes nothing away from how well she plays a depressive character.

They are kind, they empathise easily, and they sincerely want to help. You can repeat the word “sincerely” many times over: the wish to help is sincere, and the help they give turns out to be sincere and heartfelt. Afterwards, though, they talk about it as something very difficult that cost them dearly.

Two things should not be mixed up here: the inner content is very pure and unclouded. But to satisfy the depressive need for merit, the help too has to be turned into a merit. That is, it has to be presented as if it had been very difficult, very hard, and — most important of all — “I didn’t want to do it.” Only then can sincere help be credited to yourself as a merit.

And even so, none of this takes anything away from the long list of useful, pleasant and endearing qualities of depressives:

1. They are caring and always ready to help.
2. They are obliging and dependable.
3. They are generous and share whatever they have without hesitation.
4. They put their whole soul and all their strength into a profession or a cause, especially if it involves helping or rescuing others.
5. They are kind and empathise easily.
6. They solve the task even when a great deal has to be overcome to do it.

They, they, they... have a reverse side too, a conflict one.

The conflict traits of the depressive personality type

The little problem of the depressive personality type was described best of all by Adler, when he wrote about altruists who will give you the shirt off their back and then flay you alive. Afterwards they feel ashamed, and give you their last shirt again — and then take that shirt off somebody else. This is the position:

Inside depressives there is a constant struggle with their own shame, which surfaces through their central theme — morality. And this is their defining feature: martyrdom, the mood of the sufferer, painful altruism. Saintliness, “this is my cross and I must carry it”. “I am suffering for all of you.” “Nobody cares except me, and here I am doing all of it for the lot of you.”

And it often happens that there is nothing to suffer about, nobody is tormenting them. A depressive person who lands in a state of well-being starts to come apart. To prove to themselves that it is not possible to feel good in this world, they frequently provoke violence, becoming the “victims” of villains. Depressives need sacrifice, so do not get in the way of their provoking it. It lets them display their “Saintliness”: “I suffer, I overcome myself, I deny myself everything, and all around me is cruelty and violence — I am a saint.”

Depressives sometimes start playing at “I’m bad, I’m a rebel”, lowering themselves a notch, as it were. But it is done so pointedly and demonstratively, in a register of silliness and clowning, that everyone is meant to see it is not true at all and that really they are good. As a rule this game shows up when they are in a good mood, or in personalities who are already more harmonised. In acute cases, where the depressive character is sharply pronounced, the game is impossible, because there the sighing, the suffering, the going quiet and the heavy cross take over.

By temperament depressives are melancholics. Where epileptoid melancholics are full of feeling about external reactions, in depressive melancholics there is constant inner work on the theme of morality and of how it looks from outside.

They are full of constant deliberation: “What will they think? Why did they look at me like that? What could that mean? Did I do the right thing?”

To be good in the eyes of those around them, depressives show hyper-caring. These are the very same wonderful people who inflict their tenderness on you — that is,

A depressive mother sending her child out for a walk will put on a headscarf first, then a hat, then a fur hat on top of that, then cover it all with a hood, then tie a scarf over the lot: heaven forbid the child should be cold. And all of it is done with the best of intentions: so that he will not catch a chill or freeze.

That is, it is constantly underlined how hard all of this is for them. And that is not for nothing: “What pleasure? What are you talking about?” It is when you have worked long and hard, and then, in front of your comrades, you are handed a certificate and told: “Well done, you are a hero!” — that is when happiness arrives. But not for long, because by that point something has already managed to happen.

These are the people who spend their own birthday running about, carrying food and waiting on the guests, unable to sit down at the table. “What joy? What are you on about? So what if you all came to congratulate me! They have been coming for the fourth day running, and it is lay the table, lay the table, and then wash up!” They will do everything for their guests until the guests are out of the door.

Meanwhile a great deal of inner tension builds up, and it has to go somewhere. If it cannot be let out on the right address, it lands on whoever is sitting nearby: family, close ones or the dogs. Although the dogs get it less often, because animals must be treated well.

And to round off the collection, here are some other subtleties of the depressive character:

1. Dividing everything into “good” and “evil”, “white” and “black”, “right” and “wrong”. Waging “holy wars” against “evil”.
2. Sacrificing themselves, their interests, their wishes and their “shirts” for the need to receive a “good mark”, “praise” and the sense of having overcome something (“I gave my whole life for you”).
3. Workaholism.

The appearance of the depressive personality type

Representatives of the depressive personality type are very kind, and the kindness shows in the way they move, among other things. The men, if we are talking about men, are of normal build, sturdy, a little inclined to put on weight. The depressive woman is inclined to put on weight too. Their saying goes:

She is a kind, large, warm mother. From time to time they worry about their weight and start slimming, but it costs them an enormous effort. They only become truly fat in states of ill health. Towards old age they begin to shrink both in height and in girth.

Depressives can be thin, especially if they were brought up in a particular vein. There are many self-mortifying themes: diets, vegetarianism. With a depressive vegetarian you always have the feeling that he is undereating, that he looks a little blue.

The motor activity of depressives is slightly weary. It is still morning, and there they are, seemingly brisk, bustling about the flat, yet a certain tiredness is still there in their gestures and their actions. And so the activity is a little slumped, the movements fairly soft.

In general, worn out, dishevelled, tired and eternally guilty, they are easy to recognise by the look of a dog that has made a mess in the wrong place.

How to recognise the depressive personality type by speech?

Depressives are easy to spot by their suffering. These are suffering poets, sighers and “holy martyrs”. One of their favourite manipulations:

An example from a counselling session: “I try to sort out our relationship with him, I tell him what I don’t like about what is going on between us, and he goes off into another room, sits down and writes me poems.”

The same category holds the “victims” of maniacs, monsters, alcoholic husbands and other “scoundrels”. Naturally, they are the ones sacrificing their last shirt:

“Nothing depends on me — I would, of course, nothing is stopping me, I’d be delighted.”

And as people insistently earning absolution through hyper-caring, they are the “little Christs”, “sanctimonious ones”, “Mother Teresas”:

But I won’t let you be saved all the way, or there would be nobody left to save. So I’ll save you a little, not to the end. And in any case this is

It is virtually impossible to talk a depressive round; only provocation and a collision with real experience will do it. Though they are fond of authority too, because authorities can give very good approval. It is one thing if five alcoholics get together and say: “good mother”. That is pleasant, of course, but they are alcoholics. But if an authority says: “Yes, you are a proper mother” — that is happiness!