Depressive types have a violated right to independence. Put simply, this means that they have no opinion of their own — or, more precisely, that they do not allow themselves to have one.
In life this violation spills out into a fear of uniformity. Uniformity is when it is the same for everyone, when everybody's life is cut to one pattern. On the one hand, you have to be like the rest, so that things are as they are for other people. On the other hand, you still have to be different.
And in Depressive types this shows itself as a fear of condemnation and a fear of happiness. Condemnation is the source of shame, and Depressive types carry a great deal of shame and guilt as their basic experiencing:
“What will people say, what will people think? And have you thought about how it looks?”
Every country can be assigned a personality type of its own, shaped by the personality type of the majority of the population living on its territory. Religions, too, arise and take shape around the demands of that population. And so Mother Russia and the Orthodox Church are depressive in essence.
Look at the way the Orthodox Church cultivates the fear of condemnation, the fear of sin. How does the classic Orthodox Russian live?
- First we sin. We feel ashamed, we feel guilty.
- So we go to church, then we ask forgiveness, we pray our sin away. We have been forgiven, and we start living again.
- Then life starts up again, and it cannot be monotonous. Slogging away from morning till night is dull. We hold ourselves back for a while. But it is impossible to live in uniformity.
- It all breaks through: there has to be a feast. And how do you throw a feast if your soul is clean? The feast consists in getting drunk and running riot: binges, betrayals, brawling — so that afterwards there is something to repent of and to ask forgiveness for.
- And again we are ashamed of what we did. Guilt — and off we go to church again. Again we ask forgiveness, again we pray it away.
Why can a Depressive person not live in monotony? It is a manifestation of the violated right to independence: he was forbidden to be happy. For him happiness is a synonym for a quiet life, one in which there is nothing to atone for and nothing to earn. And that automatically means the end of the road: if there is nothing left to earn, then I shall get no approval either.
Attaining happiness is practically a notion of death. That is why the main ideas about happiness in the Orthodox Church are read as the life beyond the grave: “after death, in the next world, we shall get our sleep,” our grandmothers used to say. “There we shall be happy, and here we must labour, suffer and atone.” Hence the everlasting searching, striving, moving towards happiness — and earning it.
But as soon as happiness turns up on the doorstep, as soon as the soul is clean, the Depressive type starts fouling his own nest. Living happily is boring:
“and he, rebellious, seeks the storm, as if in storms there were peace”.
Everything is fine right now, but we know that something is coming. After the lull there is bound to be a storm. And the point is not that a reckoning always arrives. It is rather that the Depressive person will arrange that reckoning for himself out of nothing, which is why he lives with a sense of a threat permanently looming:
“There always has to be a fly in the ointment.”
What makes the Depressive person frightening? The unpredictable outburst driven by racket feelings. That, by the way, is where those social-media slogans come from:
“a woman ought to be unpredictable — that way she is interesting and never dull”.
It is impossible to live like this, monotonously and uniformly: it is boring! The absence of problems, of suffering, of something to overcome brings on even greater suffering in the soul. Let us throw a feast, let us smash everything around us! And then off to church, to pray for one another and ask forgiveness.
And a few more fears of the depressive personality type for the collection:
- Achievements and successes that are undeserved, not suffered for
- “Bad marks” (criticism, being “not good”)
- Categorical, peremptory statements aimed at them
- Wanting things for themselves, admitting that they love themselves
