When we are young, the conditions of love are told to us.
Even if they are not explicitly told, we can easily intuit it.
We look at the environment around us with the question:
“What must I be? What must I do? What must I become?” to get the love I desire?
Love is first for survival, because if nobody loves you, you will not survive.
Even if you were unwanted and parents took care of you just as a duty, that is still because they love to be morally right/socially right etc.
So love is required to survive when you are dependent esp.
After the survival stage is passed, love is still needed for enrichment, growth, expansion, flourishing, prosperity, real wealth, and so on.
So coming back to the topic, depression is from the loss of hope, that you can ever be/become/do something that will get you love.
Thereafter the person just lives hand to mouth existentially.
Some force in him keeps living mechanically like clockwork in cycles, but he loses all hope and falls into grief.
All his mental energies fall like a dead weight on him, like a cross which he carries and walks in despair, in the endless desert.
He becomes totally apathetic, and wishes for deep sleep to carry him away to non-existence permanently.
His daily life with this cross on his back then resembles the ‘Sisyphus myth’ i.e. rolling a rock up the hill only to watch it roll down again and repeat.
What I have described is only the surface. Let’s dive further in.
From the archetypal perspective, the world is your projection.
Everything including love shines forth from you, from the source.
If you give all of your projections away to impossible ideals, depression is inevitable.
How does this happen?
It could be a combination of your own innate tendency to do that (hyper-ambition) coupled with being born in a family (which you might have attracted from a tendency match).
So in such a case, usually the family i.e. parents, siblings etc. feel they are profoundly unworthy and undeserving, and each of them have an impossible ideal which receives their light.
As a result of that, they are always in the dark shadow of undeservingness, poverty, desperation, grief, unworthiness, and deep-ambivalence of hope.
So now when you are born, you osmotically pick up the ideals from them which may go unconscious in you by the time you grow up.
But it is those ideals that are getting your light, which are unconscious to you.
In your conscious experience, you may only see meaninglessness, darkness, apathy, disinterest, futility, despair, dim view about the future etc.
But the far away faint ideal receives all of your light.
It is like how when we have a full solar eclipse, that shadow blocks off a large portion of the earth.
In this case, the ideal that you have given away your love to, casts a huge shadow on you, turning you into its prisoner in deprivation.
This is the abstract description of the situation of depression.
I’ll give an example.
Say you look at magazine images of male and female models, and compare yourself to them.
If you project all of your love on them, and believe only they deserve love, and if you are far from that image, then to that extent you will fall in the shadow of hate.
You see them 100 times more clearly than you see yourself because they have received all of your light, like the other side of the moon in the eclipse.
Loving others more than loving yourself, or co-dependence is likely, because the other has been projected as lovely, which means in relativity to that, you will definitely fall in the shadow of hate.
Hate is darkness, which means literally, you will be mostly unconscious to yourself.
Now many different actions are possible from this condition:
* You can try to become like them, give all of your energies to that, depending on the level of shame you feel and the level of idealization you have projected on them. This will not give you depression, but will make you pursue the ideal like your life depends on it.
* If you realize it is impossible for you to be like them, then you lose hope of ever becoming something worthy of love, and fall into hopelessness, despair, unworthiness, and the smoke of grief we call depression.
For some people these ideals are more literal = like money, body, possessions, achievement etc.
But often, these ideals are more obscure, elusive, and contradict each other.
The contradiction is what makes the depression impossible to overcome on its terms.
Like what if the one who is loved has to be:
“Extraordinary enough to be admired, adored, worshipped.
But ordinary enough to be loved, included, and belong.”
So the 2 conditions above are contradictory almost.
So you could have tons of such impossible ideals.
Then they will definitely paralyze you, take away all of your light, and leave you with nothing, in the shadow.
I see this as one of the chief deeper causes of depression.
Journey to the Abstract 