One of the most difficult tasks someone with severe depression, and debilitating anxiety has, is to try to explain what is does, to other people.  Everyone who has suffered from depression, knows that others do not know what it is.  This is one experience we all share.

Most people have never really been depressed.  Certainly not the debilitating depression that some of us feel.  I can not know what is was like to grow up as a Black man in the South, in the `50s.  I can learn about it, and sort of come to understand it… maybe.  But only someone who has been there would know what it is like… and only that person could determine how well I understood it.

The worst problems are with people who think they understand, but do not.  They think they understand what it feels like, and what it does to you.  But listening to them proves they do not.

So they try their plans, and in their ignorance, they make things worse.  They make the worst possible suggestions, and have totally unrealistic expectations.  They think they know how things should work… so they act on that basis.  And it actually conflicts with what is really happening – making the situation destructive.

Isolation results.  You can’t even try to explain things to these people because they will inadvertently apply their wrong thinking, and push things in the wrong direction.  So we learn to not even try to explain.  Things work better with less communication, because communication can not exist without understanding.

It is not their fault.  How can they understand something so far outside their existence.  But if they are smart, and learned, it can be very difficult for them to accept it is something they do not get.  And if they are so very sure they understand, there is not point trying to explain anything to them.

Some people will not learn.