So you know how sometimes you fuck up big time and hurt other people? Maybe because you were flailing around in your misery puddle and accidentally splashed someone. Maybe because you were bored or lonely in your misery pit so you tried to pull someone down. Or maybe just because you were being an asshole. Then after you realize that you’ve hurt someone, your self-loathing cycle starts and it’s all wash, rinse, repeat.

Yeah, sometimes whether we mean to or not, we hurt other people. And it’s important to remember that is okay. Well, maybe not okay so much as it is inevitable. Ideally, we would never lose control and hurt other people, but unfortunately it does happen. And when it happens we can’t take it back, or pretend that it didn’t happen. Well, we can pretend, it’s just that does not change reality.

While it is tempting to try and brush over our actions. Or to try to explain them away. Or to even apologize and then beat ourselves up a disproportionate amount. These solutions don’t tend to make other people feel better, and even when they are enough to get everyone off our case, they don’t make us feel better either. Because none of these responses are enough to satisfy our internal self-critic. Our depression knows when we’re minimizing, or explaining, or self-flagellating, and it just attacks us for doing those things.

And worst of all is when we know that we hurt someone, can’t accept that it was our fault, and feel the need to lay the blame on others or even the person we hurt. When we are so disgusted with ourselves, and our actions, that we can’t handle it and need to share the guilt. Of course, this just makes the guilt worse, and our inability to manage it leads to more hurt. Then the cycle continues…These cycles are the most frightening and damaging aspect of depression. Because they perpetuate again and again, until we have lost all sense of self-control and autonomy. We even lose site of the way out. Not sure how we’ve become the agressors when we were originally the victims.

There is a way to break the chain. To prevent us from becoming agressors again, and again, and again. That is, we need to recognize that what we did was wrong, and then we need to accept that it is also okay that we did it. When we blame and attack ourselves for hurting others, we are unable to truly take responsibility for it. Punishing ourselves does not help the people we’ve hurt, and when taken to an extreme, it causes us to break, and take our punishment out on others. The only way to stop the cycle is to truly look at the hurt we have caused, and accept that it was our responsibility. That we have caused pain, and that through our will, we can stop causing pain. Most importantly, we can redeem ourselves for the pain that we have caused.

So hurt happens. It would happen even if we weren’t depressed. There would still be times when we are agressors, and still be times when we are victims. The depression just intensifies our self-blame, self-loathing, and self-punishment. It brings us past the brink of despair, and leads us into cycles of negative behavior. In order to break free of our depression, we must break free of these cycles by recognizing our responsibilities without punishing ourselves when we fail to live up to them.