Double feature: Social Depression, Silent Empty Chair

Social Depression

From an earlier TPS blog post: “For some (dysfunctional) people, it can be painful, though subliminally, merely to entertain the consciousness of another person.” By a very strange coincidence, within a recent week I saw three clients who named a peculiar phenomenon featuring this uncomfortableness with another consciousness. Not in the twenty-five years prior to that week, as far as I recall, had a client ever described it. Two of them, one a twenty-year-old woman, disclosed that it is “draining” to be among people, even for five minutes, to be expected to and proceed to talk. The third client described it as "a drag." A single person’s presence, it could even be a family member, would be enough to distress, numb and pain her mind.

This is not “social anxiety.” It is “social depression.” I know the essence of it because I am the fourth person on that list. In my predominant adult persona, as therapist, I am invigorated by a client’s presence, his thoughts and feelings and challenges. In my secondary persona, as husband to a compatible, former-therapist wife, I am comfortable with our mutual familiarity with my preconscious* psyche and its easy translation into conscious talk. But outside of work and marriage, I find it painfully and heavily burdensome to be silent with or talking to a stranger or a neighbor or to one of my wife’s friends, small talk or ‘medium’ talk. (Deep subjects would invoke my adolescent-stage narcissism fused to my professional garb.)

This is not because the more real self of me is too murky – complex and historical – to know which words to pull from the deeps. It’s because without the appropriate context for my (professional) conscious and (marital) preconscious selves, there is only left the inner child – the unformed and ungrown self – that has only fear, oblivion, and no words. Were there no behavior controls that must fall into place, in an “adult” context with stranger, neighbor or friend, the needful urge would be to collapse and become fetal.

My three clients are also this person. We don’t really go to that inchoate darkness but to recognize how recondite we are and to offer therapist’s empathy and care for it.

 

Silent Empty Chair

This is a slight idea but one that I find meaningful. I don’t know if many or all therapists who use Perls’s Empty Chair exercise bastardize it as I do. To me, the client needs to feel her internal ocean of “all the unsaid”** between her and a parent. But to feel this and then try to talk it, put it into words and concepts, is like painting the surface of the ocean. It's reducing the immeasurable to something temporal.

So sometimes a client’s failure to have the nerve to speak to an agelessly frightening father or an unloving mother can bring her to an even deeper place, beneath words. In her silence she is starting to feel and know parts of her history, aspects of her true character, and feelings that she never experienced but for a glinting moment in childhood. The look on a silent client’s face as she stares in the direction of the empty chair shows that she is changing on the inside, is finding and reclaiming more of the real childhood self that was banished early on, more of her self as left open and empty of her parent. I can’t assume, but hope that this internal change will manifest in new eyes, new seeing, new acting in the world.

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* Look up Freud’s notion of the “preconscious.”

** Term taken from Nathaniel Branden’s “Death Bed Situation” exercise. See blog post "The antithesis client," July 16, 2024.