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The kind where no good is perceived at all. Even if someone got in my face and made me acknowledge one good thing verbally, I'd feel absolutely nothing about it. I have a lot of trouble about gratitude for that reason. I could say words, but I can't feel them. At ALL. But people expect you to acknowledge good things. Which makes me feel even worse, because I can't feel it. What an even more horrible person I must be. I can't feel anything positive. And am filled with utter self-loathing and trapped in the body of the walking dead. Here's the visual I've had of it. It's like when my mind is working like it should, the little voices are in balance. There are logical positives and a reasonable take on the negatives. As the depression goes deeper, the negatives gain speed and start getting more illogical. Thing is, to me, they are COMPLETELY logical. They mock any positives that try to pop up, twist them and before you know it, have completely pummeled them into oblivion. I can try all I want to tell myself that it IS the depression, that it ISN'T logical and it doesn't make a dent. So you can imagine, any input from outside, other people, is like water off a duck's back. There is no light. There is no logic. My mind is utterly held hostage.
With age, for me, it's gotten generally worse. I think part of it is the getting exhausted from all the trying. Over and over. To no real result. Even a totally objective observer would have to acknowledge that there would be no real reason for me to expect any better of the future. With decades of data, there's plenty to base that conclusion on. Maybe I'm just weak, but after throwing myself up against a brick wall over and over, and getting nowhere, motivation grows ever less.
So yeah, my depressions are a world of inpenetrable darkness. When I read the DSM criteria for depression, I laugh. God, how I wish that's all it were. It's not even the tip of the iceberg. It's taken a lot of thought when I'm doing better to get some insight into what happens. Because when I'm in the midst of it, I can't see it at all.
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