Mother Siluana: How do thoughts influence depression?
We need to pay attention to what lies beneath our thoughts, to what we feel through them, and we need to offer them to the Lord for healing.
Fragment from Mother Siluana’s book “God, Where is the Wound?” which is now available in Kindle format on Amazon.
Question:
Mother Siluana, you talked earlier about thoughts. How do thoughts influence depression? Because depression is a real scourge nowadays, it is the illness of the century if I may call it this way - it is terrible! In what way do thoughts influence this illness, this scourge called depression? There must be a connection.
Mother Siluana:
Depression comes from our deep memories - whether they are from our early childhood, our spiritual wounds, or from our parents and ancestors who didn’t purify their minds and hearts in Church…Those unhealed traumas lie there (they lie there - they are not dead, they work through the illness) in the depths of our unconscious, because our conscious mind defends itself from them. For people who are not spiritual, the mission of the conscious mind is to not stir these waters of the deep, so that they suffer no pain. There is even a whole “philosophy” about “not stirring”: “Don’t stir things up. Leave things as they are, don’t think about them.”
And I don’t think about the things that are deposited there in the depths, but I accept thoughts that tell me that I am good for nothing, that nobody loves me…From these thoughts arise behaviors that cause the ones around me to reject me…And then I start thinking that there is nothing I can do about it. All these thoughts that I mull over and that make me crumble are an “infection” which originates from my unhealed spiritual wounds. This infection poisons my soul but also my body - in a real way, biochemically and neurologically. So these thoughts are the symptoms of my illness. They draw my attention to the fact that my heart and my mind are ill, and that I urgently need a doctor and remedies. And the Doctor of our souls with His divine remedies is very close to us.
Yes, we need to pay attention to these thoughts and not accept them anymore, because they activate those hidden programs. But, I repeat, we need to pay attention also to what lies beneath them, to what we feel through them, and we need to offer them to the Lord for healing. We need to understand that feelings are the fire of suffering. When feelings are healthy, they are useful to us because they are powers of the soul that give color and energy to our life. But when they are ill, when they are energies that erupt from the unhealed wounds of the soul, then they make us sick and can even kill us. These we need to offer to the Lord for healing while casting away the thoughts which accompany them - because these thoughts are keeping our spiritual state diseased. It’s like pouring gasoline on a fire: the feelings are the fire, and the thoughts are pieces of wood, combustible materials.
Let us not forget that the devil doesn’t attack us through our feelings. Sin doesn’t enter into us through sadness, fear, hate, envy expressed as feelings. God says to Cain: “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” (Genesis 4:6-7) So Cain’s feelings of envy and hate are not sins yet. They are ill energies of a diseased soul and they erupt out of our fallen nature without us being able to control them through willpower. Sin comes through evil thoughts that promise relief from the torment of those feelings and that lead to evil words and evil, murderous deeds.
The Lord is asking us and is giving us strength to defeat sin. Someone says: “But I am not able to not hate!” That’s true, and this observation is the first step toward healing. Only by confessing our helplessness can we stand before God with our feelings. The thought of “I’ll show him! I’ll do this or that to him!” turns this energy into an evil deed. But this energy can also be transformed into a good deed, into thinking about God, into prayer. I can choose to chase away my evil thoughts, or to commit an evil deed, or to have mercy on myself and through this, chase away the evil one and his suggestions. Or to cry out to the Lord: “Lord, save me!”
In the case of depression, the devil comes through thoughts and feeds the fire of sadness which originates in an old wound. People don’t become depressed if they didn’t have a sad story in their lives, in their past, to which they became attached emotionally. There is an addiction to negative feelings just like there is alcohol addiction. That’s why healing is difficult.
Then we need to understand that it’s not easy to change our thoughts. If someone comes to you and teaches you to “think positively”, you’ll perceive a certain change if you manage to do it, but your life will not change because these “positive thoughts” have no power over your “story”, over the scenario which lies underneath. That story needs to be offered to God, needs to be given to God.
How do I do this? How do I start? By giving up my thoughts and by offering my sadness to God. My sadness, my feelings are merged with my “story”, with my trauma. Maybe I don’t remember that trauma, but my body remembers the feelings. And whenever I have a real or imaginary reason for feeling sad, that “container” of sadness gets activated. By offering it to God and asking Him to heal it, even if I feel just a little bit of sadness, His healing grace will penetrate this “container”.
Another way is to learn to be glad for the good things, no matter how small. And to thank God for everything. Gratitude changes the soul, changes the chemistry of the brain and the entire body.
Yes, today depression is a scourge! Most of the people who are depressed have inherited severe traumas from parents, but even more so from grandparents: suicide, murder, incest, rape…All these “family secrets” that people try to keep buried are psychological burdens that turn people’s natures upside down. Some definite ways we can heal from them are purifying our souls from this heritage through forgiveness, praying for the fallen asleep, and choosing to live a Christian life in Church. At least for us, Orthodox people, who are still connected to God’s saving grace.
And so, Holy Sacraments, Church services, and prayer should not be missing from anyone’s life. When you, Reverend Fathers, pray by placing your epitrachelion and your hands on the head of a person who suffers, that is an extraordinary help to that person. A person who is depressed, a person who has an addiction needs God’s uncreated energy, needs divine grace, but also needs your human energy. Such people don't even have the spiritual energy to receive grace. They need the energy of someone close to them. That’s why, when we listen to them, we give them some of our spiritual energy. If we talk to them, reprove them or teach them, we don’t give them energy but we take it away from them. When we talk to them, we take them out of their spiritual state and we put them into a state of reasoning which produces those destructive thoughts that they struggle with. Whereas when we listen to them, we connect to their spiritual state and we give them some of our energy. It’s like a transfusion. If we also pray for them, the grace we ask for and we receive will also enter directly into them.
Communication experts say that men have a great need to learn how to listen. They say that men listen so that they can find and offer solutions. When a wife says something, for example, the husband is asking himself: “I wonder what she wants from me. What does she want me to do?” and, so he can show himself to be kind, says: “I’ll do what you want” and then he is surprised that she gets upset. He offers her a solution and she still gets upset. Why? Because what she wanted was to be listened to, to be heard, to be acknowledged.
Children and women need to be listened to, to be looked at. A man doesn’t look at his children, doesn’t look at his wife, and so the children and the wife think that they are not loved. And the man is surprised: “What do you mean I don’t love you? You don’t see that I do? You don’t know that I do?” No, she doesn’t know. Tell her: “You are very important to me. I love you!” And if you want to tell your child that you are upset with him because he did something bad, start by saying: “I love you! You know I love you very much, I have told you so many times. You are the joy of my life. But when you put your feet up on the table and you muddy the table cloth, I get upset!” And then for him, the first piece of information will be that you love him. But if you start by saying: “You are a fool! You always put your feet up on the table! I told you so many times! You take after your mother!”, then the child will perceive and will store the information that he is bad, that he has no worth. Then he will receive any loving statement with doubt, no matter where it comes from.
We need to pay attention to our words, to how we look at others. A Father was saying that because the difference between man and animal is the word, then any gesture not accompanied, not enlivened by words, is a sin. It’s a sin to love your wife without words. It’s a sin to love your children without words. It is very dangerous to love your children with gestures that can awaken sensations that they don’t know how to handle - such as biting them, or touching or kissing their intimate parts. You need to play simply with your children, you need to talk to them while you play with them, you need to show them your humanity, and they will understand what you want to say, and why you do what you do.