Jane's Childhood Self-Esteem and Depression
Depression can settle in like a long stretch of heavy sadness, hopelessness, and a feeling that nothing you do will change anything. My cousin Jane lived through exactly that kind of stretch. She lost both of her parents in a car accident when she was seven, and what came after shaped years of her life.
After the accident, Jane went to live with an aunt, who turned out to be about the worst placement our family could have arranged for her. To earn her keep she was made to do a punishing load of household chores, and insults came at her almost every day. If you have seen the movie Annie, you already have a rough picture of it. She was up before dawn to finish the chores before school, and up late into the night cooking and serving dinner for everyone else in the house.
She lived more like a servant than a child. Television was off limits. Playing with other kids was off limits. Any small slip while she carried out her duties could earn her a smack from her aunt.
When she was finally let go to bed, after the evening cleanup was done, she went to a room with a single mattress on the floor and one thin blanket. She cried through the nights. Month by month the depression deepened and her sense of her own worth kept sliding. Feeling mistreated, discarded, and used, she started to see everyone around her as part of the same cruelty, so new faces registered in her mind as threats before she even knew them.
Contempt and resentment took root, and they fed the depression further. Over the years that followed she fell into a habit of pinning her troubles on other people. By the time she reached adulthood the whole ordeal had left marks on her character. She was bitter, and whenever something painful happened she slipped automatically into the role of victim. Her schoolwork fell apart. Her self-esteem kept dropping. Her cousins mocked her, which only confirmed what she already believed: that the entire world stood against her. As a grown woman she took no pleasure in anyone's company, and it was not hard to trace that straight back to how her aunt had treated her.
None of this is surprising. Given what she went through, anger, resentment, depression, and a battered sense of self are the kinds of outcomes you would expect. Even the ordinary frustrations of a normal childhood can leave a person carrying lasting hostility toward the people who raised them, and Jane's situation was far past ordinary. Children also become skilled at hiding what they actually feel, burying resentments so deep that they are hard to dig back up years later. Even so, people do turn around.
Jane has traveled a long way out of all this. Somewhere along the line she came to see forgiveness as the thing that let her grow. Once she started practicing it, she stopped blaming other people for her problems and stopped casting herself as the victim, and that change opened the door to healthier relationships.
She even decided that befriending her aunt in the woman's old age was the better path, in spite of everything that had happened. The humiliation she carried for years did not vanish, but she began deliberately reflecting on a kind of gratitude too: that after her mother died, she at least had a roof over her head. Setting down the anger she had hauled around since childhood felt like a weight coming off her shoulders.
She is clear-eyed about it. Her aunt failed her, her cousins failed her, and the world around her failed her when she was a child. She also holds on to the belief that she will recover from those memories in full, and work all the way through the anger and the depression.
-Anonymous Contributor