Depression grays out emotion

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

Albert Einstein

This totally cracked me up.  I spent 14 years trying to explain to other people how to make a computer do what they wanted it to do.  I realized yesterday that I really miss doing that.  I still feel sad that the university that I worked at decided to streamline the work force at the expense of quality of the teaching experience.  I am now helping a few friends but it isn't quite the same of 8 hours a day of can I figure out what went wrong and can I fix it?  Can I explain to the bewildered student that computers are really that dumb?  Can I rescue the file that somehow slipped silently into cyber space and the person sitting at the computer desperately wants it back?  It was challenge after challenge all day long.  I specialized in using the person's own background to bridge the gap of understanding.  The artist the desktop became a work space.  The homemaker the computer was like a kitchen.  Each person I tried to tailor the explanation to their own understanding.  I became so good at it that a student once accused me of not knowing very much about computers.  I asked him why I thought that.  "Well you don't talk like a geek."  By using the language the other person was comfortable translated to I must not know much.  To help the student, I told him in detailed computerese exactly what was happening with the computer when he worked with one of the animation programs.  His eyes quickly glazed over and he asked me to stop talking.  Through computers I learned to speak the other persons language.  I had to understand the computers very well to be able to translate.

A counselors job is to teach each client the skills that are needed to interact with other people successfully.  The amazing thing that both my counselors excel at is they listen to me enough that they use my background and thought patterns as a way to explain concepts that I missed growing up.  I watched as each of them try to explain basic concepts that are not in my experience.  NewCounselor said, "Well you rebelled in some way as a teenager."  Actually, no.  One of my personalities was brutally trained to absolute obedience.  I was reluctant to accept this part of myself.  I had no words to express the feelings of anxiety, tension, nausea, churning inside that described doing anything contrary to authority.  My parents were authority so I was absolutely obedient.  KavinCoach worked hard at trying to find a common ground for helping me understand emotions.  He would try to get me angry and with in seconds I could make it disappear.  The gap in communication about emotions was massive.  Dissociation and PTSD widened the gap.  This month marks completing 9 years of counseling.  I am starting to have words and vocabulary to identify and share how I feel.  I am starting to recognize and identify more and more emotions.  I now understand why depression is considered a gray feeling.  It extinguishes the rainbow of emotions that should be felt until the only feeling identified is depression.