Tag Archives: Hopelessness

Depressed persons often believe they are alienated from God. Significant feelings of distance from God are noted rather than closeness to him (Hart, 2001; McMinn & Campbell, 2007). Depressed persons commonly report their conviction that God is angry with them or has somehow rejected and abandoned them for a myriad of different reasons. The social alienation and withdrawal that is characteristic of the depressed is often reinforced and compounded by this acute sense of divine alienation.

In this alienating equation, depressed people often believe they are being punished by God, that the punishment is usually deserved or just (sometimes there is a powerful obsession with having committed the unpardonable sin), and that there will never be a complete reconciliation — God has abandoned them for all time, and hell is inevitable (see Ohlschlager & Clinton, 2002).

Social histories of depressed persons often reveal a family history that is not grace based, but instead is performance oriented and legalistic. The individual often feels flawed and condemned for failing to live up to projected family or religious standards. Rather than continuing to seek the impossible (as does the obsessive perfectionist), the depressed person instead retreats into a world of alienating cynicism that seems, at first, to be self-protecting. This spiritual estrangement — believing in a core alienation in every relationship, including with God — fuels the hopelessness that may drive an individual to suicide. For if it were true that God had abandoned someone with no hope of forgiveness or reconciliation, what would be the reason for living? Such existential pain — a pain that is believed to have no real cure — can be understood to motivate the upside-down logic of suicide, in which death is then viewed as the only escape from unending pain.

Existential therapists believe that de-pressed persons have retreated from or are living in denial of the core challenge of effective living — to properly reconcile the ongoing paradox of being alone in the universe and yet also being connected to others in a sea of relationships. The spiritual-existential challenge of living, it is argued, is to resolve the competing forces of aloneness and relatedness. Although relationships have proven to be very painful, and those who feel alienated engage in a fragile and frustrating ego defense, it is even more painful to withdraw from every relationship in the hope of avoiding further pain.

“The charge [of self-induced alienation] is complex because the human self does not exist in isolation. Depressed people often are alienated from others; they are typically nonparticipant spectators to life” (Wetzel, 1984, p. 216).

The Popular Encyclopedia of Christian Counseling, General Editors: Dr. Tim Clinton & Dr Ron Hawkins