Feel Like You're Not Who You Use to Be?

In my pursue to combat the process of depression, both directly in me and indirectly in my social circle and psychotherapy practice, I have found that understanding the origins of someone’s trauma and how it finds different ways to manifest can have a tremendous impact on the healing process. Today we will explore the process of derailing and how we can use it as a starting point of inquiry.

Although our lives may change around us – with a house move, new job or relationship – many of us feel a thread of continuity inside. We are conscious of our sense of self that weaves through all the chapters of our lives. 

In fact, there is evidence that a stable, consistent sense of identity and self is vital for psychological wellbeing. 

When this thread ruptures, however, we can feel an uncomfortable disconnect between who we feel that we are and the person that we used to be. This term has been named by psychologists as “derailment”. 

In a recent paper in Clinical Psychological Science, a group of researchers headed by Kaylin Ratner at Cornell University looked into the possibility that derailment can both cause and be an effect of depression. 

People with depression can struggle with motivation and lose the will to pursue the goals that they had previously set. It is common for them to withdraw from their social relationships. These changes can both trigger feelings of derailment. 

It could also be said that derailment comes first, which the inner disorientation leaving a person open to depression. 

Although these questions have never been studied before, Ratner and her team have been exploring it as a “new feature of the depressive landscape.” They went on to say that they felt there was a “need for greater empirical and practical attention at the crossroads of mental health and human development”. 

After recruiting almost a thousand undergraduate students, the researchers asked them to complete metrics of depression and derailment four times over the academic year. They developed a new 10-item derailment measure which was based on whether the students agreed with statements like “My life has been headed in the same direction for a long time,” and “I did not anticipate becoming the person that I currently am.”

What the team found was that the scores on depression and derailment for the students stayed relatively stable over the course of the year. It was interesting to see that the students’ derailment and depressive symptoms tended to correlate at each of the time points, which suggests that there may be an association between them. 

As the researchers had predicted, the answer to the cause and effect question was revealed in the study, which showed that higher depressive scores earlier in the study led to higher derailment scores later. Conversely, higher derailment scores earlier in the year let to a decline in depressive symptoms. 

The researchers held a number of explanations for this last point, including a suggestion that whilst derailment is uncomfortable at first, it can lead people to withdrawn from unfulfilling relationships or goals, which leads to an increase in wellbeing over a longer term. It is possible that there could be other moderating factors that alter the effect of derailment on depressive symptoms, such as whether people recognize meaning in their feelings of derailment and the extent to which they dwell on the derailment. These questions remain to be answered in future research, as well as the question of how derailment and depression might interact in non-student focus groups.

“Although derailment is a novel construct and one that is still in the process of being mapped, researchers and practitioners would be keen to take note of derailment being a feature of depression’s landscape and continue to observe how such perceived changes in identity and self-direction could take shape and act within clinical presentations,” the authors said.

How to use Derailment as a starting point in healing Depression

We started this article by stating that a consistent sense of identity and self is vital for psychological wellbeing. We saw that Derailment happens when we lose the thread between who we we feel that we are and the person that we used to be. But this can also be a sign of your psyche telling you that things need to change. That certain behaviours which have been useful in the past, are not needed anymore. However, our egoic mind tries to hold on to who we use to be as a coping mechanism. So, the very first step would be to meditate onto: “What are the experiences that shaped who we think we are?”. This can be really hard to do at first and I know it can even be impossible sometimes. But should you feel the need to go deeper into this, book your session below and let’s talk about it.