What is teenage depression anyway?  How do otherwise healthy dudes and ladies become so sad and messed up, when only a few years prior they were running around playgrounds without a care in the world?  How does the average messed up teen become the average messed up adult?

Explaining teenage depression can be a controversial thing, so I guess I owe a bit of an explanation.  Here I am, running around the internet claiming that we all come from broken homes, that we’re all messed up and it’s everyone else’s fault.  A lot of people – raised in a lot of good families – would surely disagree.  I know my Mom would be somewhat less than enthusiastic.

But their minds are referencing a certain definition of “broken home”.  To them, the term recalls certain mental images – of physical, verbal, or sexual abuse, of substance addiction and neglect, of single parent homes and houses in squalor.  Certainly there are those, and certainly they would be called broken homes.

But the very purpose of this site is to challenge those beliefs in particular, and all beliefs in general.  I want you to challenge the way you see and interact with the world around you.

My “Broken Home”

My childhood home (thankfully) did not resemble those images.  I was not raised in a “broken home” in the traditional sense, the kind more likely to produce the 45th prisoner in a chain gang than 45th President in our history.  In fact, it wasn’t like that at all.  I grew up in a two parent home, in well-enough sized houses, in the suburbs of a rather affluent area (the historically awesome Northern Virginia) in the most affluent nation in the world (the U.S. you foreign devils).  I have two parents who love me (cause I’m awesome), and more family than I can count.  I have friends (cool ones), and an education (a useless one).

We experienced difficulties, but my story is no sob story.  There were not days I went hungry, nor nights I waited anxiously for a drunken father to stumble home.  I had no reason to fear our home being repossessed, or our family subjected to violence.  I did not witness atrocities or genocide, war or hate.  I was never targeted physically because of the color of my skin, or the beliefs of my religion; never made numb to the idea that roadside bombs and suicide bombers were just a way of life in my neighborhood; never in danger of being taken from my home through threat and abuse, to be made into a soldier in a war I had no part in.

At least, I don’t remember any of that happening…

I mean, it was suburban Virginia…not Somalia, or Jerusalem, or even South Central L.A.

My parents have done more for me than I will ever know, and endured and sacrificed tremendously to provide a future for my brothers, sister, and myself, and I’ll love them forever for it.  They deserve that much at least.

So when I say we are all the product of broken homes, it is not an indictment on parenting specifically, but of all that shapes and surrounds us in our youth; of family and friends, neighborhoods and nations, religions and cultures.  It’s the acknowledgment that most who walk this earth are less than they are capable of, and must have become so somehow.

We Aren’t Born Depressed

My brother and sister-in-law recently brought a baby girl into the world, and she’s super cute.

But when you hold a baby, when you watch them look up at you – at everything – in complete amazement, you can’t help but be in awe at how utterly perfect they are, how miraculous their very existence is; the result of two people who love each other, of the flawless division of one cell into billions, of a process which took thousands of years to evolve, and science which took hundreds of years to perfect.

Yet when I look into my niece’s eyes, I also see that which few recognize, or care to verbalize: that one day this little girl, who is so perfect and so loved now, will feel inadequate and undeserving; that she will at times be depressed and lonely, hopeless and confused; that she will be picked on and ridiculed and will likely do the same to others.  Her parents will yell at her and she will do the same.  Both will say things they wish they hadn’t, and will do damage they wish they could undo.  She will suffer and feel pain.  She will cause the same in others who do not deserve it, and allow it from those who do not deserve her.  She will lie and cheat.  She will hate.

Who amongst us, if any, looks upon any adult as we look upon a newborn?  Who sees that same perfection of infancy in the grocer, the neighbor, the trucker; or your parents, your siblings, your partner?  It almost seems ridiculous.  Laughable even.

We become so utterly imperfect.  We start sucking really badly.

It happens to us all.  From that baby – perfect, innocent, and so completely incapable of wrong, who owns no part of the insanity and madness which is the rest of the world – from that baby, we become sad, sorry, scared, and stupid.  We become the dysfunction that is the world; the vengeance and cruelty, the bigotry and hate.  You need not be a monster.  Even the simplest of cutting words will do.  We’re all guilty.  We all have our part.

Want to learn more? Enter your email and get free updates! Sign up now!

The Effect of Youth

I know some will disagree.  You may have had loving parents.  You may even have had a wonderful childhood.  But regardless of the size, quality, or love of our families and those close to us, we assuredly learned behaviors, thought processes, and belief systems in our youth which proved insufficient later in life, when problems mounted, when dreams died, when the rosy view of the world taught in school proved a thing of fantasy.

How else could so many people be stuck in worthless relationships?  Or scared to leave the job they hate?  Or unable to lose the weight which cripples their self-esteem?  Or entirely unwilling to make the changes in their life they KNOW they need?

Do you believe these people ever really learned the proper way to LIVE?

To the greatest extent, we are the effect of the affect of our youth.  From our earliest days to this very day we have been shaped as the wind shapes the dune, sand by sand.  And like the sand, grain by grain we drift away.

We come from homes where we were, at times, wrongly discouraged when excited, wrongly blamed when innocent, wrongly lied to when we would have easily understood and greatly appreciated the truth.  We were given a model of the world as it was experienced and learned by others of equally broken homes.  We were crippled by the limiting beliefs and moralities of parents who knew no better, of friends who were as immature as us, of a society less interested in nurturing healthy minds than in producing productive hands.  We were made inferior by forced comparisons to siblings and friends who never asked to become a standard, and made desperate by our own innate desire to please and be loved by those around us.

It is no one’s fault, but the cruel irony remains…

We suffer today because at our most impressionable age we were children.  We were born in dysfunction, raised in dysfunction, and thus live in dysfunction.  We are all the product of broken homes.  We all bear scars of our youth.

This is not the typical complaint regarding the destruction of the family unit or moral standards.  I am not concerned with that.  Not here.  Every “home” is a broken home.  Every childhood does some damage.  It is up to us – through our own struggle – to fix what has been done, to come to terms with ourselves, with our lives, with this world.

Your Life is Your Responsibility

I believe wholeheartedly in personal accountability.  The idea of your broken home does not now, nor ever, absolve you of personal responsibility for yourself and your life.  It is a theory of the past, explaining the past.  It is the why of yesterday.  The how of tomorrow belongs to you.  What you do now is what is important.

Some will continue living as they have always lived…at the whim of others, always making those wounds fresh, never realizing that they are now self-inflicted.  For them, the power of their broken home is still too strong.

But if you believed that to be the truth, I doubt you’d be reading this at all.

What Next?

If you enjoyed the article I ask you to please CLICK TO TWEET IT! Also, lemme know what you think. Leave a comment!

Now, if you’re ready, continue to the NEXT PAGE…

Explaining Teen Depression: The Effect of Broken Homes, pt. II

Did you enjoy this article?

Enter your email below and get updates by email (it's free)!