I used to think only depressed people had a little man living inside of them yelling insults into their ears several times a day. But the more I describe my inner short dude to trusted friends and family members, the more I find out how prevalent this syndrome is … Little Man Syndrome.

I have nothing against short people. Really. It’s just that ascribing the powerful ruminations inside my head to a peewee person with insecurities of his own, a small person with bad breath, helps me to not take them so seriously.

I don’t think EVERYONE has a little man. Tom Cruise probably should get himself one. It would filter some of the uneducated statements he throws out whenever interviewed. But after talking to a good friend of mine, who by all outward appearances looks self-assured, happy, and grounded … I think the difference between folks with some insecurities and those suffering from severe depression is the frequency and severity of the little man’s yelps.

My happy and grounded friend says that when work is slow, as it has been lately, and she is working on crap projects, that her little man will say, maybe once an hour: “If you weren’t so lazy, you would get yourself another job.” Or “You are too stupid to pursue any other job but this sorry one. ” Or “Your butt is getting ginormous. Like buy-two-airplane-seats big.”

Granted, those statements are a little different from: “You worthless piece of crap. Kill yourself now and do everyone in your life a favor.” But, I’m guessing, sometime before the “kill yourself” thoughts were defamations like I hear every day: “You are a weak person and therefore won’t get well.” Or “You are incapable of transforming your thoughts because you want to stay sick.” And, of course, the fabulous four: “You are fat, ugly, lazy, and stupid.” We can’t leave those out.

I mentioned in last Monday’s blog, “Surrender to the Brain,” that the little man inside my head is, I fear, snorting cocaine. Because last weekend he was screaming something lame and profane into my ears six times a minute, or once every ten seconds. That’s not a lot of time for me to reframe my thoughts, to reprimand Shorty on his attitude and to give him the low-down regarding the code of conduct expected inside my head: “If we have nothing nice to say, we don’t talk.” What I experienced last week was certainly neurotic aerobics. After three days of putting up with his bull crap, yelling at him more than 17,000 times, I finally cried uncle: “You won, dude. What do you want from me?” 

The positive-thinking, law-of-attraction-you-are-your-thoughts-and-everything-is-possible crowd would tell me to simply stop listening to him, or to politely ask him to leave, or to evict him. But I don’t think that’s totally possible for a depressive or a bipolar or anyone with a chronic illness, for that matter. This happy bunch might label me a pessimist and say that I’m clinging hard to my woundedness because I don’t know how to live without it.

Last weekend I believed them, and that was a big part of the problem. Saying that I had total control over the shrimp essentially gave him more power, because every time he muttered an unflattering word, I whipped myself once more–for my failure at muzzling the guy. So he grew and grew in size. By the end of my 72-hour wrestling match, there wasn’t enough real estate in my head to house him, and I was totally exhausted.

So as a REALIST, I say that the shrimp will always have a home in my brain’s fear center, or amygdala …. the primitive part of the brain that hasn’t been educated like the sophisticated and rational prefrontal cortex.

What HAS helped me immensely is to laugh at my little man’s accusations with a trusted friend or two. Even though my petite dude might yell 360 things into my ear in the time it takes my friend’s shrimp to register one piece of slander, I don’t have to take it any more seriously than she does.

It’s clear to me that her mini-me is completely off the mark. And, she will remind me, so is mine.

It’s just one really bad case of Little Man Syndrome.

(Image by Stephen Webster/Wall Street Journal)

* Click here to subscribe to Beyond Blue and click here to follow Therese on Twitter and click here to join Group Beyond Blue, a depression support group. Now stop clicking.