"Take me and love me if you want meDon't ever treat me unkind'Cause I had that trouble alreadyAnd it left me with a dark turn of mind." Gillian Welch, "Dark Turn of Mind" In my last post, I talked about how all of us need people in our lives who "mirror" us--who see and admire us for who we are. I also talked about how a lack of mirroring can lead to an inability to develop sustaining ambitions. Without some sense of ambition--of the feeling that we're important enough to have goals that we want to accomplish in our lives--it's very difficult to develop a sense of life purpose.I want to be clear about what I mean by being ambitious. Ambitiousness is often confused with grandiosity or selfishness. But when I talk about having ambitions, I'm not talking about being grandiose, about being full of yourself and believing that you're better than other people. I'm also not talking about selfishness. I don't believe that the only thing you should care about in life is your own success. Our ambitions always need to be tempered by our concerns for other people and by our ethical values. I do believe, however, that, without some sense of ambition, it's very difficult to believe in ourselves enough to feel that our life purpose is important and that we can realize it in the world.Two of the most common feelings that prevent people from developing their ambitions are anxiety and depression. These feelings can take many forms and I'll talk about them in other posts. But, in this post, I want to focus on how a lack of mirroring can lead to the kind of depression that can undermine your ambitions and keep your from realizing your life purpose.When I was a psychology intern, I worked with a severely depressed mother and her one year old daughter. When I first started working with this family, the daughter was a bright, engaging infant. She would smile when she first saw me and immediately try to engage me. Soon, however, the mother would put her daughter down for a nap before I came to the house. I felt that she didn't want to have to share our time with her daughter.Often, the daughter would wake up before I left the house. She would cry and then whimper, trying to get her mother to come to her, but her mother wouldn't respond. Eventually, the little girl would give up trying to get her mother to come and would wait silently in her crib until, I assume, her mother came to her after I left the house.Over the course of the several years I worked with this family--and, unfortunately, despite all of my efforts to help this mother enjoy and respond to her child--I saw the daughter become progressively less enthusiastic and willing to engage. I feared she was on the course to becoming a depressed child.Though this is an example of an extreme situation, I hope it illustrates how a lack of mirroring can contribute to the kind of depression that undermines our sense of initiative and purpose. In this situation, the lack of mirroring was caused by the mother's depression. In other situations, it can be caused by a parent's anxiety or by things that are going on in parents' lives that make it impossible for them to respond to their children in the ways the children need. The crucial point is that, as with the little girl I worked with, a lack of sufficient mirroring can lead to a feeling that it's not worth it to try, that nothing you do will produce the results you want.Though it may seem that I've described a hopeless situation, I want to emphasize that history is not destiny. A good therapy relationship can both help you understand the causes of the depression that is keeping you from finding your life purpose. And, while no therapy relationship can make up for what a parent was unable to provide, a good one can give you experiences of mirroring that can help relieve your depression and set you back on course to realizing your ambitions and finding your life path.