It's normal to feel the need to personalize the experiences of depression and anxiety. The paradox is, there's nothing personal about either of these operatons happening to begin with. They are expressions of an activated survival system we mostly do not understand.
Inheriting the genetic wiring of our hunter gatherer tribal ancestors, this is what we're working with. We experience lots of nuances with our survival systems operating in our modern life to give us the survival advantage, with depression and anxiety being expressions of this.
Depression is the survival brain's way of slowing down to avoid the danger.
Anxiety is the survival brain's way of speeding up to provoke us to outrun the danger.
Depression holds still and tries not to be seen by the threat, anxiety impulsively escapes it, and the human conditions we experience with either of these is they get stuck on, and most people haven't yet figured out how to operate our systems to give ourselves the best fighting chance at turning them off and feeling better sooner rather than later.
with C-PTSD I experience extreme levels of both of them, so I get it. I experience depression a bit more than anxiety, however the ratio is close.
Both can be brutal and intense, anxiety feeling like I am under attack by the world closing in on me, while the pressure cooker is running on the inside of me, and I'm just doing my best to hold myself together and get through the grocery shopping trip.
There's nothing personal about either of them happening. They feel very personal, and our minds personalize circumstances surrounding them, however the mechanical operations of anxiety and depression themselves are part of a mechanical survival operation, and therefore not personal.
Knowing essentially what's going on does not eliminate the experiences, they are always terrible, however knowing what we're dealing with takes the element of mystery away from it. This reduces a layer of uncertainty, making the symptoms at least a little easier to manage and recover from. Perhaps still difficult, always terrible, yet a little easier.