What is depression?

Depression can feel like an emptiness, a profound tiredness, or a total disconnect from life. It can feel like you’re always kind of in a bad mood, or like things you might usually enjoy aren’t really worth the energy. What all these feelings have in common is they’re part of our body’s shut down response. 

When we experience difficult situations, sometimes our nervous system moves us into a state of shut down to dull the pain and help us get by. It’s a bit like switching your phone to low battery mode, where certain functions are reduced to conserve power. This switch is especially likely to happen if the difficult things we experience feel persistent or unavoidable. In the short term, this shut down response might really help us get through some hard stuff. But when we’re chronically in low battery mode it can feel debilitating, and that’s what we call depression. 

In today’s world, the difficult things we experience often do feel persistent or unavoidable, because they’re often systemic. And on a personal level, implicit messages about ourselves, others, and the world that we’ve picked up along our journey can contribute to depression too. If somewhere inside we believe we’re incapable or alone, or pain isn’t okay to feel, we might default to shut down when life starts to hurt. 

How does therapy help depression?

My approach to therapy addresses the protective function of depression. Where there’s space to witness the sharp pain of life’s difficulty, there’s also freedom to release the dullness of depression. 

While we can’t control everything in our environment, therapy can help you find the places where you do have agency to shape how you live. It can also help shift implicit beliefs and memories that keep your body locked in shut down.