Psychotherapy for Anxiety and Depression?
Anxiety and depression can be all-consuming, each in their own deep and exhausting ways; becoming stitched into the everyday fabric of life. It can feel like being in the world is impossibly overwhelming, like living inside a continuous loop of high vigilance and or low mood. Therapy can help you start to feel better.
How Can Therapy Help You Feel Better?
Sometimes, it can be therapeutic to know that anxiety and depression may not completely go away but perhaps ebb and flow and rather than fighting it and ourselves when it appears, we learn to go instead to self-compassion. We can understand that these things are not a mark of weakness, but a sign of a nervous system that learned way back to keep us safe. We can feel better.
Is this Depression or Sadness?
Depression effects nearly half of the population to varying degrees over the course of life yet it remains widely misunderstood. So what sets depression and sadness apart? Sadness comes with a story and on the whole we know what’s made us cry. It is usually contained and we can see the source. Depression on the other hand feels like sadness has lost its anchor; tears, fatigue, withdrawal ever present, but it’s not clear what the source is. Depression is not madness or weakness, it is rather unprocessed loss, maybe sadness that forgot where it came from because the truth was too much to face.
Learning you’re not broken
With depression, sadness, guilt, shame and hate often becomes directed at the self. Often anger that should be directed outwards, is directed inwards. For example in childhood where a parent disappoints us, the child can find it easier to direct that anger and rage at themselves rather than at the parent. Depression can also hide behind mania; where on the surface everything is joyful when in fact this is a way of busying the mind away from what is too painful to go near. In therapy, working with the wound, recognising it, allowing it to be seen and heard, feeling the painful and the ugly. To start to learn that you are not broken but perhaps something broke your heart, to name and mourn the grief and to validate it.
Finding a sense of calm within
Anxiety can come about from feeling the world is an unsafe place and this can be something we decide at an ealy age, perhaps growing up in a household that was unpredictable, where a parent was frightening or invalidating or experiencing events or moments that left us feeling unsafe. In therapy, recognising where this fear comes from can help us to process and move on from this. We learn to question fear in the present moment and work out if this comes from the past; we can name it, grieve it and start to feel a little less scared. And the anxiety starts to melt away a little.