Depression

Depression is the other side of the coin to anxiety. Its function is also deeply rooted in self-preservation. Its symptoms include, but aren’t limited to: social withdrawal, emotional and physical numbness, the inability to enjoy anything (anhedonia), repetitive negative thoughts, difficulty doing even the most basic tasks and general fatigue.  

If our anxiety or stress continue to interfere with our daily functioning for an extended period of time, an older part of our brain makes an unconscious, executive decision. If it had a voice this decision would be something along the lines of, “If we had the ability to address the reasons for our anxiety or stress, we would have done something about it by now.

As that hasn’t happened it must be external to us and beyond our ability to control. I’m going to make us withdraw completely until these external circumstances improve. If we can’t identify and address the source of danger, I will remove us from all possible sources of danger.” So, like a tortoise retreating into its shell, we withdraw from the world around us. Depression, like anxiety, is a deeply physical condition. It’s not that we don’t want to do all the things that depression disconnects us from, it’s that we physically can’t.

Whilst under depression, the brain second guesses our every single attempt to engage with the world in order to ensure that anything we might do is absolutely safe. Much like anxiety, it is so unpleasant and debilitating that our first instinct is an overwhelming drive to get the symptoms to stop. Sadly, by doing so we ignore the sources of danger that our anxiety and depression were desperately trying to get us to resolve. We push ourselves to re-engage before we’re truly ready, we don’t make the fundamental changes required to break the cycle of anxiety and depression, and therefore make it much more likely to re-occur. 

By working with my clients to develop a better understanding of their depression, its function and motivation, we can work towards truly addressing this intrusive, confidence destroying state. We will work to develop techniques that suit the individual best.

This allows us to more compassionately mitigate depression’s most unpleasant symptoms so that the client can both re-engage with their essential needs more quickly but also work to ensure that they don’t prematurely return to the environments and behaviours that made the depressive state necessary in the first place.