Depression

There are several types of depression and here I will address one type, which is quite common and that is a bit similar to having a low-grade fever. With a low-grade fever, you can do your life, but you just don’t feel very well and you just drag yourself around. The parallel on an emotional level is that you may be listless, lack motivation, have low energy, have little or no enthusiasm and you may enjoy very few things in life. One or more these feeling states may be present and sometimes you can’t sleep and have no appetite. Typically, this kind of depression lasts for some time. At some point people lose hope.

The first thing I do is to help restore hope, by finding one or more causes of the depression and providing a direction to deal with the issues. Once you know what needs to be done – that there is a way out - you feel somewhat better and then the therapeutic work can begin.

Depression has many possible causes, and I’ll mention a few. Abuse either in childhood or in adulthood; passivity, in which a person cannot stand up for themselves, therefore giving up their power; remaining in a job you can’t stand because of fear of making a change, or remaining in a marriage that is unrewarding and being afraid to confront it; having a deep, abiding sense of unworthiness or of inferiority that permeates your life, which you may or may not be aware of.

My approach is to break down these and other issues so that they become clear and more conscious and enable you to see the choices that you actually have in life. One part of the approach is to see how your emotionally based thinking distorts present day events and makes you feel bad in any number of ways. Sometimes it is necessary to see the effects of certain conditions in childhood that carry over to the present in a negative way. It all adds up to being aware which gives new understandings and positive and constructive ways of looking at yourself and the world.