Depression Therapy
How we view depression
At The Center for Connection, Healing and Change we don’t think of depression as a diagnosis, problem, or weakness. Rather, we see depression as a set of symptoms attempting to shine a light on unmet needs, unresolved emotional pain, or protective strategies that are no longer effective.
Depression can often start out as a way of coping or as a healthy response to a difficult situation such as a loss, transition, isolation, or overwhelm. Over time, it may have become a more pervasive pattern of responding to ourselves or the world.
When we organize the history and context of depression, we often find that people experiencing these symptoms have lived through situations where it made sense to withdraw, protect, go still, or fall silent. We offer a variety of therapeutic approaches designed to help clients get to the root of their depression and explore life or relationship experiences that might have required a shutdown response.
Our therapists can support you to find a way through to the other side of depression, helping you unburden yourself of its symptoms, and move towards an increased sense of hope, lightness, and resilience.
Depression
The weight of depression symptoms
Our map for hope
Depression is often experienced as feeling numbed out, shut down, or under-resourced. It can play out as a profound loss of energy, inertia, or feeling stuck. It can be difficult to tune into your emotions, share them with others, or engage with the world around you. You may feel constantly overwhelmed, alone, or unworthy in the world.
We have found that depression and anxiety often appear together as opposite ends of the coping spectrum. Therefore, when we treat one, we know we will likely influence the other.
We specialize in family systems, attachment, trauma-informed, and somatic-focused (the mind-body connection) models of therapy. We lean on evidence-based maps for creating lasting change. From these therapeutic lenses, we often find a common denominator in both depression and anxiety is emotional or relational isolation, invalidation, vigilance, trauma, or lack of security.
Function
Depression as a protective strategy
Making sense of your depression
We begin by helping you explore the experiences that might have required the protection of shutting down. We make space for acknowledging this response was likely the best strategy available to you at the time and its function was to help you to reduce stress, survive, or move through something that was outside of your capacity to cope with at the time.
We help you get access to the parts of you that needed depression, acknowledge the struggle they were trying to resolve, and help them know that there might be another way.
If there is processing or healing to do, we can guide you through this process and help you unburden yourself of earlier struggles. Where parts of you need additional resourcing, support, or unblocking, our therapists can be alongside your wounded parts and help them find new ways to give themselves what they needed, from the inside out.
The Body
The impact of depression on the body
Healing that includes your physical world
Where it feels relevant, we welcome the body into the therapeutic process, making space for ways in which the body might feel stuck, frozen, overwhelmed, or disconnected. We offer body-focused/ somatically-focused therapy services. This approach offers ways to process and move through the physical symptoms and sensations of depression so that you can experience your body in new, more hopeful, safe, and resourced ways.
We focus on helping clients to understand the ways their best attempts at coping in earlier years may now have become limiting patterns, unhelpful beliefs, protective strategies, or stuck points. Our therapists can offer support and guidance to explore emotions and experiences that may not have been safe to feel at the time.
For some clients, they may need help with getting access to their emotional world, organizing what is happening on the inside, and finding the words to describe what they are feeling. For others, they may be accustomed to being an emotional island, not used to reaching out for connection and support, or have no experience of others being there in moments of need.
Relationships
Depression and connection
Free yourself up to love and be loved
As we help you to make sense of your depression, you might start to see both yourself and others differently and organically start to experiment with new ways of coping, relating, and becoming more fully yourself.
Our attachment-based therapists, who also specialize in couple and family relationships, can help you explore the ways in which depression might be both keeping you protected from being hurt and also isolated from connection. Depression can have a profound impact on the ability to reach out to others, ask for what we need, and share our inner world.
It can also serve as a barrier to receiving care and support from loved ones and knowing you deserve to be nurtured without condition.
It can feel overwhelming to be a resource to your loved ones and to give them what they need too. We can help you explore your earlier experiences of connection, attachment, and emotional intimacy. From there we can help you build new ways of relating that are grounded in self-worth, safety, and nurturance. You deserve to be resourced too.