Depression Therapy

Learn strategies to overcome negative thinking, boost your emotional well-being, and find lasting relief from pain and struggle.

Do You Often Ask Yourself, “What’s The Point?”

Is depression draining the color out of life? Do you struggle to make it to work or school, lacking the motivation to do anything beyond the basics? Has apathy or feelings of worthlessness made you lose the desire to engage in activities you used to enjoy, and now you dread the future?

Even though you may keep it together around others and pretend you’re okay so they don’t worry about you, behind closed doors, you may feel helpless, hopeless, and empty. Depression can affect you in different ways, ranging from deep sadness to irritability or numbness. Heaviness in your body could rob you of energy and make you want to retreat from the world.

Your Self-Care May Be Suffering

When you are in a low mood, basic self-care like taking regular showers, eating healthy foods, and doing things that usually improve your mood, like spending time outdoors, quickly fall away. Instead, you might sleep more than normal or, ironically, find that you can’t sleep despite feeling lethargic. Accomplishing even simple tasks might feel like hard work and exhaust you.

Whenever feelings of worthlessness become overwhelming, you might engage in destructive behaviors, such as self-harm, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide. Without a sense of purpose or hope, life can feel dark and lonely.

Despite how down depression can make you feel, therapy can help. Putting one foot in front of the other can gradually lift the clouds away and offer you a fresh perspective infused with hope. With counseling, you can manage depression symptoms and find your way back to life.

Because Living Alone Is On The Rise, So Is Depression

As lonely as suffering from depression can feel, it is a common mental health disorder. In 2021, “An estimated 21 million adults in the United States—8.3 percent—had at least one major depressive episode.” [1] Statistics gathered by the World Health Organization (WHO) confirm that “depression is about 50 percent more common among women than among men.” [2]

With more people than ever living alone, it has created widespread isolation and emotional disconnection. In exchange for face-to-face contact with friends and family, many of us settle for impersonal substitutes, such as texting or commenting on social media feeds. Not surprisingly, a recent study found that “reported feelings of depression were higher among adults living alone compared with adults living with others.” [3]

Millennial And Gen Z Adults Are Especially
Prone To Depression

Unfortunately, many younger adults feel disenfranchised by the economic instability they face, contributing to their sense of hopelessness. What’s more, depression can be exacerbated by more existential threats, such as global warfare, climate change, and political unrest. Because our phones can expose us to a firehose of disturbing images, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the bad news.

Social media can also be a culprit for mood disorders. Although the research as to whether or not social media is linked to depression is challenging to interpret, one researcher noted that “constantly looking at images of people who appear to be happier than you, and more successful than you, who generally seem to have a better life than you, certainly doesn’t make most people feel better.” [4]

Finding a safe space to talk about how you feel with a counselor can help you create strategies to manage your depression symptoms that restore a sense of hope. With therapy, it’s possible to climb out of the dark hole of depression and get your life back on track.

Depression Therapy Can Restore A Sense Of Hope

Being depressed can create a vicious cycle that is hard to escape. To avoid emotional pain, you may resort to other ways to distract or soothe yourself, such as substances, food, sleeping too much, or self-harm. Although you might temporarily interrupt your pain this way, these unhealthy behaviors create more emotional disconnection in the long run.

We’re all wired for connection in safe and loving relationships. If you didn’t experience that earlier in life, you may have eventually given up on the idea and, as a survival mechanism, disconnected not only from others but from your sense of self. Abandoning yourself in this way could hinder your ability to develop healthy relationships as an adult, leading to anxiety and depression. In depression therapy, we can safely trace back to when the disconnection you feel first happened.

What To Expect In Sessions

Sessions offer a safe space for you to be open and honest about how you’ve been feeling without a filter. Getting the chance to talk about depression with a counselor not only normalizes your experience but also opens the door to solutions.

In depression therapy, the objective won’t be expecting you to be happy 100 percent of the time. Instead, the goal is to get you back to a baseline where you can appreciate the normal ebb and flow of emotions and enjoy happier moments when they arise. What’s more, depression counseling can help restore the function that may be missing from your daily routine.

I Offer Helpful Modalities For Depression Treatment

Incorporating evidence-based modalities—such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Internal Family Systems (IFS)—into depression treatment will ensure that therapy offers tangible skills you can draw from to establish a healthier self-care routine and prevent you from being pulled down into low moods.

For example, DBT will provide you with practical coping tools for depression, such as emotional self-regulation, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness skills. With CBT, we can utilize behavioral activation—which focuses on how thoughts and behaviors influence each other—to break out of negative cycles that fuel depression.

Additionally, we may incorporate somatic awareness therapy to help you tune into the body and notice where you feel the pain. We can then follow up with IFS to identify the part that holds the most pain and use journaling, guided imagery, and validation techniques to discover and understand the sensations of depression. This exploration helps demystify where depression is coming from, allowing you to have more control over how you think and feel.

When you find your way back to the light, life will have new meaning and your ability to experience joy will return to you. Connecting to others more healthily and following through with goals will no longer elude you. With hope, you will feel more like yourself.

But Maybe You’re Not Sure If Depression
Therapy Is Right For You…

The thought of dropping my perfectionist habits in therapy terrifies me. It’s all I know.

Participating in therapy to learn how to live without perfectionism can be challenging. In fact, it may be the most difficult thing you have ever done. However, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’ll realize you want to be free from its torment. Rather than being consumed with making everyone else happy all the time, you can put your needs first. Letting go of perfectionism will give you the ability to come home to yourself and tap into your authentic wisdom and peace.

Why do I need therapy for my perfectionism since it means that I’m striving to be the best at what I do?

Superficially, your life strategy has worked up until now—you’ve achieved a lot, and people are happy to have you on their team. But if you are looking into therapy, then some part of your carefully designed pattern to smile, obey, and work hard is high-functioning anxiety that is no longer working for you. Perhaps behind closed doors, self-medicating and self-harm is taking its toll. If perfectionism worked in the long term, you would feel peace and joy, but you don’t. Perfectionism disorder treatment works—we can do this together.

If I meet with a therapist about my perfectionism, won’t I be judged?

One pitfall of the perfectionist mindset is believing that asking for help is not allowed. Although striving for excellence unassisted is often rewarded, this trait is keeping you stuck. The truth is that some people who love you know therapy for perfectionism will help you. You are probably judging yourself the most for seeking support. We will work on that in our sessions. Soon, you will realize that asking for help from a qualified therapist will be the most perfect thing you have done in your whole life.

Depression Is Treatable — Why Wait?

Taking the first step can be hard, but it is so well worth it. To find out more about online perfectionism therapy with me, please call or text (615) 785-5562 or visit my contact page.

[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/major-depression 
[2] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression 
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr199.pdf 
[4] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/02/right-now-social-media-adult-depression