Depression Therapy

What is depression therapy?

There are many different types of therapies that successfully help people recover from depression. In our practice, we rely on a combination of treatments supported by research as effective in treating depression. This includes Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Mindfulness Therapy (MBSR), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT) and Psychodynamic Therapy.

What is depression?

In the beginning, depression is typically considered a natural response to a difficult life situation or event. It’s expected that we will feel sad if, for example, our romantic relationship has ended, someone has died, we lost our job or did not succeed at something we cared about. But sadness morphs into depression when it starts to skew the way we think about ourselves negatively, others and the world in general. As it takes over, depression causes us only to see what’s wrong in our lives or with ourselves. We only have a sense of what does not work and what won’t be okay. We simultaneously develop a blind spot for what is good, okay, enjoyable and beautiful, which depression therapy can help you to see again.

It’s quite natural then for life to start feeling meaningless. To cope, we withdraw from our relationships, stop pushing ourselves to try new things and self-soothe with drugs, alcohol, sleep, TV or video games. As this becomes habit, it chips away at our self-esteem because we don’t feel like we’re functioning and thriving in the world but pulling away from it at all costs.

How can depression therapy help me?

We take a multi-pronged approach to depression therapy and attempt to tackle it from all sides. First, how you think has everything to do with the way you feel. As such, we initially work on your relationship with your thoughts. In doing this, we will help you identify your depressive thinking habits and teach you how to challenge thinking patterns that hurt you. At the same time, we will work with you to practice recognising thoughts for what they really are - just thoughts! After all, just because you think it does not make it true. And even if your thinking is right, that does not mean that it’s helpful and buying into unhelpful depressive thoughts is a dangerous game.

Following this, we will work on your relationship with uncomfortable feelings such as sadness, pain, hurt, shame, fear and anxiety. Most of us take our feelings far too seriously and do anything we can to stop feeling bad and start feeling good. What we don’t realise is that this actually makes matters worse. We either exhaust ourselves because it takes so much effort to keep busy and distract from our pain or, counterintuitively, the same drive to avoid feeling our pain means that our attention is actually always on it! The fact is that in life, we will have sadness and happiness, pain and joy, fear and relief, etc. Most of us have no problem feeling what is good, but we need help to sit with negative feelings. We will teach you to sit with discomfort and observe negative emotions as they naturally come and go.

Throughout this process, we will be helping you cultivate a sense of compassion and understanding for your depressive pain and where it comes from. In our healing, we must go back to the origins of depressive thinking and painful feelings, which commonly brings us back to difficult childhood experiences.