Depression

Feeling alone is a lonely place to be.

At night is when you feel the worst about yourself. It’s the quiet moments alone with no one else around when you reflect on your day. You start focusing on what you didn’t do and who ignored or misunderstood something you said. These thoughts cause your eyes to tear up because you don’t understand how your life got this way.

Distracting yourself from other things that once gave you pleasure doesn’t help. You have close friends with whom you could talk, but they have their struggles. You don’t want to burden them with your emotional stuff.

Instead of being excited when you awaken, you become annoyed or sad that you must push and pull yourself through the day. Thoughts of what you need to do start to overwhelm you, and you wish you could stay in bed all day.

Your weekends are just that – a recipe of one part declining social activities to stay in bed, and one part eyes glued to your phone, mixed with some sleeping on and off. And yet, even with those “lazy days,” you still never feel rested or fully rejuvenated. The sadness continues to linger day after day.

Trying to heal from the past, but you can’t.

Dealing with the past was the story of 40-something Denise*. She was still healing from a broken engagement with someone with whom she thought she would spend the rest of her life.

“I just see us in two different places in our lives; I can’t do this anymore.” His words to her repeated in her mind several times a day as she traced back past moments in their relationship, searching for where the relationship breakdown started.

Denise often asked herself, “Where did things go wrong? What’s wrong with me?” Then, she heard her grandma’s voice as she recalled their last conversation.

Her grandma’s voice dripping with impatience and apathy, said, “If you don’t treat your man right, another one will. Could’ve been that weight you put on that turned him off.” Hearing that was like a gut punch. This accusation made her feel like the breakup was her fault.

Denise felt worthless.

For the last eight months, Denise became her grandma’s caretaker due to her rapidly declining health. Although she was shocked by her grandma’s comment, it didn’t seem strange. Throughout her childhood, her grandma commented about her skin tone, weight (“too fat, too skinny”), size of her nose, voice, hobbies, and love life.

Nothing Denise did was good enough, which also extended to Denise’s caretaking abilities. Every chance her grandma got, she would make a criticism. This constant criticism began to cause severe self-doubt and weigh on Denise’s mind even when not in her grandma’s presence.

To compensate for the breakup, Denise started smoking weed every day after work, causing her to have the munchies. Within a few short months, she had gained 19 pounds. But by this time, she couldn’t stop herself from the cycle of smoking and eating.

Denise told herself, “I don’t have a choice; there’s nothing else I can do not to feel sad.” Those activities became the only highlight of Denise’s day. She couldn’t wait to get home, get into bed, light up a joint, and zone out on TV. These activities helped her stay afloat until this zoning out started creeping into other areas of her life.

Zoning out made things worse.

One day, while driving home from work, Denise started thinking about how she wasn’t good enough and how she’d probably end up alone.

She arrived at a stop sign, and after a quick cursory glance, she put her foot on the gas and pulled forward. She was zoning out but was still in a hurry to get home and get to her usual routine. She didn’t see the car approaching her from her right side and had an accident.

Although no one was severely injured, this event made Denise seek therapy. She had felt down about herself for far too long, was too reliant on weed to make her happy, and had no other coping tools to help her get through life.

Therapy helps lift the burden of depression.

When Denise finally met with me, we started by continuing to process her excruciating breakup. No one seemed to validate her feelings and understand how traumatic this breakup was until now.

Over time, we began to process old childhood wounds of being raised by a woman who constantly told her she wasn’t good enough. We even processed how Denise was raised by her grandmother as a young child (her parents were teens struggling with drugs and could not raise a child on their own). She did not know this information until she was 25 years old.

We went through every painful memory and processed it together slowly and carefully. Then, we worked on healing by increasing the time spent outside Denise’s bedroom and in nature. Denise joined a yoga class, started meditating, and accepted social weekend activities.

Therapy taught her who she was and how to pull her out of Depression’s rigid grasp on her life. Best of all, she did the work and was soon back into the dating scene as a fully healed and present individual.

Call me today to find purpose in your life again.

*Name changed to protect client confidentiality.