Call it What You Will
The word depression applies when a core set of symptoms is persistently present for weeks, months, or even years:
Low mood (dysphoria), with emotional pain and/or numbness
Inability to enjoy anything (anhedonia)
Intrusive negative thoughts about the self
Too much sleep, or not enough (hypersomnia / insomnia)
Lack of motivation; efforts feel absurd/futile
Despair about world, future, humanity
Diminished sexual desire
Disordered eating, either excessive or deficient
Retreat to addictive behaviors
Stuckness
There’s a big mystery at the heart of human nature: on the one hand, each of us is a free moral agent, personally responsible for our choices, our actions, and even the quality of experience. On the other hand, our range of options is constrained by our circumstances—especially past circumstances that shaped our brains.
Since nobody knows exactly how free or unfree we are, therapy helps remind you that you might be underestimating how much influence you can exert on what it feels like to be you. Feeling down makes it harder to think clearly about what you can do to feel better. Bring in a therapist, and the situation changes: there’s more leverage on what seemed unmovable.
Dysthymia
Some people experience long stretches of chronic sludge, a glum existence that isn’t painful enough to be called depression. It doesn’t stop you from making a living, and you might be able to keep a relationship going in this state, but not much happens, and not much is learned. Cannabis addiction sometimes shows up here (not always), taking away some anxiety but also some motivation, which makes for a different form of anxiety.
The relative mildness of dysthymia is part of what’s dangerous about it: it makes you feel unworthy of care, while telling you that you don’t really need it anyway. So it drags on. Breaking out of it involves change: like reaching out to a therapist (by phone or email) to consult about possibly scheduling a first session. When somebody is more fed up with feeling bad than they are nervous about trying to change—they try to change.
Depression
Music psychotherapy can release pent-up feelings of sadness, anger, regret, shame, guilt, yearning—whatever’s down inside that seems so overwhelming that you just don’t want to feel it. Often the refusal to feel is the real problem. A numb, dissociative depression is avoidance across the board. But a painful depression can be a defense against specific feelings of grief, or of anger, that your unconscious thinks you can’t deal with. Support from a therapist can help you safely to explore the alternatives to depressive avoidance. In million of therapy sessions over the past century and a half, people have found that a greater willingness to be sad made them less depressed. It also helped them to develop, or restore, a capacity for joy.
Therapy can lead you to improve the rules of the game you play in life. For example, it’s not fair to compound your suffering with guilt about not being happy. Feeling bad is bad enough, without feeling meta-bad about it. Let yourself off the hook with that one. If you’re in treatment, you can’t be faulted for not trying. And therapy, like all meaningful self-care, is a process, not an event. It doesn’t work instantly, like a light switch, because its a process of growth, not a mechanical adjustment.
Depression is like the darkness of a forest at night, and the therapist is a non-depressed companion who has some expertise in the general workings of the human mind and heart. Some of the guidance is like a flashlight, helping you avoid bumping into trees; some is like navigation by the North Star, orienting you in the landscape even when you can’t see much else. Certain songs or melodies have been with you a long time, like constellations always overhead, and we can use those to help you steer your life in the direction you want it to go.
If you feel depressed, consider scheduling a therapy session with me, at (315) 529-9031.