Depression: It's more than "just" sadness

When is it depression?

Some people think depression and sadness are the same thing. Or depression and grief. Like you’re sad your kid made a bad choice at school and you wish he didn’t have to spend recess “on the wall.” Or you’re grieving because your aunt died, and she was your favorite, and you cry sometimes when you think about her. Those things are different from depression - not less than or better than.

Depression is more about wanting to disappear, become tiny, curl up in a corner and stay that way forever. You can’t sleep but once you do you can’t get up. At all. And you feel like this pretty much all day every day.

Your limbs feel heavy, and walking from the couch or bed to the sink for a glass of water is like moving through mud and you don’t have the energy to even think about trying it. In fact, you might actually have mud – or at least dirt – throughout the house since, with depression, it’s hard to be motivated to clean.

You CAN get stuck in sadness and develop depression. And you CAN get stuck in grief and develop depression. But generally, sadness and grief ebb and flow depending on your situation, while depression sticks around for more than a couple of weeks.

You’ve lost interest in things that used to be fun for you. You don’t socialize anymore and even Facebook takes too much energy. You used to love visiting friends but now you spend your time at home alone, and don’t even open the curtains. You used to enjoy going dancing but now you binge watch Scandal or Breaking Bad.

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Generally, sadness and grief ebb and

flow, while depression sticks around

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If you’re eating, you’re eating whatever’s easy – whether it’s healthy or not, tasty or not. Or you might be eating all the time. Boxes of cereal and milk, cartons of ice cream, bags of potato chips, supersized candy bars one after the other, or Happy Meals from drive throughs. But you’re not likely cooking nutritionally balanced meals that take planning or look and taste appealing.

You’re probably moving and talking much slower than normal for you – so much that other people might have noticed. Your parents would say you’re “dawdling,” and coworkers would call you unmotivated, but you just know you’re exhausted. And your voice has become monotone with less feeling, shorter sentences, and smaller words.

It’s likely gotten harder to concentrate and make decisions. You don’t read books anymore or watch full length TV movies, but rather flip through magazines and watch shorter shows. And if the choice is what to eat, you probably won’t eat at all. What to wear? You’ll just stay in your bathrobe.

You feel so worthless and guilty and hopeless that you wonder why you were even born, like you’re a burden to all those around you, like your existence is a mistake. You can’t imagine a better or different future.  Please, if you feel like you might hurt yourself, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or go to the online Lifeline Chat at http://chat.suicidepreventionlifeline.org for help.

And all of this feels like it’s gone on for an eternity and that it will never, ever be different.

That’s depression

I picture sadness and grief as bumps on an otherwise steady road of life. Depression is more of a dip, a dent (or a depression) in the road, so deep you need help to climb out.

If this sounds like you - if you think you might have depression - call me for a free consultation where we’ll discuss strategies to get you feeling better or whether you need more help. And in the meantime, click for some activities to get temporary relief.

As always, thank you for reading my post, and please share with anyone you think it might help.

5 Short Steps to Help Yourself Feel Better

Think back to the past week. Think about the positive, negative, and neutral events that happened. Did you have a bad day? Did you feel abandoned or panicked when the person you turned to wasn’t available? Do you want to feel better when it happens again? Because you will feel let down, disappointed, or abandoned again someday. We can control of our feelings of sadness, abandonment, grief, rage, and anxiety by changing our thoughts with a simple activity called cognitive restructuring.

In 5 steps, you can change what you think to change how you feel.

1. Name the triggering event I had a bad day last week and Susan didn’t help.

2. Name the irrational belief Susan didn’t help because she doesn’t like me anymore.

3. List the feelings caused by the belief Sadness and abandonment.

4. Dispute the irrational belief Susan didn’t help because she was taking care of her sick baby.

5. Name the new effect Feel closer to Susan and secure in our friendship.

Now you try it. Start with something small and simple.

1. Name the triggering event

2. Name the irrational belief

3. List the feelings caused by the belief

4. Dispute the irrational belief

5. Name the new effect

With practice, you can train yourself to manage your thoughts and keep feelings of depression, anxiety, fear, abandonment, and more from getting in the way. Let me know how it goes. Post a comment or email me at robin@balanceinsight.com

EMD What? FAQs about EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR) is one of the great counseling techniques (stay tuned for others) to lessen the triggers and flooding that come with anxiety. It works on the stuck memories that come out with physical sensations when we are confronted with smells, sights, people, places, or sounds that are similar to trauma, pain, or fear we experienced in the past. For example, if you’ve experienced sexual assault that started when you were sleeping, by a man with alcohol and cigarettes on his breath, you might start sweating or crying when you smell the combination of cigarette smoke and alcohol. You might start hyperventilating or having chest pain when you are woken up from a deep sleep. You might need to sleep with the lights on, or in your living room, or not much at all.

Triggers

The smoke, alcohol, darkness, being woken up, or sleep itself, are triggers that flood the brain with chemicals that put us into fight, flight, or most commonly, freeze mode.

We feel immobilized and experience panic, perspiration, inability to catch our breath, chest pain, tingling sensations in our hands or feet, lightheadedness, nausea, or headaches. We might get a flush of being extremely hot or cold, blacking out, and even a sensation of either watching ourselves from outside our bodies or of not being present in that time and space at all (this last one is called dissociation and I’ll post more about it later).

Protection

These physical sensations, interestingly, are our brain and body’s way of protecting us from danger. Our brain was so overwhelmed by the danger and trauma of the assault that it goes into protection mode to make sure to keep us from getting assaulted again – it warns us if any aspect of the assault is present now to tell us to get away and get safe.

When you think about it that way, our brains are pretty amazing, right? The problem comes when the brain’s attempt to protect us isn’t helpful, like when we are not in danger of assault but the brain thinks we might be, so we can’t be around certain smells or sights or places without experiencing the physical and immobilizing symptoms I talked about above.

While our brains are terrific at protecting us, that protection, when we don’t need it, gets in the way of us living life and doing things we want to do.

Enter EMDR Therapy

EMDR is a technique that I use, to help your brain recognize that sleep doesn’t necessarily lead to assault, nor does darkness, or the smells of cigarette smoke and beer.

EMDR uses something called bilateral stimulation – stimulating both sides of the brain – to get the emotional feeling side synced up with the logical thinking side. Integrating the two sides around the trauma helps the brain reprocess the traumatic event and move it from a current trauma to a past trauma, thereby lessening the physical triggers and panic in the present.

Sounds like such a relief, right? It certainly can be. EMDR does not make the memories go away, but it does lessen and dilute the symptoms related to the assault – or car wreck, dental visit, humiliating or fearful event, loss, death of a loved one, combat, dog bite, or, or, or, you get the idea.

Like all EMDR trained therapists, I've gone through rigorous training over an extended period, many hours of practice, and consultation with a certified EMDR supervisor, to make sure it's the best and most effective treatment for the issue/s you want to work on. Just like psychotherapy – longer, deeper, talk therapy – is not right for every person or even every issue of the same person, the same holds true for EMDR.

If you experience symptoms such as panic, tingling hands or feet, anxiety, nausea, avoidance of places, smells, sounds, or people, or a sensation of not being present, ask me about EMDR and whether it might be helpful for you. Request your free consultation here.

Note: If you are involved in a lawsuit, or if you plan to be involved in a lawsuit, related to the original trauma, please contact your lawyer to determine whether it is advisable to keep your triggers intact until the legal issue is resolved.