Understanding Depression: It's More Than Just Sadness

Depression is not just a passing mood; it's a persistent state that robs you of energy, drains your motivation, and leaves you feeling disconnected from your life and the people you care about. It often feels like walking through sludge—heavy, exhausting, and overwhelming.

Depression is a signal that something in your life or system is stuck, whether it's unexpressed emotion, a history of trauma, or chronic stress that has depleted your capacity for joy.

Variations of Depression

Low Energy and Loss of Motivation

• The Experience: This is the difficulty getting out of bed, the avoidance of normal responsibilities, and/or the sudden loss of interest in hobbies or activities you once loved. This often includes feelings of chronic fatigue and profound apathy.

• The Impact: Procrastination, feelings of guilt or worthlessness, and a lack of belief that things will ever get better.

Emotional Numbness and Irritability

• The Experience: For some, depression doesn't look like crying; it looks like feeling numb, empty, or constantly irritable. These are often defenses against feeling overwhelming pain.

• The Impact: Frequent snapping at loved ones, isolating yourself, and feeling a profound sense of loneliness or detachment from your emotional life.

Depression Fueled by Identity and Systemic Stress

• The Experience: Depression can be rooted in the cumulative weight of being constantly misunderstood, marginalized, or navigating life in environments that are not affirming of your identity or cultural background.

• The Impact: Persistent feelings of hopelessness tied to external forces, deep wounds to self-worth, and the difficulty in seeing a positive future.

Our Work Together

Our work focuses on identifying the roots of this heavy feeling and restoring your natural energy for life. We move you from a state of stuckness to action, clarity, and sustainable wellbeing.

Therapy is built on the belief that chronic depression often involves more than just negative thoughts; it is also rooted in a dysregulated nervous system and fragmented self-worth. The practice blends specialized, cutting-edge modalities with grounded relational support to help find meaning and energy. This can include:

• Holistic Regulation: Methods that address the physical exhaustion and emotional numbness of persistent low mood.

• Targeted Processing: Specialized tools to reduce the intensity of negative self-worth and past emotional burdens.

• Sustained Skill Building: Practical tools to challenge self-criticism and re-engage with life.

Therapy for Depression using EMDR and Holistic Approaches

EMDR: Processing the Roots of Self-Worth

While commonly known for trauma, EMDR is highly effective in reducing the intensity of self-criticism and processing the memories that fuel low self-worth. The process utilizes EMDR to target and process the emotional networks linked to persistent feelings of shame, failure, or hopelessness.

• When you experience: Persistent negative self-talk (e.g., "I'm not good enough," "I always fail") that feels automatic and intense.

  • EMDR helps by: Creating distance from the emotional charge of those old self-judgments, allowing you to install a new, stable sense of intrinsic worth and competence.

• When you experience: Emotional burdens from past relational losses or failures that leave you feeling deeply depleted.

  • EMDR helps by: Reprocessing these difficult memories, allowing them to be stored without the emotional intensity that constantly drains your energy in the present.

Body-Based Skills: Mastering Your Nervous System Regulation

Body based skills is crucial for depression because it addresses the profound lack of energy and motivation often experienced. Depression is often held in the body as low physical energy and sluggishness.

• When you experience: Profound fatigue, lethargy, or emotional numbness (feeling "checked out").

  • Body based skills help by: Gently guiding you to notice and safely move the "stuck" energy associated with the low mood, increasing your ability to tolerate and utilize positive, restorative physical sensations.

• When you experience: Difficulty engaging in activities or feeling motivated to make changes.

  • Body based skills help by: Reconnecting you to your body's intrinsic resources, allowing you to gradually restore capacity and find the physical grounding needed to initiate action and re-engage with life.

Integrated Skill Building (Holistic Talk Therapy)

The foundation of the work involves integrated talk therapy, where you can learn practical, holistic, and relational skills to manage depression and build a meaningful life.

• Meaning and Value. You clarify your deepest values and commit to taking small actions that align with them, even when motivation is low.

• Sustainable Change. You build practical skills to challenge depressive feelings, thoughts, and behaviors as well as explore how cultural expectations or chronic stress contribute to your depressive state, creating boundaries to protect your emotional energy.