There’s Is Nothing Wrong With You
If you go to my specialty page on Depression Treatment, you will read about an approach to dealing with depression that does not focus on gaining control of and eliminating the thoughts and feelings of depression. You will learn how depression does not mean that there is something wrong with you; it is not a problem that you have to fix. Instead, depression means that there are some ways of thinking and acting that are not working for you; they are working against how you want to live your life.
Several of the blogs on the Depression Treatment page will describe the different ways we try to control our depression. Our minds try to figure out, evaluate, and come up with a strategy for eliminating it. You may try to avoid the depression by fighting the thoughts and feelings, shutting down by sleeping or keeping busy, or using substances like alcohol. These efforts may give some short-term relief from your depression, but it always seems to return. Like the depression itself, these efforts to control are not working for you; they are working against how you want to live your life.
How you want to live your life. Those are important words, and an important part of how I work with people who struggle with depression. In your heart and mind, you feel the depression and you are deeply dissatisfied with how your life is going. Deeply dissatisfied…that is good news. Think for a moment. Where does dissatisfaction come from? It is the difference between how you see your life to be and how you want your life to be. If there wasn’t a picture in there of what you want your life to be, well, you really couldn’t feel dissatisfied.
The problem is you can spend lots of time and energy trying to understand how your life is right now. Where did this depression come from? How long has it been around? What can I do to eliminate it? There are lots of approaches to therapy that will try to help you answer those questions.
But what about the other side of the dissatisfied equation? What about that picture inside of you of how you want your life to be that creates the dissatisfaction? What would it be like to spend some time unpacking and exploring and finding ways to give expression to that picture? This part of my approach to counseling is called naming and living out your values.
What are values?
Values reflect your deepest desires for how you want to be in the world, how you want to behave and interact with others, what matters most to you, and what you want to stand for. These values are not just ideals; they guide and motivate actions in all the areas of your living: work, play, relationships, family, spirituality, civic life. While these values live deep with you, you may not have spent much time thinking about them or defining what they are. But still they are there, because they are the source of your dissatisfaction…that gap between how your life is and how you want your life to be.
A word of warning. When you begin to consider your values, you may feel some discomfort. Spending some time intentionally noticing the difference between what you do and what matters to you will give you pause. And it should. Let’s say you value being an engaging and open partner in your relationship, but when you start to think about this value more intentionally, you will see how you have been withdrawing and withholding from your partner. And that can be uncomfortable, but it is a good kind of discomfort. It is not a discomfort dictated by your depression; it is a discomfort that comes from feeling how you are not giving expression to an important value in your life. It is a discomfort that can motivate you to make some behavioral changes, not to control the depression but to give expression more fully to what gives you meaning.
So I invite you to give up the illusion of controlling your depression.
You have spent a lot of time unpacking the depression story that seems to control you. I invite you to spend some time with your values. Values that are deep within you. Values that you may not have considered in a long time. But they are the values that create the dissatisfaction with how your life is going. They are values that can guide you, even in the presence of the depression, to make choices that give meaning and vitality to your living.
Watch for more blogs about how to develop this focus on values or contact me to schedule some time to talk about this.
Click here to learn more about depression treatment.