All these efforts to overcome depression are about controlling or managing your thoughts and feelings. You try to control by avoiding or pushing them away. You try to control by identifying and replacing with different ones. You try to control by understanding them which will lead to more positive thoughts and feelings. But here’s the thing.  Let’s say I run into you in ten years and ask you how are doing with your depression.  My guess is that you don’t want your answer to be: Well, for the most part I am managing and controlling it and getting through life.  You want to be able to speak about how your life has a sense of meaning and vitality. 

When people come to me for depression treatment, many of them are taking an antidepressant medication prescribed by a psychiatrist or a primary care physician. Often I will have people ask me whether they should take one of these medications. Will it help with my depression? Will it make it go away?

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.

There may be nothing more beautiful than a sunrise, except perhaps a sunset. Sunsets begin with a first hint of light. Gradually, the light increases and gives you a display of color that grows until the sun climbs over the horizon. Sunrises tend to evoke awe and wonder. It is not just the colors; it is the promise of the end of darkness and the beginning of a new day. It is not unusual for an individual or a group to watch a sunrise in silence. Everyone is caught up in the experience. And yet, there is a way that the mind can take us out of the wonder of the sunrise. 

A very important question that I ask when people come to counseling is all the different things you have tried to overcome your depression.  The answer to this question is usually quite revealing, because most people will share a variety of strategies to gain control of the depression.  People talk about trying to keep the depressive thoughts and feelings at bay, or they try to replace them with more positive thoughts and feelings.  Others will talk about trying to figure out why they are depressed.

How much you try…those words capture what most of us do in response to depression.  It goes something like this.  The depression means that there is something wrong with me.  If there is something wrong with me, well, I need to try as hard as I can to control the depression.  And there are lots of ways that we do this. 

So being on autopilot is not a problem; it is being on autopilot most of the time that can contribute to problems like depression.  Our routines become ruts.  When the thoughts and feelings that contribute to depression show up, we usually respond by trying to avoid or fight off those thoughts and feelings. These attempts to control the depression can become so habitual that they become a part of our autopilot living.  Along with all the other things we routinely do during the day, there are the decisions we make to fight or avoid the depression…and we don’t even realize that we are doing it.