Through a Dark Lens: The Complexities of Depression

Depression is more complex than most people realize. Exploring one's psychological self as a tool towards unwinding the layers of depression. In understanding and making more sense of it, we can solve the mysteries of depression.

Depression often blocks self-compassion, keeping us stuck. There is little fun in the lands of judgments, self-criticism, and heaviness. There isn't much life there, so much as an absence of vitality. Depression leaves us psychologically overweighted in negative bias. Depression often leaves people feeling sluggish, disliking themselves, confused, or somehow rejected by the course of their lives.

Depression is confusing. Sometimes, it hits out of nowhere, perhaps during a life transition or finding one's way through complex grief. Other times, it takes us decades to notice that we've been depressed all along; it has always been there, and we never knew it wasn't typical to have this dullness as our mental baseline.

Depression can hit us at any stage of life, but is extremely common in both middle-life existential crises or later years when reflecting on our regrets and noticing limited time to change course. It's confusing and costly, whenever in a depression, to carry the weight of not really understanding your emotional toll and why life feels so burdensome sometimes.

The weight of depression can feel so overwhelming we start searching for an escape route, substance use, violence, or suicide being the most extreme. Depression can take the form of irritation, anger, or violence. When in extreme pain, we often need to project it elsewhere. It is too hot to hold the weight of heaviness, inner tension, and confusing feelings; we have no sense of how to deal with or find our way through.

Depression is often a form of repression. Something is being Pressed-Down. De-Pressed. But what, I wonder? Anger, sadness, vulnerability, power? Inside a depressed state, what have you not let yourself fully feel?

It's a mystery that lives inside each person's journey through depression therapy. We could never boil down a story such as yours to a box that tells us what depression is. You are more complex than you thought. Depression is often a weight on you that's hard to make sense of. We might learn to dismiss our state of ennui and tell ourselves that depression means we can't get out of bed. Yet many of us are functioning through life depressed, with a lack of meaning, living a life tied up in guilt because we are either too afraid or have no road map for doing something beyond what others told us.

Depression is asking us to lift something up.

Depression gifts are the symptoms trying to grab your attention. If you're listening, depression calls to you and asks you to turn inward, get curious, and reconnect to yourself. We just never knew how to understand and get to know our depression. We're so busy and conditioned to try to escape our pain.

In a world that wants to feel better fast, the road towards understanding your depression is different than the pharmaceutical route—understanding and knowing something completely doesn't happen in a quick fix. While medication can and often does help, it is incomplete as the sole route toward depression treatment.

We may not want to know ourselves completely. Considering that you will only be living with yourself your whole life, how depressing is it not to want to know yourself?

Depression therapy is a gift towards knowing yourself more, a move that starts a process of accepting oneself. You don't have to stay complacent and confused by yourself and your life.

Depression often asks you to reconnect to whatever got split off in you. When navigating painful or traumatic experiences, we become fragmented; we disconnect, split off, and separate from our wholeness. Depression is one part of us taking over and repressing other parts. Depression therapy can help you start to make sense of what's overwhelming your psyche and where there needs to be a rebalance. Self-compassion, a powerful tool in depression therapy, is one step towards reducing the self-harm or self-neglect that is often a big part of depression. It takes time and sometimes years for people to reorient themselves with self-kindness and respect.

Depression skews our lens in the negative, and in our attempts to attend inward, we often become overly focused on ourselves, neglecting other parts of our lives, including our relationships. When our relationship with ourselves is off-kilter, we tend to treat our relationships with others similarly.

Part of why therapy for depression often includes people putting effort into caring for others is that where we place our attention impacts our mood. We double our difficulty when we are overly focused on the negative perspective, spotlighting ourselves. We can find relief from our pain by focusing on and giving to others. As empathetic beings, we can generate a good feeling by caring for others just as much as we attend to and care for ourselves. Reimagining the interconnectedness of self and others is a requisite for moving beyond depression.

Starting to unwind our complexities in psychotherapy with a safe and supportive relationship is a brave step towards uncovering the mysteries of almost any part of yourself. Whether you're finding your way through depression, substance use, addiction, life transition, or post-traumatic stress, look inward and start considering how and where you're layered more than you realized. What other mysteries might lay beyond the symptoms? What's the kind of relief you seek?

"Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough."
- George Washington Carver.