The antidote to depression may not be what you think

Reflections from both sides of the therapy room

Image by Mike Hindle on Unsplash

The most powerful antidote to depression may not be what you’ve been led to believe. My decades of working through my own pain, and sitting alongside other people as they navigate theirs, have taught me that we’re often looking for it in the wrong places. It’s not joy, or gratitude or positivity. It’s not exercise or eating well – though these things can undoubtedly be helpful.

The most powerful antidote I’ve found to depression is to fully feel your sadness. Or rage. Or shame.

Does that sound paradoxical?

We often think of depression and sadness as the same thing, but they’re not. Depression is what happens when we don’t fully feel our sadness, our pain. When we try, consciously or unconsciously, to move away from it, disconnect or shut it down. When we try to move forwards in our lives without fully honouring what is there, the losses we have felt, the wounds and hurts we carry.

In order to do this, we tend to numb ourselves a little (or a lot). When we stay in the numb zone for too long, this can become depression.

The most effective route I know out of the stuckness of depression is to find the feeling you’ve been suppressing.

The route out of depression is to feel.

The body can be our access point. The body is often holding that which our thinking mind is avoiding. Becoming intimately acquainted with the landscape of our body sensations leads us closer to what is needing to be acknowledged and released. When we’re in the lockdown of depression we have often become very disconnected from our physicality, cut off from our very sense of aliveness and vitality. Getting reacquainted with the body can begin to reconnect us. It can start with pausing, noticing, taking a deeper breath, and moving towards, rather than away from, that which aches, that which cries for our loving attention.

When a client is stuck in a particular emotional state and it’s not shifting, despite holding space, compassion, tenderness and curiosity around it over weeks and months, there is almost invariably another emotion sitting underneath it that they’re not feeling. When you drop a layer deeper and access that, the emotional gridlock tends to crack open a little.

The emotion that is the most stuck is often the furthest one from the person’s immediate awareness. Some people come in raging, when actually they need to cry, others come in crying when they need to get angry, set some limits, find their no.  They may come in angry with the world, when underneath they are feeling like they are a failure. You get the picture.

As for me personally, I have been good at feeling sadness. I laid on a therapist’s couch for weeks that turned into months and then years feeling sad and working my way through her Kleenex supply. Heck, I think I kept Kleenex in business for a number of years through my late 30s and early 40s. Yet nothing was shifting. Only later did I realise what was missing. I wasn’t connecting with something that felt darker and deeper underneath my sadness. I wasn’t connecting with my shame. Only when I started to face and feel my shame, my deep-seated sense of failure and inadequacy, did the depression start to lift. Shame has been the gnarly one for me. For some it’s sadness or grief, for others anger. It may be the emotion that you were punished for expressing as a child, or the one which others around you communicated, implicitly or explicitly, was not acceptable.

It’s helpful to figure out – what’s your gnarliest emotion? What’s the one you have buried the deepest? We need to be able to access the full range of our emotions to be able to experience life in all its technicolour.

I work a lot with a therapy called EMDR.¹ One of the reasons I love it is that it reaches beneath the rational layer of the thinking mind of both therapist and client – our intellectual notions of ‘what we need to talk about’. It dips into our subconscious mind and shines a light on what is hiding there. What is asking to be seen, heard, acknowledged, felt. It excavates the dark corners of our psyche, releasing and dissolving layer by layer that which we have been avoiding, suppressing or burying. It frees it to move through, and in doing so it also frees up the energy that has been bound up in holding it under (like the energy it takes to hold a beachball underwater). It can give us back our vitality and allow this energy to be available for other things.

When I work with EMDR for depression, the themes and memories that reveal themselves tend to circle around loss, separation and humiliation. Research has pointed towards these as key experiences in the genesis of depression.²

It can be hard to do this work alone. We struggle to see our blind spots, and sometimes the gnarliest emotions need the gentle, loving container of a compassionate witness to coax them out of their hiding places. To give them permission to be felt.

Therapists can be the midwives to our pain, helping its release and safe delivery, companioning us on the journey, showing us that it can be borne. We need someone who has been there before and is not fearful of the intensity of the experience. Someone who is willing to step into the fire with us and withstand the flames.

Feelings tend to release their grip once they have been fully met and felt. If we can ride the peak of the waves without moving to fix or avoid, they will release and set us free. If we can do this repeatedly, even the darkest depression or despair tends to begin to shift and metabolise. This is the alchemy that can happen in the therapy relationship.

Depression can be a dark, lonely and hopeless place. The pathway out of depression requires something we’re not good at in the West – patience, time, slowing down and feeling deeply. It helps enormously to have a companion on that journey.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this. Do join me in the comments to let me know how this has landed for you. (If you’re reading this in an email, click through to the website to join the conversation).

Please share this post with others if it’s been useful and do become a subscriber to hear more from The Therapy Room.

1. EMDR is an evidence-based therapy that works with the left and right hemisphere of the brain as we process painful, challenging and stuck places in our lives. Originally developed for the treatment of trauma, it is now used much more widely and is a powerful and effective tool in helping people release distress and access new perspectives.

2. Kendler, K.S., Hettema, J.M., Butera, F., Gardner, C.O. & Prescott, C.A. (2003) Life event dimensions of loss, humiliation, entrapment and danger in the prediction of onsets of major depression and generalized anxiety. Archives of General Psychiatry, 60, 789-796