Do You Feel Sad All The Time Despite Having All Of The Ingredients For A “Happy” Life?

Are you feeling unfulfilled despite having a picture-perfect life? Do you find it difficult to get out of bed each day or that you’re just going through the motions daily? Have you lost interest in the things that once brought you joy?

Maybe you’ve noticed that you struggle to connect with loved ones and have begun to opt out of seeing them whenever possible. Perhaps your marriage has hit a rough patch and you can’t shake the feelings of hurt, shame, or loneliness. You may even compare yourself to other couples and wonder why life bodes so well for them.

Though you may be committed to getting to the root of your depression, you struggle to accept this reality when you feel like your life is simply too good to be distressed. As a result, you can’t understand why you’ve lost the motivation you once had for life. Or perhaps despite your beautiful life, you may feel hurt and sorrow from marital struggles whose source you cannot pinpoint.

Maybe you try to address your feelings of isolation, disconnect, and loneliness by ignoring them. Yet over time, you realize that these signs of depression won’t disappear. You can no longer ignore that you lack the vibrancy you once had each day. Maybe you’ve even become irritable as of late and have unintentionally lashed out at loved ones.

You deserve to experience life at your best and depression treatment can give you the hope you need to get there. Working with a therapist can offer support to accept what you’re feeling without judgment and patiently work through your challenges.

Depression Can Befall Anyone From Any Background

No one is immune to experiencing symptoms of depression—it knows no age, background, socio-economic status, race, ethnicity, or gender. We can be from an affluent community and still experience depression. With the right support, we feel we can overcome our challenges. However, without support, we run the risk of isolating ourselves from loved ones without a trusted confidante who can validate our struggles.

Why is depression so challenging? It is difficult to deal with because to many, we live a desired lifestyle, so we may feel shame when we experience sadness, an irony compared to our seemingly happy circumstances.

The truth is that we cannot be happy when we innocently compare our lives to the social media feeds of others and are saddened when we then feel inadequate about our own accomplishments. Moreover, we cannot be happy when we have issues that we believe aren’t affecting others, like marital problems. And when left unfulfilled by the external trappings of our successes, we become unhappy and begin to seek deeper meaning.

This internal questioning is not what people see externally and it often juxtaposes with our “dream life,” as we stay quiet about what we are really feeling. Overcoming depression is hard because we often feel as though we shouldn’t be experiencing it; we’d prefer for our lives to be a source of happiness rather than discontent. We also fear being different. If no one around us is dealing with depression, we worry that we are defective when those around us seem happy, healthy, and normal.

There is nothing defective about your capacity to feel or be affected by life circumstances. In depression treatment, your experiences can be validated and you can rebuild the foundation to become the person you were always meant to be.

Depression Treatment Can Help You Find The Joy In Life Again

Your depression may cause you to feel invisible or stuck in life, butet therapy can help you identify triggers and understand how depression has affected your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

I offer a safe space to explore what’s causing your depression and find strategies that can help you to successfully cope with symptoms. My encouraging, non-judgmental, and solution-oriented approach has helped many clients address the symptoms of their depression and identify its sources, which often include work stress, prolonged isolation, marital issues, family history, and substance abuse, among others.

Treatment begins with an intake process, which will allow me to learn more about your background and symptoms to see if I may be a good fit. From here, we will delve into who you are and the goals you hope to accomplish through therapy. Additionally, we will complete a series of intake assessments over the course of the first few therapy sessions.

Ongoing sessions will explore issues outlined in your treatment goals. Some clients like to focus on one specific issue, while others explore many issues at once. In treatment, we will navigate various aspects of yourself—emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental—to pinpoint what may be the root cause(s) of your depression. From there, we will build individualized strategies to help bring relief. As you peel back the layers on your life experiences, you may observe behavior patterns that have contributed to your depression and have kept you from living the full life you deserve.

Throughout therapy, we may also identify unhealthy patterns you developed as a child that contribute to how you currently form relationships with yourself and others. For example, certain attachment styles were helpful coping strategies when you were a child or teen have since perhaps become counterproductive or maladaptive.

Depression treatment may include any number of evidence-based modalities that can help improve your mental health and can also be used well after treatment. Mindfulness calms your inner thoughts so you can better manage the stress and anxiety that cause depression. Somatic therapy allows your physical body to process experiences by connecting these experiences to sensations you feel. We will help you regulate your emotions and internal responses via breathing techniques, physical exercises, sensation awareness, and grounding methods. And should the source of your depression stem from a traumatic event, we may also use Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to help you gently recall distressing experiences so that your brain can process them more fully.

Depression treatment can give you an opportunity to find your way back to yourself and get emotionally unstuck. It can offer you the skills to rewire your brain for the better, giving you the power to change negative thought patterns so you can view the world with a balanced perspective.

Maybe you still have questions about depression treatment…

I don’t have the time for depression therapy.

If you suffer from depression, chances are that your condition has already robbed you of precious time, but therapy can help reclaim your time. To accomplish this, we identify the root cause of your depression and work with you to develop healthy coping strategies to heal so you can live your life again with renewed motivation. Additionally, we also offer the option for telehealth, which can give you the freedom to experience therapy from anywhere without the time required for a commute.

I’ve tried to treat depression before, but nothing has worked for me.

There is something to be said for the fact that you recognize you have a problem and have tried to remedy it. And with the stigma that surrounds mental health, many people do not find the courage to seek professional help for their healing, so kudos to you. What we can do in therapy is start from where you are, looking at what you have tried and developing new ideas for treatment. The benefit of therapy is that it allows you to explore various tools with a trained professional to see which ones fit your mental health needs.

I don’t think I suffer from clinical depression but can therapy help me find relief from sadness or loss of interest in my life?

Therapy can absolutely benefit you if you experience depression-like symptoms. I can help you whether you struggle with major depressive disorder or are just experiencing the emotional lows that come with difficult situations in life, or.

Are You Ready To Seek The Help You Need To Heal?

Depression can cause you to sink into an unshakeable sense of despair. But if you’re ready to take one step at a time forward to reclaim your true self, I invite you to give us a call for a free 15-minute consultation at 508-297-1491 to see how we can help.