Therapy for Depression and Anxiety
Depression hurts. It takes all the fun out of life. It’s hard to get out of bed, hard to get things done, hard to take care of ourselves, hard to engage in our relationships. We feel unmotivated, overwhelmed, hopeless, helpless and impotent. More often than not, only the ones closest to us truly understand what we are going through.
Because the only sure thing about life is its uncertainty, any significant life event can trigger depression and anxiety in some people. Sometimes it can be set off by an external negative situation like divorce, job loss, death, moving, and illness. Even positive situations like marriage, childbirth, job promotion or plastic surgery can surprisingly trigger depression in people, particularly if change of any sort proves difficult for them.
These situational depressions often respond quickly to psychotherapy. The importance of feeling understood and supported cannot be overstated. Feeling like we have a proven ally in our fight to reclaim ourselves is priceless. But unless our thought process can be examined and challenged, the benefits of talk therapy will be limited.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a process where our cognitive distortions are first identified in order to demonstrate how they are promoting and sustaining a negative bias to our thinking. These distortions are ways our mind convinces us of something that isn’t true, and they keep us feeling bad about ourselves. Some of them are:
- Double standard thinking
- Believing in the fallacy of universal fairness
- Overgeneralization
- Black and white thinking
- Filtering out the positive, filtering in the negative.
- Jumping to conclusions.
- Catastrophizing.
- Perfectionism
- Shoulds – Living up to others’ expectations
- Always needing to be right.
- Taking things personally
- Making erroneous assumptions
Effective therapy will help identify these cognitive distortions in order to breakthrough their negative and powerful hold on our thinking, our behavior and our choices. Effective therapy will help us create a more positive and more inspired outlook, not only in the presenting situation, but in our life. As Einstein said, “a problem can seldom be solved at the same level of thinking in which it was created.”