What Helps Depression During Major Life Transitions? #3

July 10th, 2012 · depression, life transitions, major life transitions, what helps depression

Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIN

What helps depression, in terms of concrete practical steps you can take, when you’re “stuck in the desert” during major life transitions?

Here are 5 concrete observations about what helps depression of the kind into which major life transitions can often bring us.

1.  The Best Way Out is Through

This may sound completely counterintuitive, but it’s essential to acknowledge the existence of depression, and to face it head on.  Very often, people try to avoid the reality of their depression, or to talk themselves out of it.  However, the only way to truly be able to come to terms with depression is to look straight into it, and to acknowledge, “Yes.  I really am depressed.”

2.  Work Concretely with the Depression

This extends point #1.  Rather than just passively enduring depression, it’s essential to actively enter into it, to dialogue with it, and to try and understand what is going on with it.  Journaling about what is going on, and about what one is feeling and thinking can be useful.  So can the active use of techniques like painting; working with clay, and even creating pictures with collage.  All of these techniques can yield important insight and awareness, although working with a good properly trained therapist to understand what is coming up or appearing in this work is essential.

3.  Don’t Fall Into the Trap of “Self Help Alone”

This point is related to point #2.  Many people adopt a “Lone Ranger” strategy, and rather than seeking out a good therapist, try to cope with the desert of depression during major life transitions using only self-help books.  This strategy has an awful success rate.  Recognizing that you’re human, and reaching out to someone who has the skills and compassion you need often makes all the difference in the world.

4.  Believe That the Depression Has Something to Give You

I know that this idea might seem bizarre, even scandalous.  However, it’s true: there’s something valuable at the heart of the depression.  If you can find it, it will help you on the journey to becoming more yourself.

5.  “If You’re Going Through Hell — Keep Going!” ~Winston Churchill

Churchill’s famous quote has a great deal to do with the realities of psychotherapy for depression.  If we can face the particular crisis and challenge created by major life transitions, and try to open each one up and engage creatively with it, it will not last forever.

Wishing all of us the strength and support to “keep going”,

PHOTO:      Some rights reserved by szeke

What Helps Depression During Major Life Transitions? #2

July 3rd, 2012 · depression, life transitions, major life transitions, what helps depression

Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIN

There are key elements of psychological and personal growth involved in getting to what helps depression of the type that occurs during major life transitions.  What helps depression starts very often with a deeper level of emotional honesty.

Dealing with What We Can’t Sort Out

Sometimes, major life transitions are just overwhelming.  We can have a certain image, idea or feeling of ourselves and our life situation, and then find out that it gets completely undone by some development or crisis in our lives.  Although we really need to find some new way to approach our lives in such a situation, our initial reaction can be to try and return to the past, and to simply pretend that the new situation doesn’t exist…

Regressive Restoration of the Persona

Jung used this term particularly with the major life transitions associated with the second half of life, but it also applies to quite a number of other, similar transitions.  It pertains to situations where we essentially try to go back and live in the persona, or the way we presented ourselves to the world, that we had prior to the commencement of amajor life transitions.  We strive to convince ourselves that we still are that very same person.

Yet, despite our very best efforts, we can often find that we are simply not able to pull it off.  We go through the motions of living as we once did, but we seem to be only a shell of who we once were.  We simply can’t go back.

Yet, in Our Depths…

We may be in a state of conscious denial of the emotional impact and life impact of major life transitions, or even in a state of conscious depression, blankness or feeling bereft.  However, this doesn’t mean that the unconscious mind is not engaged with the impact of major life transition in its own ways.

Changes in My Identity and My Way in the World

It may be extremely difficult to come to terms with the pain, grief and loss that we encounter in major life transitions.  Yet often, it is only through surfacing these feelings that we begin to move towards the deeper understanding or attitude emerging from the unconscious.  Often, only this will allow us to accept life as it is, to find what helps depression, and to move forward, perhaps even haltingly.

Who, then, am I now? How do I now think, feel and relate?  Often, only through exploring our inner reactions in a process such as Jungian therapy do we begin to accept, move forward and create our lives again.

PHOTO:      Some rights reserved by dpape

What Helps Depression During Major Life Transitions? 1

June 18th, 2012 · depression, life transitions, major life transitions, what helps depression

Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIN

Do we really know what helps depression during major life transitions?  The surprising answer is yes. It has a lot to do with giving attention to what the particular depression may be trying to tell us.

It may seem surprising to many to think of depression as even occurring at the time of major life transitions.  But, in fact, major life transitions often have a lot to do with its onset and, also with what helps depressed states.

What are Major Life Transitions?

A major life transition, simply put, is any event or series of events that substantially and durably changes a person’s subjective experience of his or her life.  It is any of those experiences in life that entail moving from one way of life or means of life to another.  Examples include, but aren’t confined to:

• job loss or change of job (or these days, fundamental changes in the nature of a job);
• marriage; divorce or marital breakdown;
• migration to a new country, or, in a huge country like Canada, migration from one region to another;
• midlife transition, which is often caricatured as “mid-life crisis”;
• major illness;
• loss or death of a loved one; or,
• retirement.

Primal societies so respected major life transitions that they often changed an individual’s name when one occurred, as in the Bible (e.g., Jacob to Israel; Saul to Paul).

What Does Depression have to do with it?

Often the changes that occur in a major life transition can seem to consume us.  They can feel like they become the sole object of our attention.  We may find ourselves unable to escape extreme sadness, lack of motivation, or listlessness.  Or we just may not know how to respond.

What Goes on in Depression, from a Depth Psychotherapy Perspective?

One way to think of it is as Jung did: the withdrawal of “psychic energy” from the external world into the inner life, and, particularly, the unconscious.  When this occurs, the unconscious mind is seeking to come to terms with the new situation, and to find a new attitude and response to what is happening in life.  When this can occur, life can move again, and flow.

OK, but What Helps Depression?

If depression is associated with a major life transition, it’s essential to get to the heart of the depression — its very nature.  It’s often only when a person understands how depressed mood may relate to a major life transition that he or she can understand what helps depression in his or her particular circumstance.

PHOTO:      Some rights reserved by Make Some Noise