You may be thinking that talking about your depression won’t change anything. If it’s just talking, you’re probably right!  

Therapy is a very specific kind of talking, which uses a scientific approach to help you find out and understand what is happening inside you. Depression has a cause. Sometimes we think the cause is something outside of us, like a job we don’t like or someone else’s behavior.  And while these things can be distressing, they are not the cause of depression in and of themselves but instead a trigger to a reaction inside that is the cause of a depressive episode.  In therapy, we form and test hypotheses together to get to the bottom of what is driving your symptoms.  By doing this, you can learn the exact cause and you can address it and free yourself from the symptoms.  In therapy, you explore both what happened outside you and what happened inside you so you and your therapist can find the way out of darkness.  

Therapists use a scientific approach to help you form a hypothesis and test it: 

  1. Look at when your depressive symptoms started and what was happening around that time 
  2. Explore your symptoms currently in a specific example so you can get a clear picture of the exact sequence of events inside of you that lead to symptoms and problems 
  3. Discover exactly what core feelings get stirred up in the body that lead to feeling anxious and wanting to avoid feelings 
  4. Determine what automatic avoidance behaviors come up that take you away from your healthy feeling signals inside so that you can reconnect to them and get good information for yourself. 
  5. Using your newly found good information, you take adaptive actions and begin to feel better and better. 

Just talking about something does not magically fix anything. Thankfully, there are scientific ways to find out what is causing your depression. Once the cause is addressed, you can live a life free of depression. 

Leslie Auld LMSW, ACSW