Tag: trauma

The Role of Anger in Depression

Sigmund Freud used to refer to depression as anger turned inward. While many people may regard this as an overly simplistic approach to the most common mental health disorder in the world, there is no doubt that anger plays a significant role in depression. As one study from 2016 found, when it comes to emotional disorders in general, the presence of anger has “negative consequences, including greater symptom severity and worse treatment response.” Researchers concluded that “based on this evidence, anger appears to be an important and understudied emotion in the development, maintenance, and treatment of emotional disorders.” When it comes specifically to depression, science seems to be further supporting Freud’s theory, showing more and more how anger contributes to symptoms. A UK study from 2013 suggested that going inward and turning our anger on ourselves contributes to the severity of depression.

Having worked with depressed clients for more than 30 years, these findings were not surprising to me. Many of the people I’ve worked with who struggle with depression also share the common struggle of turning their anger on themselves. As much as I try to help my clients express their anger rather than take it on and turn it inward, I witness first-hand how hard it often is for people to interrupt this process. It’s a challenge for them to recognize the nasty way they treat themselves; they are significantly more critical of themselves that they are of others.

People who suffer from depression often have intense “critical inner voices” that perpetuate feelings of unworthiness and shame. When they listen to this inner critic, they not only feel more depressed, but they also find it much more difficult to stand up to their depression. This includes acting against their critical inner voices, taking positive actions that could help them feel better about themselves (like engaging in activities they enjoy), and being more social.

Getting angry at these “voices” can be liberating, but that means getting in touch with our core feelings of anger rather than aiming it at ourselves. Dr. Les Greenberg, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, describes an important difference between adaptive anger and nonadaptive anger. Anger is an adaptive response when it motivates you to assertive action to end a violation. For example, when we may feel angry at the cruel way we treat ourselves today, we’re in touch with our adaptive anger, and we feel like we’re on our own side. Letting ourselves feel and express adaptive anger can help us feel less burdened, freer, and more in touch with our real self.

Maladaptive anger, on the other hand, affects us negatively. For one thing, it can contribute to feeling victimized, sulky, or stuck in a feeling of being wronged. Examples of maladaptive anger turned inward can include feeling overly critical toward ourselves, hating ourselves, or seeing ourselves as powerless, pathetic, or helpless. The generally dysfunctional responses that result from maladaptive anger are based on emotional schema from traumatic experiences in our past. Often, our critical inner voice is at the root of maladaptive anger, driving us to remain in a state of frustration and suffering.

We can almost feel the difference between maladaptive anger dragging us down and deeper into a state of anxiety or depression and adaptive anger relieving us of a heavy burden, lightening us emotionally, and contributing to our taking constructive actions. While it can feel scary to face these deeper, core emotions, we must access adaptive emotions to transform our maladaptive emotions. This can be a vital process in helping us deal with depression.

One study by Dr. Greenberg showed that Emotionally Focused Therapy can transform maladaptive emotion through the process of expressing it and eliciting the response of an adaptive emotion, i.e. adaptive anger. This approach was especially effective in improving depressive symptoms, interpersonal distress, and self-esteem. As Dr. Greenberg described it, the process “aims within an affectively attuned empathic relationship to access and transform habitual maladaptive emotional schematic memories [articulated as critical inner voices] that are seen as the source of the depression.” Transforming these maladaptive emotions may, therefore, be one of the keys to fighting depression.

Our approach to transforming anger turned inward, which has some similarities to Greenberg’s approach, is to have the person verbalize their critical inner voices as though someone else was telling them these angry thoughts. We also encourage the person to express the feeling behind the thoughts. Often, when people do this, they express a lot of rage toward self. By saying the thoughts in the second person (as “you” statements), they begin to get some separation from their harsh, critical attitudes, and often have insights about where these thoughts come from. It sets the stage for them “answering back” to these attacks and taking their own side. The goal is also to help the person develop more self-compassion and a kinder, more realistic point of view toward themselves.

As we externalize our negative thoughts and the accompanying anger, we can better stand up to our inner critic and take a compassionate stance toward ourselves, treating ourselves as we would treat a friend. This doesn’t mean denying our struggles and setbacks, but it does mean embracing the practice of self-compassion. Self-compassion, as defined by researcher Kristin Neff, involves three key elements: self-kindness, mindfulness, and awareness of common humanity. Research has shown that the practice of self-compassion can significantly reduce a depressed mood. As one study pointed out, maladaptive or irrational beliefs underlie the development of depression, however, when high levels of self-compassion helped to counteract these negative thoughts, there was no longer a significant relationship between irrational beliefs and depression. This same study showed that it is “especially the self-kindness component of self-compassion that moderated the irrational belief-depression relationship.” Thus, the primary aim for someone struggling with resolving their emotions around depression is to treat themselves and regard their feelings the way they would a friend. It’s not about feeling sorry for ourselves, but about feeling strong and worthy and less afraid to make mistakes.

Ultimately, accepting that anger plays a role in our depression should be an empowering tool in our fight to feel better. When people express anger outwards in a healthy adaptive manner, they feel less depressed. Accessing and expressing this anger isn’t a matter of acting out, being explosive, or feeling bitter toward our surroundings. In fact, it means exactly the opposite. It’s an act of standing up for ourselves and accepting that we are not who our “voices” are telling us we are. It’s a process of facing up to the things that hurt us but also facing off against the inner enemy we all possess that drives us deeper into our suffering. The more we can take our own side and resist our tendency to turn our anger on ourselves, the more compassionate and alive we can feel in facing any challenge, including depression.

Lisa Firestone, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, author, and the Director of Research and Education for the Glendon Association. She studies suicide and violence as well as couples and family relations. Firestone is the co-author (with Robert Firestone and Joyce Catlett) of Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice, Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion, and Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships. Firestone speaks frequently at conferences including the APA, the International Association of Forensic Psychology, International Association of Suicide Prevention, the Department of Defense and many others. She has also appeared in more than 300 radio, TV, and print interviews including the BBC, CBC, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Psychology Today, Men’s Health and O Magazine.

 

 

SHUTDOWN: WHY PEOPLE WITH DEPRESSION FEEL SO NEGATIVE

Depression is a state of shutdown in which an individual’s psychological system shifts toward negative feeling states and diminishes the positive feeling states. The hallmark features of a depressive episode is a high negative mood state (characterized primarily in terms of depressed/demoralized/defeated/despairing feelings and secondarily in terms of anxiety, irritability/defensive hostility, and guilt/shame) and a diminished positive mood state (loss of interest, pleasure, energy, desire, and excitement).

Why do people get depressed? The primary reason people enter depressive shutdowns because they cannot obtain the necessary psychological nourishment needed to energize their behavioral investment system. Think of it as being akin to a state of starvation, only instead of physiological nutrition, the individual is lacking psychological nutrition. What is psychological nutrition? The fundamental principle that underlies psychological organization is that of behavioral investment. The psychological system is organized to direct mental energy and action toward investments that offer a return on those expenditures. When one is a getting a good return on one’s investments, then one feels fulfilled, energized and engaged. However, when one is not getting a good return, one begins to feel frustrated, anxious, irritable, or disappointed. If one cannot find an effective pathway for getting one’s needs met, one begins to enter into a state of psychological shutdown called depression.

So what are the core psychological needs that people have that need to be nourished? There are many different possible classification systems of needs (and motives and goals that people seek fulfillment around, see, e.g., here). I offer five categories here that overlap loosely with Maslow’s classic hierarchy of needs.

Safety and Security Needs. First and foremost, the psychological investment system is concerned with basic safety and survival. If one’s physical safety is chronically threatened, if one is in constant pain, if one is chronically hungry, and so forth, the attention of the system will largely be focused here.

The Base Pleasures. Good sex, tasty food, relaxing on a warm summer day on the beach after working hard. The “hedonic” pleasures serve as a fundamental reward and signal positive investments (at least in the short term). Good investment systems are generally characterized by meaningful effort and hard work toward a productive goal, followed by short periods of relaxing and enjoying the base pleasures.

Relational Needs. Our core psychosocial need is to be known and valued by important others. Most notably, this includes being known and valued by members of our family of origin, friends/peers, romantic partners, and community. Needs for relational value are reflective of one’s degree of social influence. And folks go about achieving social influence and relational value in different ways. For example, see here for power and achievement needs relative to belonging and intimacy needs.

Developmental Growth Needs. We can think about an individual’s psychological system as being akin to an investor’s portfolio. An investor has resources that have the potential for growth and loss. An investor with a diverse portfolio whose investments are growing in a way that is exceeding expectation is flourishing. The same is true for an individual. Each individual will have “personal projects” that are engagements they are involved in that afford opportunities for growth (hobbies, interests, creative and playful endeavors, meaningful work projects, etc.). If an individual is chronically stuck and not growing or is largely cutoff from their growth pathways, or is frequently failing to meet expectations, or is deeply investing in pathways based on extrinsic reasons that are not consistent with their underlying emotional/motivational needs (or intuitive sense of potential), then the investment system is vulnerable.

Existential/Transcendental/Virtuous Needs. Adult humans are meaning-making creatures that need to have a narrative for how their lives and personal projects make sense. As Victor Frankl notes in his timeless classic Man’s Search for Meaning, if they cannot place their suffering, personal projects, virtues and relationships in the context of a larger narrative that provides meaning, then they will be vulnerable to developing a nihilistic attitude, which is the belief that their lives or actions really don’t matter, because really nothing matters. A nihilistic narrative can undercut the emotional value that folks get from engaging in such projects, leading to existential crises or depressions.

Why do people have trouble getting their psychological needs met? Sometimes the answer is obvious. For example, consider the city of Aleppo in Syria. The people of that city have been completely brutalized and many folks there undoubtedly feel depressed. (As an interesting aside, it is worth noting that the field of psychiatry/clinical psychology is divided as to whether such individuals should be considered “clinically depressed”). In other obvious cases, folks get depressed because of chronic pain or illness, or death of a loved one or because they get addicted so substances that ruin their lives or because they are abused or isolated.

Other times the issue is much more complicated. Consider that there are many people that live in nice houses and seem to be surrounded by caring people and are achieving in their lives, yet they also get depressed. Indeed, despite the fact that we have more and more technology and more and more resources and control over our environment, we seem to be struggling more than ever with feelings of depression and anxiety. What is going on in these cases?

The short answer is that I think the modern, fast-paced society is placing many new, unusual stressors on our emotional system. And I don’t think people have been well-educated about how to appropriately process negative feelings. People have been given much more freedom to acknowledge negative feelings than in past generations (read this story to see what I mean), but there has not been good education on how to learn and grow from such feelings (see here or here). What I see in my clinic is that individuals try to avoid negative feelings, and wish everything would just be fine. They often try to act publicly like everything is fine, but they have no idea how to maturely process and learn from their negative feelings. Instead, they enter into an intra-psychic battle with their negative feelings, often working to banish them, or criticize themselves out of their feelings or try to “stay positive”. This creates a powerful “split” in their psychological systems. Namely, their feeling system is sending one signal, their internal narrator is in conflict with that signal, and they are trying to publicly present a totally different image than their inner conflict. All of this sets the stage for a “neurotic breakdown”.

In addition, I see many parents who value their kids, but who do not know how to guide their children in processing negative feelings. Instead, too many have been caught up in “self-esteem nation” and act in an overprotective way, essentially communicating both that their kids are fragile and that others are responsible for keeping you happy. Another group teaches their kids to repress and minimize their feelings. I am not blaming parents here. The modern world is complicated and psychologists and psychiatrists have generally not done a great job being clear about the nature of emotions and relational needs.

At the societal level, we need to recognize both the dramatic changes the information technological revolution has brought to our world and how many of the institutions that provided guidance for the good life are breaking down. Religious systems have lost much of their authority. The political system has broken down into a polarized way. I think our educational system is broken in the way it assesses performance and fails to teach character values. Science often seems to characterize the world as an amoral, meaningless physical system. In other words, in terms of our existential/transcendental understanding, there seems little that supports the deep-seated need that many people have for true meaning making. So, we live in a fast-paced, high-stress world in which we are overloaded with choice, we regularly observe massive amounts of inequity in power and resources, we give lip service to negative feelings but often characterize them as disease states and provide very little real education about human emotions and needs, and institutions that provided deep meaning making systems have lost their authority.

The bottom line is that depression arises, in most cases, when people do not receive the necessary psychological nourishment from their investments. This arises because of brutal environments and injury from traumas, diminished capacities to meet growth expectations, intrapsychic and interpersonal conflict with important others. Unable to find a path forward folks shutdown and, unfortunately, getting depressed in modern society likely creates more problems than it solves. So folks get trapped in neurotic depressive cycles.

There is clearly no easy fix, as depression is a massive health problem. But I do believe there is much that can be done. We need (and can achieve) a much better shared understanding of human psychological needs and nourishment. We also need a clear recognition from institutions like the World Health Organization that depression emerges as a function of psychological malnourishment, rather than being brain disease stemming from neurological malfunctions.

My ultimate vision is for the development of a holistic meaning-making system that harmonizes the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities in a way that affords an understanding of our human natures such that we can have a more effective guide toward fulfillment during these rapidly changing times.

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D., author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology, directs the Combined Clinical and School Psychology Doctoral Program at James Madison University. He is a licensed clinical psychologist with expertise in depression, suicide, and the personality disorders. He has developed a new meta-theoretical system for psychology articulated in many professional journals and is now applying that system to researching well-being, personality, and social motivation, and he and his students are working on the development of a general system of psychotherapy. Henriques received his M.A. in Clinical/Community Psychology from UNC-Charlotte and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Vermont. He also completed several years of post-doctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania under Aaron T. Beck exploring the effectiveness of various cognitive psychotherapy interventions for suicide and psychosis. Henriques teaches courses in personality theory, personality assessment, social psychology and integrative adult psychotherapy.

 

How to Prevent Stress From Shrinking Your Brain

 

Have you ever felt so stressed out and overwhelmed that you can’t think straight? We now know that prolonged stress or trauma is associated with decreased volume in areas of the human brain responsible for regulating thoughts and feelings, enhancing self-control, and creating new memories. A new research study, published in today’s issue of Nature Medicine, is a first step in uncovering the genetic mechanism underlying these brain changes.

Depressed People’s Brains are More FragmentedIn this study, conducted by Professor Richard Dumin and colleagues from Yale University, scientists compared the genetic makeup of donated brain tissue from deceased humans with and without major depression. Only the depressed patients’ brain tissues showed activation of a particular genetic transcription factor, or “switch.” While each human cell contains more than 20,000 genes, only a tiny fraction of them are expressed at a given time. Transcription factors, when activated, act like light switches, causing genes to be turned on or off. This transcription factor, known as GATA1, switches off the activity of five genes necessary for forming synaptic connections between brain neurons. Brain neurons or nerve cells contain branches or dendrites that send and receive signals from other cells, leading to interconnected networks of emotion and cognition. The scientists hypothesized that in the depressed patients’ brains, prolonged stress exposure led to a disruption of brain systems involved in thinking and feeling. Depressed brains appeared to have more limited and fragmented information processing abilities. This finding may explain the pattern of repetitive negative thinking that depressed people exhibit. It is as if their brains get stuck in a negative groove of self-criticism and pessimism. They are unable to envision more positive outcomes or more compassionate interpretations of their actions.

Glucocorticoids Damage Brain Neurons 

The stress response involves activation of a brain region known as the amygdala, which sends a signal alerting the organism to the threat. This results in activation of the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis and release of a cascade of hormones, including cortisol, widely regarded as the quintessential “stress hormone.” While short-term cortisol release prepares the organism to sustain “fight or flight” and fend off an attacker, long-term exposure appears to cause brain neurons to shrink and interferes with their ability to send and receive information via branches called dendrites. In animal studies, under chronically stressful conditions, glucocorticoids such as cortisol can remain elevated for long periods.

Traumatic Experiences Can Shrink the Hippocampus in Those Who Don’t Recover

This finding is another piece of the puzzle regarding how stress and prolonged distress may impair our ability to think in creative and flexible ways. Research in both mice and humans has demonstrated an association between stress exposure (foot shock in mice, life events in humans) and shrinking of the hippocampus – the brain center responsible for forming new, time-sequenced memories. Studies in women with PTSD resulting from childhood sexual abuse and Vietnam veterans with PTSD have shown 12-26 percent decreases in hippocampal volume, relative to those without PTSD. In another study, patients recovered from long-term major depression showed a 15 percent decrease in volume of the hippocampus, compared to non-depressed patients.

Major Life Stress Damages the Prefrontal Cortex

In addition to hippocampal shrinkage, major life stress may shrink brain neurons in the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), the brain area responsible for problem-solving, adaptation to challenge, emotional processing and regulation, impulse control, and regulation of glucose and insulin metabolism. In a study of 100 healthy participants conducted by Dr. Rajita Sinha and colleagues at Yale University, and published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, those with more adverse life events had greater shrinkage of gray matter in the PFC, compared to their less-stressed peers. Recent major life events, such as a job loss, make people less emotionally aware while life traumas, such as sexual abuse, seem to go further, in damaging mood centers that regulate pleasure and reward, increasing vulnerability to addiction and decreasing the brain’s ability to bounce back.

Summary 

While the evidence is not yet conclusive, these studies suggest that prolonged exposure to stress can shrink the brain, both via the damaging effects of cortisol on brain neurons and by disrupting expression of genes that facilitate neuronal connections. This raises the question of whether there is anything we can do to prevent such damage. Since we can’t always control how much we are exposed to financial, relationship, or illness stress, are there preventive activities we can do to maintain cognitive resilience so we can continue to deal effectively with the stressors? It is not known if we can reverse the damage by these methods, but we may lessen it and make our brains more resilient to stress.

Brain-Enhancing Activities to Combat Stress

While the below list is not exhaustive, the three activities below have enhanced brain functioning in controlled studies.

Take a Daily DHA Supplement – DHA or Docosahexaenoic acid is an Omega-3 fatty acid that is a central building block of brain tissue. DHA is thought to combat the inflammatory effects of cortisol and the plaque buildup associated with vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease. According to Dr. Mehmet Oz, in one study, a dose of 600mg of DHA taken daily for 6 months led the brain to perform as if it were three years younger.

Exercise Most Days – In studies with mice exercise led to a more improved performance on cognitive tasks than exposure to enriched environments with lots of activities and stimulation. Exercise leads to increases in BDNF or brain-derived neurotropic factor, a substance that strengthens brain cells and neuronal connections. BDNF is also thought to promote neurogenesis or the creation of new brain cells from existing stem cells in the hippocampus. Although these effects can’t be studied in living human brains, researchers have found increases in BDNF in the bloodstream of humans following workouts.

Do Yoga, Meditate, or Pray – These activities can activate what scientist Herb Benson at Massachusetts General Hospital calls “the relaxation response,” which lowers blood pressure and heart rate and lowers subjective anxiety. Benson and scientists from a genetics institute showed, in a recent study, that inducing the relaxation response can beneficially alter the expression of genes involved in inflammation, programmed cell death and how the body handles free radicals. The effects shown were in the same genes implicated in PTSD and depression. According to Jeffery Dusek, Ph.D., co-lead author of the study, “Changes in the activation of these same genes have previously been seen in conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder; but the relaxation-response-associated changes were the opposite of stress-associated changes and were much more pronounced in the long-term practitioners.”

About the Author

Melanie Greenberg, Ph.D. is a licensed Clinical Psychologist and expert on Mindfulness and Positive Psychology.  Dr. Greenberg provides workshops and speaking engagements for organizations,  life, weight loss, or career coaching, and psychotherapy for individuals and couples. Visit her website: http://www.drmelaniegreenberg.biz

This article originally appeared in Psychology Today.

 

Stress and Depression

Survival depends on the speed of noticing and responding to threats to our safety. In a depressed brain, the parts of the brain that are scanning for danger and responding to it are overly active. Perceiving threat comes too easily. There are several factors about this necessary and natural biological response that may contribute to depression.

  • The response time is one such factor. Humans are biologically geared to respond to threat with a physical response to it. Without thought or decision, the brain/body makes possible necessary, immediate action when a threat, or stressor, occurs. Regardless of the level of overt danger, when a person feels a threat, the body responds immediately with arousal in the nervous system, intensifying heart rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure to allow for rapid physical activity. This response is proportional to the threat and ends when the threat is gone. A person also gets a release of energy, the activity of the stress response system, needed to fuel the rapid physical activity. These responses are lifesaving when threats to safety occur – but they are also an underlying factor in developing depression when they are overly active. Some people are born with brain structure that commits too many brain cells to scanning for danger, making the threat response too active.
  • The intensity of the sympathetic response may be too great, meaning that the level of arousal and the way it triggers stress response is excessive proportional to the threat. This too can be genetic, or it may be an outcome of early childhood adversity causing high arousal to even smaller threats. It is also important to note that traumatic experience often results in hypervigilant attention to the environment and also a biological tendency to overreact to reminders of the trauma.
  • Another aspect of how the threat response system can contribute to depression is how hard it may be to calm the stress response or the nervous system arousal. When these two systems that govern response to stressors are insufficiently supplied with the neurochemicals that bring them back to homeostasis or that buffer brain structures from the impact of the arousal, a person may be negatively affected by the very systems that should otherwise be protective. Unable to calm down quickly enough, the strong and persistent arousal of the nervous system and the stress response system is damaging in several ways. One theory of depression is that the inflammation throughout the body will ultimately cause many kinds of physical and emotional outcomes, not the least of which is depression.

The threat in a modern world may not be the overt danger that human systems developed to cope with stress but rather any situation that calls for a response, even when the demand for physical energy is unnecessary. For example, the stressor may be a situation that is not unexpected or dangerous. It could be a boss who makes a demand for overtime hours when you want to be home with your family or a child who is sick and keeping you awake at night. Those may be temporary and insignificant in general, but when they are ongoing or when they are too frequent then the stress system becomes antagonistic to health.

Over-activation of the nervous and stress response systems ultimately exhaust the brain/body. You can help yourself be less affected by stress. A person may, by genetic predisposition, respond too intensely to a normal level of threat or ongoing life stress may exhaust the supply of energy and create distress. Since so many of us live lives that are filled with stressors that are not the life-death-get-up-and-run variety, we would be well advised to learn the means to diminish stress. While each person must apply these guidelines to his or her own situation, the outline is simple:

  1. If at all possible, eliminate your stressor. Deciding to change is often the hardest thing people do: Can you stop trying to do something that is just too difficult, that you do not have the capacity for? Can you walk away from things that you cannot control and then manage your guilt for not trying? You might need the perspective of an outside observer to help you figure this out.
  2. Manage your time or manage your environment. Learn to make good use of lists to create job tasks by prioritizing or stop saying yes to demands for your help when you have too much to do. And learn the skills to organize the environment. Trying up may be life-changing indeed for some, but the diminished stress of an orderly environment can be life-saving, especially when you combine it with using calendars, reminders, and lists to manage time.
  3. Manage your attitude. Lightening up and finding your sense of humor can go a long way toward lowering your stress level. So, can becoming more sanguine about life experience. Learn to tell the difference between what is urgent is important and then learn that urgent may sometimes just be ignored.
  4. Learn to relax. This is not just about ‘vegging out in front of a program or video game. It is about loosening those muscles and calming the mind. Whether you do best with brief and frequent breaks every day or relax with longer periods of muscle relaxation, either way, it is a relief to your brain/body to relax. People who develop apps know this, so, it turns out there are countless options to use technology to guide your relaxation practice. You may be one of those who relaxes via vigorous exercise. But relax. Daily.

When you have addressed these four means to diminish the intensity of your response to ordinary life stress, then you will be on your way to eliminating depression too.

By Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D.

Dr. Wehnrenberg is a coach and therapist, an author, and an international trainer and speaker on topics related to psychotherapy for anxiety and depression, stress management and optimizing anxiety for achievement. She is a practicing psychologist, coaching for anxiety management and providing psychotherapy for anxiety and depression disorders. She has been a trainer of therapists for 25 years, and she is a sought-after speaker for continuing education seminars, consistently getting the highest ratings from participants for her dynamic style and high-quality content. Her individualized coaching for panic, worry and social anxiety has helped professionals from entrepreneurs to corporate executives, from sales personnel to IT specialists.

Margaret is a frequent contributor to the award-winning Psychotherapy Networker magazine and has produced Relaxation for Tension and Worry, an audio file for breathing, muscle relaxation, and imagery to relax. Audio and DVD versions of her training are available for obtaining CEU’s. She has seven books on topics of anxiety and depression published by W.W. Norton, a and a workbook, Stress Solutions, published by PESI. Check out her website MargaretWehrenberg.com.

 

 

 

The Connection between Depression and Trauma and Neglect

Why do people become depressed? A popular theory is that it is the brain chemistry that is in disarray. But this way of thinking often obscures the issue.

Depression rarely comes out of nowhere. It almost always has an explanation, even if it is not apparent to us. Also, read “What is Your Depression Telling You?”

A better explanation for why many people become depressed is, in my opinion, that we develop vulnerabilities earlier on in our life that predispose us to live a life that is lacking in zest, enjoyment, and meaning.

Oftentimes these earlier vulnerabilities point us to experiences of trauma, neglect, or interpersonal disappointments that may or may not be fully apparent to us.

We almost all undergo some kind of trauma, neglect, or serious interpersonal disappointments at some point in our life, and how we deal with these events can prepare the ground for a later depressive episode. To understand why this is is to understand how humans function.

 Responding to Trauma by Losing Ourselves:

When we go through difficult events that we don’t know how to deal with, our psyche responds just like a lizard that loses its tail because it is afraid of a predator. It helps us make an adaptation out of fear, but always at the cost of making us a little less human, or little less ourselves.

Overwhelming shame, for example, might make us abandon a piece of who we are, or in the worst case, our entire person.

How Sexual Abuse Can Lead to Depression:

If I was sexually abused, for example, and didn’t know how to deal with my conflicted emotions and loyalties, it might make me feel bad about wanting and desiring. I might be confused about whether I myself sent out the wrong signals, and might question if the sensation of pleasure I felt, really meant that I desired the abuse, or that my desires are bad.

The psychological compromise I can make to rid myself of my shame is to begin to live a passive life where my awareness of my desires and wants is dimmed, or totally banished. This might mean that I get involved in relationships that are not particularly good for me, that I put up with mistreatment or one-sided relationships because I am reluctant to say “no”, or that I unconsciously seek out bad relationships because I at some level believe I should not get what I really want, or deserve to be punished in some way to atone for my badness.

This compromise I have made to deal with the unbearable experience of sexual abuse has now prepared me for life of lackluster results and lack of enjoyment.

If I become depressed, this is therefore not because there is something wrong with my brain. It is because some part of me doesn’t want the life that I have. My depression is like the last call to me deep from within that indicates that I need to make changes to my life situation because the status quo is antithetical to life. My adaptations to a difficult situation, have now become destructive to what life is really about. Life has turned against life, and my depression is thankfully alerting me to this fact.

Trauma Comes in Many Forms:

Trauma does not have to imply a big dramatic calamitous event, but can refer to any moment when we felt overwhelmed with painful or distressing emotions we did not get the help to deal with. Sexual abuse, physical violence, or growing up with alcoholic parents are some of the more apparent reasons why a person might get exposed to emotional overwhelm, but there are many others.

gifted

One of the more frequent causes of adaptations out of fear is the fear of losing love from the people we depend on. In Alice Miller’s book “The Gifted Child”, she describes how this can happen due to growing up with narcissistic parents.

A child, she says, has the need to look into their parent’s eyes and see themselves reflected. If I cry, I need my parent to validate that I am feeling sad, and if I am happy, I need my parents to be happy for me. Unfortunately, some of us look into our parents eyes, and see our parents feelings, not our own. When we are sad, they feel inadequate and get annoyed with us. When we are excited, they are too busy watching TV, and tell us to shush.

These kinds of experiences when they accumulate over time can create serious distortions to our self-image, and can make us abandon ourselves in a pursuit to become more acceptable to our parents.

Research has shown that threats to our sense of safe connection with a caregiver register in our brain as panic, and that losing our connection completely registers as pain. To avoid feeling these unbearable emotions, we will do a lot, even if it means ridding ourselves of our natural spontaneous desires and feelings.

Other ways to deal with the threat of loss is to become numb, or to become what the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers has described as a “dead person with wakeful eyes”.

What Does Depression Have to Do with It?

When we pay too big of a price to stay safe early on in life, we enter into adulthood ill prepared to deal with life’s challenges.

If we have gotten used to numbing ourselves to unpleasant emotions, we will likely also find it difficult to feel joy and excitement.

If we have learned to live our life in an effort to please our parents, our accomplishments won’t really mean much to us, and we will pursue goals that are not aligned with what we really want.

If we had to abandon ourselves because of shame about our needs or our feelings, we will forever have a sense of emptiness inside because we aren’t fully honoring and accepting who we are.

In many cases, when we really look at the reasons why people become depressed, we find a childhood history of trauma, abandonment, or neglect that has resulted in adaptations that are currently getting in the way of living a meaningful life.

Depression is often simply telling us that we are not really living our lives as ourselves.

To resolve this situation is to confront the underlying reasons why we make the choices we do, and to see to what extent we are really living a life based on avoiding shame, anxiety, guilt, and pain, and not a life based on our genuine feelings, needs, and aspirations.

Rune Moelbak, Ph.D., is a psychologist and depression specialist in Houston, Texas. He is the owner of Better Therapy, a therapy practice for people who want to discover the underlying roots of their current psychological problems.

 

 

How People Become Resilient

Maria Konnilova writes in The New Yorker magazine, “Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?” Read her Article

Are New Treatments for Depression Right Under Our Noses?

Some interesting pilot studies in 2014 are providing hope for the future of depression.  Curiously, these new possibilities all involve the mouth and nose.  Breathing a certain way, speaking a certain way, and inhaling nitrous oxide all may have potential in reducing symptoms and breaking the cycle of depression. Read the News

Featured In:
Featured in The New York Times
Featured in The New York Times
Featured in The New York Times
Featured in The New York Times
Featured in The Washington Post
Featured in NPR
Featured in The New York Times
Featured in The New York Times

Built by Staple Creative