A psychodynamic approach to ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION
There are many treatments available to address anxiety and depression, such as therapies that help change negative thought patterns and medications that target the neurochemistry of mood and emotions. Finding relief from these often very tenacious and debilitating symptoms can be terribly difficult.
There is no single valid choice of treatment. All treatments require patience, a degree of faith in positive results and alignment with personal values. Psychodynamic depth psychotherapy offers individuals a process of exploring depression and anxiety as powerful expressions of an untenable inner situation. Through careful exploration, in the attuned, caring presence of the therapist, what lives underneath the deadening and/or reactive states is uncovered. Slowly, the courage to live life, despite fears or alienation, can emerge or re-emerge. There develops a sense of a more stable center where before “the center did not hold.”
Anxiety has many sources, not the least of which is that we live in anxious times. Intrapsychically, anxiety indicates the presence of inner conflict perhaps due to underlying fears and expectations of loss, disapproval or rejection. The capacity to tolerate anxiety is learned. Often early wounding indicates that old, chronic anxieties must be faced and worked. Anxiety, I was taught, is like a fever – it is a sign of a struggle going on within the personality. In therapy this struggle can be named, felt and transformed. Therapy can also help you recognize “normal anxiety” which is part of life and very much part of being a creative and freedom-seeking, self-actualizing person.
Similarly, depression, which may come paired with anxiety, is not necessarily a pathological presence that must be removed or cured as soon as possible. Times when we feel walled off from life can be times of necessary hibernation, a “dark journey of the soul,” a “fruitful” or “pregnant” darkness, a time of composting, of a symbolic death before a rebirth. Therapy can help you be with and tolerate the pain of such a journey, and to find your way through. Therapy also can help you stay functional in these “worst of times.”These ways of working with anxiety and depression take time and commitment, but can give your life new meaning and purpose. This is soul work.
There are many treatments available to address anxiety and depression, such as therapies that help change negative thought patterns and medications that target the neurochemistry of mood and emotions. Finding relief from these often very tenacious and debilitating symptoms can be terribly difficult.
There is no single valid choice of treatment. All treatments require patience, a degree of faith in positive results and alignment with personal values. Psychodynamic depth psychotherapy offers individuals a process of exploring depression and anxiety as powerful expressions of an untenable inner situation. Through careful exploration, in the attuned, caring presence of the therapist, what lives underneath the deadening and/or reactive states is uncovered. Slowly, the courage to live life, despite fears or alienation, can emerge or re-emerge. There develops a sense of a more stable center where before “the center did not hold.”
Anxiety has many sources, not the least of which is that we live in anxious times. Intrapsychically, anxiety indicates the presence of inner conflict perhaps due to underlying fears and expectations of loss, disapproval or rejection. The capacity to tolerate anxiety is learned. Often early wounding indicates that old, chronic anxieties must be faced and worked. Anxiety, I was taught, is like a fever – it is a sign of a struggle going on within the personality. In therapy this struggle can be named, felt and transformed. Therapy can also help you recognize “normal anxiety” which is part of life and very much part of being a creative and freedom-seeking, self-actualizing person.
Similarly, depression, which may come paired with anxiety, is not necessarily a pathological presence that must be removed or cured as soon as possible. Times when we feel walled off from life can be times of necessary hibernation, a “dark journey of the soul,” a “fruitful” or “pregnant” darkness, a time of composting, of a symbolic death before a rebirth. Therapy can help you be with and tolerate the pain of such a journey, and to find your way through. Therapy also can help you stay functional in these “worst of times.”These ways of working with anxiety and depression take time and commitment, but can give your life new meaning and purpose. This is soul work.
“…Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul.”
JAMES HILLMAN in BLUE FIRE (1989)
“Self-realization … can occur only as the individual
confronts and moves through anxiety-creating experiences”
“Anxiety is essential to the human condition.”
ROLLO MAY in THE MEANING OF ANXIETY (1977)
“Self-realization … can occur only as the individual
confronts and moves through anxiety-creating experiences”
“Anxiety is essential to the human condition.”
ROLLO MAY in THE MEANING OF ANXIETY (1977)