I started to read through the comments of others here, but I'm running out of time, as I need to leave for work soon. So I hope that what I'm going to say here isn't duplicative. And if it is...well, I suppose you can treat it as another "vote" in support of.
My bouts of depression have been either a) short-lived, or b) situational in nature. I tend to be moody and unsatisfied a lot of the time, which will, if frustrated enough, spiral down into a short-lived depression. The last six months I have been seeing a therapist because of when I was dumped in August, on top of knowing that my marriage was an utter failure that I didn't feel I could get out of without messing my husband's life up because of his INS issues.
Basically, from what I have experienced, I come to the conclusion that a therapist is like a guide. They cannot solve your problems for you (and shouldn't), but they can help you sort through all the reams of rational and emotional data to find patterns. What good are the patterns? Well, my therapist goes on the theory that no one is perfect and that at some point in our development, we all developed our own ways of coping with things as children. Some of those things we grew out of as we matured emotionally. But others of those things, if they were a form of coping developed out of a stronger type of childhood stress, became more lasting methods of dealing with things. Compare it to a tree. If you hack deeply enough that you get through the bark, into the wood beneath, you'll leave a wound. Yes, the bark will grow over it if you didn't do enough damage to kill the tree, but a cross-section of that tree's trunk will show you that the scar is still there, pocketed safely away. It's the same thing with people, and when things in our adult life "trigger" these wounds, that is, things that resemble whatever happened to us back then, the whole situation sort of slides into a groove, a pre-made pattern in our heads that our little child-selves perceived at the time of the original problem/wounding/what have you.
For me, therapy has been a way to uncover all those childish patternings and all the faulty things that those events "taught" me about the world, and then to attempt to change them. Which of course, is really hard, because you have to first change the way you perceive and process some of these things at a really deep, basic level that is connected to your limbic system/primal/emotional center before you can even think to start to change them. It's not that we were "wrong" exactly in dealing with things in certain ways that worked at that time, it's just that after those events are over, those methods linger on, even though they no longer apply to anything.
From what I read, I did see someone before me saying depression feeds on itself. I can say from experience that this is true. It's like an energy sink that gets set up by some trigger, like some elaborate Rube-Goldbergian machine that transports and obscures the emotional energy until its source is well nigh unrecognizable. For me, at least, therapy is about dismantling that machine and going back to the source in order to see things more clearly, to identify negative, useless, draining, injurious patterns that are at times labyrinthine in nature, demolish them, and reset the system.
no subject
My bouts of depression have been either a) short-lived, or b) situational in nature. I tend to be moody and unsatisfied a lot of the time, which will, if frustrated enough, spiral down into a short-lived depression. The last six months I have been seeing a therapist because of when I was dumped in August, on top of knowing that my marriage was an utter failure that I didn't feel I could get out of without messing my husband's life up because of his INS issues.
Basically, from what I have experienced, I come to the conclusion that a therapist is like a guide. They cannot solve your problems for you (and shouldn't), but they can help you sort through all the reams of rational and emotional data to find patterns. What good are the patterns? Well, my therapist goes on the theory that no one is perfect and that at some point in our development, we all developed our own ways of coping with things as children. Some of those things we grew out of as we matured emotionally. But others of those things, if they were a form of coping developed out of a stronger type of childhood stress, became more lasting methods of dealing with things. Compare it to a tree. If you hack deeply enough that you get through the bark, into the wood beneath, you'll leave a wound. Yes, the bark will grow over it if you didn't do enough damage to kill the tree, but a cross-section of that tree's trunk will show you that the scar is still there, pocketed safely away. It's the same thing with people, and when things in our adult life "trigger" these wounds, that is, things that resemble whatever happened to us back then, the whole situation sort of slides into a groove, a pre-made pattern in our heads that our little child-selves perceived at the time of the original problem/wounding/what have you.
For me, therapy has been a way to uncover all those childish patternings and all the faulty things that those events "taught" me about the world, and then to attempt to change them. Which of course, is really hard, because you have to first change the way you perceive and process some of these things at a really deep, basic level that is connected to your limbic system/primal/emotional center before you can even think to start to change them. It's not that we were "wrong" exactly in dealing with things in certain ways that worked at that time, it's just that after those events are over, those methods linger on, even though they no longer apply to anything.
From what I read, I did see someone before me saying depression feeds on itself. I can say from experience that this is true. It's like an energy sink that gets set up by some trigger, like some elaborate Rube-Goldbergian machine that transports and obscures the emotional energy until its source is well nigh unrecognizable. For me, at least, therapy is about dismantling that machine and going back to the source in order to see things more clearly, to identify negative, useless, draining, injurious patterns that are at times labyrinthine in nature, demolish them, and reset the system.