Anxiety and Depression

Anxiety and depression can fill us with feelings and behaviors that provide challenges to everyday living. Learn how working together can help you start feeling whole.

Understanding Anxiety and Depression

I believe that depression and anxiety are usually a “normal” response to an “abnormal” condition or experience. For example, if you grew up in a highly conflictual family, you may have developed depression as a way of disengaging from the conflict and finding your own brand of peace and quiet. Often what was a helpful way to cope as a child no longer works for us as adults and we need to find new ways of being in the world and dealing with stressors.

Sometimes we internalize unhealthy beliefs about ourselves that all the positive affirmations in the world won’t help us let go of. Some examples are “I’m not good enough,” “I’m unlovable,” or “Something bad is going to happen to me.” When a holistic approach (involving the body, mind and spirit) is used, it is possible to change these self-defeating beliefs and free yourself from the anxiety and depression they lead to. We all have an innate wisdom and ability to heal… I can be your guide to help you find your healing.

Anxiety and depression can grip us with feelings and behaviors like worry, panic attacks, crying, hopelessness, worthlessness, and irritability. You may find that life doesn’t feel worth living, you aren’t enjoying things like you used to, or you have trouble sleeping or can’t get out of bed. Compulsive behaviors, restlessness, or isolation sometimes caused by depression and anxiety can also make us feel isolated from those most important in our lives.

Moving Forward

Here are just a few of the ways I can support you beyond our time in therapy together that may be beneficial at helping you see results and relief:

Yoga
Meditation
Breath-work
Body work
EMDR
Reiki/energy work/auric healing
Visual imagery
Relaxation techniques
Ceremonies
Poetry reading
Cognitive restructuring

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door,
in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life,
whom you ignored
for another,
who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image
from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

—Derek WalcottLove after Love

The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,
they’re in each other all along.

—Rumi

To pretend that we know what a client needs, what the client should do, what choice the client must make, is to deny mystery and to betray the client. Any thorough-going therapy needs to help the client accept and confront the mystery which enfolds us all…

—James BugentalThe Art of the Psychotherapist

I will not live an unlived life. I will not live in fear Of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, To allow my living to open me, To make me less afraid, More accessible; To loosen my heart until it becomes a wing a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance To live so that which came to me as Seed Goes to the next as blossom, And that which came to me as blossom, Goes on as fruit.

—Dawna Markova