Combating Depression

Combating Depression

Feeling alone during the holidays can easily trigger one's depression.  When this happens the individual can begin producing self-defeating thoughts (i.e., I don't want to get out of bed.  I don't want to hang out with family.  These people don't want me around anyway.)  A person in this state may not need a new family but perhaps just some help developing healthier thinking patterns.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy is a therapeutic technique used to help the client combat irrational thinking and develop new skills.  Once the CBT technique is learned, one can also utilize its principles at home.  If you have depression you may not need a life long battle in therapy but just sixteen sessions or so to learn the technique for yourself.  If a person is struggling with low self-esteem he might be experiencing negative thoughts about his/her abilities and/or appearance, Due to these negative thinking patterns someone may pass up a promotion at work or avoid social situations with friends.

Challenge: Exercise with others

In order to relieve the client of these destructive thinking patterns, the therapist helps the client identify the problematic beliefs. This stage of the therapy is called functional analysis, which helps with learning how feelings, thoughts, or situations can contribute to maladaptive behaviors. This can be extremely difficult for clients that typically refuse to look introspectively.  The difficulty is exacerbated by not only asking the client to look deeper into situations differently, but when the client's mind is obsessing about one particular perspective (aka: tunnel vision).

The next part of CBT focuses on the maladaptive behaviors. Through psycho-education the client begins to learn new ways to manage his/her emotions in a healthy manner. If a person is struggling with depression there might be a chance that he/she is compounding the problem by self-medicating with alcohol or other drugs. This would be the step when the client practices new coping skills to use in real world situations to avoid a relapse or digging deeper into depression. The client would point out anxiety-provoking situations and then practice those social situations with the new skills.

The goal of CBT is to help a client gradually change his/her behaviors over time to produce a more healthy lifestyle, whether it is better managing emotions or developing healthier relationships.  Homework may be used in CBT such as exercise (to release those feel good endorphin's) or socializing with others that you may not engage with otherwise, as practice.

Practice makes perfect!

Tony Nichols

--I find joy in helping other's experience hope and peace in their life.