Why Am I Depressed?

I am lying in bed in my dorm room watching back-to-back episodes of Six Feet Under. A show about a family funeral home where in every episode it opens with someone dying. Not the most uplifting show. I’ve been locked in my room alone for hours. I couldn’t tell you what time it was anymore. My body feels like its tied down with weights. Even moving my hand to play the next episode feels like a monumental amount of work.

During these hours of mindless tv, I am trying to avoid these awful feelings inside of myself. This darkness within me. It scares me but I can’t escape it. No matter where I run it is with me. This heaviness on my soul. And in the few moments that I connect with it, I just start to cry. Cry uncontrollably. I hate myself for crying. I feel weak. I feel vulnerable. I’m scared that someone will see me. Someone will judge me.

To sum this state of being into one word – depression.

I lived like this for many years until I finally took the steps that I needed to end my depression once and for all. If you are ready, your journey starts here.

Sadness vs Depression

We throw around the word depression or depressed a lot in American culture. And many times, we conflate it with sadness. These two emotions are very different from each other.

Sadness is one of the five primary emotions that every person experiences throughout life (the other four emotions are happiness, anger, fear & disgust). Having moments of sadness is normal. And sadness, like all the other primary emotions, is meant to be temporary.

For example, you are at your favorite coffee shop. You order a coffee and pastry and the barista tells you that they are sold of the pastry that you like. Your disappointed. You were looking forward to that pastry. You feel for some moments a sense of sadness over not being able to have what you were looking forward to. You skip the pastry and go back to your car and continue on with you day. By the time you start your car, the sadness and disappointment has passed.

We all can think of examples when this has happened to us. These moments of sadness. And that is the key distinction between sadness and depression. Sadness is temporary and is about something in the present moment.

Depression on the other hand, is unrelenting. It can come from nowhere. It can hit you like a bus and suck every once of life out of you. It can last for hours, for days, for weeks. On an emotional pain scale sadness would be a minor discomfort, like tripping over your own feet. Depression on the other hand can be as intense as having multiple broken bones in your body. Intense and proud pain.

Why am I Depressed?

Some insider info about your subconscious: its job is to keep you alive, not happy. So, if you experienced a particularly sad moment in your past. A sad moment that was more intense than you were able to handle. Or you were taught not to express or feel sadness, that emotion stays within you. Emotions need to be felt. They need to be expressed. If they are not expressed, your subconscious will suppress it so that you can continue to live your life. But a part of you breaks off and stays stuck in that sadness. Stuck in a loop, over and over again, experiencing those sad feelings with no resolution.

As time moves on, if you continue this pattern of hiding from or ignoring your emotions, more and more pieces of yourself break off and stay stuck in that sadness. Living in that eternal hell within yourself. Replaying that experience over and over and over again. Your subconscious can only suppress so much. It gets tired, just like your muscles do from carrying a heavy weight for a long time. So, it lets some of that emotion out to give itself some relief.

That old sadness that has built up within yourself, that is the source of your depression. That is why the feelings seem to never end. It is years upon years of sad moments that you could not or would not feel. So many parts of yourself have broken off and are living in that pain. And they want to be heard. They want to be rescued from this torture.

How do I Stop the Depression?

You have to find and rescue the parts of yourself that have broken off. To bear witness and feel what they experienced and finally bring them to a place of peace. How? With a guide who has been there before and has the tools to help you connect with yourself.

In my mental health practice, I have helped my clients reconnect with the parts of themselves that have been stuck in depressive pain. Clients who have been living with depression for so long, they didn’t know if they could go one more day. You can bring yourself to a place of peace. You can finally end your depression.

The first step is getting the support that you need on your journey of healing. Take advantage of a free tapping session I offer and begin the journey towards reclaiming a sense of peace and compassion within yourself. You are strong enough to do it. You are worthy enough to do it. Just take the first step to begin.