Struggling with Depression?

We all feel down sometimes, but when you’re experiencing depression, these periods of sadness and despair become more intense, and can seem intolerable and feel like they will go on forever.

• Depression leads to negative and painful moods and emotions that feel can feel overwhelming.
 
• Depression generates cycles of negative thinking that are difficult to break.
 
• Depression can create strong feelings of self-criticism, doubt and worthlessness, and leave you dwelling in painful memories and disappointment, guilt and regrets.
 
• Depression is associated with increased and sometimes overwhelming anxiety.
 
• Depression saps your energy and ability to focus and concentrate, making it difficult to do even simple tasks.
  

If you’re struggling with depression, life can feel meaningless and empty. Depression can leave you feeling helpless and hopeless, without motivation or direction, unable to enjoy anything, and feeling like just giving up because nothing you try seems to work.

How Counselling and Therapy Can Help

I'm a Guelph counsellor and therapist who specializes in helping my clients overcome depression.When you come for counselling or therapy for depression, there are a number ways I'll work with you to relieve your depression, improve your mood, and help you start feeling better.

Some of the things we'll do are:

• Explore what's been going on in your life and help you gain insight and understanding into the factors that are contributing to your depression and making it so hard for you to overcome.
 
• Examine the way in which your patterns of behaviour, thinking and self-talk may be contributing to your depression and how making changes in these patterns can help reduce your depression.
  
 
• Identify concrete steps you can take and changes you can make to reduce and relieve your depression and manage the depression you are experiencing.
 
• Help you learn new ways of relating to difficult emotions and negative moods that will enable you to tolerate these feelings and keep them from becoming overwhelming.

As you gain insight and build more nurturing ways of understanding yourself and your experiences, your depression will begin to lift, your mood will improve and you will begin to feel more positive about yourself and your life, and more hopeful about the future.

You can read more about depression and how to handle painful emotions on my blog, where you'll also find posts about how you can benefit from cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for depression, and use mindfulness to help you cope with depression. You can read more about how I can help you use mindfulness to relieve depression on my mindfulness-based therapy website.

For more information about therapy for depression, here's a sample treatment plan for depression you can download that outlines some of the things we'll often work on if you're struggling with depression.