Depression is debilitating.

Every other week for the last five years I met with my therapist. Either in her office, or in my bathtub surrounded by pillows and blankets during the pandemic days of tele-health AKA zoom therapy.

I found my therapist in 2018 during an acute mental health crisis that desperately needed to be tended to. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating and even the smallest things seemed impossible. Depression. It has been a part of my life for a long time and it is a part of many people’s lives. According to a 2022 article by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, one in every ten people in the United States reports having depression – I’m certainly not alone in experiencing mental health challenges in the western modern era.

Mental health plummeted with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and it shows no signs of rebounding any time soon. In fact the CDC recently stated:

‘Nearly 3 in 5 teen girls (57%) said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” That’s the highest rate in a decade. And 30% said they have seriously considered dying by suicide — a percentage that’s risen by nearly 60% over the past 10 years.’

I spent years crying in my therapist’s office. To be honest, the widest array of emotions I’ve ever felt in my life happened in that office. I’ve fallen asleep, sobbed, screamed, and shouted. I’ve walked out the door at the end of a session drenched in sweat and tears only to go home and fall asleep for four hours out of sheer exhaustion. I fell apart.

Amazingly, that all turned out to be ok. More than ok actually. In that room with my therapist I also softened, slowed down and found the deepest, most visceral connection with compassion that words will never be enough to convey. Trauma is trauma’s fault and it’s everywhere. Everyone experiences trauma and the world we live in is actively inflicting trauma on all of us us bits and pieces at a time. We become desensitized to the everyday horrors we read in the news, listen to on podcasts and absorb through social media. Of course so many of us are depressed.

My personal work was a combination of attachment therapy, emotionally focused methods, mindfulness and somatic practices, and internal family systems. I’ve seen more than my fair share of therapists in my short 33 years, and this is what finally ‘worked’ for me. After years of falling apart and coming back together, experiencing shift after shift after shift, what I was learning and practicing in therapy started to become the norm. It started seeping into my everyday life and affecting every piece of who I was and wasn’t anymore.

I had tools for when my nervous system became dysregulated. I learned how to breathe and recognize when anxiety was welling in my chest in hard, stressful moments. The smallest incidents that would have crushed me a couple of years ago now seemed completely manageable. I learned to recognize anger as a good friend and guide and my relationships flourished. I finally felt like I was actively participating in my life instead of watching it fly by.

Reaching the point where I knew I was ready to graduate from therapy took years and it was grueling and arduous work. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It is also overwhelmingly the most rewarding, fulfilling, and beautiful thing I’ve ever done. At the end of therapy I got myself. I got contentment, compassion, softness and ease. I got a complete paradigm shift and a return to a full and whole self that had always been there. Much of my journey has been in remembering and I suspect much more of it will be in the future.

When I told my therapist I was ready, we both cried. Our work together was instrumental in my personal growth, healing and unfolding into the person I’m proud to be today. Compassion has become my guiding center and I’ve found a wholeness I never in my wildest dreams would have thought was possible.

988 is the United States national suicide hotline number available 24/7 or texting 741741 will bring you to confidential support via text messaging

Open Path psychotherapy collective is a sliding scale option for therapy and is available online and in person

https://openpathcollective.org/