Depression can feel like trying to walk through a swamp of molasses. Or like driving with the emergency brake engaged — you can get places, but it takes so much more energy just to overcome the inertia that’s trying to get you to stop.
Depression and anxiety are among the most common reasons people find their way into a counselor’s office. They are also among the most misunderstood — often treated as character flaws, or managed with medication alone, when what they’re really asking for is to be listened to at a deeper level.
Depression
Depression can have many sources. It’s important to rule out any possible physiological causes first — a visit with your primary care provider is always a good idea. Ruling out things like thyroid functioning, medication interactions or side effects, and hormonal factors is wise, because no amount of counseling will help if the underlying cause is organic.
Depression that is of psychological origin can vary from feeling down and unmotivated to struggling to get out of bed and function in daily life. The intensity of your experience will shape our treatment approach. If prolonged depression is causing you to miss work or significantly affect important areas of your life, I may advise you to consult with your primary care provider about whether pharmacological support might be helpful alongside counseling.
I tend to view depression as stalled-out energy — emotions that have stagnated. Often, when we peel back the depression, we discover sorrow, sadness, or grief that has stopped moving, creating that swamp-like feel. Ideally, emotions are flowing like a stream or river, releasing in various ways through daily life. When we build walls around our hearts to protect ourselves from difficult feelings, we interrupt that natural flow. The result can be depression — and anxiety.
With depression, one’s gaze is often oriented toward the past — toward loss, regret, what was or wasn’t. The weight of what has already happened presses down on the present moment.
Anxiety
Anxiety feels awful. At lower intensity, it can feel like a vibration or hum — a low-grade restlessness that won’t settle. It can involve hypervigilance, always scanning for possible threats. At higher intensity, anxiety feels like chaotic energy that can’t quite find a way out of the body, so it bounces around. The mind becomes the engine, the gas pedal stuck, thoughts revving at high RPM — going over the same thing endlessly, stuck on repeat. All of that energy spinning its wheels is exhausting.
Imagine for a moment if the internal sensations of anxiety were converted into kinetic energy and you moved your body at the same speed as what you feel happening inside — the gas pedal pegged, the brake giving way, suddenly moving at a crazy high rate of speed. How fast would you be moving?
While depression tends to look backward — toward the past — anxiety looks forward, imagining scenarios, anticipating the worst. The limbic system, once it has identified a threat, will stay hypervigilant looking for similar threats. It doesn’t care much about logic or probability. If a UFO crash-landed on your neighbor’s house, your brain might spend a good deal of time scanning the skies — even though the odds of it happening again are essentially zero. That’s anxiety. It’s not rational, and that’s the point. Logic doesn’t touch it.
I know this territory from the inside. For a few years of heavy travel, I developed an intense claustrophobic anxiety response on airplanes. In the worst of it, I found myself running full panic speed down the aisle of a plane — briefcase over my shoulder, screaming for them to wait — convinced the only relief was getting off. A kind flight attendant offered me a seat closer to the door, and I spent the four-hour flight focused on breathing. It wasn’t pleasant, but I made it. I share this not to center myself, but because I believe it matters that the person sitting across from you has been in the swamp too.
The Wall Connection
Imagine a young child left to navigate the challenges of life without much emotional support from their caregivers. That child begins building the wall. Which means the part of self that gets trapped behind it — disconnected from meaningful human connection — is probably going to be pretty lonely, sad, and after some time, quite depressed. And since humans are wired for relationship, prolonged disconnection will also generate anxiety. Imagine a caveman cast out of the tribe: suddenly much more at risk, because there is safety in numbers.
If the root cause of depression and anxiety is a younger part of self trapped behind a wall, no amount of CBT or medication will solve that problem. That young part needs to be set free.
The needs that drove the wall’s construction didn’t disappear when the wall went up. That young part — the one who started laying bricks in the first place — is still back there, behind the wall, alone and scared, carrying unmet needs that were real then and are still real now. Lonely. Sad. Anxious. Waiting.
It’s worth noting that people often enter romantic relationships with an unconscious hope that their partner will be the one to finally reach that younger part — to open the gate, to offer the love and safety that was missing. It’s an understandable hope. But it’s a hope that tends to place an impossible burden on the relationship, because that work isn’t something a partner can do for you. It belongs to you. The adult you — the one sitting here, reading this — is the one who gets to go back for that kid. Learning the skills, gathering the resources, and becoming the attuned presence that younger self needed all along. That’s reparenting. And it’s some of the most meaningful work I get to do with people.
Our inner loving parent attunes, or tunes in, to the inner child and inner teen in ways our parents couldn’t. A loving parent’s message is: you are enough; you matter; I see you, and I’m glad you’re here. A loving parent also affirms that it’s okay to have feelings — both pleasant and unpleasant. They do not judge or react to inner family members. They feel compassion, curiosity, gentleness, calm, connection, acceptance, and patience toward them. Our loving parent does not get scared by situations that frighten our inner children. The loving parent resides in the present, yet can visit the past to give our inner children the love and support we did not receive in childhood.
— The Loving Parent Guidebook, ACOA
What Treatment Looks Like
Unresolved trauma is also a significant driver of both depression and anxiety. More and more research shows the impact of trauma on the body — energy that gets trapped without an ability to release. At first it might be like holding a small balloon under water. But as unresolved trauma accumulates over time, it becomes more like holding a beach ball under water. That’s difficult to sustain.
When treating depression and anxiety, we start with resources. Learning what calms the nervous system. Breathing exercises that slow the breath rate, slow the heart rate, and help the body shift toward a calmer overall state. Mindfulness practices that anchor attention to the present moment — because that terrible thing that happened in the past feeds the depression, and the imagined terrible thing in the future feeds the anxiety, but right now we are in between those terrible things. And when we connect with the moment, it might not be that terrible. It might be okay. Our five senses all operate in the present. Intentionally noticing what our senses are telling us — the smell, the temperature, the weight of our body in the chair, the friction of our feet on the floor — helps the nervous system settle.
Part of what we build together is a personalized toolkit — grounding practices, self-soothing strategies, a self-awareness protocol you can use between sessions — so you’re not starting from zero when a hard moment hits.
One of the resources I often introduce early in the work is what I call a “heart drawing” — a simple, timed exercise using oil pastels. The instruction is to take everything you’re holding emotionally in that moment and put it on the page in under five minutes. No thinking, no planning. Just an emotion dump. People often worry they need to be artists. They don’t. Every person is creative, and we are not looking for museum-quality work — we’re looking for honest work. I keep a stack of finished heart drawings in the office to show people what this actually looks like. The two paintings on this page began that way.
Once we have a number of resources on board, we can begin approaching the work that looks at what is actually causing the depression and anxiety. We’ll explore these using experiential methods. It’s not uncommon for people to come in saying they don’t know why they feel the way they do, and that is okay. Together, we’ll use curiosity and experiential techniques to help you connect with the parts of self that are subconsciously feeding the depression and anxiety. From there we can explore what those parts need, and begin working on the root cause.
Depression and anxiety are treatable — not just managed, but genuinely healed at the root. The swamp can drain. The brake can release. And you don’t have to find your way through it alone.