Depression

It’s like sadness always lives inside you.

You’re stuck in a bad mood.

Friends invite you out for the evening, but you’d rather stay home.

Cleaning the house or completing other responsibilities feels impossible.

When you’ve used all your energy just to make yourself a bit of food and keep your pets or kids alive, there’s nothing left for anything else.

How are you even keeping yourself alive? Deep in your mind, you know your responsibilities are piling up, but you can’t tend to them. There’s too much. It’s all just too much.

You spend so much time telling yourself you’ll get to it, call them back, clean it up, figure it out, follow up, respond to that message. But actually, doing those things seems impossible. Absolutely impossible.

Depression colors everything and nothing all at once.

Where do you go now?

You’re waiting for this wave to pass. But you know the pieces you must pick up after will also break you a little.

Why? Why must it go on like this? Why are others able to get it together, day after day?

What you wouldn’t give for an ounce of that feeling.

Is there even a type of therapy that will make you feel motivated? Or is it all just trying to make yourself see things differently?

The thing is if you could see it differently, you would! If you could manage to feel differently, you would! You didn’t choose this.

Getting to the heart of why you feel so sad…

In therapy, we won’t rush to get rid of the sadness with new ways of thinking about your life. I won’t dismiss how you see things or your feelings. They are real. They are valid.

My approach is more thorough and thoughtful than that. Somatic Breathwork gets to the root of what is causing you to feel down. Once that is relieved, you will naturally feel better.

Our first few breathwork therapy sessions start with us getting to know each other. You can ask questions about breathwork or any other part of therapy. I will ask you about what’s going on right now, all the way back to childhood. It helps me understand your story and how I can best provide care, especially during breathwork.

In breathwork sessions, you’ll connect with significant early life events that set the stage for how you are feeling. It feels so good to finally cry about something that actually matters so deeply and relieves so much pain. You’ll notice that the more you cry in breathwork, the less you feel like crying other times. This is because connecting to and crying about the original issues is what heals you.

Many clients with depression don’t recall any specific events that they relate particularly to their depression, but every single client eventually discovers those moments when they do breathwork. The mind is wise. It knows what we are ready to learn and heal and will reveal it as we breathe.

If you aren’t ready or able to cry or release any emotion yet, that’s okay, too! Each breathwork session reveals some piece of your story. We witness it together and slowly allow your emotions to come forward at their own pace.

There are no “wrong” or “bad” breathwork therapy sessions for depression.

Each one is exactly as it should be.

When you’ve gone through a few breathwork sessions, we will also start doing talk therapy sessions. This is to talk about some current issues that are coming up and to begin re-formulating your outlook on life.

Unlike typical talk therapy where you might sometimes feel gaslit (“Come on, did your sister really mean it like that? Or, did you just take it the wrong way?” Yikes! Ouch!), talk therapy after breathwork feels like a rush of clean air.

As a therapist, I don’t have to twist your arm to get you to see things differently. We just have a conversation, I pose some new ways of thinking about something (when you’re ready!), and it flows through you. The pieces that fit will stick with your new way of thinking. The pieces that don’t just fall away. There’s no struggle.

Angela* came to therapy after years of struggling with depression.

She had done some talk therapy as a teenager and an adult. She found it helpful at the time but had forgotten much of what she had learned. As life’s stress piled up (school, work, relationships, kids), it was hard to remember everything she was “supposed to tell herself.” She felt somewhat like a failure for ending up in therapy again, wondering why she couldn’t make it work.

After talking extensively about Angela’s childhood and early adulthood, I could see why she was still struggling.

Her parents always argued, then they got a divorce. They put her in the middle of their arguments. One parent even got arrested, and the shame followed her around.

We saw it all in her breathwork. Angela said she had no idea that her parents arguing had affected her so much. She knew it wasn’t good but didn’t know that it had actually traumatized her. I guided her through those moments when her parents were preoccupied with arguing and unaware of Angela’s fear. I empowered her to find her voice.

In our breathwork sessions, she stepped up and told them they were hurting her. She was shocked that she was able to do that. Her parents had been so dominating that it seemed unfathomable that she could have a voice and speak for her own needs.

We saw this reflected in her personal life. She spoke to a coworker who had been borderline abusive and set a clear boundary. Her husband remarked that he could see she had changed, too.

Let me help you out.

If you find yourself struggling, reaching out for support is a crucial step. Seeking professional help, like somatic breathwork for depression, can make a significant difference. If you’re down in the depths of depression, please know I’m available by email at therapy@drlesliewright.com or phone at (805) 836-0975, whichever way is easiest to reach out.

We can set up the first session via email or have a free 20-minute phone call to answer your questions and find out more about how to get started. This could be the last or one of the last times you are ever this deep in your depression.