Another view of Depression and Anxiety
Reading Healing Tasks: Psychotherapy and Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse by James I Kepner. Re therapy I'm often questioning whether what we're doing is what we're supposed to be doing, so I thought I'd do some learning about what the process is supposed to be.
This is a good read. There are, admittedly, some pages I don't get - either they're too abstract, or I'm not catching the nuance/implications. It's not a self-help book, it's much more a book for practitioners. There's a lot of good lessons for me.
One lesson is the notion that prior trauma causes you to over-react to challenges. I did just that in an interaction while I was reading it, and it informed me to ask: Am I over-reacting? Why? and there was value in that.
Another two lessons that I'm still pondering are:
- Depression is the result of long-unprocessed, accumulated, compounding-interest grief that hasn't been mourned, which presents as a general sadness or malaise;
- Anxiety is the result of long-unprocessed, accumulated, compounding-interest fear that hasn't been worked through.
These definitions (and I've been in search of definitions) made sense to me and helped me understand.