Anxiety and Depression

Depression and anxiety can feel paralyzing, but they don’t determine your future.

• Are you struggling with feelings of sadness and anxiety, and are finding it difficult to feel hopeful that you can feel better?
• Do you feel exhausted and depleted – the kind of fatigue that can’t be cured with a good night’s sleep?
• Do you feel hopeless that you can feel better, and unsure what might help you heal?
• Do your worries and low feelings about yourself keep you stuck?

You have been managing a lot of difficult feelings, and perhaps have been struggling for quite some time. Depression and anxiety can make everyday life feel impossible, and it can be hard to know how to start feeling better. Poor sleep, worry, low mood, and other symptoms can take their toll and make it hard to feel hopeful about your future. Perhaps you wonder how you got here, or perhaps you have an inkling about why you are feeling the way that you do.

Depression and anxiety can feel like invisible weights you carry that keep you from living a full life.

It may be that you’ve felt depressed or anxious for so long that it feels like this is a normal part of who you are. This may feel so familiar to you that prioritizing your growth and making space for yourself feels difficult or impossible. You may feel doubtful or unsure that you can feel better, or you may feel afraid of what the path to feeling better may entail. Depression and anxiety often entail feeling hopeless, and can prevent you from imagining a life in which you are feeling better and living a life characterized by joy.

You may feel hopeless about feeling better, but you don’t have to continue to feel depressed and anxious.

Healing is possible.

Though you may want to rid yourself of these painful feelings, it’s important to attend to these feelings while they are present so that you can understand why they are there and what they are telling you. In psychotherapy, growth entails wading into these feelings and exploring them in the context of a therapeutic relationship that helps you identify how these feelings came to be, ultimately helping you feel better.

Common Concerns

How long will it take for me to feel better? Typically, symptoms of depression and anxiety develop over time, and so it also takes some time to get to the root of it and feel better. Often people find that experiencing the care of a trained listener who is fully present to know you and help you is the first step toward beginning to feel better.

Will medication help? Perhaps. We can discuss a referral to a psychiatrist for a medication evaluation.

Is there something I can do on my own to feel better? Why psychotherapy? While there are all kinds of self-help books, and no doubt well-meaning people in your life that can give you advice about how to feel better, chances are you’ve already tried that but haven’t found it as helpful as you might expect. Psychotherapy seeks to treat depression and anxiety through the care of the therapeutic relationship, which is uniquely helpful to get to the root cause rather than simply treating symptoms on a cognitive level.

Depression and anxiety are treatable. You can feel better.