Out of the Blue: Six Non-Medication Ways to Relieve Depression (Norton Professional Books) Read Online Free Page A

(e.g., getting a paper and looking for a job, finishing an art project)
    As we talked about this, Cindy began smiling at times, even while discussing her depressive experience. (I said that I wanted to learn the Cindy way of doing a good depression, and this phrase seemed to tickle her. She also got a kick out of my naming her depressive experiences “Depresso-land.” Of course, not everyone would take this renaming as she did; some would see it as minimizing or invalidating. We therapists need to be sensitive to each of our clients, and this knowledge emerges from our conversations with them.)
    If we were making a map of Cindy’s “Depresso-land” and “Confidence/Competent-land,” this is what the maps might look like:

    As you can see, this approach is very individualized. No two people’s maps will be the same. We often talk about “depression” as if it were a thing, but although many depressed experiences share common features, they always occur in specific and particular ways for the person in front of us. The non-depressed features are also very particular and specific. But we are so often focused on the suffering (as is the person experiencing depression) that we neglect to investigate and discover other experiences that don’t fit with depression.
    I once read a book on Zen and art (Pirsig, 2006)—the title long lost to the obscurities of my memory—and the author said that when an artist draws a tree, he doesn’t draw the branches and the leaves. Instead, he draws the spaces between the branches and leaves, and a picture of the tree emerges. This resonated with me because that’s what I do when approaching depression. I’m interested in discovering and detailing non-depressed experiences, actions, thoughts, and experiences. That way, I learn about the person’s abilities, competence, and good feelings as well as get a sense of the suffering she has experienced.
    ONE FOOT IN: ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND POSSIBILITY
    Working with people who are depressed can require a delicate balance. They are usually lost in their depressive experience and perspective, so you have to join them in that experience and let them know you have some sense of what they’re going through. At the same time, you have to be careful not to get caught up in that discouragement and hopelessness along with them.
    Think of it as having one foot in their experience and one foot out. I call this Acknowledgement and Possibility. It involves acknowledging the depressed person’s suffering, validating his felt sense of things, and inviting him out of that experience.
    When people don’t feel heard, understood, or validated in their experience, they often resist any cooperation or change efforts. On the other hand, if all one offers is acceptance and validation, it’s all too easy to help the sufferer wallow and stay stuck in his depressive experience.
    I remember a client I had early in my psychotherapy career who would come in week after week soaking up my kind acceptance, unconditional positive regard, and empathy. She would get her weekly support session and then go back to her miserable life. During one session—it was probably about our twenty-second—I heard myself saying, “So, you’re depressed again this week.” And realized I wasn’t really helping her.
    Around that time, I began to study with the psychiatrist Milton Erickson. He had many creative ways of challenging his patients to move on and change. I began to incorporate some of his methods into my work and noticed that my clients were changing much more quickly than they had before. But I still liked the warm, kind, active listening I had learned in my elementary counseling training and didn’t want to lose that respectful approach. So I combined the best of both worlds and created this Acknowledgment and Possibility method.
    This method not only respectfully acknowledges the person’s painful and discouraging experiences, but also gives him a reminder that he isn’t