Have Depression and Anxiety Controlled Your Life for Long Enough?

You don’t feel like yourself anymore. You live every day with an ache or tightness around your heart or in your gut, a heaviness on your shoulders,  a tension in your head, or a tearful pressure behind your eyes, some feeling that tells you something is wrong, and you can’t figure out how to get it to go away. That feeling that something is wrong keeps you up at night, it drains your energy during the day, and it makes all the things you have to do feel ten (or a hundred, or a thousand) times harder.

You may have been living with these feelings for years, maybe taken medications, perhaps gone to therapy before or found some tips or tricks on the internet that have helped you cope. But while some of those have helped a bit, for a while, you’re tired of living this way.

Depression and Anxiety often look and feel different for everyone.

They often go hand in hand, but you might also find yourself experiencing more of one and less of the other.

You might dread going to work every day, where you feel miserable while you try to concentrate and accomplish tasks, and be so exhausted when you get home that you just collapse on the couch all night.

Or you may dread the stressful interactions with your loved ones that have taken a toll on your relationships, so you might find yourself working more or staying away, or isolating yourself as much as possible. You may feel the tension, exhaustion, or edginess all the time, and just dig deep to find the endurance to make it through one more day without letting anyone else down.

You may struggle with things like:

  • Eating poorly
  • Lacking the motivation and energy to exercise or do things you want to do
  • Not wanting to do things that you used to find interesting and fun
  • Using substances to self-medicate more
  • Being on edge and irritable, or snapping at others over little things
Woman sitting in the woods in need of therapy for depression in Ohio

You might fight with yourself about these behaviors, wishing you could change to be more healthy, and then get more down on yourself when you don’t.

SCHEDULE A FREE 20-MINUTE CONSULT

Let’s dig deep to restore your vitality for life at the roots

Man walking on a path feeling better after therapy for depression and anxiety in Ohio

By making the choice to face what doesn’t feel okay and address it at its roots you can restore your energy and hope for life. Connect more open-heartedly with people who love you, and find the courage to change or leave situations that are not right for you.

Look forward to each new day without dread and despair. Face challenging situations with confidence and authenticity instead of insecurity and imposter syndrome. Find and embrace adventure, growth, and joy in your life.

I will work with you to create space for healing by sensitively and compassionately exploring your inner emotional world with you. I start with the assumption that your depression and anxiety hold lessons about the unmet needs in your life, the unresolved pain or grief that has been mounting, the situations that are unsustainable, the feelings of loneliness or shame that are lurking within, or other reasons that are true for you about why you are feeling this way.

As we get to know these lessons and stories I will support you in a process of starting to meet your needs, heal your pain, and find release from the burdens in your life that are weighing you down and making everything feel so hard.

Therapy for depression can help you…

Feel like yourself again

Look forward to your future with hopefulness

Stop coping with what is wrong and start making it right

Find inner calm and peace

Enjoy your life

Restore Hope. Rediscover Calm. Reclaim Your Life.

Your Questions Answered

Sadness or periods of feeling more down are normal emotional responses to difficult experiences or situations. Depression is more of a persistent feeling of low mood, loss of hope, and difficulty enjoying or being interested in things. It may come with low energy, sleep or appetite changes, irritability, and suicidal thinking. Depression may or may not have a specific cause. It can feel more all-encompassing. At the same time, depression, sadness, normal ups and downs, and grief can overlap and flow into each other. Therapy can be a helpful choice when any of these, or any combination of them, is disrupting your life.

IFS therapy is an approach that helps you navigate the “inner world” of your emotional and mental processes. We get to know the “part” or parts of your inner world who are feeling depressed or anxious, we learn what has those parts feeling that way and perhaps feeling stuck that way, and we find relief and healing for those parts by helping them connect with your innate self-compassion, creativity, confidence, calm, and courage. Through this process we help create a greater sense of internal harmony and emotional balance.

We can do that! I’ve written this page to address both depression and anxiety together because I often see them, and clients experience them, as two sides of the same coin. Both are natural ways our bodies and minds respond to difficult, persistent problems or stress and tell us that something is wrong.. There is significant overlap in symptoms, and it is not uncommon to be worrying and increasingly anxious at the same time as we are feeling a loss of hope and more depressed. Therapy with me is always tailored to your specific needs, issues, and goals, and focusing on your unique experience is always essential. We will spend our first couple of sessions talking about that together.

Yes. Whether to take medication for depression and anxiety is your choice. If it is relevant to your situation I can support you in a process of discerning whether you may want to talk to a provider who prescribes medications for depression or anxiety. I do not bring an agenda about whether you should or should not use medications to those discussions. I understand that this decision can be complex and difficult and I am here to support you in what is right for you.

To be most effective, therapy sessions in the beginning of therapy should generally be either once per week or once every other week. Greater frequency is likely to help you experience progress more quickly. It may be appropriate to reduce session frequency after the goals of therapy shift from immediate needs and concerns to focusing on maintaining your progress.

The length of therapy varies from person to person and depends greatly on a person’s individual needs and specific situations. Many people can begin to experience benefits of therapy within the first few sessions, while some goals may take a longer time to work toward. My goal as your therapist is that you feel supported in making progress at the pace that is right for you.