Sadness, Grief and Depression

“Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.”  ― Maya Angelou

 

Anger often covers up underlying sadness. Sadness makes you feel weak, listless and unmotivated. So your psyche gives you anger to fire you up. Anger motivates you to survive.

But if you stay angry, you never deal with the sadness. It festers and often turns into a depression that lasts for a long time, keeping you in a holding pattern until you are ready to face the sadness and its impact on you.

Holding onto sadness and putting it in a burial chamber can be a way of denying the source of the loss that led you to begin the grieving process. You are left stuck in one stage of mourning – that of anger.

When that anger has no external target to focus on, because you can’t blame anyone in particular, you turn the anger inward and it becomes depression. You hide your sadness and loss inside your depression.

Depression protects you from having to deal with overwhelming grief and sadness that has no words.

But depression

•  sets you apart from loved ones, making you feel alone and lonely

 

• makes you more angry and irritable while headed for a chronic long term depressive disorder

 

• makes you emotionally unavailable to your partner and children

 

• co-exists with joint, muscle, sinus, lower back and head pain (Biological Psychiatry, 2010)

 

• enhances physical pain from injury and surgery (Journal of Pain, 2010, Anesthesitlogy™ 2014)

 

• makes you 5 times more likely to die if you have heart failure (World Heart Failure Alliance White Paper, European Society of Cardiology, 2014)

 

• compromises the growth and integration of new neurons in your hippocampus (memory center of brain) and olfactory bulb (smell center of brain), the two main areas of neurogenesis in the brain. (Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, May 2015).

 

• makes you sleep more or less depending on your personality

 

• makes you eat more to numb feelings

 

• makes you prone to substance abuse to numb feelings ( JAMA, Psychiatry, 2013)

So why not face the loss and the sadness that goes with it?

Maybe it’s the loss of your ideal childhood

Did you lose a parent when you were very young?

Perhaps you lost part of yourself when you were abused or raped

What if you are unable to grieve the loss of a miscarriage?

Have you lost the idealistic faith in the perfection of your parents or yourself?

Maybe you haven’t forgiven a parent for taking away your favorite toy and are holding onto the anger and grief

 

How therapy helps

Therapy that provides you with insight and awareness, while helping you understand and process the roots of your anger, sadness and loss, known as psychodynamic psychothreapy, has been proven to rewire your brain. PET SCANS show that there is less activity in the regions of the brain associated with depression after psychodynamic psychotherapy. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 2014

 

Articles

How bitterness and self-blame make you sick

How to prevent bitterness and blame from making you sick

Unresolved anger and stress keeps you depressed longer

Pull out the roots of anger and stress and ease depression with connection to nature

Whatever the origin of your sadness or grief, stop it from turning into a deep depression that robs you of years of your life.

Make that call and let me help you get in touch with the sadness and grief that is blocking you from living your life to its fullest extent.

 

CALL 310-985-2491

I offer coaching and therapy services