How Counselling Can Help You Deal With Depression
Depression is a severe condition that can affect your life in different ways. This disease goes beyond feeling sad and touches your thoughts, behavior, body, and mood. You may also experience fatigue, lack of interest, low motivation, and the need to isolate yourself from the rest of the world. People who experience these symptoms must seek immediate treatment to prevent the condition from becoming severe.
Several treatment options can help eliminate or manage depression. One such method is counseling. Counseling involves talking to a health expert who does not judge you but merely listens to you and performs various tests to develop an appropriate solution. This piece discusses multiple ways in which counseling helps you combat depression.
Psychodynamic Therapy
This form of therapy assumes that you can suffer from depression due to unresolved unconscious conflicts in your childhood. The therapist helps you understand the full range of your emotions, including the troubling and contradictory ones. You can begin to bear such feelings more effectively and put them into a positive perspective with the therapist’s help.
The significant advantage of this therapy is the long-term focus without emphasis on anything intensive. You can ease into the treatment method and establish the connection between various vents and the feeling of depression. Psychodynamic therapy also helps increase self-awareness and emotional capacity.
Interpersonal Therapy
Interpersonal therapy is a counseling tactic that recognizes poor social support and conflicts between people as causes of depression. The therapist helps you address present and past interpersonal interactions and social roles. You can both pick several areas upon which to focus the treatment.
This treatment is brief and includes scrutinizing social relationships with important people in your life. Some of the significant relationships that your therapist might explore are those with your family, friends, co-workers, and partners. You may also need to role-play specific scenarios that help improve and practice your communication skills. The therapist can also help you develop skills for building solid relationships and a social support system.
Cognitive Therapy
Counselling often uses cognitive therapy to treat depression. Cognitive treatment relies on the idea that your thoughts affect your emotions. For example, two different people might look at one similar predicament differently and think of it in separate ways. The person who chooses a negative approach is at a higher risk of depression than those with an unbothered or positive reaction.
The therapist helps you identify the typical patterns of thinking which cause your depression. You can also begin turning these thoughts into positive ones and improve your mood. Cognitive therapy is goal-focused and short-term, hence preferable for most people.
Behavioral Therapy
Your behaviors contribute to depression in the same fashion as your thoughts. Therefore, behavioral therapy is similar to cognitive therapy, focusing on habits. The therapist directs you towards practices that support positive mental health outcomes. Therapists may also select a combination of cognitive and behavioral therapies.
This method treats anxiety and depression disorders by taming both thought and behavior patterns that contribute to depression. For example, the therapist might request you to keep track of activities in a week and account for your choices based on your thoughts before making decisions. You can both uncover cases of cognitive distortion such as overgeneralization and automatic adverse reactions.
Depression affects your health by increasing your vulnerability to high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, back problems, and cardiovascular disease. Depression is a disease like any other; hence, you should visit your counselor if you experience depression symptoms.
At Comprehensive Counseling Services, we provide patient-centered care to help heal your depression. Contact us today, and let us improve your mental health.
