Demystifying Depression: From Numbness to Aliveness

Do you struggle with chronic numbness, doom scrolling, lethargy and overall grayness?

Does Life seem like it’s in black and white? Do you struggle to feel joy, love, or anything really?

This is sadly very normal.

Call it what you will: depression, disconnection, or a thick fog of deadening sitting between you and your life. It’s excruciating. Your lack of feelings is actually excruciating. If you resonate with this, this workshop is for you.

Why is this normal and pervasive right now? Believe you are not alone! 

Most people are flooded with the demands of life right now. Keeping up with the financial demands of their lives in a recession, tending to their relationships, and living during a time where unending amounts of information are readily available and constantly emerging about crises of all types. War, Political divide, Climate catastrophes. None of this even speaks to the regular up and down challenges of having a human heart that feels pain and loss. 

All together, these challenges together lead to an overwhelming burden of complex factors to process effectively and so instead, people lean toward shut down and numbing. Many multi billion dollar industries profit off of us shutting down and consuming: The entertainment industry, the beauty and health industries, food and fashion, alcohol, pornography, recreational drugs. There are ample places to receive nullifying input and this leads to a zombie-like state of coping, where nothing upsets us too much BUT nothing moves us and our feelings don’t move. This leads to dullness and emotional constipation.

So what is the solution?

Believe it or not, like it or not, the solution is learning skillful ways to move toward the various pains that plague us. Finding effective and supportive ways to process and digest aka FEEL the various pains that people would rather avoid is the answer. 

What? I’m depressed and you want me to feel more pain? Yes! Believe it or not, the acute experience of suffering connected to any of the personal or systemic challenges that people are facing is almost always very temporary. When we actually allow our feelings and know how to scaffold ourselves with them, they move quite quickly. And when feelings move, the pain of them is reduced. 

These workshops are designed to be not only full of information, but practical steps for you to take on your healing journey. My goal is for you to come away with implementable action items so that you can begin the "work" of healing. 

Here is what you will learn: 

• Dyadic sharing and connection time.
• Ways to recognize depression.
•  What are the first go to behaviors that increase in moments of overwhelm?
•  What happy emotions do you lose access to when you are sinking?
•  What is the biggest fear you have about actually experiencing what the hard
•  Feelings?

• Ways to understand and honor the underlying needs that any numbing and depressive strategy is attempting to meet.
• In addition to understanding biggest fears, can you write a love note to whatever is seemingly keeping you in a window of tolerance?
• Through that love note, what can you underline or define as the biggest need the numbing is maladaptively compensating for.
• Can you write a list of consequences coming from the engagement in the numbing strategies.
• Can you think of a more adaptive way to meet the underlying need?

• Ways to create small emotional release sessions that enhance your ability to actually feel and digest pain.

• Emotional Expression: Anger, Fear, shame, and Grief practices
• How to identify the emotion to begin with as far as emotional release?
• Basic setup for generic emotional release
• Specific Anger Ideas
• Specific Fear Ideas
• Specific Grief Ideas
• Specific Shame Ideas

• A recordable guided meditation that will support moving from numbness to feeling.
•  Will lead a 20 minute emotional meditation that can be recorded and used at 
• home.

• A worksheet that becomes a self care strategy for particularly overwhelming times.
• Support People I can talk to if I need to
  
• What is the most stress relieving activity I like doing
• What is my favorite way to slow down and connect emotion
• What is my favorite way to inspire me to get out of bed and get going
• What are the simplest and most helpful diet nutrition hacks I need.
• How much water am I drinking daily?
• Am I eating a few meals a day?
• How much sugar and processed foods am I eating?

• What are my weekly emotional release goals?
• How many times should I try to make a window to feel my feelings
• What are the main emotions I need to be dealing with currently?

• What are the ways I connect to others of something bigger than myself? 
• Favorite place in nature? 
• How often can I get to my favorite place in nature
• Am I a part of any groups where there is common interest?
• How do I connect with any faith or a bigger sense of meaning in my life?

*You will receive replay access in the event that you can't make it live, though it is encouraged as there is an interactive Q&A portion to the workshop.