Anxiety and Depression Writing

Tame Your Mood is a monthly newsletter focused on the noble challenge of overcoming anxiety and depression. Psychotherapy for depression and anxiety requires many approaches, among which is the critical need to develop your understanding of what these wild moods actually are, how they work and function, and how we can get ensnared. These writings are here to help you build an understanding that supports the uprooting of the wild moods.

Below, you will find about 10 years of writings to help you understand the wild moods more deeply, practices to experiment with, and hopefully inspiration that anxiety and depression are not permanent, and there is actually a way out of them.

 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

January 2025 – Internal Family Systems: The Young Adult Part

This month’s article continues the run of Internal Family System (IFS) reflections (on Protectors, Exiles, the Self, and World Events) this time on the Young Adult part. The YA is the part of the psyche that emerges generally (in the West) about early to mid-20’s, when there is a transition from the more protected environments of family and school into having to build out an adult life. This is not the full Adult, which is marked by a stabilized ability to know and accept the world as it is, and regulate the inner world as one navigates with sufficient skill the external world. It’s a difficult and often un-demarcated phase of development, which leads to a blurring of the Adult and YA, an unhelpful conflation. So, the following piece attempts to clarify what the YA is and isn’t, and I hope it helps in spotting this Part in yourself, such that you can keep bringing forward the full Adult. (If the IFS lens is intriguing, you can check out the popular version of IFS, No Bad Parts, and the clinical manual, Internal Family Systems Therapy, both by Richard Schwartz.)

During this winter, may you be finding warmth in the cold, and light in the dark.

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in Internal Family Systems / Self / Young Adult
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

December 2024 – Internal Family Systems: Seeing the World (and Self) Through an IFS Lens

In this article, I will be continuing on with the run of IFS articles (on Exiles, Protectors, and the Self) to give a sketch of IFS applied to ourselves and macro-level actors at a time of such social and political upheaval. To see current reality clearly, we need multiple lenses, but it would seem that an accurate psychological lens is sorely missing. There is much more to be said and explored about psychology and groups than I can cover here, but hopefully the article can give you a sense of what IFS can offer both to understanding, empathy, and compassionate social relationships. Whatever side of the aisle you sit on, hopefully it’s clear that all of those qualities are desperately needed.

If you are in America, may your Thanksgiving have been filled with genuine gratitude, and otherwise may you be finding strength, resilience, and useful challenges in these interesting times.

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in Depression / Internal Family Systems
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

November 2024 – Internal Family Systems and Depression: The Self

In this month’s article, I continue the depiction of how the Internal Family Systems (IFS) “plural mind” model intersects with the phenomenon of depression (you can find the previous article on Protectors here, and Exiles here), with a focus on the Self, what IFS considers the central organizing principle and force of the psyche. Essentially, the Self can be thought of as the archetype of the ideal parent, but one that can and needs to be installed in the middle of our psyche for all the various parts to calm down and collaborate. Arguably, this installation is both what heals depression, and what psychotherapy itself is ultimately about.

IFS is a very rich model which these last articles are only sketching, so if you get interested and want to go further, you can check out the popular version of IFS, No Bad Parts, and the clinical manual, Internal Family Systems Therapy, both by Richard Schwartz.

May your late Fall be full of the richness of darkness, both in its quietude, and in its opportunities for contemplating losses and change.

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in Depression / Internal Family Systems / Self
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

October 2024 – Internal Family Systems and Depression: The Exiles

In this short run of articles about Internal Family Systems (IFS) and depression, we covered last month (see here) the Protector who deploys depression in the service of exiling unwanted parts of the personality. These parts who are ostracized are known as “Exiles” in IFS, and they will be the focus for this month, what they are and how they are related to depression. (To explore in more detail, see No Bad Parts, by Schwartz.)

As another summer is drawing to a close, may you have the space to reflect on these endless cyclical changes, and if you feel any loss with this transition, may you be able to feel that measure of grief and listen to it respectfully. The more we do that, the less our griefs get stuck.

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in Depression / Exiles / Internal Family Systems
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

September 2024 – Internal Family Systems and Depression: The Protectors

The next few issues will be looking at depression through the lens of Internal Family Systems Theory (IFS), a model of psychotherapy that dates back decades (with its roots going back even further to the early days of Freud and Jung) but is seeing a huge surge in interest amongst psychologists and clinicians. Although depression can be seen through multiple lenses (as you can read here), IFS has probably one of the best lenses on the condition, particularly in its framing depression as related to what IFS calls the Protector. Depression is best seen as a systemic defense, rather than a persecutor, and IFS offers an elegant way of highlighting this vital point.

May your late summers be not too sweltering, and if you’re heading back to school, I hope the transition is easy, or at least a useful challenge.

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in Depression / Grief / Internal Family Systems / Protectors
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

August 2024 – Depression and the Divine Child

I try to give a “pointillistic” view of depression in these newsletters, from the very pragmatic (as with here) to the rather abstract (like here), to give multiple ways to think about this complex experience. Today’s newsletter will be more of the latter, although in a weird sense (as hopefully you’ll see) fundamentally pragmatic. So, this month I’ll be describing what Carl Jung called the archetype of the Divine Child, specifically seen through the lens of a Jungian analyst named Donald Kalsched.

Kalsched writes about what he calls the “self-care system”, which is essentially the way our psyches protect themselves from damage when in contact with a threatening or caustic outside world. We’re all aware of the normal protections, such as defensiveness (“I didn’t do anything wrong!”), but Kalsched unpacks a more primal phenomenon, a defense system at the level of the basic archetypes which is organized around the protection not of the personal “Inner Child,” but of the more fundamental Divine Child.

Take a read and see if or how this idea might apply to your own life. Once you get the concept, it can be a very useful addition to the pragmatics of dealing with depression.

May your summer be progressing with the right mix of comfort and challenge.

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in Archetypes / Depression / Grief / Inner Child
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

July 2024 – Faith in the Age of Overwhelm

Unsurprisingly, I’ve been having many conversations this week about national and global politics, about power vs. powerlessness, and survival. With the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the assaults on democracy worldwide, and the uncertainties of our future, it is no wonder that these subjects are part of the therapy conversation. Yet, for all the details and myriad particular concerns, the central questions all essentially seem to boil down to: How do we remain active? And how do we stay centered in the storm?

The article below was written around the beginning of Trump’s presidency, as I was working with clients (and myself) around these questions. The same discussion is returning and I’m seeing how my response, and my suggestion about how clients can orient themselves, has remained the same since 2016. In essence this is: practice grief (there are vast losses that the world at large, and we as individuals, are refusing to, or too overwhelmed, to grieve) and faith. But here I mean faith in a specific sense, being the intentional and conscious choice to assume that the world is, in essence, good not bad, given that the existential question of “Is life/these times good or bad?” cannot be answered simply by data. Change-oriented action, in whatever appropriate form, almost naturally follows on locating ourselves in that matrix of grief and faith. But if we do not root ourselves there, our actions with either be spastic and poorly considered, or frozen.

So, may you find some measure of footing in this stormy and uncertain time, and a faith that allows you the space to grieve what is being lost, in order to find and embrace what still remains.

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in Faith / Grief
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

February 2024 – The Ghosts of Stalled Grief

In this month’s article, I’m writing about grief again, given that it is so central to the process of depression, its emergence and resolution. Specifically, I’m discussing how “ghosts” get created when our capacity to tolerate the loss of something that has been life-structuring gets overwhelmed. There’s no quick solution, but more of my point here is that knowing that you are camped out in a necropolis, and not actually in life anymore, is the necessary step to restarting grief and returning to life.

May your winter be progressing with only a manageable level of chill, and may you have the grace to remember that it is always just a phase in the rotation of the seasons.

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in Grief
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

December 2023 – “The Stream Which Seems an Endless Lake”: A Metaphor for the Grief Process

Following on the last two newsletter articles (here and here), this month’s thoughts focus on a metaphor for grief that I use frequently, because of the way it seems to usefully embed the different phases of grief as it unfolds from shock to acceptance. Of course, find the metaphor that works for you, that describes your actual experience in a way that gives it shape and language and meaningfulness. But here’s a suggestion of one which you can tuck in a pocket, and bring out in times when it’s hard to find an understanding of loss that isn’t simply endless misery. Given that we’re fully heading into the holiday season (like it or not), and that the archetypes of family are getting lit up along with the fairy lights, it seemed an apropos time to offer up this lake-and-river imagery.

So, however your December is shaping up, may you find a joy that matches your unique self, and enough supports to make use of whatever the stress of the season brings you.

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in Grief
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

November 2023 – The Protocols of Grief

Fall (in the Northern half of the planet), with its increasing dark and insularity, as well as the setting in (for some of the planet) of the holiday season, can bring on experiences or re-experiences of loss. Sometimes these are new losses, and sometimes these are losses that we tried to tuck into the attic but nonetheless have made their way downstairs. Given the build of our human psyches, these losses trigger the grief process as the way we’ve been designed to resolve those losses. But as natural as that is, we often initially resist or deny or rationalize the loss. Which doesn’t work.

So, in this month’s article, I lay out a sketch of the “protocols” of grieving, the stripped down elements or principles that make the process flow as smoothly and elegantly as it can. Hewing to these as best you can is a decent (if not cookie-cutter) recipe for engaging a process all of us would prefer to ignore. But since hiding grief is the invitation to depression coming on, it behooves us to surrender to the grieving, and these rules of grief are here to support us in that surrender.

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in Depression / Grief