depression

 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

The “Coffee on the Corner” Voice: A Counter-Voice to Depression 

Joe was getting ready to watch a movie in his living room, and having prepared some evening coffee–he was one of those who could do that–sat down on the couch and set the coffee down on the coffee table (naturally). Since the table was scattered with magazines, he put the coffee right at the edge. A voice in him said, “Probably shouldn’t put it there. Best to move the magazines and avoid a mess.” The movie had started, he was munching a snack, and said to himself, “Meh, it will be fine. Too much of a hassle. It’s fine.” Then he moved to adjust on the couch, his foot hit the table, the stack of magazines slid surely to the side, and the coffee cup tipped slowly, almost gracefully, to empty it’s contents onto the white rug.

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in Depression
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

What Emotions are Trying to Tell Us

(Audio version, click here, or here to download.)

While emotions are not at all simple experiences (as Dan Siegel makes clear in his book, “The Developing Mind”), there is a class of emotion which are universal, cross-cultural, and definable in ways that most of us will quickly understand. These are called the “categorical emotions”, and are generally listed as: anger, sadness, fear, disgust, contempt, joy (happiness), and surprise. (Varying theorists would make this list slightly differently, but we’ll go with this one.)

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in Uncategorized
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Audio – Depression and the Fundamentals of Healing

Here is the link to this audio talk, which presents what I see as the barebones essentials to understanding and healing depression.

 

(You can save a copy to your computer by right clicking on the audio bar–i.e., that shows the progress of the recording–and then clicking “save audio as…”)

in Audio / Depression
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Anger is Your Friend: The Restoration of Anger

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!”–(John 2:15)

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in Anxiety / Depression
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Energy and Depression

Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist and preeminent writer on neuroscience, has a great story about being at a conference with a gaggle of different hard science people, especially physicists. He realized that he didn’t really know how energy is or should be defined, so he went around asking these folks, whose bread and butter is studying energy, and their somewhat sheepish answer was, “We don’t really know,” followed up by, “Well, it’s the capacity to make stuff happen.”

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in Depression
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Grief: From Pain to Poignancy

Most of us are not very good at grieving. We deny loss, we judge emotions, we fear getting lost or stuck, or “wallowing,” or we fear judgment or unsupportiveness from others. Maybe it’s the legacy of eons of human history in which we were so exposed to disease, social chaos, natural disasters,  psychological trauma, capricious death, that we had to learn and teach our young an emotional stoicism to just survive. Maybe it’s our American culture of individualism, hyper-masculine, capitalism, gladiatorial social relations. Regardless, if we look in, and around, most of us will find a good measure of ambivalence about grief. Yet, without learning the terrain and skill of grieving, we’re left profoundly exposed to the vagaries of this life and all its losses. It behooves us to be better grievers.

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in Depression
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Depression: Finding energy when feeling exhausted

One of the hardest elements of depression, as you who have experienced it will know, is that when depressed, it takes more energy, and more time, to do less, and to do it less efficiently. Yet, the dilemma of this fact is that to do nothing has about the same effect as napping in quicksand.

So I want to focus here on a core principle of working with depression, being: match your work to your amount of energy, and build energy by working. I’ll use a near-at-hand example-me-to illustrate this principle, and then do some theorizing towards the end.

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in Depression
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

The Education of the Depressive (pt.2)

(This article is a continuation from last month, which, if you missed, can be found here.)

5) Graduate School

Deeper and deeper into the subject at hand.  As in literal graduate school, you are focusing in on your subject and seeing both the minutia in greater relief, as well as the more profound levels of reality.  At this level, with depression as a syndrome being essentially dissolved, the process of healing can continue into these subtle realms of more detailed mapping, and more attention to breaking up the fragments of depression (e.g., negative thinking as it is anchored in bodily experience) that are left in one, even though depression itself has been crushed.

This is the level where the grieving (being defined as, “The emotional process of letting go of that which is already gone”) becomes less of something that happens to us than something that we intentionally do.  Letting go, and practicing non-control, becomes finer and finer as we recognize how the belief in futility is encoded in our memories and nervous systems at subtler and subtler levels.  We come to embrace grieving as the actual process by which acceptance is attained, and see clearly how and why that is the only path to a real openness and reception of life as it is.  It’s a place where various wisdom tradition teachings are stripped down to their basic realities, and we start seeing their truths at our very funky and unique individual levels.

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in Depression / Therapy
 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

“April is the cruelest month”

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory with desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

(T. S. Eliot, “The Burial of the Dead,” from The Waste Land)

A patient, deep in depression, recently wrote to try to describe his experience of Spring. He said, “The sunshine is crushing, the flowers are incredibly sad, and seeing the couples in the park is like stepping on the third rail.” Why is this? Why do the very things that feel life affirming and attractive, when we are not depressed, become sources of pain when we have descended into depression?

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in Depression