energy Archives – Marty Cooper, PhD, MFT

June 29, 2017August 27, 2022 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

Energy Theft: The Toxic forms of Shame and Guilt

[Democracy is coming]

From the homicidal bitchin’

That goes down in every kitchen

To determine who will serve and who will eat.

(Leonard Cohen, “Democracy”)

Sarah, 27, who is about to finish graduate school with a PhD in engineering, hates to call her mother…and does so, dutifully, and with dread, every week. Saturday mornings come with a call that her father always picks up. “Hi Dad, how are you?” She’s not close with her father, who has never seemed that interested in her. “Well,” he says, “Retirement is better than not. Doing some golf. Things are going ok,” this being a version of what he always says before, “Oh, here’s your mother. Be well.”

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.”

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.