depression as a message that your heart is wounded
Today we are revisiting our series, “what is your depression trying to tell you?” in which we delve into understanding our emotions as messengers helping us interpret our unmet needs. Emotions (even the painful ones) are friends, not foes, trying to give us vital information about our internal world so we can fix issues at their source and thrive again.
Let’s explore one message that depression may be trying to get you to hear: that your heart is wounded. There’s great book about dealing with painful emotions called “Feelings Buried Alive Never Die” by Karol K Truman. Wow, that title paints a mental picture, huh? The truth is that we can’t outrun pain; we cannot stuff it in the closet and close the door and hope it disappears. The hard truth is that buried pain will be there waiting for us until we are ready to deal with. But if you stuff enough of it, it might start to pop up in your life in uninvited ways and crash your party. This stuffed pain may show up in the form of depression, chronic illness, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, low grade anxiety, or physical ailments like head aches, irritable bowel syndrome, etc.
Consider these examples:
Somatic psychologist Susanne Babbel MFT, PhD writes about the connection between psychological health and chronic pain issues: “Often, physical pain functions to warn a person that there is still emotional work to be done, and it can also be a sign of unresolved trauma in the nervous system.”
Johns Hopkins Medicine illustrates that chronic anger, resentment, and unforgiveness can increase your likelihood for suffering from depression, anxiety, heart disease and diabetes, as well as lowers immunity and increases chronic pain. But practicing forgiveness can improve your cholesterol, help you sleep better, decrease pain, and lower your risk of heart attack.
In my own life, I’ve experienced depression in different seasons and for different reasons. There was a season when I was stuck in a job where I felt overwhelmed, overworked, and like my passion was all dried up. During this time I was constantly fatigued, felt like I could never get enough sleep, and I was pretty irritable. To deal with the stress, I would overeat and over-binge on Netflix and social media to numb out the sense of frustration I felt, further adding to the feelings of depression. In this case, the depressive feelings were a helpful indicator to me that my work-life was way out of whack and causing all kinds of issues for me. The pain of the depressive symptoms forced me to stop and re-evaluate this area of my life and make the hard choices to leave that job and deal with the underlying fears that were keeping me stuck and giving me excuses not to chase after the dreams my heart truly craved.
Another time in my life I dealt with depressive symptoms that were coming from underlying resentment issues in my close relationships. I was constantly feeling like people were taking advantage of my kindness, like my time was all tied up doing things that I really didn’t want to do, and that I couldn’t say no. What it felt like in that season was a slowly building underlying anger, always being drained of energy, and a listless hopelessness that prevented me from connecting to a sense of joy in my present or excitement about my future. Where was this depression really coming from?
At the time I had no idea, but after digging deeper with the help of a therapist, I discovered this depression was trying to help me address on-going issues with not knowing how to set boundaries with people. As my therapist and I dug deeper into the boundaries issue, I discovered this was coming from a low self-esteem and faulty belief that I had to earn love in my life through being helpful to others. Going through this process with my therapist changed my life. Today I am so thankful for that period of depression because it alerted me to some huge issues under the surface that were sabotaging me and needed an overhaul. In place of this dysfunction, I started to understand that I am worthy of love simply for who I am, not what I do. I am still learning this in my life, and the journey has been LIBERATING! As a result of addressing those root issues, I started to thrive and come alive in ways I had not experienced before. It’s been a beautiful journey, and it’s still ongoing. And paying attention to what my depression was trying to tell me helped get me here.
Painful emotions such as resentment, rage, hopelessness, are not meant to wreck you—they are meant to help you. Just like the nerve endings that scream “PAIN! PAIN! PAIN!” when your hand touches a hot stove, those pain receptors go into alarm mode so you can take action and snatch your hand off the heat and treat the burn before any major damage is done. Same with our painful emotions—if we can learn to be really tuned into our emotions and follow the symptoms of pain to the source of the unmet need, we can return to a state of emotional health. It’s when we ignore the pain sirens and leave our emotions on the burning stove that we end up with bigger problems.
Therapy can help you dig under the surface of the depressed, anxious, numbed out, or overwhelmed feelings and find out what the roots are. It can help you find pain that needs comfort, shame that needs compassion, and lies about yourself that need to be upgraded into beautiful, liberating truths. Therapy can help you learn to live more self-aware and tuned in emotionally so you can catch little things before they become big things and learn the tools to care for yourself as life happens.
Call today for a free 15-minute phone session if you’d like to talk about working with me to take the next step in this journey for yourself.