Depression and Self-Esteem

Depression sucks the life out of you.

Typical symptoms include:

Feeling bad or shameful about yourself

Poor boundaries and difficulty asserting yourself

Difficulty identifying your needs

Chronic sadness or irritability

Feeling stuck, without purpose or direction

Feeling disconnected

Low self-esteem

Low mood

Depression can have many causes, including lifestyle, hormonal, and psychological causes.

1

Psychological factors include

poor boundaries and being passive, disconnection from your needs, suppressing key emotions like sadness/grief or anger, unresolved trauma, negative self-talk, and low self-esteem.

2

Hormonal factors include:

Adrenal fatigue, hypothyroidism, low testosterone and sex hormone levels. Hormonal imbalances are common yet often underdiagnosed in depression – even when a Dr says that your test results are “normal”!

3

Lifestyle factors include:

sunlight exposure, exercise levels, diet, sugar consumption, omega 3 levels, engaging in enjoyable social activities, and improving sleep quality.

Through Somatic Therapy we can effectively address the psychological causes of depression.

Transforming Self-Esteem

The tragic reality is that many people struggle with low self-esteem. People with low self-esteem often struggle with poor boundaries and passive communication. It is a vicious circle, because when a person doesn’t speak up for themselves this in turn leaves them feeling worse about themselves. Yet it can be hard to speak up for yourself when you don’t believe you are worth it. In Somatic Therapy we work with boundaries at a concrete practical level – in the body where boundaries are felt and expressed.

Low self-esteem is usually an unconscious survival strategy for how a person coped with trauma, neglect, and/or abandonment in their early years. Think of a young child – small and utterly dependent on their parents. When a parent fails or traumatizes them, it is terrifying to look the truth in the eye and see that the parent has shortcomings that the child cannot change and yet is utterly dependent on the parent for their survival. The truth would be terrifying to see, so children almost universally make a story that the trauma or neglect was their fault because they aren’t lovable or good enough. The child does not knowingly sign up for a lifetime of crippling self-esteem. Rather it is a split-second unconscious decision that forges this belief in the child. By seeing the trauma or neglect as their fault, the child holds onto an idealized illusion of their parent, represses their anger so they don’t upset the parent, and also gains a sense of control because they believe if they just act better or differently then the trauma and/or neglect will not happen again.

Through a blend of Somatic Therapy, Coherence Therapy, and Applied Neuroscience, we can transform your self-esteem into a relationship of love and caring.

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