Gently Heal Your Depression

The cause—or causes—of your depression are important. But they are not as important as healing it. Here’s an analogy that will help explain what I mean: If a pedestrian is hit by a car and is badly injured, the emergency room physician doesn’t need to know what happened. He doesn’t need to know where the accident took place, how fast the car was going, or if the driver had been drinking. All he needs to do is determine, by x-rays or other means, the extent of the pedestrian’s injuries and treat them.

When the patient’s immediate medical needs have been met and her healing is underway, then it makes sense for her to take additional steps to take care of herself. She may decide to wear reflective clothes if the accident happened at night. She may decide that trying to beat traffic by running across the street against a red light is not something she wants to do anymore. Or she may change her route and stay way from traffic altogether. Before she goes walking again, it’s important that she understands why the accident happened and how to prevent it from happening again. But like I said, what’s more important—much more important—right after the accident is that she gets the medical care she needs.

One way to look at depression is that it’s an injury, or as is more often the case, a collection of injuries. But they aren’t physical injuries. They’re emotional ones. And just as physical injuries are cause by physical traumas, emotional injuries are caused by emotional traumas. And just as it’s more important to treat  physical injuries, so that it can begin healing, than it is to determine what caused them, it’s more important to give the emotional injuries that caused your depression the treatment they need so they can start to heal.

There are lots of treatments for the emotional injuries that cause depression. The one I recommend people start with is giving themselves lots and lots of self compassion for the pain the injuries have caused. I recommend this because we human beings are innately compassionate, because everyone can learn to give themselves the compassion that they automatically give to others who are hurting, and because doing that is a very good treatment for healing the emotional injuries that cause depression. Once you’ve done that and healing of those injuries is underway, then, as I wrote at the start of this post, it’s helpful and appropriate to look at what caused the injuries and how to prevent future ones.