There may be periods when depression comes into your life, perhaps sometimes more insidious, sometimes maybe suddenly, brutally, ruining your plans. It becomes your enemy who, as time goes by, if you do not pay attention to it, tries to install itself more and more comfortably. The climax may be when, tired of its attacks, you consider that life really doesn’t make sense to you anymore.

What are the symptoms of depression? Depressive mood most of the day, almost every day; significant reduction of interest or pleasure for all or almost all activities, most of the day, almost every day; significant involuntary weight loss or weight gain (e.g., a change of more than 5% of body weight in a month), or decrease or increase in appetite; insomnia or hypersomnia; unrest or psychomotor slowness; fatigability or lack of energy; feelings of uselessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt; diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecision. These symptoms are present almost every day. In addition, recurrent thoughts of death and recurrent suicidal ideation may occur. You can see if in the last two weeks such symptoms have appeared, but for a correct evaluation, you really need to call a specialist!

Although it may seem paradoxical, you can turn depression – enemy into depression – ally! And you can do this by turning to an experienced psychologist who can help you see what is behind depression and find the right solutions for you.

Behind depression you can discover several causes:

• older sufferings, reactivated by a recent event; for example, the separation from your partner, who activated the fear of abandonment, the fear that was structured in childhood, in relation to the significant people in your life;
• anger accumulated in time, unexpressed and turned in the present against your own person;
• sometimes depression is generated by subtler things, such as burdens transmitted at the transgenerational level; it can be a depression whose role is to keep the mother, in her turn depressed, afloat (you can self-assess in the role of a helpless person and in this way you give a meaning to your mother’s life, who feels useful helping you);
• a perfectionism that does not leave you alone and that has become burdensome;
• if we talk about postpartum depression: you just became mother, some changes have occurred, things do not take place as you expected, you are overwhelmed by the new role in your life, you are missing professional life, etc.

So, from the enemy, depression can turn into an ally, because it can give you the opportunity to become aware of unsuspected things until then, to work in the direction of processing events, painful situations, to reassemble things emotionally and to grow on a personal level.

Psychotherapy is the solution to get rid of depression! At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that if we talk about psychotherapy, this is not an event and that’s it – things are miraculously solved! It is a process, which takes place sometimes faster, sometimes slower, depending on the rhythm of each person! The important thing is that, at the end of it, you can leave behind the patterns by which you sabotage yourself and you can have the life you want.