I’m going to make it.

I’m going to make it. I keep telling myself that. I’m back on the therapy wagon. I’ve been searching for someone who does EMDR therapy. And I found a person. While investigating different kinds of therapy, I found out there was something called “depression therapy.”

Depression therapy is something that I didn’t know existed. Over the years, I’ve talked about being depressed with my various therapists. I’ve gone through periods where I’ve felt low. But, I wouldn’t necessarily believe that there was therapy that specifically addressed depression. I guess there is.

When I was growing up, I heard about the wondrous nature of therapy. My parents told me how it could help with your problems. I started seeing a therapist at age 15, and I was depressed. It wasn’t a fun time. Talking about depression in therapy helped me. It was difficult to talk about the vulnerable emotions that surrounded being depressed. I felt shame for not being able to function at an optimum level. I felt like I was different from my peers and that made me sad. It was difficult to relate to those around me when I was fixated on how down I felt about myself. It wasn’t easy to get over being depressed. It took some time because I needed to get to the bottom of what was causing my depression. Part of it was that my brain works differently than other people’s brains. Another issue was hormonal. I was a teenager, and another problem is that I was used to thinking negative thoughts about myself.

I believed that I wasn’t trying hard enough. The idea that I was causing my depression made me feel even worse. When you’re already depressed, and you blame yourself for the misery it hurts. I didn’t know that I was harming myself with these negative thought patterns because I thought that I wasn’t trying hard enough to be happy. I looked at the people around me, and they all seemed to be enjoying their teenage years, but I was fighting with the black fog of depression. I would have given anything to feel better, but I could not lift the weight of my sadness. It was more than the sadness; it was the loss of hope. I didn’t think that I was ever going to feel better. I thought I was stuck with depression and I just had to manage these awful feelings. I was wrong because they did eventually leave when I worked on my problems in therapy and started taking medication. But at the moment they felt cumbersome. There was hope, and that brings me to the type of treatment that I’m doing now. I am engaging in EMDR which is trauma therapy.

I didn’t realize how much trauma impacted me, and I wasn’t able to move through it; I kept going, and that wasn’t me dealing with my problems. I was going through the motions. I was a zombie, and I wasn’t facing the scary things that happened to me. I wouldn’t say that it was even so much “scary” as it was a particular event that impacted and saddened me. I didn’t want to look at it because it was painful. I tried to bury it, but I knew that it was time to deal with it and I did. I looked at it, I went to EMDR therapy, and when I was there, I watched my therapist move two fingers back and forth, not knowing what to expect. I was skeptical at first because I didn’t know what was going on. As I watched my therapist’s fingers move, I closed my eyes, and I started to see bizarre things that didn’t make sense at first, but after a while, they formed a pattern, which revealed that I wasn’t over my trauma. My brain was telling me that I needed to see these things – even if they were disturbing – allowing me to heal. I knew that healing wasn’t going to take one day, that it’d take a while, but that’s okay. I’m going to make it. I don’t know how, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know that therapy is a piece of the puzzle, and another part is talking to friends, writing, living. Being me. And I know this -I’m going to make it.