What I help with
Depression therapy for the weight that will not lift.
Depression is not sadness, and people who have it usually say so. Sadness has a subject. Depression is flatter than that.
What this is
Depression is not sadness, and people who have it usually say so. Sadness has a shape and a subject. Depression is flatter than that. It is the loss of motion, of color, of the sense that anything you do will land anywhere.
It shows up as tiredness that sleep does not fix, as a slow retreat from people you actually like, as difficulty starting things that used to be automatic, and as a running commentary that is harsher with you than you would ever be with anyone else. In children and teenagers it often looks less like sadness and more like irritability, or like school quietly becoming impossible.
There is usually a reason. Depression follows loss, prolonged stress, trauma, isolation, and stretches where you have had to hold more than one person can reasonably hold. In Internal Family Systems terms, the part that has shut things down is often trying to stop you feeling something it judged unsurvivable. Understanding that is where the work starts.
What the work looks like
A quiet, honest shape to the hour.
We look for what shut down, and when
Depression rarely arrives from nowhere. We trace it back, without pressure, to what was happening when the lights began to dim. Psychodynamic work earns its place here, because much of that is not consciously available at first.
We work with the critic, not against it
Almost everyone carrying depression also carries an internal voice that calls the depression a personal failure. In IFS that voice is a part with a history. We get to know it rather than try to out-argue it, which never works for long.
We rebuild motion in small, real steps
Insight on its own does not restore energy. Alongside the deeper work we pay attention to sleep, movement, contact with other people, and the smallest actions that are genuinely available to you this week, not the ones that would be available if you were already well.
Who this is for
Adults, teenagers, children, and older adults in Greenville and across South Carolina. That includes depression that has been present for years, depression that arrived after a specific loss or a birth or a move, seasonal patterns, and the functional kind where you are still going to work and still answering messages and nobody around you has any idea. I also work with families where one member is depressed and the household has quietly reorganized itself around it.
Questions
A few things people ask.
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