Why counselling doesn’t work on the treatment for depression

If you are already feeling depressed then there’s a very good chance that talking about your problems and why you feel the way you do will only result in making you feel even worse.

While it can be helpful to have a sympathetic ear and someone to off load to, talking about what’s not working in your life and how low you feel, will only serve to keep you locked into feeling depressed.

What causes depression?

While the external reasons that affect peoples mood may vary, a big factor in feeling depressed is the link between sleep and serotonin.
When you sleep at night your body goes through different sleep cycles. During the deep stages of sleep your body is at work repairing, detoxifying and replenishing. Serotonin, one of the bodies key neurotransmitters, is produced during the deep stages of sleep. Serotonin regulates your sleep, mood, appetite and libido. Serotonin and sleep go hand in hand because serotonin also produces melatonin, the hormone that regulates your natural sleep cycle.
Therefore to keep you perky and sleeping well serotonin is the wonder drug produced by your body.

During sleep you also dream. Whether or not you can remember your dreams doesn’t matter. Dreaming is a natural part of the sleep cycle. The reason you dream is to allow your mind to process your thoughts and feelings through story and metaphor, helping to create more headspace for you the following day. A little like deleting old files on your laptop to create more space.
Situations in life can naturally make you worry more. Many people have a tendency to misuse their imagination and think in worst-case scenario terms, which creates greater feelings of anxiety and worry in the mind and body. All of these worries, doubts and anxieties need to be processed during sleep. Therefore if we have more things on our mind, we spend longer in the dream state dreaming them out. The dream state is a paradoxical form of sleep and during the dream state we are actually fully conscious.

What does this have to do with depression? The longer you spend in the dream state, the less time you spend in deep sleep, which is when the body produces most of it’s serotonin. Low serotonin levels lead to you feeling lethargic, tired, lacking motivation to do anything, overwhelmed, sad, like you have no control of your life and feeling alone among other things.

What’s the right treatment for depression?

While now and again a problem shared can be a problem halved, in the treatment for depression, the most successful interventions involve;

Calming down the mind and helping to slow down the run away train of negative thoughts
Educating you on how to manage your thought processes in a more productive way, stopping you from thinking the worst
Understanding what factors have led you to feeling depressed and helping you to see life from a different angle through a solution focused approach
Showing you techniques to lift your mood every day
Helping you shine a light on what is going well in your life
Teaching you successful sleep strategies to get you sleeping better and using hypnosis to calm down the mind and help you get better quality sleep
Educating you on the right foods to eat to boost your mood
Helping you understand what depression is and empowering you with the knowledge and techniques needed to help you get through this period in your life no matter how long you have felt this way

Why counselling isn’t the best treatment for depression

Many forms of counselling are long and drawn out and problem orientated rather than solution focused meaning they tend to focus on the problem and what’s not working or what has happened in the past, getting you to rake over old ground, rather than moving you forward using interventions such as those highlighted above. While counselling can highlight why you feel the way you do, it can’t create the same shifts that hypnotherapy and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) can to getting you feeling happy, healthy and more energised.
My clients have been amazed at how quickly they have got better as a result of working with me because many of them have spent years in counselling to no avail.

One of my recent clients who has spent most of her adult life feeling depressed and had ‘tried everything’, opened her eyes after our first session of hypnotherapy and said her eyes ‘felt like diamonds’. Her husband feels like he has a new wife.

Another client came back for her second session, again having spent her life battling with depression and through every form of counselling, to tell me that she had ‘the best night’s sleep’ she can ever remember having after our first session. She felt like the fog she had been living in had been lifted and she could see life in colour again.

Listen to how Olivia overcame clinical depression and ME and now runs 3 successful businesses…..

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Sara Maude

Sara Maude is an Edinburgh Hypnotherapist, Solution-Focused Psychotherapist, EFT Practitioner, Transformational Coach and International Wellbeing Trainer providing in-person and online sessions. Sara provides problem-free therapy which goes deep into the heart of the unconscious mind to create powerful lasting change.