A Holistic Approach to Anxiety & Depression
When a cookie-cutter, un-holistic approach isn’t working.
Going beyond the label. Address the toxic cycles behind the anxiety/depression.
The one who comes fully alive is still in you. Even though there is distance, a thread of connection remains. This is how you are fighting for yourself in the face of anxiety and depression.
You are stuck in anxiety/depression loops.
✅ You’ve got the toolkits.
You’ve been handed the breathing kits, told to reason your thoughts away, or that it’s all about your engagement with the materials. While these coping skills have value, they lose their potency when unthoughtfully and universally applied.
✅ Your understanding stops at the label.
A diagnostic stamp was applied to your anxiety/depression cycles and the exploration stopped there. You are uncertain exactly how it works and what triggers it. The diagnosis may have helped provide you some ground, but the roots are missing.
✅ You think it’s all you.
Stopping at a label can leave clients with the impression that it’s all about their coping skills. The environment, relationships, and external often gets ignored. But coping skills can’t change a toxic work environment that’s leaving you looping in anxiety or a relationship that’s not working anymore that’s leaving you looping in depression.
Why a Holistic Approach to Anxiety & Depression?
There are many roots to anxiety and depression: toxic relationships, living in systems/culture not built for you to thrive, misaligned lives, hormonal cycles, familial inheritance, adaptive survival response, chemical imbalances, substance usage, and more.
Bringing it all to the light helps counselors assist a client to find coping skills and life changes their body is craving that are unique to them. To me, it’s part of listening to a client in a way that helps them hear their own wisdom, tendencies towards healing, and needs.
Greeting your anxiety and depression.
Anxiety and depression flourish with inattention, neglect, and isolation.
Attention:
Turn towards your story and your discomfort. Explore the roots and qualities of the cycles with Mindfulness and Somatic therapies.
Care:
Begin to define the specific care and structure you need to get through the cycle and avoid it when possible with Gestalt and Humanistic therapies.
Connection:
Create a deeper, more compassionate connection with yourself and your your world through IFS and Attachment therapies.
