Struggling with Depression as a Mental Health Professional
Sometimes it helps me empathize; Sometimes I just feel like a hypocrite
“Professional? Masters degrees [plural]? Starting a Ph.D.? Clinical Mental Health Counselor? What the hell do you know? Do you really think you can help people? What do you have to offer?”
These questions are brought to you by “Impostor Syndrome” — the sometimes crippling thought that you are not good enough, smart enough, experienced enough, or just enough at all. While Impostor Syndrome may not be an official diagnosis in any manual or catalog, it impacts many people across many disciplines. Myself included.
The Past
The short version is that I was a moody teenager whose moodiness become overwhelming, developed into actual depression, when then manifested itself into suicidal thoughts and risk-taking activities with wanton disregard for my safety or the safety of others.
The longer version is that I, like many people, had no idea how to healthily regulate my emotions or how to compartmentalize different areas of life that were causing me distress so I would flood with emotion and eventually explode. Although my upbringing was relativity stable, I still struggled emotionally. Situations that other people could just let pass, I would dwell on until it dominated my attention.
Eventually, things became too much for me to handle on my own so I began to unload more and more on my friends until, of no fault of their own because they were just kids too, it became too much for them as well. Having become a burden, or at least believing I was, I began to have fewer people with whom I could speak about my problems.
Alone one night, I went to the roof of an abandoned hospital that my friends and I used to sneak into (don’t tell my mom…) and did so with the intent of not using the stairs to come back down. Not to leave you in suspense, I made my way back down the stairs several hours later after weighing my options between life and death, hope and despair, continuing or quitting.
Even now, I cannot really place what helped me make the decision to live. Sometimes I tell myself it was because I didn't think the building was tall enough, other times I think God showed up in a very critical moment before I really actually had any faith at all. I have a lot now but that is a different story and one I will mention briefly below.
The Progress
Sometime after coming down off the roof via a staircase and not unassisted gravity, things began to get better. Not on their own or with no effort, however. In fact, it was a lot of work and required a lot of change.
I started seeing a counselor who was calm and compassionate and allowed me to feel my emotions while also helping me understand and process where these emotions were coming from and what I needed to do with them. I needed to listen to them, learn to speak their language, and learn to express my emotions, healthily, to other people. This is what started everything for me. It is why I am here today doing what I am doing professionally and writing what I am writing pleasurably.
While working with this counselor, I also began playing lacrosse at my high school. Being from the south, this was not a common sport but a handful of people I was acquainted with invited me to come to check it out and see if I liked it.
I loved it.
But mostly, I loved the friends I made. I felt like, and truly did, belong. Having grown up in the shadows of other people, I finally felt like I was able to be myself and be understood by other people who cared about me. That was, and is still, important for me to experience because, before this, I felt like, and was alone.
Eventually, one of my friends from the lacrosse team invited me to a church youth group. It was at this point that I began to get curious about the big picture of everything. I mean everything. What was so monumental about this experience, was that this was the first time in a long time that I had actually counted the future as being anything. Prior to this, I did not care about a future I was not certain I would be a part of in the first place.
Among many other things that this changed about my life, it gave me hope and made the future something that not only existed in my mind but something I actively looked forward to. This was the type of hope that did not disappoint.
The Present
Currently, I am a mental health counselor and have worked with people with a multitude of different presenting issues, not the least common of which is depression — the very thing that I intensely struggled with in the past. The thing is, however, that I still struggle with depression. Not in the same way as I did a decade ago, of course, but genuine depression is not something that is “cured.” Depression is something that is treated and maintained and will ebb and flow in every individual's life to varying degrees.
Treating and maintaining depression involves work on the part of the individual struggling with it. If I were to stop doing the things that I now know that I need to do in order to maintain homeostasis, I run the risk of being taken down by my depression. Contrariwise, if I keep doing the things that I know are bad for my mental and relational health, I run the risk of staying stuck in depressive states.
This is always important for me to know about myself but it becomes increasingly more important when I am working as a counselor. In order for me to be present, I need to be out of my own head and be as close to 100% “in” with the client because that is what they deserve. That is what was given to me in counseling and others should get nothing less.
Most days, this is easy because during my master's program, preparing me to become a counselor placed a large emphasis on students doing their own work in order to be best prepared to help others. Because of this, I was able to learn more skills for containing my own emotions in order to be fully present with other people. I was also able to learn how to tap into my own emotional pain to empathize with the pain of others. Even if it was not the same situation or the same pain, I could tap into something that I had felt or was currently feeling in order to connect more with someone else.
Some days, this is hard because — as I have said elsewhere — counselors are people too. Not a revolutionary statement, I know, but it is something that I forget about myself. When I try to set myself up as an unfeeling, unwavering force of empathy and connection, I set myself up for failure. When I fail to admit that I am hurting, I do not take the active steps to process my own emotions before a counseling session and can very easily lose track of the therapeutic process; and that feels very hypocritical.
The thing is, I know what I am supposed to do. I spend most of my day talking through what you are supposed to do with depression and pain with other people. The thing is, the gulf between knowledge and action grows wider and wider the more I stop listening to my emotions and stop doing the things I need to do to maintain balance.
When I do take the time to acknowledge this apparent hypocrisy, as I am here, I am actually presented with the opportunity to re-frame it and create an opportunity for connection. The opportunity for connection comes from the fact that, when I understand that I too am human and will not do everything perfectly, I have the opportunity to extend grace and love to myself. When I do this, I am able to demonstrate and model this for the people with whom I work.
No one is always going to practice perfect self-care, no one is going to remain slip-up free when they are working on developing new, healthier habits to improve their mental health.
Not me.
Not you.
Not anyone.
The Presence
I intend to write more on this at some point but here are my abbreviated thoughts. Practicing presence is one of the most fundamental ways in which we can help other people when they are in pain. This can also be called “holding space” for another person and means that we are allowing someone a place in our lives, in our attention, in our hearts. When we allow people a place to process their pain, we give them the opportunity to no longer be overwhelmed by the loneliness that that pain is causing and give them a safe space and a safe relationship within which they can continue healing.
When I am gentle and graceful with myself with my own struggle with depression, I learn how to better hold space for my self and, in turn, become more readily able to hold space for others because I know what it feels like to feel isolated and overwhelmed.
Practicing presence means being immediately available to walk with someone through something. It means truly being there for someone and in order to do this, it helps to be able to tap into an experience of your own without getting dragged down into your own stuff in the process. As one of many counselors who deal with depression, both personally and professionally, I have to work hard to maintain the balance of my own stuff and the pain of others who are coming to counseling.
In the end, I would not trade my story or my experiences for anything else. Everything that I have learned along the way, both in life and in school, has all prepared me to try to be there for people when they are in pain. To practice presence. Learning to process my own pain and deal with my own depression has made me who I am and lead me to the career that I love. So, in an odd way, I am thankful for my experiences with depression.
