How Being Trauma-Informed Transformed My Experience With Depression

A fortnight ago, I noticed that it was getting harder to get out of bed. On some mornings, I’d succeed in escaping reality with a couple of extra hours of sleep. Mostly, this featured strange dreams communicating my subconscious insecurities.

But on other mornings, I’d find myself just lying on my sheets without an ounce of energy despite having slept for thirteen hours. For a minimum of forty-five minutes, sometimes stretching to five more hours, I would lie there, disconnected from my body, staring at nothing, having thousands of fleeting thoughts that induced longer-lasting feelings.

These would never be good feelings. They would be nasty enough for the thought of death to seem like an obvious solution.

Regardless, after a while, I always managed to drag my behind to the eventual task of the day that couldn’t be put off till later. You know, like my son’s hunger, a client’s counselling session, or a pending purchase of staples.

Once I start working, I feel the looming negativity take a back seat. The dopamine derived from completing tasks helps fuel my motivation. The smile on my child’s face wipes away the suicidal thoughts. And for about eight to nine hours, I completely forget that I’m suffering from moderate depression.

This high-functioning variation of the world’s leading cause of disability only showed up in my life because I’ve been dealing with depression for a decade now. First diagnosed at age seventeen, my relationship with my mental illness has transformed beautifully in the last ten years.

All the credit goes to the privilege that gave me access to knowledge. As a psychologist, I’ve been blessed with information, tools, and resources that have completely changed the way I view and experience my illness.

So much so that this time, when I relapsed, it felt both familiar and different. Familiar because I’ve spent so much time in my entire adult life so far dealing with the symptoms. And different because this is the first time I feel like depression is not my enemy.

Instead, it feels like a natural consequence of the life situations that preceded its onset. Since I’m a trauma-informed mental health professional, there is a vast difference in how I view my problems vis a vis how a conventional professional would.

In the past, the field of mental health has focussed on the disease model, which looks at illness as a set of symptoms, risk factors, and circumstances warranting treatment or cure. There is a dichotomy between sickness and health and you can only be in one place at a time.

The trauma-informed lens, on the other hand, sees health as a continuum. It focuses more on what factors will incrementally push an individual further up the spectrum. With that logic, it’s not that my depression has returned again putting me back at square one in spite of therapy and anti-depressants.

Rather, what’s happening is that I’ve moved further down the line temporarily till I fight my way back up. This model helps accommodate the idea of high-functioning depression. It also forces me to focus on the things that work for me as opposed to the “problem behaviours”.

It’s almost as if being trauma-informed eliminates any scope for judging what’s happening to me, which paves the way for genuine learning.

For example, I haven’t been eating much in the last couple of days. With the disease model, I’d look at this as a classic symptom of depression; changes in appetite. It would add to the mental checklist I used to have in my head confirming that I’m in a shit situation that needs to be fixed.

In contrast, the lack of judgement has allowed me to understand this appetite change. Just recently, I realised that when I don’t eat for hours at a stretch, I feel the physical signs of hunger in my abdomen. This feeling is very satisfying as opposed to the general numbness and disembodiment I feel when I wake up every morning.

It makes me feel alive. It reminds me that this is my body.

I would have never gotten this insight if I just saw my inability to eat as further proof of my brokenness. Without a clear understanding of the situation, it would have been much harder to find or accept solutions.

Earlier, I had to force myself to eat because a hungry mother is not an effective parent. Now, I replace the need for connection to my body with yoga or simple stretching. Do you see the difference?

The former is perceived in an accusatory way like, “this is what your problem is now deal with it”.

The latter is gentler with an acceptance of the symptom as a biologically correct consequence of the numbness. Once you identify the purpose it was solving, you can easily look for and accept alternatives fulfilling the same purpose.

Imagine looking at the situation from the judging way and then having someone tell you, “beta, yoga kiya karo” (try some yoga, dear). Wouldn’t you want to throw the nearest hard object in their general direction? If not spiral into further self-loathing thoughts.

Another difference I’m seeing in this relapse is in my ability to execute cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

CBT, a very commonly prescribed treatment for thought disorders like depression and anxiety, is essentially the practice of training yourself to identify unhelpful thoughts and then, replacing them with more helpful ones.

I’ve been practicing it since 2016, if not earlier, and back then, it was effective but challenging to initiate. Most probably because I didn’t have access to my “thinking brain”.

Let me explain. According to the Triune Brain Theory, our brain is split into three layers. The innermost layer, or the reptilian brain (aka., survival brain), is responsible for essential bodily functions that help us survive.

A layer on top of it is the emotional brain or the limbic system, known for its involvement in our behavioural and emotional responses.

Finally, on top is the neocortex, the centre of all our grey matter, which equips us to do cognitive tasks that make us human. I like to call this the “thinking brain” because of how we can’t think logically or rationally without it. On a side note, we fail to experience empathy too without the mirror neurons embedded in it.

Now, each time a person feels threatened, the human body is wired to switch off the thinking brain. Quite simply because, if you are being attacked by a predator, you can’t afford to think, “hmmm, I wonder what the length of this field is so I can determine the appropriate speed I need to run at in order to escape this beast pronto…”

No! You’d just run as fast as possible immediately without giving it much thought. Because that is the only way to save yourself.

Interestingly, the threats that our daily lives put on us today aren’t wild animals chasing us but abstract things like bills, deadlines, people’s expectations, etc.

So, as much as our body is cut out to stop cognition and initiate movement (fight or flight), it doesn’t help us anymore.

When you’re depressed, you see threats everywhere all the time. So, your thinking brain is more or less switched off for the most part. How can one perform CBT if the main organ that makes CBT possible is in resting mode?

No wonder this treatment took so much effort back then. Today, the situation is different.

My training in trauma-informed therapy has equipped me with several tools that switch my thinking brain back on. These are mostly ways to relax my body and trick my brain into believing that there isn’t any threat around.

After all, if you relax your muscles, your brain gets the feedback that the threat around you doesn’t need you to fight or flee. Automatically, you regain access to your neocortex.

Ever since I have learned this, my focus has been on training my body to notice any muscle tension as quickly as possible so that I can release it. Consequently, I have a lot more access to my neocortex than I ever did before.

Therefore, CBT is a lot easier to do. Not to say that it’s a smooth sailing journey at all times. I did mention that on some days it takes five waking hours in bed before I can reach my desk. Nevertheless, it feels a lot more doable than ever before.

These are two of the many ways being trauma-informed has transformed my experience with depression. Feel free to share your thoughts, opinions, and personal experiences in the comments below. I’d love to hear what works or doesn’t work for you.

And if you know someone else battling depression, do share this article with them!