What if: they are but symptoms
Depression, Anxiety, OCD, ADHD...
I continue to be amazed at the ways in which the following conditions - Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Depression or Major Depressive Disorder, Attention and Hyperactivity Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - continue to be reframed by the experts as not stand-alone conditions in their own right.
A recent video with Dr. Gabor Mate (trauma expert, MD) referred to them as “symptoms” rather than “diseases.”
He said you could call them diseases, but that that’s a shallow approach.
Either within the person’s own body/mind or within their family/ancestral line there were adaptations or unresolved needs - traumas that were imprinted/set upon the body/brain and mind connection to struggle to adapt, to process, to resolve.
It didn’t. It couldn’t. So we adjusted - sometimes mal-adapatively so.
Much like our nervous systems get stuck, so do our abilities to process, integrate, and evolve in a healthy way.
That may sound all very far-out -
But I share it because starting with them as symptoms can make a key difference in reframing the starting point and how to treat them… if may shift if you regard them as curable, treatable, or the root cause.
Embedded in there is a notion that you must go deeper, because you may not have healed or addressed where it came from.
Sure, it could have been from your own life, childhood, abuse, problems with hormones and neuro-transmitters, but -
If they are symptoms, they have causes and possible treatment approaches that vary tremendously.
That’s one of the most maddening things about having anxiety and/or depression - I think, anyway, from my own personal experience.
You don’t always know why.
I recall stopping sleeping and being diagnosed with depression and them wanting to know if I didn’t like college and just wanted to go home.
It was laughable to me - I didn’t want to go home.
I wanted to stay in college more than anything.
But I felt like I was losing my fucking mind, because I couldn’t sleep.
Still - I was diagnosed with depression and given anti-depressants.
Thank God they helped me sleep.
But, now, looking back - it was a bandaid -
It didn’t treat the underlying issue.
So, it would resurface again and again.
Both my mother and I — and I think even my therapists and the psychologist and doctor I went to - likely believed that there was no treating or curing my depression.
Because it was listed in the family history from my mother’s side.
Yes, a nod perhaps to how far medicine and psychiatry and psychology has come.
And also - we didn’t know hot to approach the body/mind/spirit as an integrated system. It was so limited to how to approach it.
I am reminded of how much I’ve needed to learn, to read, to try, to experience, on my own - in my own healing journey.
I look back and - in my case, and—
I believe this very strongly -
While I grew up believing/having been taught that I just got a genetic bad hand dealt to me - a predisposition to depression from my mother and her side of the family -
I now understand to be unresolved trauma and a need to heal the wounds that had led to depression.
Was the depression real? Absolutely.
Was it a mood- no? It was too deeply ingrained and long-standing.
I understand the impetus to call it a disease or mental illness.
But the problem with that is we treat it as stand alone without considering what led us there.
Also, unfortunately, we mostly just offer up medications or talk therapy as western-based and stream-lined ways of ‘treating’ depression.
We treat symptoms in western medicine and don’t try for a cure. Many don’t even think it exists - at least with medication. More research is certainly needed, but also —
An integrated and holistic approach —what is sometimes called eastern or alternative medicine - is—ironically—the more advanced. It’s usually more comprehensive and also includes many different approaches to treating different types of depression.
Now, twenty three years later - I have so much I would tell that 19 year old girl who took a medical leave from college because she couldn’t sleep.
I would tell her that it didn’t have to be a life sentence - that I was carrying some heavy wounds in my DNA and a hefty emotional inheritance that I would need to address.
But - that there was hope. That it could set me free from restricting “mental illnesses” and diseases.
Now - I take stock of what I’ve tried and how where I am now is so so different from then -
I believe EMDR helped to cure my anxiety.
I believe hot yoga treated my anxiety and trauma and depression.
I believe somatic healing helped to heal my residual grief and trauma.
I also believe that biofield tuning cured my genetic depression.
I know that adjusting my microbiome improved my gut and anxiety and mood and sleep.
I know that polyvagal stimulation helped ease me out of fight-flight.
It all sounds oh-so woo-woo. It doesn’t make any sense.
But it’s my truth. My lived embodied experiences.
And I offer it because - I see how my depression and anxiety and intergenerational trauma and addiction were but symptoms.
They were wounds.
They were trauma.
But they are—increasingly—more and more relegated to my past life - and while they may have been my family’s history - they need not be the future unfolding as well.
There is hope.
<3