Depression. What is your body actually telling you?

Happy Friday everyone! Today is going to be a purely reflective piece, and I hope to make it somewhat shorter. A tall order for me, I know. God bless the tangent.

Depression is a very well known condition, which modern science and psychology evidence has suggested is a dopaminergic issue. Your brain is struggling to generate enough dopamine - the neurotransmitter of pleasure, motivation and inner drive. Hence why we feel so listless, tired, unmotivated and down when we are experiencing a depressive episode.

Thus, the current treatment recommendation for depression is a cognitive behavioural approach of something called Behavioural Activation. Schedule in tasks of either pleasure or mastery in order to boost your dopamine levels, thereby dealing with the root cause of the depressive symptoms and abra cadabra - you are feeling happy, energised and motivated once more! And yes, this is the case, for endogenous forms of depression. But what about exogenous depression, the depression that is a direct consequence of circumstances, stressors and life-changing events? To read more about the difference between those forms of depression, see the link here (https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-endogenous-depression-1067283).

Certainly, we cannot ‘pickle ball’ or ‘craft’ our way out of grief, a feeling of suffocation from debt, or confusion on how to proceed in your career. We cannot productively proceed when our systems are misaligned with our reality. What if depression is actually protecting us, rather than punishing us?

I think we have made a fatal error in our interpretation of depression, and I think it is an invisible consequence of seeing the world and our experiences through the biased lens of capitalism and individualism. When we stop functioning in a way that suits the system of productivity, measurable outcomes, progress and optimisation (shudders), then surely we must be the problem, not the system? Right?

This biased perspective might sound like:
“If I can no longer produce, work, socialise, then I am deficient, broken, and unworthy. Something is wrong with me, I need to fix my depression to better fit the world. No-one else seems to be suffering like I am, so I must be the problem”

What if we have been misunderstanding depression all along? What if it is our body’s most protective and ancient defence mechanism against pursuing a life that does not align with your soul’s truest desires?

I have come to believe, over my many years of practice, that depression is incredibly wise and protective, stopping you from proceeding in a life that you are deeply unhappy and dissatisfied with.

For my visual folk out there, I see depression as a weathered and wise old grandmother that gently approaches you in the night, as you burn the midnight oil, frantically working yourself into the ground. She wraps a warm blanket over your shoulders, gently blows out the light and guides you to bed, reminding you of your exhaustion and your need for rest.

“But I have to finish this or everyone will be disappointed in me!” You shriek, unable to shake off the adrenaline of stress, still coursing through your veins.

Then let them be disappointed, she answers. Completely un-phased by your grand ventures, goals or desires. You are tired. You need rest. And how do you even know the path you so desperately tread is leading you to the destination you desire?

You stop, not because you want to, but because you have to. You realise you cannot continue, and the exhaustion washes over you. Motivation flees. Pleasure eludes you. The whole world stops around you, like someone pressed the big red button that says Do Not Push.

We have been fooled into believing that a life of comfort and pleasure is the very best thing for us. We mistake anhedonia - the psychological symptom of losing pleasure or interest in things you normally enjoy - as a horrible symptom that must immediately be corrected. Throw behavioural activation at it! Bring more pleasure and mastery into your life, more dopamine, more comfort, more enjoyment! In reality, that just worsens the depression. What if anhedonia is actually the solution being subtly communicated to you through your body.

Not more pleasure, less please.

“Modern humans are in a "comfort crisis" - an evolutionary mismatch where the elimination of physical friction and hardship has left us physically and mentally ill. Because our brains are wired for survival in a harsh, scarce world, engineered comfort creates a void that fuels anxiety, depression, and a loss of purpose.”

The Comfort Crisis - Michael Easter (https://www.teesche.com/bookshelf/michael_easter_the_comfort_crisis)

Following this intuitive wisdom, I have been prescribing dopamine fasts to my clients who present with treatment-resistant depression and the results are staggering! They report an almost immediate resolution of depressive symptoms, greater clarity, focus and a sense of inner peace returns.

Here is my radical take - Depression is not the disease or the disorder, it is the antidote to an overly manufactured, highly structured, restrictive life that divorces us from the undeniable reality that we live in a wild, beautiful, untamed world that demands alignment, presence, and gratitude from us. We don’t need to experience more, possess more or accomplish more. Sometimes, we need to slow down, take stock of what we have and plan for the journey ahead, to ensure that both the path we tread and the destination we are moving towards, are aligned with our deepest selves, honours the intuitive spirit of our souls and respects our values in life.

Therapeutic Skill of the Week

I challenge you to conduct the dopamine fast experiment that I give to my clients. For just 1-3 weeks, try the following:

1. No music, podcasts or auditory stimulation while you complete a task, like driving, walking, cooking or cleaning. Just listen to the sounds of the task itself, hear the world around you unfiltered.

2. Limit fast food, high fats and high sugary food intake as much as possible. Get that cheap dopamine out of here! Opt for whole foods instead, like healthy fats, high protein, fruits, leafy greens and legumes.

3. No screen time at all. Yep. AT ALL! No social media, delete all the apps. No TV series, no movies, no documentaries, no true crime. Instead, you can read a book, or listen to a podcast (and not while you are doing something else, just listen to the podcast).

4. If you drink alcohol, use cannabis or smoke nicotine, significantly reduce, if not stop the usage completely.

5. If there is anything else you secretly do that gives you a big rush of dopamine without you earning it, stop doing that thing.

Here is a list of slow dopamine exercises you can do instead:

• Exercise

• Walking

• Reading

• Meditating

• Mindfulness

• Yoga

• Socialising with friends and loved ones

• Writing

• Journaling

• Tidying up

• Cooking

• Completing a little goal or chore

• Listen to nature sounds (I will go as far as allowing emotive, instrumental tracks)

• Laying in the sunshine

• Swimming

• Visiting a new place

Poetic Reflections

    “Water wouldn't sound so melodious if there were no rocks in its way.
It's the resistance that gives it rhythm,
the obstacles that give it a voice.
A river flowing without interruption would be silent, almost unnoticed.
Just like that, ease rarely creates depth.

It's the friction that shapes movement into something meaningful.
The wind becomes music only when it passes through leaves.
A flame dances brighter when it meets the dark.

Stars are only visible because of the night that surrounds them.
Even a heartbeat is felt because of its steady rise and fall.
What challenges you is often what defines your presence.
Because without something to move through, even the strongest force goes unheard.” ‍

- Unknown

Thank you for reading.

All my very best,

Tala

The Psychology of Visibility and the Damage of Invisibility

Happy Friday everyone. It is looking like I’ve fallen into a monthly rather than a weekly rhythm with these posts. Such is life. I shall turn this into a learning moment of adjusting your expectations to fit what is realistic for you, rather than condemn and shame yourself for not meeting an unrealistic standard you have set for yourself. Monthly it is! Hurrah for adaptability and down with perfectionism!

Many of my recent conversations with clients have focused on this experience in life of being witnessed and how this true experience of being witnessed leads to healing. This will be the focus of today’s post.

Think back to a time where you felt the most safe and connected with another person. Likely, your mind takes you back to an interaction where you are seen, actually seen by another person, and you feel a sense of acceptance, belonging and understanding that has only occurred because they witnessed you. They saw you exactly as you are, and did not reject, condemn or shame you. Your experience was accurately reflected back to you, and your nervous system could finally settle down. It felt safe, you were finally understood, you were accepted, you belonged.

I would like to invite you into an honest and critical reflection of why being witnessed doesn’t just feel good, but is fundamentally healing, and why the opposite experience of being dismissed, disregarded, forgotten, misunderstood and unseen is not just distressing or uncomfortable, but actually damages the soul and can even lead to cumulative traumatic presentations such as Complex PTSD and Adjustment Disorder.

Language has evolved alongside human communities, so that we can have a shared, meaningful experience and move collaboratively through life, understanding ourselves and the things that happen to us by echoing our experiences back and forth in conversation with words and with our bodies.

There is a loud bang, and a pre-verbal toddler looks to Mum to gauge whether we should run and cry, or if we are safe. Mum’s body looks safe and happy, so I am safe and happy. Meaning is formed.

Vice versa.

The toddler sees a cockroach and is curious! They pick it up, take it proudly to show Mum and she screams, and immediately the cute little bug becomes a frightening, terrifying, disgusting thing! Run and scream, just like Mum did. No words necessary to create a meaningful experience.

Now, add in the complexity of language, and we start to see how fundamentally life altering it can be to be either seen/understood or unseen/misunderstood by those we rely on to create a shared meaningful experience of our lives.

A young teenager fails her driving test, and tearfully shares her grief, sadness and disappointment in self with her mother. Her mother tells her daughter brightly, “Don’t be sad! You will take the test again and pass, it is no big deal!” Rather than witnessing and reflecting her daughter’s grief, she is unwittingly sending her the message ‘your experience of grief is wrong, stop feeling sad’. Often times, vulnerable teenagers will hear a statement like that and an old wound of “I’m wrong, I’m bad, I’m too much” can get activated. That one opportunity for connection over a normal human experience of disappointment and grief becomes a wound on top of many other wounds of not being seen, heard or understood.

Many people move through life feeling like only a certain version of themselves is worthy of being loved, because of such consistent conditioning as the above situation. When I succeed, when I am happy, when I have no problems, my family and parents reflect those emotions back to me, and I am safe, I am seen, I belong.

Yet, when I have the very normal experiences of sadness, grief, disappointment, frustration, anger, jealousy, and pain, those same loved and trusted people deny my reality, reflect back how I should change to be better, how I am ungrateful, how I should revert back to the happy version that they are able to understand. This complex emotional mess is not welcome here. This does not belong.

Is this experience sounding familiar? We are exploring the fundamental experience of feeling invisible. The whole complexity of your being feels like it is too much to be received by those you love, so you hide who you actually are, how you actually feel, only presenting the version that you have (painfully) learned over time will be accepted and not rejected. This experience of disconnection, in and of itself, is wounding, as our safety wholly depends on our connection with those around us.

Now, let us expand this from the individual level to the societal level.

A great way of understanding the damage of invisibility is to explore the role that societal structures play in systematically excluding or misrepresenting a group of people from the shared narrative of life, portraying an experience through dominant cultural perspectives, which is fundamentally damaging as the above process of feeling misunderstood, unseen, unheard, now becomes amplified on a societal level, and the selective expression of self continues.

“It hurts when the things people were once shamed, punished, or excluded for suddenly become trendy when used by someone with more social power.”

- unknown

Think about the harm that cultural appropriation can cause to entire peoples. Traditions, norms, and practices are often dismissed, disrespected, misunderstood, or misrepresented. This is especially evident in some areas of Western psychology, where ancient healing practices are frequently detached from their cultural contexts, with little acknowledgement of their spiritual, religious, and sacred origins, reducing them instead to accessible, and at times “trendy” tools for wellbeing.

Consider mindfulness, now one of the most widely used and recommended techniques by psychologists, presented to clients with often no reference to the meaningful framework of the Buddhist origins of the practice, and how it relates to their spiritual practice of seeking liberation from suffering through enlightenment (Nirvana) by ethically working towards developing a state of self-insight and awareness, outlined in the Satipatthana Sutta by Buddha.

At the same time, psychologists will eagerly reference Francine Shapiro and the theoretical foundations of EMDR therapy. This is not a critique of that practice, but rather an invitation to notice this broader pattern, that even within systems aimed at healing, dominant Western frameworks often determine whose knowledge is named, credited, and centred, while the origins of other healing traditions are minimised, secularised, or left unspoken.

Why is it that some cultural practices are welcomed in one context but rejected in another? These questions matter because they invite reflection on how practices are adopted, transformed, and sometimes stripped of their original meaning when moved across cultural boundaries, and how this practice can further alienate an already alienated people.

This is not to suggest that all use of cultural practices is harmful, but to ask whether we are attentive to context, history, and power. When practices are separated from their cultural and spiritual roots without acknowledgement, there is a risk of reducing rich traditions to consumable techniques, while the communities they originate from continue to face marginalisation or misrepresentation.

How many of you know the name Sir Isaac Newton, founder of the laws of physics. Now, how many of you know the name of the author of one of the most widely used mathematical branches, Algebra? His name is Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. There is also a broader historical pattern in how knowledge is remembered. Many scientific and mathematical contributions from the Islamic Golden Age, for example, were transmitted into Europe through translation, where names were often Latinised or reshaped:

Ibn Sina → Avicenna

Ibn Rushd → Averroes

Abu Bakr al-Razi → Rhazes

Ibn al-Haytham → Alhazen

Jabir ibn Hayyan → Geber

Nasir al-Din al-Tusi → Tusi

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni → Alberuni

Al-Zahrawi → Abulcasis

Thabit ibn Qurra → Thebit

Al-Kindi → Alkindus

These scholars made foundational contributions to mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and astronomy, yet their histories are forgotten in mainstream narratives of scientific development. Yet, names such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison are burned into our collective memories. This is not accidental, but an intentional framing of our shared collective history, amplifying certain perspectives and realities over others.

In Australia, this conversation also sits within a specific historical context. The White Australia policy only formally ended just 53 years ago, and the ongoing impacts of colonisation continue to shape the lived realities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities today. Australia is a multicultural society, but not one that is free from structural and interpersonal racism.

Where to from here? Toward greater understanding.

This reflection is not an attack of individuals or cultures, but an invitation to awareness. Ignorance is not always intentional, but it can still have consequences. Taking time to understand the people, histories, and meanings behind practices we use or encounter matters.

Consider how different it is to live in a society that reflects your cultural reality back to you, compared to one where your language, practices, or beliefs are unfamiliar or misrepresented. Then consider how it feels when those same practices are adopted without the context in which they carry meaning, care, or even sacred significance.

At its heart, this is also about recognition: being seen, being named, and having one’s experience accurately understood. Even small acts of awareness, such as naming origins, acknowledging histories, and holding complexity, can be healing and meaningful.

For psychologists and practitioners, this points to an ongoing ethical responsibility: to remain curious about cultural context, to broaden the range of intellectual and healing traditions we engage with, and to ensure that the knowledge we draw upon is not only used, but also respectfully situated. Ultimately, this is not about exclusion. It is about making space for a more honest and relational understanding of where knowledge comes from, and who it belongs to.

On an individual level, it is an invitation to explore how we interact with one another interpersonally. How are my own cultural biases, perceptions and expectations of self informing my response to this person, and if I focus on understanding their experience with curiosity, openness and acceptance, how might I focus on amplifying their experience over my own comfort?

Poetic Reflections

""Human Beings are members of a whole

In creation of one essence and soul

If one member is inflicted with pain

Other members uneasy will remain

If you have no sympathy for human pain

The name of human you can not pertain"

‍ ‍

- Saadi Shirazi, Golestan

Therapeutic Skill of the Week

Since we have made beautiful reference to the mindfulness practices of the Eastern Philosophical practice of Buddhism, let us understand why awareness of our present moment can help us transcend unhelpful narratives of suffering, and move ever closer to an experience of enlightment.

Mindfulness as part of Buddhism encourages;

• awareness of the body

• awareness of feelings

• awareness of mind

• awareness of mental objects (thoughts, perceptions, phenomena)
  
  

This means purposely turning your attention aware from the stories that our minds create, and noticing the moment to moment sensations, emotions and thoughts.

1. Slow everything down. Turn your attention first to the sensations within and without your body. Notice the rise and fall of your breath. Notice the clothes on your skin. Notice the impermanence of each of these sensations. How hard you have to work in your mind to hold these sensations in mind, though you are feeling them every minute of every day. Notice your brain’s tendency to try to place a value judgement on these sensations as good, bad, pleasant, unpleasant. Notice that urge, then objectively and neutrally observe the sensations from a place of pure consciousness, not driven by any expectation or value placed on the sensation.

2. Now, repeat this awareness to your emotions. What feelings are present for you in this moment, and same thing. Notice if you wish to react or judge the emotional experiences, welcoming one and rejecting another. Notice the urge to react, then mindfully observe the emotions purely as they are. Notice their impermanence. Notice their presence. Notice how they shift over time.

3. Now, to the mind, with all of its internal experiences of thoughts, perceptions, projected sensations in the head, trying to maintain the same awareness of judgements and reactions to thoughts. Just allow them to be. Notice their impermanence. Notice their presence.

The beauty of Buddhist practices lies in connecting thoughtfully with your experiences, working towards ego diffusion and experiencing life without judgement, attachment or reaction, thereby allowing life to move through you and accessing an increased level of self-awareness, consciousness and subsequently, peace.

Thank you for reading.

All my very best,

Tala