http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20030507-000002.html
If you're going to take action against depression, then you need to
understand that child abuse commonly underpins adult depression. In
almost every case of significant adult depression, some form of
abuse was experienced in childhood, either physical, sexual,
emotional or, often, a combination.
Recovering from depression as an adult requires some detective work
in ferreting out the nature of the exploitation. If you don't do
it, you'll be crippled in recovering. It isn't advisable to unearth
or recapitulate every nasty detail of past experience, but you do
need to get a general map of the abuse landscape.
Scientists know that traumatic experiences such as child abuse or
neglect change the chemistry and even the structure of the brain.
They sensitize the stress response system so that those who are
abused become overly responsive to environmental pressures. They
shape wiring patterns in the brain and reset the sensitivity level
of the machinery.
Eventually, even small degrees of stress provoke an outpouring of
stress hormones, and these hormones in turn act directly on
multiple sites to produce the behavioral symptoms of
depression--the vegetative state, the sleep disturbances, the
cognitive dullness, the loss of pleasure. They push the brain's
fear center into overdrive, churning out the negative emotions that
steer the depression's severity and add a twist of anxiety.
To undo the imprint of abuse, you must access it, expose it and
process the experience. Otherwise, it creates a rotting core of
self.
Both depression and abuse are legacy issues. They run together in
families, passed down from generation to generation. The
intergenerational transmission of abuse is invariably associated
with the symptoms of depression. Abuse brings with it the
vulnerability to depression.
There are many actions you can take to curb the legacy of abuse and
stem the depression vulnerability it generates.
Map the landscape of the abuse you experienced. Become the
cartographer of your psyche.
This is not something you can do completely on your own. Talk to
those who shared the landscape with you and ask them to share with
you what they remember. It is not likely that you remember
everything on your own; denial is a coping mechanism everyone uses.
You overcome the limitation of your own awareness by checking out
your experiences with siblings, aunts and uncles, whoever was
around when you were young.
Once you map the landscape you begin to get control over it.
Educate yourself about trauma and abuse. You don't need to uncover
every incident of your childhood, but you must touch on the major
ones.
Do not rely on yourself to undertake this process alone. It is not
something you can do alone; you need help from others. For one
thinkg, it's too difficult to do without the support of others. For
another, the information is too inaccessible to unearth on your
own.
It isn't essential to embark on this process with a therapist,
although it helps enormously to have a good one. But you do need
smart and caring friends who can provide support.
Recognize that by virtue of the hypersensitivity of your response
system, current difficulties can trigger fear and alarm reactions
that quickly veer out of control in brain circuits that bypass the
reason. When your trauma zone gets triggered, you are likely to
react in ways that impair relations with others and lead down a
path to depression.
But you need not be a slave to reactivity. Instead, learn to jump
out of the trauma zone and look at your problems and how your
responses get triggered.
The more we find out about emotions, the clearer it is that they
are connected to physical health and well-being. The practical
implications cannot be overstated. There is more than one pathway
to gaining control over your emotional reactivity. While you can
certainly employ mind-centered techniques to heal your mental
state, you are not limited to them.
You can also enlist your body to heal your mind. Pay attention to
the care of the body. Being connected to your body has the
additional advantage of delivering you from feelings of
helplessness.
A number of body-based experiences are critical to giving you a
sense of control over emotional experience. At the most basic level
is rest. Make sure you get adequate rest.
Exercise is vitally important in improving the way you feel. It
increases your capacity to withstand emotional challenges. It
boosts confidence in yourself and generates well-being. It also
increases your sense of control over experience.
One of the simplest and most immediate ways to gain emotional
control is to engage in deep-breathing. Deep breathing relaxes the
nervous system and calms emotional alarm circuits unwittingly set
off when experience triggers your trauma zone.
Just as there are physical routes to healing the mind, so are there
spiritual routes. Whatever spiritual connections you have, now is
the time to strengthen them. A strong spiritual framework adds
solace to the difficult exploration of early trauma. It also helps
you stay in touch with the big picture
