Here’s what I do best:
Substance Use
Substance use tends to show up as a survival strategy for most people I work with. It helps people disconnect just enough to cope with life’s struggles. Many people find substances are/were the only thing that ever made them feel “normal,” or the only thing that made them feel like they weren’t spinning out of control constantly. But substances (regardless of which one(s) you use) can take on a life of their own. Instead of being the thing to fix our problems, substance use can become a problem by robbing you of your ability to experience life fully.
Depression
The lived experience of depression can be so debilitating—it tells us a story that we have no energy for anything, we don’t deserve anything, nothing will ever change, and nobody loves us. Sound familiar? Sometimes depression is a response to something situational that is going on, and sometimes it’s not. There are almost as many iterations of depression as there are humans beings experiencing it.
Trauma
A lot of the stuff that’s not going well in our lives is often tied to things that also didn’t go well earlier in our life experiences. Needs went unmet, boundaries were violated, we didn’t feel seen or heard in our formative relationships. As a result we developed survival strategies to overcome these unmet needs and violations of trust. These survival strategies served a purpose--they created a sense of control, structure, and safety when there wasn’t any. The problem is that once we are out of the immediate danger of whatever was happening to us, these strategies often don’t work as well as they used to, or as well as we would like them to.