Defining Diagnoses
You’re not crazy. You’re not broken. You’re more than just your diagnosis from a book.
That said, these terms can help you understand your challenges and how therapy can help you move forward.
Depression
How it feels:
stuck, numb, hopeless, disconnected, ashamed
How therapy can help:
Therapy can help you identify and dismiss unhelpful ways of thinking. It can remind you of who you are underneath everything that you carry and give you hope that you won’t always feel like this. Therapy can be empowering. You can fight back!!
Anxiety
How it feels:
Nervous, overwhelmed, worried, avoidant, spiraling
How therapy can help:
Therapy can help you spot the thoughts that feed your anxiety and teach you strategies to change the script. Shrinking worries down to their actual size makes it easier to face fears. If you’re spinning out of control, therapy has tools to slow down and ground yourself.
PTSD
How it feels:
Tied down to the past, hypervigilant, avoidant, ashamed, flashbacks
How therapy can help:
When you’ve faced trauma, stuffing the painful memories in the closet is a survival strategy. With PTSD, the memories start spilling out of the closet and into your daily life. Therapy can help you actually process the trauma and put it in long-term storage where it belongs.
Substance Abuse
How it feels:
desperate, dependent, out of control
How therapy can help:
Therapy helps by giving people who want to change a push in the right direction. Having a strategy and accountability are key. Therapy also can help you understand why you use and giving you tools to help the root cause.
Men’s Issues
Feelings specific to men’s issues:
Shame, anger, shut down, pressure
(Quick note – obviously these feelings are not exclusive to men or those identifying as male. But the way our society defines men and masculinity creates male-specific issues and feelings.)
How therapy can help:
Therapy can help by helping you change your definition of masculine. Maybe you don’t have to soldier on and carry the weight; maybe you do feel afraid or embarrassed sometimes; maybe there’s a way to resolve these feelings instead of covering them up with anger.