Adam Stanford
- Apr 10, 2023
- 4 min
Adam Stanford
- Mar 20, 2023
- 3 min
Adam Stanford
- Feb 27, 2023
- 3 min
top of page
720.560.3551
6825 E Hampden Ave Suite 202, Denver, CO 80224
Telehealth for Colorado
All appointments are virtual only
Adam Stanford, LPC, LAC
Find more happiness and
fulfillment in your life
Are you feeling stuck with your depressed thoughts?
-
“I just want to crawl in bed all day.”
-
“I don’t really need to take a shower anyway.”
-
“How many days of work can I get away with missing?”
-
“I wish everyone would just forget that I exist for a while.”
-
“Literally nothing sounds like fun, I don’t like anything anymore.”
-
“I hate myself. Everything good I do is just mediocre things that anyone should be good at.”
-
“I’m just a burden, no one wants to be around someone who is depressed.”
-
“I’m so pathetic, happiness comes so easily to everyone else.”
-
“I hope one day I just never wake up. I don’t want to kill myself but it would be so much easier if everything just ended.”
-
“I wonder what it would be like if I just drove into that tree right now.”
From My Blog
Signs that depression is becoming unmanageable
-
It’s so hard to focus that your performance at work is suffering
-
Notable periods of time disappear when you’re not sure what you were doing or you just stared blankly
-
Feeling tired all the time and normal activities feel like a struggle
-
Thinking you would be better off dead even if you’re not suicidal
-
Having a hard time seeing any hope for your future
-
Letting important relationships fall to the wayside, self-isolating
-
No longer enjoying things you used to like
-
Frequently ruminating on sad experiences from your past
-
Sleeping or eating a lot more or less than usual
-
A predominantly negative perspective about life and the world
-
Losing your sense of identity and feeling empty
Many people struggle with severe depression at some point
Depression can be chronic, recurring, or a single episode, and it can happen to anyone. Sometimes the line between feeling really down for a while versus clinical depression can be a bit blurry but both are difficult to live with. We don’t get to pick and choose our feelings, and when you fall down, it’s common to struggle with figuring out how to pick yourself back up.
In 2020 alone, over 21 million Americans, 8.4%, had at least one major depressive episode (1).
Depression can create a self-sustaining cycle in which the things you feel like doing provide small comfort in the short term but perpetuate depression in the long term. Our culture can create the delusion that depression can be overcome with strength but this is just a way to deny your emotional experience as a human and denial doesn’t work. I’ve been through my own depressive episodes and using skillful strategies, not strength, is what helped me recover from them.
I can help you find the way forward
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has been proven highly effective for depression, even more than medications, and the improvement can last a lifetime with continued practice of the techniques (2). CBT emphasizes more rational and constructive thoughts to help shift your overall thinking patterns in a healthier direction. It helps people understand on an individualized level where all of those depressive, automatic thoughts come from and why they are so intense.
By exploring your cognitive distortions, values, attitudes, and deep-seated core beliefs about yourself and the world, we identify exactly how to challenge and replace your depressive thoughts over time. This probably seems overwhelming on your own but I’ve completed intensive training in CBT to learn how to give people all of the support they need to understand and stay committed to this process.
I’ve also completed intensive training in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy which provides a wealth of specific skills that are also proven to help (3). Mindfulness skills create more calm and sense of control in your life by helping you train to remain present in the moment, aware of what’s going on inside and around you, and be more intentional in how you respond to and focus your thoughts, how you manage your emotions, the actions you choose, and the words you say.
Interpersonal effectiveness skills can help improve your mood by strengthening your relationships with others or end toxic relationships. Emotion regulation skills help you respond to difficult emotions in various ways including when they are really intense. Distress tolerance skills help you manage crises such as when you become flooded and flight, fight, panic, or freeze are triggered.
To provide the most effective depression treatment, I combine these approaches and explain the various steps and skills in a way that you are able to understand clearly. I help you not only learn the concepts but also see how they apply to your own life and specific circumstances. I often suggest specific things to practice in between sessions and gently provide additional accountability by following up with you on how they went.
We can explore any challenges you face with the skills and how you can overcome them together. Changing your thinking and behavior can be hard to do, and I specialize in supporting you throughout the entire process. depression treatment with me is a lot more than talking about how your week went. I help people implement change on a deeper level in a way that can help you effectively manage your depression for the rest of your life.
Addressing some common concerns when considering depression treatment
“Everyone gets sad. I don’t need therapy,
I just need to be tougher.”
If you could choose not to be depressed, then millions of people worldwide wouldn’t be suffering from it. Life can get very difficult and there is no switchboard for emotions to turn them on and off. If you pay close attention, you’ll probably notice people who just, “tough it out,” are miserable on the inside.
People who are truly happy practice certain thinking and behavioral skills and for some of them it does come naturally. But they aren’t happier because they are tougher, they’re happier because of their thought patterns and the actions they choose. Thanks to extensive research, we now know how others can learn to think in a healthier way and use their behaviors to improve their mood and resilience in similar ways.
“This is just another obligation to add to my busy schedule.”
A busy lifestyle is one reason why my clients typically prefer meeting online. It eliminates the time spent driving and sitting in traffic. Some clients even meet with me on their lunch break. The techniques from CBT and DBT can make your whole life more manageable… a small investment of time can result in a huge reduction in the sense of chaos that causes you to feel nervous to make the commitment in the first place.
If you can carve out just 55 minutes per week, you can learn how to balance your life and handle your stress so that almost nothing feels overwhelming anymore.
“Can you really help? I think I might be hopeless.”
A lot of people feel hopeless because other things and therapists they have tried only helped a little bit but didn't create lasting, meaningful change. Conversations about how your week went, or what happened in your childhood, may give you some insight but don't provide direction for your future. I help people develop new skills that make a much bigger difference than simply talking about things that bother you.
CBT is uniquely suited for actually changing hopelessness and low self-esteem in ways that other therapies usually don't. Many therapists say they do CBT but just focus on surface level thoughts called cognitive distortions. I go much deeper with CBT to address your unhealthy core beliefs which cause the unhealthy thoughts.
DBT mindfulness and emotion regulation skills are also a lot more helpful in addressing feelings of hopelessness than what other therapies have to offer. If you haven't yet learned a wealth of new, well-proven skills to fight for your happiness, you probably owe it to yourself to try.
Begin moving forward with your life
bottom of page