The story you've been told about yourself
If you're living with depression you've probably heard the same handful of things on repeat: just get up, go for a walk, think positive, try harder, push through. And underneath it there's a quieter voice — possibly yours — wondering whether they've got a point. Maybe I am just lazy. Maybe something's actually wrong with me.
Depression is not laziness. It never was. What you're carrying isn't a failure of willpower or a flaw in your character — it's your body doing exactly what bodies do when they've been overwhelmed, or depleted, or holding too much for too long.
People come in exhausted and ashamed, sure they ought to be able to fix this on their own if they just dug a bit deeper. And they have been digging. The effort it takes to get through one ordinary day inside a depression is more than most people who haven't been there will ever clock.
What your nervous system is actually doing
Your nervous system runs in three broad states. One is where you feel engaged, connected, more or less settled — Stephen Porges calls this ventral vagal, the social-engagement mode. One is revved up and on alert: the sympathetic, fight-or-flight gear most of us know well. And then there's a third state that almost nobody talks about. This three-state map comes from Porges' Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011).
The dorsal vagal shutdown
Picture a possum gone limp when a dog has it cornered — playing dead. That's the dorsal vagal response. It isn't a decision; it's an automatic, protective shutdown. Energy drains away, everything slows, the world goes flat and grey. In a person it looks a great deal like depression: the fatigue, the numbness, the pulling-away, the way pleasure and motivation just won't switch on, the sense of being one step removed from your own life.
Your body isn't being lazy. It's keeping you safe the only way it knows.
Why willpower was never going to do it
We're a culture that loves the idea of thinking and pushing our way through anything. So when that doesn't budge a depression, the shame piles on top: now you're not only depressed, you feel like you've failed at fixing it.
The roots usually run further back
Depression rarely turns up out of nowhere, even when it feels like it did. Look underneath and you'll usually find some mix of stress that never got discharged, grief that was never properly felt, old relational wounds that taught your system it wasn't safe to need or to feel, and a long, slow drift away from your own emotional life.
What we picked up in our first relationships — whether it was safe to feel, to need, to reach for someone — gets wired into the nervous system. It isn't only memory. It's a lived pattern in the body, shaping how you treat yourself and how you reach for others every single day.
How I work with this
I use an integrative approach. That means I help you integrate your thoughts, feelings, sensations and symbolic life. It's about building a collaborative relationship intra-psychically, interpersonally and eco-systemically — within yourself, with the people around you, and with the living world you're part of.
When we bring a slow, curious attention to physical sensation, we start to get underneath it — to the grief, the anger, the longing, the bone-tiredness the shutdown has been sitting on top of. What does this part of us want us to know? What is it trying to protect us from?
My work with depression, here in Bendigo, Kyneton and online, pulls on a few threads that belong together.
Settling the nervous system is usually where we start. Before anything deeper can be touched, your system has to learn it's safe to be in dialogue with this shutdown. That comes slowly — through the steadiness of the relationship between us, through the breath, through small somatic practices that help the body remember what being present and alive feels like. Nothing gets forced.
Listening to the body lets us work where the depression actually lives. So much of it is a deep disconnection from sensation — everything muffled, everything flat. As you rebuild a relationship with your body, the small shifts start to register: shoulders dropping, a bit of warmth in the chest, a moment where something genuinely feels like something. Those small moments of feeling are where it begins to turn.
If this is sounding familiar
If you're recognising yourself in any of this, you're welcome to read more about how I work with depression. No pressure, nothing expected — just a sense of what's possible.
Depression counselling in Bendigo & KynetonThe relationship between us is where the attachment and interpersonal work happens. If early on you learned that connection couldn't be counted on, or that your needs were too much, depression tends to carry a quiet conviction underneath it: I'm on my own with this, and no one can reach me. The relationship in the room becomes the place that belief gets tested — not by my arguing you out of it, but by the lived experience of being properly seen and held by another person.
Coming back into your life is what all of it is working toward. Back into your body, your feelings, the people around you, some sense of what it's for. Depression shrinks your world down to a pinhole. The work widens it again — not in one go, but in ways that hold: a real laugh that catches you off guard, a flicker of curiosity, an evening you actually feel like cooking dinner. They add up, and the colour comes back.
What getting better actually looks like
Let me be straight with you, because I think honesty serves you better than reassurance here. Recovery from depression isn't a clean line. There'll be days that feel like three steps back. There'll be stretches where the heaviness rolls back in and you wonder whether any of this is doing anything.
Getting better doesn't mean turning into someone relentlessly upbeat who never feels sad again. It means the full range of your feeling life coming back, and your nervous system learning, slowly, that it's safe to come up out of the shutdown — that the world isn't as dangerous or as empty as the depression keeps insisting.
You don't have to understand it to start
One thing worth knowing: you don't have to turn up to therapy with an explanation for your depression already worked out. You don't need a single traumatic event to point at, or a reason that adds up neatly. Sometimes a depression is a thousand small things that never got digested. Sometimes it's the body's answer to a life that has quietly drifted away from what you actually desire.
That last one deserves more airtime than it gets. A fair amount of what I see called depression is closer to a kind of grief for the life not being lived — the work you fell into rather than chose, the move you didn't make, the version of yourself you put away at nineteen because it wasn't practical. No amount of nervous-system work touches that on its own. It has to be looked at squarely, and then something has to be decided. Therapy is a decent place to do the looking.
All you have to bring is yourself, as you are right now — even if that self feels flat and empty and barely there. Especially then.
I work with depression in Bendigo, Kyneton and online, across Victoria and further afield. The first step is a free 15-minute discovery call, where we talk about what's going on for you and get a feel for whether working together is right. No commitment, no pressure — just two people having a conversation.
You don't have to carry this on your own.