CBT Can Be Great — but It Didn’t Cure My Depression

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can provide meaningful tools for your mental health, but sometimes, they aren’t enough. This is my story of finding more support and realizing that healing can be a complex and ongoing process.

I’ve struggled with depression from my teen years on, though it took me a very long time to admit it to myself.

Despite saying I was fine, I still put myself in therapy to try to help myself feel better. I first reached out to the therapists available to me through my college when I was a student and continued to see a therapist for a large portion of my adult life.

Therapy helped at first. Especially CBT, which taught me how to quiet my mind and prepare for events I knew would be stressful. I finally felt like I was starting to gain the tools and language I needed to deal with my own mind.

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A setback in my healing

But then the floor dropped out from under me. One of my twins died in utero at 32 weeks, and his twin’s prognosis was uncertain. After delivering them a few days later, my surviving twin son spent a month in the neonatal intensive care unit.

I couldn’t say I was fine anymore.

I could barely say anything.

When he came home, and life settled down, I went back to my therapist’s office with my new son in tow. He screamed the whole time.

Feeling disconnected from therapy

I sat in my therapist’s office, feeling so detached from everything. The dim lights were too bright, and the thoughts I had were so loud that they all just blended together in my head and created this constant white noise.

I thought and felt everything and nothing all at once, and it was all locked up inside of me as I stood at the bottom of an empty hole with no way to climb out.

Driving myself to my therapist’s office was like trying to climb out of the hole, only to find the walls of the hole were totally smooth without anything to grab onto.

I wanted to help myself, but I couldn’t find the words. My son’s constant screaming in the office was almost a relief because at least one of us was verbalizing the turmoil of nothingness that I felt.

I tried again.

It was pretty much the same. I didn’t have the energy or ability to tap into the part of me that needed help. I couldn’t do the work required to deal with anything that just happened to me.

I was cruising on autopilot, a shell of a person. CBT, or any kind of therapy at all, was like trying to bail a sinking ship out with a pasta strainer — totally ineffective.

Realizing that I needed more support

That shell took my son to a routine checkup at his pediatrician’s. I had known our pediatrician since my daughter was born 4 1/2 years earlier.

He took one look at my hollow eyes and hunched shoulders and said, “You know, it’s OK that you’re not OK, but you need help, my dear.”

I told him I was in therapy.

“It’s not enough. I think you need medication, and that’s OK,” he reassured me. He stayed in the room while I dialed my OB-GYN’s phone number.

I got an appointment right away, and she looked at me and saw the signs of the postpartum depression that my son’s pediatrician saw and prescribed me antidepressants.

She assured me I was not a failure for needing them but a fighter, trying to use all the tools available to deal with my postpartum depression.

Accepting what I needed

So, I added that tool to my toolbox. I started to feel things again. The white noise of thoughts untangled itself so I could work through one thought at a time.

The antidepressants helped me help myself again in light of what had just happened and helped me find the energy to put into therapy so that it could also be the effective tool in my self-care toolbox that I needed it to be.

The bottom line

It’s not that therapy doesn’t work.

It absolutely does, but sometimes, it’s just not enough on its own.

When the act of CBT or any therapy feels overwhelming or like it’s not worth it, maybe it’s time to add another tool to your self-care toolbox that can help it work effectively again.