Summary of Insights

Two (of many) reasons we may get depressed:

1. Unbelief / unawareness of God's closeness, living a life devoid of meaning, love, prayer, liturgy, and working toward common, transcendental goods.
2. Unresolved hurts / adversity of the past - which burden us so much that we give up hope for living a life of secure love and connection with God and others.

The Church helps us with the first by fostering faith (awareness of God's reality, closeness), and connecting us with others striving to grow in hope and love.

Life is full of obstacles to growth in love. Neuroscience explains that hurts program us to react to obstacles with fight, flight, or freeze responses - leading to long term discouragement (depression). Cognitive Behavior Therapy points out that these responses are anchored by negative beliefs that:

• these obstacles are unbearable sources of senseless suffering
• our narrow emotional reactions to obstacles show that we are hopelessly inadequate

Through therapy and with the saints, we can come to reframe obstacles as bearable challenges that can lead to growth. This takes place through a combination of cognitive reframing and spiritual reframing. One takes place at the second level of the heart, and the other takes place at the deeper, third level of the heart.

While psychology can help with un-programming the stuck fight-flight-freeze reactions from the past, it is our Catholic worldview that can train us to see everything in life in relation to God.

"Life is not just pushing the Sisyphus rock up the hill; it is an opportunity and even struggle for growth leading, God-willing, to infinite happiness."

Read the full article here.