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Understanding Depression Through the Nervous System

  • Writer: Amber Mercer
    Amber Mercer
  • Sep 1
  • 3 min read

 If you’ve ever felt heavy with sadness, numbness, or exhaustion that doesn’t seem to lift, you are not alone. Depression is a full-body experience and the body’s way of protecting itself when things have felt too much, for too long and have overwhelmed our capacity to cope.

Let’s explore what depression can mean through the lens of the nervous system and how approaches like Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy and AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) can help us understand it with more compassion and clarity.


Depression Isn’t Just in Your Head, It’s in Your Nervous System

Your nervous system is your body’s built-in safety system. It’s constantly scanning your environment, outside of conscious awareness, and asking “Am I safe”? “Am I connected”? “Do I need to protect myself”? When things feel safe, your body softens. When things feel threatening, your system prepares to fight or flee. If those options are not available your system moves into another form of protection, freeze or shut down.

Depression often reflects this shutdown response, known in Polyvagal Theory as the Dorsal Vagal State. It’s not laziness or lack of motivation. It’s your body saying, “I’ve tried everything and now I need to conserve.” This is a protective strategy not a personal failure.

Imagine a dimmer switch slowly turning down the lights. That’s what the nervous system does when it’s overwhelmed, it dims sensation, emotion and energy to protect you from further overload.


How Early Relationships Shape the Way We Feel 

Somatic attachment therapy helps us understand how our earliest relationships, especially with caregivers, shape the way our bodies respond to connection and stress. If emotional safety was inconsistent, unavailable, or conditional, your body may have learned to disconnect or collapse as a way to cope.

These patterns are not conscious choices. They are adaptive responses, ways your system learned to survive relational environments that felt unpredictable or unsafe. Depression can be a reflection of these early imprints. It’s the body remembering what it felt like to be unseen, overwhelmed, or alone and responding in the only way it knew how.


Depression Can Be a Sign of Something Tender Beneath

AEDP teaches us that depression often guards something vulnerable such as grief, fear, longing, or an unmet need. These emotions may have felt too big to hold in the past, or were threatening to name or feel, so your body learned to numb them out.

Therapy seeks to address needs such as safety, attunement and presence so your body begins to trust that it can feel again without being overwhelmed. When that happens, the system starts to thaw. Energy slowly returns. Emotion becomes more accessible and the body begins to believe that feeling is survivable.

It’s like standing outside a locked room in your own house. You know something’s inside but you’ve learned not to go near it. Therapy helps you find the key. Not to rush in, but first to listen at the door, to gently begin to open it and peer inside, lending witness to what’s there, with support.


You Don’t Have to Do This Alone 

Healing from depression isn’t about becoming fearless or endlessly happy. It’s about learning, not just cognitively but experientially, that you can feel what you feel and still be safe. That you can move through discomfort and still stay connected.

Therapy can support this process. It’s not about fixing you because you are not broken. It’s about helping your body remember what it feels like to be supported, seen and understood. These aren’t luxuries, they are your birthright.


Final Thoughts 

If you’re living with depression please know your body is doing its best to protect you with the information it has. With the right support, you can begin to listen to what your system is saying, respond with care and slowly rebuild your sense of safety and connection.

Thawing doesn’t happen all at once. It begins in moments of warmth, when the body starts to believe safety and connection is possible.

 
 
 

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