Insight and Connection
Insight and Connection is hosted by Patty and Kam Dirilten. Patty and Kam are psychotherapists and have been married for 25 years. They have two children. The goal of the podcast is to bring common everyday issues to a deeper place of understanding through humor, research, experience and discussion.
Insight and Connection
Understanding Depression
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Welcome to Insight and Connection, where my husband Cam and I, who are both therapists, discuss everyday issues on a much deeper level to help others make more sense of the world we live in, live more happily in it, and feel more confident in developing solutions for themselves, their families, and their communities. So glad you're here. Welcome back to Insight and Connection. I'm Patty. I'm Cam. And today we are going to talk to you about depression. We haven't done that yet. We've hit other mental health issues, but depression mainly what drew us to that subject today was it's Christmas Eve. And we have been, you know, noticing an increase in referrals at the Center for Insight and Connection. And this time of year is always, yes, I think when we're watching holiday movies and we're going to parties, and you know, the holidays are kind of known for that. That's what we kind of talk about. But what we have noticed is quite the opposite in the mental health world and substance use is up. Oftentimes holidays can be a trigger for people to relapse. And I think that depression can get triggered a lot during the holidays. A lot of my first responders talk about how suicide is up around the holidays. And so that's kind of what triggered us. This is not a holiday podcast, but it's really made it made us really sit down and think about what's relevant this time of year. And that's why we're we're choosing to do this subject.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, and depression isn't one of those seasonal disorders either.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02Right. It's just due to the nature of the time of year and sometimes some of the increases. You mentioned that. But I think that that story that you found this morning, completely unrelated to the holidays, is super important.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. So we'll start in the 1950s. We're gonna we're gonna try to connect all the dots here. So I think in order to have a full understanding of depression and the epidemic proportions that that's at now, it's a very common disorder. We've got to back up this conversation even before the 1950s. But we're starting there just because we only have an hour. So in our pre-discussion this morning, this experiment with Rusis monkeys came to my mind. And I'll share that with you. It's an old study that happened. Harry Harlow was the psychologist at the time that conducted this study. And what made him want to study Rusis monkeys and their attachment to their mothers was the trend happening in the 1950s in psychology, which was that attachment to mothers was something to be careful about. In fact, there was a psychologist, and his name was, I have to find him here.
SPEAKER_02He's not that popular because his theory has since been dispelled.
SPEAKER_00Yes, this was kind of before attachment theory, attachment theory became the go-to theory, and it got some traction, I believe, in the 70s, if I'm not mistaken. But John B. Watson was his name, and this was a quote from John B. Watson. When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. Behaviorist John B. Watson. Oh my dear God. Okay. So I mean, that's not that long ago. I know our parents were born at that time. And that's a relevant connection. That's right now, just kind of highlighting that in your head is that if you're in your 50s, your 40s or 50s, your parents were raised in a time where it was thought that mother affection was a dangerous instrument. That's that's a really important piece. Okay.
SPEAKER_02Of course. Now, of course, if you were born in like the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s, remember, your parents were the children of these parents.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER_02That is also check mark relevant portion number two.
SPEAKER_00Highlight that in your mind. Okay. So now Harry Harlow had wanted to, he wanted to do an experiment. He that didn't feel right to him. So he was like, I'm gonna do an experiment with these Rusis monkeys. Now that this was a terrible experiment for those animal lovers out there. Uh not a good, not a good time for Rusis monkeys. And so, but he took baby monkeys and he took them away from their mothers and basically gave them two choices in kind of in a lab situation: a wire mommy and a cloth mommy. And the wire mommy had, you know, all the the basic things that the Watson guy had said were, you know, feeding and sheltering and all the survival stuff is what should be. That's all children need. Everything else is a luxury. And not just this Watson guy, but the trend at that time was that all children need is really just to be fed and to have shelter, all that survival stuff. All that attachment stuff is irrelevant. So this guy said, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a study to try to prove that wrong. And so he did, and the Rusis monkey experiment was that, you know, you he was putting basic survival stuff in a wire monkey, the same survival stuff with a cloth monkey. And surprise, surprise, the baby monkeys were going toward the cloth mommies. And of course, this had a horrible impact on all those baby monkeys. But what we learned was this was the beginning of the understanding that attachment is such an important what is even is attachment? And how does it impact a child if there isn't an environment where us those attachment needs are being met? This was the beginning of all that. Thank goodness. So thank you, all those baby monkeys that's that suffered a terrible life. Yes.
SPEAKER_02Because of it.
SPEAKER_00So I think that's important to state because if we think about those babies that were born to mothers at that time, and they were not being that that outlook wasn't important, right? It was like, let me just feed my baby, and that's all I need to do. What happens during attachment, if you're, you know, if you understand attachment theory, is that there's all these mirror neurons happening. And that period of time we know now is so imperative for that future development of that baby moving forward into their lives. This is the foundation, zero to five, I would even argue in utero, that sets children up for success in all areas of life when those first five years have, you know, safety in them, have connection in them, a regulated mother or a regulated attachment figure that's able to connect with that baby and what's happening in all those emotional circuits, they all get wired properly when that happens. It's like it brings up, I think I brought this up in another podcast. There was a study done with kittens, and those kittens were born, and some psychologists thought it'd be a great idea to cover the kitten's eyes for s for a period of time. I think it was like several weeks, to prove this point that when those those kitties were the things on their eyes were taken off, they were not, they weren't able to see because of those mirror neurons weren't developed. So it's kind of like this idea of you use it or you lose it. It's the same kind of idea here with attachment. And how we connect with our attachment figures is extremely relevant to how we attach to people in our adult lives.
SPEAKER_02But I think you can even go one step further than that, which is we hear in our offices a lot, you know, indiv people are kind of sick and tired of just going through life and merely surviving. Right. So if you look at it from like the wire monkey thing where all they're being provided for is the shelter and the food. Those are basic survival needs.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right. But when we as older humans, right, we can now talk, we can now experience the world, not necessarily only being held by our mother. If all we're getting out of our life is our basic survival needs, it feels we feel very disconnected. We feel out of touch. Right? That's there's more to life than just I ate today, I was safe today, I'm gonna sleep today and redo it. Which is now getting into when some of these other attributes are not a part of our life because they were never part of our attachment. Is there a correlation between depressive disorders? Because that sounds depressing. My whole life is just sleep, eat, have a roof over my head, sleep, eat. That's that's awful.
SPEAKER_01Like real flat.
SPEAKER_02Real flat, right? So like flat affect as described as a depressive disorder.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Right? So I love this. I love how you just we popped right here to like what that might look like if a child's been raised by a parent that wasn't able to connect properly with with her child. Okay.
SPEAKER_02But it ties into that. So there is no mirror, right? There's no none of the mirror neurons. You don't know how to experience connection. You only know how to experience the acquisition of basic needs. I know how to eat, I know how to get out of the rain, I know how to be warm or to get warmth, right? But I don't know how to love, I don't know how to socially interact, I don't know how to feel if some of those things are given to me.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes.
SPEAKER_02Right? Because it's not learned.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So I love this. I I love exactly where you just took this. And it's like when when we're working with depression, there's sometimes this sense that there's a an absence of. And we don't we can't quite put our finger on it. There's not an activation. So it but if the dominant symptom that someone comes into the office with is depression, it's almost like it's hard to work with sometimes because you can't quite grasp it. It's almost um, it's just it's a lack of.
SPEAKER_02They have a felt sense, but they don't know why. Yeah, so it's very hard to ascertain in a clinical interview, other than I feel flat, I feel blah, I have interest in nothing.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02But okay, as compared to what? They don't know. Because there there is no comparison, right? And of course, that's that's a very extreme case. We're not saying that you know everybody coming into our office was fed by a wire monkey.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02But certain early traumas or certain early attachment situations can present the same way.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And so when we look at depression, if we come back into the present now for a minute, and we look at the prevalence of depression. So the prevalence of depression we were looking at this this morning, Sam. And what what were the numbers?
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, we found I think as of like 2023, it was about 21 million Americans, right? Complete. Which is that's a lot of people.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_02Well, and those are people that were actually diagnosed. So that was somebody that had gone to a therapist or a hospital or whatever and got a diagnosis. Probably higher than that. Obviously, not everybody goes to sessions, and then in that it was it was, of course, broken up further. You know, it's definitely more prevalent in females than in males. The lower your socioeconomic level, the higher the prevalence, right? Interestingly, over 60 less, right? But the highest or the fastest growing range, and this could be from a couple of things, but that was like the 12 to 18 year olds. So it could be one that they're more likely to attend therapy, so they're actually getting diagnosed and part of the statistics, or the other one could be well, there's some other factors, right? Like that the the parents are the that they are the children of the parents that were raised by this group where this train of thought still happened, right? Where there wasn't a healthy connection, so the parents didn't have a healthy connection and they're can therefore cannot provide it to their children. Right. There's also like media, phones, things like that that just simply disconnects us from people. We don't know. We from a very early age they had a phone or an iPad. So there it was just kind of past the time on a screen.
SPEAKER_00The absence of the absence of connection. Yes. Which which I think is relevant when we're talking about this de this diagnosis of depression. And the way that we are treating it currently is we are using antidepressant. Yeah, like here's a medication. Oh yeah, if you Google depression and you Google treatment for depression, what's gonna come up is medication and cognitive behavioral therapy. And those things are great at mitigating or even stabilizing, right?
SPEAKER_02Simply getting you obviously one of the aspects of depression, a depressive disorder would be loss of interest in everything, stay in bed all day, you know, bed rot, that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00Well, what are the let's define that? Yeah, right. So so there's major depressive disorder, and that's the one that everybody talks about.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's the one where you would get some of these criteria, you know, which would be like loss of interest in things that you or just loss of interest, period, or loss of interest in things that you once enjoyed, lack of connection, fatigue, sleeping too much, uh sleeping not enough. Sleeping not enough, inability to attend things that you should, right? Like going to work. Uh can't make it to work on time. So a a major depressive disorder would be where you're experiencing those things for two weeks or more.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02And and the Then that's the easiest one to that's the most common one.
SPEAKER_00I think, you know, sleeping. I think we talk about eating too much or too little.
SPEAKER_02I was gonna say it could be both.
SPEAKER_00And then negative self-talk. You know, what I I guess what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_02Which of course can go so extreme as hopelessness, helplessness, yes, you know.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So those are the emotions. So I say, you know, you you hear me say that anxiety is a state. I believe depression is also a state. It's a state of being that is described by these symptoms, right? With the sleeping and the eating and the loss of interest in activities and issues with focus and concentration.
SPEAKER_02Isolation.
SPEAKER_00Isolation, right? For a period of two weeks or more. Now, we use depression in our everyday language, like, oh, that was I'm so depressed, right? And so this is different than the the state of depression, lowness, or just kind of bummed or not feeling it. You know, yeah, that's different than a disorder. Okay, like depression and even grief, right? I think sometimes grief and and depression can be lumped in the same kind of thing. That's a very different thing. Even PTSD, when you read the definition of PTSD, there are components of depression in it. And so because it's a state, it's a state of being.
SPEAKER_02Well, even some of the substance use disorders, right? People argue which came first, the the the depression or the substance use disorder, and it doesn't really matter. They there's a high comorbidity rate, right? Some of the some of the drugs are actually depressants. Yes, right. How can you not expect to be depressed if you're consuming mass quantities of a depressant?
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_02So they're all tied together, and it's very messy. But the reality is it can be a de a depression diagnosis. And it goes beyond just two weeks. There's the persistent ones that can be lasting for like two years.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02Um there are also ones that are can that can be attributed to like a medical dis a medical diagnosis. I have cancer. Well, yeah. You're probably gonna feel a certain way about that.
SPEAKER_00But is that is that so you know, as we're exploring this, you know, that's what's it's what's in mainstream. We're starting there, okay?
SPEAKER_02Well, and like postpartum, perinatal, right? All different kinds of them.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And so when you Google this, right, medication and CBT to help somebody, you know, stabilize or reduce that's those symptoms, which is so great. It is. Okay. And what we're kind of getting back to, okay, because in the world of psychology, as we go back into our history, right, we s we're starting this discussion in the 1950s, okay, and then we go into the 90s, 1970s, where psychopharmacology, that study of medicine, became the most preferred treatment for mood disorders. They moved away from psychoanalytic theory and away from understanding what was happening with that person. And they moved into psychopharmacology to be able to be the primary treatment for depression and other mood disorders, which was so great at the time because it was a quick, um, I think what were some of the early ones? Like Prozac was one of the early ones. And it was really helpful and great and groundbreaking. But unfortunately, they abandoned the psychoanalysis and used the psychopharmacology as the primary treatment. And that's really unfortunate. So, what what at least I'm discovering now, and I think other EMDR therapists and you too, Cam, is that when we're doing these, we do the floatbacks or we do the here's the presenting issue, and we're identifying the memories in the memory network that have to do with the triggers to that presenting issue, we're finding that what's back there is childhood stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. You okay, you come in, I feel flat, I feel isolated, I feel depressed, I feel helpless, I feel powerless, whatever. When was a recent time that you felt that way? Okay, when was a okay, when was a recent time? Oh, was there any times in the past? And all of a sudden we're going back to some childhood experience where you first learned or first felt this way. And they are oftentimes almost all the time, but oftentimes associated with some sort of either trauma or attachment experience.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00It's relevant.
SPEAKER_02And it's relevant, but ki I don't want to say ignored. We just want to bring more light to it. Right? There is in fact a connection, somehow, research hasn't proved it yet, between these adverse experiences that made you feel a certain way in your childhood and the prevalence of you to have a depressive disorder later in life.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02Agreed?
SPEAKER_00Yes. And we're seeing this anecdotally in our offices. Right. Which when we're talking about depression, we're connecting these dots and talking about postpartum depression for a minute. Okay. So there was a study that we read this morning that was connecting that that and relating that if you had childhood trauma or adverse experiences in the hit in your past, then it increases the likelihood that you will have postpartum depression. So if that's the case, if that's the study, and I I need to find that study, we're looking a bunch of stuff this morning. If that's the case, then wouldn't it follow that women of child rearing years before they get pregnant to go in and find out, you know, it address that trauma of the past so that it doesn't impact their pregnancies and their attachments to their babies when they're born? Because if they don't go and do that work, it will impact the next generation. So, and it does, not will, it actually does. And so now if you have a mother who was dealing with postpartum depression, how do you think that that might impact the attachment relationship? It does pretty severely, it does. So you can heal it though. I mean, this is the this is the coolest part about what we do is that you know, when I when I have someone in the office and we, you know, they have this depression and they're flat and they can't quite figure out what's going on, right? Struggling in relationships, maybe their whole lives and with their children, with their spouses, with friends. They just don't know. What's been wrong? If I'm hearing that, I'm moving to something called the early uh trauma protocol. And what that is, is it takes a look at what experiences, implicitly stored experiences, not explicitly stored, but implicitly stored, experiences because children experience the world largely somatically. Okay, they're not thinking I'm bad or they're not doing that. It's just a way that they experience the world. And so with memories like that and how we get to that, there's a slightly different way to get after those stored memories.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think there's a great representation of that, of that very idea, how especially like very small children, before they can speak and necessarily walk on their own, right? Experience the world somatically through their attachment figure. So I was watching the show on Netflix, it's called Pole Dark. Anyway, long story short, I think that the directors did a fantastic job. There was a uh a mother, a young mother and the baby that were at the funeral burial of the baby's father. Now, this baby had never met the father because the father had been imprisoned just prior to their birth. And they're all around the the hole and the mound, and the everything is buried, and it's all very quiet. Not a s there not an adult is making a sound. The only sound is the wailing sounds of the baby crying. Because but the baby is being held by the mother. Now, obviously, the baby's never met the father, doesn't really know about death and grief, but does know that the attachment figure that is holding her, or him, I think it was a him, is under great distress. So they are feeling it somatically. So they are wailing at a very quiet burial. I think that's a great example of what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_00Yes, like Gabor Mate.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, when when his mom had called the physician right when the the Nazis were invading you know in in right before the Holocaust and and the and he Gabor Mate tells the story of needing his mother needing him to be seen by the physician in town. And he said, because he's crying all the time. And the doctor goes and tells her, Well, all my Jewish babies are crying all the time. And he makes the statement of, you know, what does an infant know of genocide or war or invasion? He doesn't. What he knows is that his attachment figure is in distress and holding him, and that's why he was crying.
SPEAKER_00And that impacts that that child on that level, and those are the memories that the early trauma protocol can get to and clear for children. So for, you know, it's not hopeless. It's not like if you if you've had postpartum depression and you're you that was that was there in those early years for your child, it doesn't mean, oh no, I'm a terrible mother. That's the very thing that we need to be paying attention to, is why is that the takeaway from that situation? And then linking that back to early prior things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't think that's the takeaway. I think the takeaway from the situation is the importance of attachment in general. There are positive, we're only talking about the bad ones, right? The crying, the stress, whatever. This also applies to the hugs, the kisses, all those things that that previous study said, oh, those are detrimental.
SPEAKER_00Not study, it was Watson. Or Watson. Whatever.
SPEAKER_02Right. The entire thing is how we mirror more than survival.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02Right? And if we don't learn those things, then the world feels very blah.
SPEAKER_00In the early trauma protocol, part of that protocol is to reset emotional circuits. And this is the cool I mean, before I learned this, I didn't even know it existed, but I since used it. And some really very amazing things happen sometimes when I take someone through that intervention. So that intervention, the thing that I learned when before I began using this is that there's four protective circuits, emotional circuits, and four life-enhancing circuits in the brain that are that's happening when that in utero when that baby is born. And it's through that experience with that attachment figure, and not just mother, but other attachment figures too, that that sets that foundation for how that person experiences themselves and emotions moving forward on into childhood and adulthood. And so those four protective circuits are shame and so it's like the shame can be a protective circuit. It's my fault, right? We can look at Piaget. I I was just, I've been doing these deep dives and deep studies on these things lately because I'm a nerd. And Piaget talks about how during his pre-operational stage that he defined with children around age five, five to seven, I believe, there's they're egocentric in nature. Okay. So the way they see the world is only through what they can see. They cannot see another person's perspective. And there's a great video online that kind of shows this with a little boy who's, you know, is it with a with a psychologist, and the psychologist is asking, you know, they're looking at this what sitting at a table. Sitting at a table with like a mountain, right? A mountain model with animals and trees and all these things around it. And the therapist is sitting on one end of this model, you know, across from this model, and the boy who's about five is sitting on the opposite side. And so the psychologist asks the boy, what do you see? And he points out what he sees, okay? And she says, Okay, cool. And then they switch sides. And the psychologist asks him again, what do you see? And he says, Whatever is different on this side of the mountain. And then the psychologist asks, Well, what do I see? Knowing he's already been on that side of the mountain. He could not answer that question. Not because anything's wrong with him, but because developmentally speaking, children are by nature egocentric. So, like if you think about parenting now, if you have a five-year-old that left a mess and dad gets home from work and is pissed because the five-year-old won't understand that he had a long day, that he he's exhausted, and now he's got to come home to this mess. And he's yelling at the five-year-old because the five-year-old didn't see his perspective. Of course he didn't see your perspective. He's not developmentally there yet. He can't understand that. So, you know, that that whole concept of understanding what this child needs, right? And that can't, that we have to parent according to the development of that child. Okay, so going back to those circuits, those protective circuits, and getting them wired properly, right? So if a child, so again, going back to that shame, children are hardwired to use that shame. And when they use that shame, it's almost like defensive in nature.
SPEAKER_02So what's interesting, right? So here's how that's uploaded. We have a child and we have a father attachment figure in your example. Attachment figure is gone all day. Attachment figure walks in the door. Now sees the child. Child hasn't seen the dad all day. First thing he does, yells at him for the mess. What does the child upload? As soon as my father sees me, I get yelled at.
SPEAKER_00Which means, what about him? Right. I'm bad.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. Right.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Now that's being wired.
SPEAKER_02That's being wired. Now, of course, we're not saying don't teach your children not to make a mess, or don't teach your children not to clean up, but their more appropriate response is probably you walk in, kind of go, oh crap, I gotta clean that up, greet the child, hug the child, tell the child you miss them, and say, Hey, like we can't have this like this. Let's work on cleaning this up together because this isn't this isn't how life, this isn't, we don't want to live like this. I don't want to, you know, I I don't want to come home and do this. It takes time away from doing something with you. Right.
SPEAKER_00I would even say one step further from that child's perspective, he's missing dad all day.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And as soon as dad walks in, he's excited. That's those life enhancing that circuit, right?
SPEAKER_02But my excitement is greeted with, but I'm excited to see him, but he doesn't want to see me. Yes, that's why I say that's why I was bringing it up. So what he And we've all done it, and it's terrible. So what we didn't do it on purpose.
SPEAKER_00Is oh my goodness, I'm so happy to see you. What have you been doing all day? Oh my goodness, I see a lot of toys on the ground. Gosh, you know, I'd like to play blocks with you. Can we get this other stuff cleaned up together while before we play blocks, you know? And then that child doesn't feel that shame connected with the person that's supposed that he wants to feel excited to see. It's then it be creates a conflict. Okay, so we need to understand this understanding. So I think back to that idea of psychological.
SPEAKER_02Or even that missing somebody must be bad because if I miss them and am excited to see them, and then their response is this, ooh, I should probably stop missing and wanting to connect with them because that causes me distress.
SPEAKER_00Now, now I'm gonna never need that.
SPEAKER_02And this is if it happens enough times.
SPEAKER_00Right. I'll never need that. I'm never gonna put myself in a position to have to be excited when someone comes in the door and then gets shut down. So what does that child do unconsciously? I'm just not gonna need that connection. And then that's the step that fosters depression. It's later on, right? Yes. So you might have more of a despondent child, right? Or you might have a child that's not doing very well in school, and there's no obvious reason, right? It's just like everything he's got friends, and I guess he does okay in school, and the kid just kind of flatly goes through life. And the reason why is because that life-enhancing emotion wasn't safe to feel. So I'm now gonna go, I'm not gonna need it. And then now we have trouble in relationships. We've got the the kid might not be actively having a hard time, but then that's the kid that gets overlooked, that's the kid that doesn't ever get that connection.
SPEAKER_02But that's where survival versus you know, surviving versus thriving get further and further apart, right? Sure. The the child's healthy, eats, and waits fine, sleeps up okay, roof over its head. But is that enough?
SPEAKER_00It's enough for survival. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But are we Is this as good as it gets?
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Wait, and being in let's be honest, we're this is a first world country. We have our challenges, but it's a first world country, right? We do more than just survive in this country. Our day-to-day is not based around simply you know, eating, staying safe, and sleeping. We have there's so much more available to us. But if that's all you have, but everybody around you has more. Which I think probably attributes to the lower your socioeconomic status, the higher your the prevalence of depression, right? Those are you are feeling less, unable to get less, unable to get more, than some people out there. Leads to depressive symptoms, right?
SPEAKER_00And with a lower socioeconomic status comes higher ACE scores, right? There's there's a higher prevalence of those ACE scores, and then having a higher ACE score can lead to uh higher.
SPEAKER_02As identified by our simple example of like the blocks and the mess and the whatever, right? Like ace adverse child experiences don't have to be, you know, parent in prison or watching. But that is more yes, but that those are the easier measurable ones, right? Those are those have a screen, but those other things happen too. And it also would have to do that with the number of parents even in the house, right?
SPEAKER_00Sometimes people in the house, right?
SPEAKER_02How many siblings?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, is there a parent?
SPEAKER_02Single parent.
SPEAKER_00Not not is there an absent parent, right? So when you have that socioe, it makes sense then if we are l understanding what drives depression and not just slapping a medication on it, but also doing that more psychoanalytic work, dare I say, and understanding what how the past connects to the present, right? Now we can truly treat the underlying roots of that with things like somatic therapy or sensomotor therapy or EMDR or the myriad of other trauma treatments to get less depressed, you know, to meet criteria or to get less to what's a to decrease symptomatology, is my point. So going back to this article, I found that the the author to this article, this article was done, I believe, in Brazil. And the title of it, it's from um the archives of psychiatric nursing, which I thought was amazing. And this was done in June of 2025. It was published in June of 2025. And the title of it is The Influence of Childhood Trauma on Postpartum Depression, a prospective cohort study. I was so happy to see this. It's so amazing. I think we're going to start to see more studies like this that are going to structure a better discussion about depression and be able to understand how the past is actually connected. But the highlights of this study stathood trauma significantly influences postpartum depression in both early and late postpartum stages. Postpartum depression symptoms remained stable over time with no significant interaction between time and childhood trauma exposure. Emotional abuse, physical abuse, and emotional neglect were the most consistent predictors of early onset PPD.
SPEAKER_02Which is postpartum depression.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Emotional neglect and sexual abuse were the strongest predictors of late and chronic postpartum depression. So this study is so groundbreaking. It offers us this sort of safety to talk about how the past is related to the present. Where for a very long time, CBT was the thing, right? You you don't go against CBT. You don't talk about other, you don't talk about psychoanalysis or psychodynamic. You don't talk about those things. Those things are not related. Insurance companies don't like to pay for therapy that is going to talk about how the past is related to the present typically. And now I think in our history, it's turning, we're turning a corner, and we can talk about how both are very, very important. The other study that we came across was this study about this topic of fobbing.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh this is this is incredible. Did you look up the def definition of fobbing? I can find it here.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, I have it. Okay, what snubbing someone by giving attention to your phone rather than them in a shared social moment.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Great.
SPEAKER_02Now a shared social moment doesn't mean you purposefully. It could just be in a group and you're on your phone instead of participating in that. Right. Like shared doesn't mean that purposefully shared, but what should be shared. So the the examples would be like scrolling social media when you're at dinner or at a at a table. Or texting during a movie, or constantly checking your phone every time it vibrates for some little reason, right? Snapchat, oh, so and so's location change. Oh, Facebook notification, oh a tax. It's like, well, why not be present? Why not be in the moment?
SPEAKER_00Well, why not? No, we know why. Right?
SPEAKER_02Okay, so so well, and so one more thing. So the impact of snubbing, it says snubbing or fobbing? Well, fobbing.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_02Sorry. Damages relationships, causing feeling of rejection, decreases intimacy, and can worsen anxiety or depression, creating a cycle where being fobbed leads to more fubbing.
SPEAKER_00Love it. I think that's relevant.
SPEAKER_02I think that's relevant.
SPEAKER_00So this morning, how we were even introduced to this.
SPEAKER_02And now we're we're not telling everybody out there to put your phones down. That's not the point.
SPEAKER_00We're not.
SPEAKER_02We don't want to judge people who use their phone.
SPEAKER_00No judgment. Just this connection between about what the impact of that behavior of being on the phone all time all the time has on yourself and on others. And even being able to identify what's driving your own scrolling.
SPEAKER_02And so fubing- Well, and how to even recognize it in yourself.
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00So how we even got on on we this new word that now is probably my new favorite word is fugbing, P-H-U-B-B-I-N-G. Was that I was I found a study because we were talking about adolescence. This is how this kind of got discovered this morning. Was that we were talking about these three, you know, populations that are being affected.
SPEAKER_02Or three age groups. Yes. Right?
SPEAKER_00It was like the age groups, and one of them being adolescence. Adolescents. So we found this. I was just doing Google Scholar and found this study that was done in 2025, and it was the title of it is The Relationship Between Parental Fubbing and Adolescence Depressive Symptoms, a systematic review and meta-analysis. Okay, can't talk today. So this was a study that was looking at how the behavior of parents being on their phones all the time were impacting their children. And the findings supported the detrimental effects of parental fubbing on adolescent mental health. And this was like an analysis of all the studies that were out there. So the study sample sizes that they were analyzing ranged from 293 to 4,213. And most of the samples were from middle and high school students. So they were looking at all these, all these studies. So that's what a meta-analysis is. They were looking at all the studies. And the conclusion was that there are detrimental effects, including depression, on parental fobbing. And so if we link this back to our part of this discussion, this earlier part of discussion about how attachment really is a very, very important for being being able to wire that brain well in an infant through those attachment times when a child is between the ages of zero and five. Okay. It doesn't stop there. That's just the foundation. So if we have a parent or parents, and the family dynamic is really everybody's on their phones all the time, and there's no connection being made. This has to be considered when we're looking at the topic of adolescent depression.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think it even snowballs even further. So one, the parental snubbing part, we now have children mirroring the mirroring their attachment figures.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Okay. Yes.
SPEAKER_02We also know that these things decrease relate quality of relationships. Right? So now we have children imitating their parents in a bad way. So now the children are less connected from their parents because they've just learned to do the exact same thing. Now the parents are depressed that they're not connected with their children. Their children are have no connection to their parents. The children are now in a social gathering where all the other children are also more glued to their phones than they are to the person sitting right next to them, probably looking at the same app.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02So now they've taken this learned trait from the kitchen table to the school to the wherever they go, and it's just like spreading.
SPEAKER_00And now we have an adolescent who's missing something. And where what do you think they're likely to do to fill that void?
SPEAKER_02They're going to find it on the phone, except then they're going to see that their life kind of stinks. And then they go on TikTok and see all this awesome stuff. Or which makes them feel even worse.
SPEAKER_00Or they're happy, they're having sex earlier.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. But it's but it's not really connected.
SPEAKER_00They right. They don't know because they don't have that schema that, you know, they're looking to fill that void of something's missing in here. So what do they do? They look toward risky behaviors.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Because that risky behaviors lift our mood.
SPEAKER_00But they don't know that. I know. They're Looking for something. And so what do they do? They find it in in sex, they find it in drugs, they find it in something.
SPEAKER_02So or even just other dangerous physical behaviors. Right. Sure. Right. But it can also it can also show up in like adversarial things with with peers.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Absolutely. So these the children, right, that are depressed, you know, depressed, that that this high amount, a large amount of adolescents are depressed.
SPEAKER_01It's a state.
SPEAKER_00It's a state, okay. Or even clinically depressed, okay? If we really identify what's causing that, okay, and we look at that family of origin, right? Now this is not the blame game. No. Okay. It's about drop going all the way back to those parents they weren't connected with, right? Especially in our age group, our parents were from those the 1950s and 60s. So if you think about that, how that then trickles down. And like our parents didn't have that foundation. They didn't have a schema or map of how to be connected to. And so then that impacts the next generation. Okay. And then now the now you we introduce phones, okay? And now to deal with that, with that loss of I don't know what I'm missing, I'm gonna go to my phone and I'm gonna try to find it. Now how that very way of trying to mitigate that void.
SPEAKER_02Well, and technology has made it very easy, right? So when we felt a certain way, we had now had a solution to our uh quote unquote solution to our disconnect in our pocket. We have pocket computers, right? Yes, except for that phone or that tablet is worsening the situation. Not that much different than any other addictive behavior. But the but the feels like a solution in the present until it no longer works.
SPEAKER_00The rooted issue is that void.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Right. Which in the short term, this fixes the void.
SPEAKER_00That was being perpetuated in the 1950s out of fear of spoiling a child. Right. Okay.
SPEAKER_02And that if we hug them, we're not teaching them to fend for themselves.
SPEAKER_00Be independent, right? We'll spoil them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And, you know, I think that that Watson guy was picking up on the power of that relationship between mother and child.
SPEAKER_02But not considering the other side of it.
SPEAKER_00If you look at his history, I was reading a little bit about his history, and his own mother was really rigid and really strict. And I think it's almost like, you know, all these things are connected. So as he's growing up in psych in the psychological world, he's reflecting on what's driving his own interests, right? It's biased because of his own interaction with his mother. So he comes out and says, mother's love is dangerous. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But your reaction to him is kind of biased too, right? Because you have a different perspective. You're like, that Watson guy. Yeah. Right? But it's it's not like you know, you have an understanding of why he studied what he did. It was because of his place in the world.
SPEAKER_00Excellent point, Cam.
SPEAKER_02But now that we have a better understanding of that our place in this world today is very much connected to our place in the world when we were one and five and seven and thirteen, why are we not connecting them? Why are we just saying, oh, I'm sorry you feel flat? Here's Alexa Bro.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right? It's like, yeah, here's one so we can kind of get you to have the motivation to get out of bed or to go to work. Right? But in the absence of that pill, are you just going to go back to bed? Or are you going to use this opportunity, this stabilization opportunity, to address the root cause of why this happened to you, right? Why you were so vulnerable to, you know, like in real life experiences, a breakup, right? Or the loss of a job. Grief is loss of a person is a little bit different because that's a of you're going to be depressed. You know, that that's okay. That that's a natural part of it. But why regular or expected circumstances in your life have such an overweighted, you have such an overweighted response to them probably has a lot to do with all your past days.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_02It you yes, you should feel a little bit sad or concerned when you lose your job, but not to the point where you're locked in your room for months on end, not able to function.
SPEAKER_00What is that triggering?
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And at least just asking the question, right? Like not being afraid to answer that question or or ask it. You know, that that what has happened in your life that maybe felt this way before. Just asking that question. You don't even have to be EMDR trained to ask that question and begin to be curious about. I've had so many clients that we do these, you know, we we do the EMDR and we identify the memories of the memory network, and they just have so many light bulbs going off. They're like, I've had 10 years of therapy, and not once did we ever talk about this thing that happened when I was little. I had kind of forgotten about it. And that makes me sad because it is absolutely relevant. And we know this because when we reprocess that thing that was never discussed, we reprocess that, we get a trait shift on it. We have a mitigation of symptoms. So it's it's relevant. It this needs to be, this is this is why we're talking about it like this today, not just defining depression and giving you those definitions. And, you know, we're trying to help to have this discussion and make it safe to talk about the fact that this past material is absolutely relevant to present-day presentations. And it's pretty complex. You know, it's pretty complex. And if if we begin to be curious about how the past, even before, not even just past, like my own past and my, you know, 50 years of life, but how the past of my own parents impacted my early years and beginning to ask those questions, I think I think we we can discover more and more how it actually is connected and come up with more viable intervention and solution for these things rather than just staying in the present and trying to put band-aids on symptoms.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the band-aids on the symptoms is the thing. Because so many people just come in, like, I'm depressed. I'm anxious and depressed. How many times do you hear that?
SPEAKER_00All the time.
SPEAKER_02All the time, right? And then, but then you hear them. And I mean, I would hope that I have decent mental health. And you're hearing these things and you're like, yeah, that's bad. Like that's a bad situation for like a week. But like, why is this having such an impact?
SPEAKER_00Why?
SPEAKER_02Well, we know why, but they don't know why.
SPEAKER_00Asking this question and it's not just, oh, life sucks, right?
SPEAKER_02It's not just hearing on TikTok, on Snapchat, on social media, whatever, that I have so I have anxiety, I have depression, right? Uh all this sucks. I see all these things on the news, all these people suffering, all the whole world sucks. Well, I mean, that's being uploaded by those videos are being pretty you know put on there by people who probably didn't attend to their stuff. And so everything's overweighted. Everything's overweighted. Well, when that happens and it everything is that overwhelming, yeah, it's uploaded in a bad way. But it doesn't have to be like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's like we're we're we're focusing, putting too much weight on connecting in our diagnosis.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Then we are on being able to be introspective and curious about why I'm suffering. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I am MDD. Yeah, I am a generalized anxiety disorder. No, no, you're you're not. Like at some point when we work together and some of those criterion are removed, you no longer have that diet. You don't have these diagnoses forever. So don't get so attached.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think sometimes that happens. It's almost like if I get better, then well, we know there's a like a yeah, uh But then I'm not I'm not MDD. Well, what does that then mean about you? Being curious about that, you know, to be able to find the you're happier, yeah. And then what's that mean about you?
SPEAKER_02I know.
SPEAKER_00Well, sometimes people say, I don't deserve this happiness, yes, or the family dynamics.
SPEAKER_02Well, why don't you deserve this happiness? What past experiences have led you to believe that the happiness that you have now earned through treatment or work that you have done, whatever it is, good schoolwork, good grades, winning team, good relationships, whatever. What makes you think where was it taught to you that you don't deserve this?
SPEAKER_00Great curious question. Right. Great curious question.
SPEAKER_02You do, in fact, deserve it because you did the work.
SPEAKER_00It's selfish. I get that a lot. Like it's selfish to for me to pay attention to myself. And you know, I think it when I hear that, we're having a discussion about the difference between selfishness and why is it selfish for you to pay attention to yourself? Yeah, like selfishness versus self-compassion. It's okay for like I'll I'll give the example all the time of like it's selfish to eat all the cookies so nobody else can have some. It's not selfish if you're gonna take time out for you to for yourself to meditate, so you can you can connect deeper with yourself and then as a result then be able to love everybody in your life more thoroughly.
SPEAKER_02But even the cookie example is not quite right. Like if you're sitting there eating all the cookies, well, yes, we all know that we should share cookies. But it's selfish if you purposefully eat all the cookies so nobody else can have them.
SPEAKER_00Yes. But if you're starving and you just came off the street and you're you haven't eaten for two days, eating all the cookies would not be selfish.
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_00So the motivation underneath it is uh whether it's care or self, and that's selfless, but if it's care or selfishness is the motivation selfishness, is doing something specifically for yourself, and the consequence is someone else is gonna suffer.
SPEAKER_02You're doing it on purpose, yes, you know, like because I I am more important, and therefore I do I need to disregard everything else in order to satisfy my need. But self-care is not selfish, self-care is I need to take care of myself so that I can participate in a bigger environment, right?
SPEAKER_00It's like I am not important versus I am just as important, right? So, like that comparison, like, you know, like I it would be selfish for me to pay attention to myself, right? But why is that other person more deserving of that than you are? It's about it's about evening the scales in the work that we do. And the work that we do isn't just cognitive behavioral work where we're trying to get someone to think differently about themselves. We're identifying where did you learn that pattern of behavior? Where did you learn to call that selfish? Right. And so that's the deeper type of therapy that we do at the Center for Insight and Connection. And we, you know, the EMDR training really helps us do that. Psychoanalytic work really fits well with the AIP model. And that's what we're doing. And as we're doing it and as we're we're talking about these subjects, you can't deny the fact that the past is relevant when we're talking about these common mental health issues like depression. So, you know, I I hope today with our bouncing all the way from the 1950s to, you know, today, Chris.
SPEAKER_02Fubbing. Which is a 2025 term.
SPEAKER_00Yes, we we were able to connect some dots, maybe get you uh thinking a little bit about your own life and your own experience in it and how your own past is related to your own present. And if depression is something that you're struggling with, or you know someone that is struggling with depression, there's hope. That's the biggest message that I will give my clients that are experiencing depression, chronic depression, is that there is hope because most people haven't really explored how the past is related to the present. And then there's hope in embedded in that. So that's what I uh if you take away nothing, take away the fact that if you or someone else you know is depressed, there is absolute hope when we especially when we connect the dots between the past and the present.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00So thank you all for listening, and we will talk at you next time. Bye. Insight and connection, sponsored by the Center for Insight and Connection, a private psychotherapy practice in the suburbs of Chicago.